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CHRISTIANS PREPARE BISHOP MICHAEL NAZIR-ALI
FOR EXILE
RECLAIMING CULTURE IS GOSPEL MINISTRY P. ANDREW SANDLIN
THE GOSPEL OF LIFE VS. THE CULTURE OF DEATH JOE BOOT
THE GOSPEL AND EDUCATION DENNIS DOTY
FALL 2015 General Editor
JOSEPH BOOT EICC Founder
JOSEPH BOOT
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Editorial
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Reclaiming Culture is Gospel Ministry Rev. P. Andrew Sandlin
Ryan Eras
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The Gospel of Life vs. The Culture of Death
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The Gospel and Education Dennis Doty
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Prepare For Exile: The Role of the Church in Society Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali
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Ministry Introduction Rev. Steven Martins
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Resource Corner
Rev. Dr. Joe Boot
Jubilee is provided without cost to all those who request it. Jubilee is the tri-annual publication of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC), a registered charitable Christian organization. The opinions expressed in Jubilee do not necessarily reflect the views of the EICC. Jubilee provides a forum for views in accord with a relevant, active, historic Christianity, though those views may on occasion differ somewhat from the EICC’s and from each other. The EICC depends on the contribution of its readers, and all gifts over $10 will be tax receipted. Permission to reprint granted on written request only. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement Number: PM42112023 Return all mail undeliverable to: EICC, 9 Hewitt Ave., Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4, www.ezrainstitute.ca
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To receive Jubilee please visit, www.ezrainstitute.ca/jubilee Or write to us: EICC, 9 Hewitt Ave., Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4. jubilee@ezrainstitute.ca
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JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 15
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RYAN ERAS RYAN ERAS is Director of Development and Administration at the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Ryan holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto, where he focused on bibliographic control and the history of censorship. He has served in various educational and support roles, providing bibliographic research and critical editorial assistance for several academic publications. He lives in Toronto with his wife Rachel, and their three children Isabelle, Joanna and Simon.
WE HAVE OFTEN HEARD that the
gospel is the good news. Linguistically this is true; the word ‘gospel,’ from the Greek euangelion, literally means ‘good news.’ But we must then ask what the news is all about; the question is deceptively simple, yet its implications far-reaching. Contrary to many popular depictions, the gospel is not an appeal or an advertisement, as though Jesus were an ideal choice for those in the market for a messiah. Rather, the gospel is the good news of the kingdom of God (Matt. 24:14), and so necessarily, it is the good news of the kingship of God; it is the announcement that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, that He has defeated all rival kingdoms of darkness, and is building His kingdom of righteousness on earth. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings contains a superb expression of the nature of the gospel message. Concluding this classic epic, the reader is heartened to read that “there is a king in Gondor again.”1 Our response to the real gospel message should be similarly characterized. At the cross, Jesus Christ has defeated the power of sin and death. The King is on His throne, and is now, by His Spirit at work in His people, putting things right in the world, that He might deliver the kingdom up to God the Father (1 Cor. 15:24). Jesus Himself points to His earthly ministry as an indication that the kingdom of God has come. When the disciples of John the Baptist asked whether He was the one they were waiting for, Jesus tells them, “go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them” (Luke 7:18-23). In other words, the powers of darkness are pushed back, defeated and silenced by the power of the true King. Andrew Sandlin has helpfully summarized it this way: “The Gospel is the good news that God in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection is reversing the guilt and corruption of sin both in individual lives and in the entire world.” Critically, while the gospel centers on the person and work of Jesus Christ, it is a theme that runs throughout Scripture long before the birth of
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Mary’s boy child. Indeed, we sing at Christmas of “thou long-expected Jesus.” The gospel message begins with creation, and finds its consummation in the new creation, for God’s plans do not change. The Alpha and Omega is Lord of all of life, at all times. Isaiah famously prophesies: For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore (9:6-7).
