Just Love? A day conference with Dr. Garry Williams

On Tuesday 2nd March at the Bryn-y-Groes Conference Centre in Bala, North Wales, Dr. Garry Williams will be speaking on the atoning work of Christ and the attributes of God. It looks like a great conference, which I'd love to go to. Click the title of this post for more details.

Christian jargon

All of us like to simplify difficult concepts into catchy slogans. Most of the time, it's with good intention, i.e., we want to communicate something quickly and simply. At other times, it's because we're lazy. This sort of "bumper sticker theology" needs to be questioned and tested, because it can frequently begin to drive our theology rather than stem from it. We can build our lives and churches on them while never thinking them through and holding them up to scrutiny. I'm sure I do this just as much as anyone. Here is one that I've been coming across, followed with my concerns.

"We need to live the gospel"
What people intend to communicate is positive, i.e., the gospel must inform all of our lives, not just be an outward profession for Sundays. This slogan is dangerous, though. You see, Jesus lived the gospel! The good news is not about us; it comes to us. If the news is all about Zac and his life, then it's a pretty crummy gospel. But isn't that what we hear so frequently, i.e., "the good news is that my life is changed!"? I fear that this jargon puts the next generation on the track toward the social gospel. While this generation assumes that the meaning is clear, the next generation will follow it to its logical conclusion, i.e.,our acts of love and justice in history is the gospel. Real personal transformation will happen, but it will only take place if we keep the true gospel in its rightful place. Jesus lived the gospel - God the Son was incarnate, lived a righteous life, died a sacrificial death, was raised from the dead to begin the new creation, and He reigns at the right hand of God the Father, offering forgiveness & justification to sinners through grace alone until the Day in which He returns.

Baptism and the form of corporate worship

Lately, I've been pondering the new church trend that seems to be sweeping across the West, i.e., getting rid of formality and tradition in order to emphasize that the local church is a small community. This manifests itself in "house churches" and in church networks that consist of very small congregations. I'm sure that "returning to the forms of the early Church" is not the only reason people are doing this, as many also see it as a way of engaging with culture, but I think it must contribute to it.

It's nothing more than a hunch, so I'm merely throwing this out there to see what you think. But do you think this will be more common within credobaptist circles?

Here's my reason for suspecting this: when I, as a paedobaptist, think about the early Church, I don't think about Pentecost. I go back to the people of Israel, who assembled under the same covenant of grace that I do, except under a different administration. My understanding of the covenants forces me to do this. Obviously, the patterns and forms of temple worship are entirely inappropriate to the people of God under the new covenant. Therefore, I think of the synagogue worship that characterized the post-exilic community. Due to my doctrine of the church, the forms that the post-Pentecost people of God used are not the earliest model to learn from; they were building off the synagogue traditions that preceded them. Meeting in homes as small groups was, therefore, a temporary necessity, rather than something that was ideal.
I expect that a credobaptist will approach the synagogal worship of the pre-Pentecost people of God much differently than me, though, as they believe that there is much greater discontinuity between the new covenant and the covenant given to Abraham.

Circumcision and Baptism

Scott Clark has a really helpful post over at the Heidelblog, which discusses the link between circumcision and baptism from Colossians 2. It's really worth a read.

Reformission Scotland

"Reformission Scotland is a Scottish church planting partnership. Our aim is to plant gospel churches that will replicate themselves." (from their website)
The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (from the States) is giving oversight and support, while a number of pastors from different Presby denominations are joining in. This looks like a really encouraging development up North.

My two questions are:
- What is the nature of their commitment to the Westminster Standards?
- What denomination will these new church plants be part of in the long-term? On their website, they talk about the way the ARP is giving oversight to the church planting. Is this with a view to another denomination?! Will this lead to a number of churches that are Presbyterian in name and congregational in practice? A quote that raised my eyebrows is, "Neither side is concerned about denominations or ecclesiastical empires."

(HT: Sean Clokey)

Is it time to shoot a sacred cow?

Do Christians have the right to institute holy days? That is, do men have the right to determine what days are set apart for the purposes of God?

