Taking Temperatures

Of Prophets and Kingdoms

The Otago Daily Times recently published a thoughtful editorial on the "state" of the Church and churches in New Zealand.  There are few media which could have penned such a piece: Otago is probably the last geographic location where something like this could be found.

These are difficult times for mainstream Christian churches.  Many congregations are dwindling and ageing and the stark divisions between liberals and conservatives continue to manifest themselves, particularly on the issue of same-sex marriages. Parishes in many places cannot afford full-time clergy, and rural and urban churches close regularly.

Most Christians in New Zealand will be aware of these stark realities.  We are now one of the most secular nations upon earth.

Letter From America (About Uncool Churches)

How to keep Millennials in the church? Let’s keep church un-cool.

By Brett McCracken, Updated: July 31, 2013

The Washington Post
 
 Last week a column on CNN’s Belief Blog titled “Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church” went viral, partially because any time the words “Millennials,” “leaving,” and “church” are combined in a headline, people pay attention.

But why? Why do we care so much about the reasons Millennials are reportedly leaving churches?

I’m a Millennial, but I am weary of everyone caring so much about why Millennials do this or don’t do that. I’m sorry Millennials, but I’m going to have to throw us under the bus here: we do not have everything figured out. And if we expect older generations and well-established institutions to morph to fit our every fickle desire, we do so at our peril.

The CNN piece, written by Rachel Held Evans, makes some good points, to be sure. The line that I saw shared on Facebook more than any other is this:

Letter From the UK (About Liberal Bishops)

A day of judgment for liberal bishops

By Damian Thompson
Religion  
Last updated: October 12th, 2012
The Daily Telegraph

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His new book is called The Fix: How addiction is invading our lives and taking over your world.

The riches of liberal Anglicanism (H/T the Bad Vestments blog)

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph

The strangest thing happened last week, though few people noticed it. America officially ceased to be a Protestant country. According to the Pew Forum, the percentage of Protestants has dropped to 48 per cent, down from 53 per cent in 2007. That’s a huge shift.

But, before Catholics start punching the air, let me point out that the percentage of Catholics has been flatlining for years at 22 per cent. The big jump is in unaffiliated Americans, including atheists – up from 15 to 20 per cent. These “Nones”, as pollsters call them, are laying waste to the religious landscape of the United States. And Britain.

Tolerable Religion

Infidelity and Its Tricks

Tolerable religion in our post-Christian world is religion which is essentially private. If a religion has to have a social expression, it might just be tolerable if everyone is a volunteer, involved because they chose to be so. Within a particular religious group, the modern world would give it languid "high fives" if it had no rules, strict regulations, doctrines, or practices to which all participants must conform.

The apostasy of our age would far prefer a religion which is voluntaristic from woe to go. "Here is a neat doctrine or idea" (but it's up to you whether you believe it or not, of course.) This kind of religion is tolerable. Anything further is offensive at best, harmful to people at worst.

This brings us to the paradox of the Church of Christ. Highly dogmatic it surely is. After all, the core of the Gospel message to Unbelievers is: "Believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Reject Him and His salvation, and the wrath of God abides upon you." It comes with a divine injunction to repent (turn away from) sin. Moreover, the Church of Christ has all sorts of doctrinal particularities, which to the modern Unbelieving ear seem terribly pedantic and irrelevant. Still further, the Church insists upon these doctrinal abstractions, warning that to disbelieve such is to put one's eternal welfare at risk.

More than any other organised religion found in this world the Church has organised its beliefs and doctrines into formal creedal statement, derived from the Scriptures, but organised in such a way as to present doctrinal precision. "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," and "I believe one holy, catholic and apostolic church," for example. If you turn to the Belgic Confession, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Confession, or the Twenty-Nine Articles you will find official extensive doctrinal formulations declaratively stating what the Bible teaches--and calling all Christians likewise to believe.

The Church of Christ is thoroughly dogmatic--although its dogmas are not originally its own. Its doctrinal formulations, if they are to have any conscience-binding authority at all, must be and are derived from Holy Scripture--that is, from God Himself. However, because God alone can bind the conscience, and because the Lord Jesus Christ alone is lord of the conscience, the Church is not entitled to bind in addition to, or beyond, what is revealed and taught in Scripture itself.

The Church commands belief in the Name of God. But it does not compel belief. Faith must be what every individual person believes, as well as a common corporate commitment.  In that sense the Church is voluntaristic. It invites people to enter into covenant with God. But the terms and conditions are God's; they are not negotiated. "Choose you this day whom you will serve," commanded Joshua. "But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

Such religion is deeply offensive to the modern ear. To the spirit of Unbelief such claims to authority are not just wrong, they are inappropriate to humanity. They denigrate and risk harm the psyche. They are implicitly abusive. But David Brooks, writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times sees right through the contemporary zeitgeist of Unbelief.

Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

That’s because people are not gods. No matter how special some individuals may think they are, they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own. . . .

Rigorous theology provides believers with a map of reality. These maps may seem dry and schematic — most maps do compared with reality — but they contain the accumulated wisdom of thousands of co-believers who through the centuries have faced similar journeys and trials.

Rigorous theology allows believers to examine the world intellectually as well as emotionally. Many people want to understand the eternal logic of the universe, using reason and logic to wrestle with concrete assertions and teachings.

Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity. Without timeless rules, we all have a tendency to be swept up in the temper of the moment. But tough-minded theologies are countercultural. They insist on principles and practices that provide an antidote to mere fashion.

Rigorous theology delves into mysteries in ways that are beyond most of us. For example, in her essay, “Creed or Chaos,” Dorothy Sayers argues that Christianity’s advantage is that it gives value to evil and suffering. Christianity asserts that “perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench real good out of a real evil.” This is a complicated thought most of us could not come up with (let alone unpack) outside of a rigorous theological tradition.

Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most.

He concludes with this pearl of wisdom:

I was once in an AIDS-ravaged village in southern Africa. The vague humanism of the outside do-gooders didn’t do much to get people to alter their risky behavior. The blunt theological talk of the church ladies — right and wrong, salvation and damnation — seemed to have a better effect.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Not the Clerk of Session 

Theology - Ecclesiology
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, November 04, 2010 1:31 pm

I am currently teaching an elective on Jonathan Edwards at New St. Andrews, and something we recently covered made me realize the ways in which historic evangelicals need to speak and be heard, and need at the same time to listen carefully.

The Reformation was a revival of true gospel preaching, and such gospel preaching always comes down to the point of decision. Good preaching is aimed at the will; all good preaching aims at conversion. If the people are not converted, they need to be. If they are, then a message aiming at true conversion will encourage them, not beat them up. As Luther put it, we are called to a lifetime of repentance.

Good preaching reminds every Christian soul that we live before the God who sees and knows the heart, and who will sift those hearts in the great day of judgment. The problem arises when the need for true conversion is moved from the declaration of the gospel to the membership interview. The former declares the truth with the understanding that only God can see the heart. The latter, in the name of God seeing the heart, pretends that the minister and elders can see the heart.

If it is true that not every member of the visible church will be in glory, and it is true, then there must be a demarcation between those covenant members who are going to Heaven and those who are not. That demarcation is called heart conversion, or regeneration. All genuinely Reformed believers acknowledge the reality of this. The practical, pastoral issue concerns whether that true heart conversion is measurable by human beings. Can we detect it in a certain enough way to be confident that we are letting only the regenerate come to the Table (or, in baptistic churches, to baptism), and are successfully keeping the “not known to be regenerate” away from the Table? 


These questions go back to the Halfway Covenant, in the years before the time of Edwards. Now in the popular understanding, the Halfway Covenant was a downgrade of spiritual standards. In reality, it was an attempted upgrade, an upgrade that failed, one that backfired. This is how.

In Calvinist churches on the Continent, membership was based on 1. a profession of faith in Christ and 2. an outwardly obedient life. For the first, you told everyone you believed in Jesus. For the second, you didn’t spend all your time in saloons and shooting out street lights. Here is John Calvin: “we recognize as members of the church those who, by confession of faith, by example of life, and by partaking of the sacraments, profess the same God and Christ with us” (Institutes, Vol. 2, pp. 1022-23).

But by about 1636, some American churches had begun requiring some more than this (not something less). They wanted a testimony from each prospective member, a testimony relating their personal experience of salvation. The same would go for someone wanting to be a "full" member, in the sense of coming to the Table. Without that personal testimony, they were denied. But they had been baptized. And so what happened when they grew up (which happens more quickly than you might think) and married, and wanted their children to be baptized? What do you do? You have a baptized man and woman, professing faith in Jesus and in the truth of the Christian religion, who are living sober and decent lives, and who could join any Calvinistic church in Europe. They want to have their child baptized. What do you do? The Halfway Covenant said okay, all right already.

Church members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publickly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, where they give up themselves and their children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their Children are to be baptized (Halfway Covenant, 1662).

The minister before Edwards was his maternal grandfather, Rev. Stoddard. Now Stoddard was in some respects a proto-liberal. Don’t make too much of that, but it should be noted. He was right about some things. He said, for example, “No man can look into the heart of another, and see the workings of a gracious spirit.” He leaned against the Halfway Covenant, adopting open communion in 1677. He believed that communion was a converting ordinance, and he was opposed to the idea of church covenants as being judicial in nature. He was therefore against church discipline generally. There he was wrong, and Edwards was right.

Edwards was right that church membership brought with it certain judicial responsibilities, and he was very cautious in how he tried to bring the Northampton church back to a tighter line. But he was at heart a revivalist, which meant that the tighter line was still drawn in the wrong place, at the point of membership interview.

A distinction should therefore be kept sharp between the preaching of the Word, and the shepherding of souls. The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, but this does not mean that a minister can see hearts. When it comes to the division of soul and spirit, the Scriptures are sharper than a sword. But at the same point, fallible ministers can be as sharp as a pound of wet liver. But the fact that he cannot see this or that heart exhaustively should not prevent him from preaching the Word searchingly.

We lean the opposite direction, to protect ourselves against the errors of that other guy, who is leaning the other way. Some men see tyrannical pronouncements over the hearts of others in membership interviews, and so they refuse to declare the authoritative word of God from the pulpit -- unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Other men know that they should declare this searching word from the pulpit, and they therefore assume to themselves the same prerogatives in the pastor's study. Oh, the vanity of man! When Scripture says that "all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do," the "him" there does not refer to the clerk of session.