It’s an important question to consider, seeing that we’ve just finished one “holy day” (i.e., Christmas) and are moving toward “holy week” (i.e., Good Friday and Easter). The idea that Christmas and Easter are illegitimate holidays is not something I had ever considered until recently, because of the unanimous approval that 21st century Christians give them. I’m sure that questioning their validity is equivalent to pointing a shotgun at the proverbial sacred cow, but I’m convinced that it’s time to do so. The only question I have is whether to pull the trigger…

Year after year, battles are fought to keep nativity scenes in public squares, society attends church en-masse, and little figures of baby Jesus are sold. At Easter, crosses are seen, ashes mark foreheads, and people avoid chocolate. Churches largely buy into these traditions, arguing that it provides evangelistic opportunities. Stars are hung from church ceilings, manger scenes abound, Easter egg hunts are organized… you know the drill. I really wonder if this serves to inoculate a culture against Christianity rather than confront it with the gospel. Much of the population in the West surely considers itself to be ‘Christian’ due to the celebration of these “holy days” and resultant sporadic church attendance. It seems like Christianity, as a result, is trivialized.

But I have yet to answer the initial question I asked, i.e., do we have the right to institute a holy day? I must agree with the Westminster Assembly and answer with a resounding “NO!” The Directory for the Public Worship of God states in its Appendix:

There is no day commanded in scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord's day, which is the Christian Sabbath. Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.

Throughout Scripture, God is the one that sets something apart as holy. It is nonsense to think that we can determine what pleases Him. He determines what tools and instruments would be set apart for temple service. He declared that the tribe of Levi would be His priests and Aaron’s descendents His high priests. His decree made Jesus a priest after the order of Melchizedek. He determined the holy days in the Jewish calendar. He still sets His people apart from the nations, calling them holy. He sets apart the bread, wine, and water for His own special purposes. His Holy Scripture proceeded from Him. He doesn’t give us the right to declare things “holy”. If that were the case, why not create some more sacraments, a conclusion that the Roman Catholics have come to?

I can’t help but wonder if this is a modern day example of Mark 7:7 - "'in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.'”

It’s interesting that we’ve embraced these man-made holy days and have largely rejected God’s holy day, the Sabbath, which had its beginnings at creation, not with the old covenant. Mark 7:8 – "You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." Mark 2:27 – “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Trueman on snow, Pascal, and entertainment

I'm just finishing up an excellent book by Carl Trueman, called The Wages of Spin. It's a collection of essays he wrote on historic and contemporary evangelicalism, which I highly commend to you. Seeing that Manchester (where I live) is in the midst of the largest snowfall in recent years, I was immediately drawn to one of the essays Dr. Trueman wrote in the middle of a snowstorm, called Boring ourselves to life. I hope you find this part as thought-provoking as I did:

[The snowstorm] has been instructive to me in more than just the area of my winter sport skills. One of the most amusing sights on the television in recent days ahs been that of the queues of people in the shops stocking up on winter essentials in case they are trapped in their homes for any length of time. Now by 'essentials,' I do not mean fod, milk and other necessities. Hey, this is America after all; gargantuan consumption is virtually compulsory; and the average American refrigerator routinely carries enough supplies to feed the whole of Africa for a month, or the typical Western family for at least a week. No, I'm referring to American essenetials, and the queues I am speaking of are the lines of people at the local video stores who, the TV reporter informs me, are stocking up on movies lest they get trapped in their homes and become bored.
My initial response to this gem of information was to burst out laughing. Perish the thought that any of these people should be so deprived of prepackaged entertainment that they might have to read a book, or (horror of horrors!) actually talk to other members of their families. Yet, on serious reflection, I realize the phenomenon is a very telling one, underlining once again that we in the West have become a decidedly entertainment-based culture. With no problems regarding supplies of essentials, the greatest fear that we have at any time of potential crisis is that we might be deprived of being amused for a whole forty-eight hours. (p. 175)

Then, Trueman goes on to speak of the perspective of Pascal in his Pensees.

Pascal lived in a world which was marked both by its incredible busy-ness and by its appetite, at least among the social elite, for pleasure and entertainment. Pascal categorized this phenomenon as distraction. Distraction is the production of entertainment for the purpose of taking one's mind off the deeper realities of life. In a famous paragraph in the Pensees, he asks why even kings have trivial entertainments organized for their amusement. He can understand, he says, why poor people might enjoy the odd dance to distract them from the miserable drudge of their daily lives, but why should a king, glorious, powerful, surrounded by proofs of his own greatness, need trivial entertainment? The answer is that, left to himself with nothing to distract him, he will think about himself and the reality of the death that awaits him.

He finishes his essay with this exhortation:

Let us take time, then, to be bored, to strip away from ourselves the screens we have created to hide the real truths of life and death from our eyes. Let us spend less time trying to appropriate culture for Christianity and more time deconstructing culture in the light of Christ's claims on us and the world around us. Only then, I think, will we truly grasp the urgency of the human predicament. If it snows again, don't rent a video; read a copy of Pascal's Pensees.