Government is mentioned twice in this brief passage; this promised child was to be a king, from the line of David. Certainly some of the Jews of Jesus’ time believed this prophecy, though they did not recognize the full scope of His kingship. Indeed, “perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” (John 6:15). Christ’s testimony before Pilate, that His kingdom is “not of this world (John 18:36),” was a statement about the source of His authority, and by implication, about the extent of His reign. The kingship of God is not limited, but crosses all borders, filling the whole earth (Zech. 14:9). The gospel is also a message that has been entrusted to God’s church for all ages. Christopher Wright explains that “Jesus announced the imminent arrival of the eschatological reign of God. He claimed that his people’s hopes for restoration and for messianic reversal were being fulfilled in his own ministry.”2 While these hopes were indeed fulfilled in Christ, the work of the kingdom is ongoing. Wright continues: “the new community of Christ, now living in the eschatological era of the Spirit, is making the future hope a present reality.”3 There is work for God’s people to do, and we labour joyfully, under the banner of our victorious King. Truly, of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Editorial: Issue 15
IN THIS ISSUE: This issue of Jubilee is offered as an introduction to the nature and scope of the gospel message. Andrew Sandlin defines and explains the gospel in light of the cultural mandate, discussing how the gospel should give us both a firm confidence in the power and promises of God, as well as the conviction to put forth our own efforts for the good of society. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali exhorts God’s people, and the institution of God’s church, to faithfully preach the unpopular gospel of repentance, for it is only in turning away from sin that we can know true light and life. Also included are illustrations of the gospel’s application to particular spheres, highlighting the implications of the gospel message to all of life. Joe Boot discusses the life-giving nature of the gospel over against a culture of death, demonstrating that Christ’s lordship extends to our very lives. Dennis Doty considers the central gospel issue that is education, the significance of pedagogical approaches, and the importance of the family, in training and equipping the next generation for faithful gospel ministry. We are also excited to welcome a new team member, Rev. Steven Martins, to the ministry of the Ezra Institute. A summary of Steven’s testimony and vision is also included in this issue.
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J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). 2 Christopher Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2006), 301. 3 Wright, The Mission of God, 303.
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P. ANDREW SANDLIN REV. P. ANDREW SANDLIN is a fellow of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He is Executive Director of the Fellowship of Mere Christianity, Preaching Pastor at Cornerstone Bible Church-Santa Cruz County, Faculty of Blackstone Legal Fellowship of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and De Jong Distinguished Visiting Professor of Culture and Theology, Edinburg Theological Seminary, and is President of the Center for Cultural Leadership. He founded CCL in 2001. An interdisciplinary scholar, he holds a B.A. in English, history, and political science (University of the State of New York); he was awarded an M.A. in English literature (University of South Africa); he has taken doctoral work in English (Kent State University); and he holds a doctorate in Sacred Theology summa cum laude (Edinburg Theological Seminary). He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society. Andrew is married to Sharon and has five adult children and three grandchildren.
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RECLAIMING CULTURE is Gospel Ministry
This article is adapted from an address delivered to Christian Concern, London, on July 27 2015. GOSPEL MINISTRY DEFINED AND DESCRIBED
WE CHRISTIANS ARE GOSPEL people. The Gospel is the good news. (Paul famously summarizes it in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4.) What’s the good news? It’s generally identified as the salvation offered to sinful humanity on the basis of our Lord Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. By simple faith we trust in Him, and we’re rescued from God’s righteous judgment that each of us faces due to our sin. The Spirit then works within us to gradually purge the corruption of our sinful nature.1 This is the good news. God gets rid of both the guilt and corruption of our sin.2 This common evangelical description is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. And the fact that it doesn’t go far enough has momentous implications for the Christian’s cultural obligation – and for the Gospel itself. In more philosophical language, this common description is necessary, but not sufficient. You can’t have the Gospel without it, but you need more than this to have the Gospel. To prove this point, we might first to consider the Gospel disclosed in the Old Testament. A prime example is Isaiah chapter 52 (which Paul excerpts in Romans 10:15): “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Him who brings good news [Gospel]” (v. 7a). Isaiah is encouraging the oppressed Jews that one day God will bring the full-fledged Gospel to them. That Gospel is the message of deliverance by their King: “The LORD has bared His holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God” (v. 10).
The Gospel is both a joyful emancipation of God’s people, as well as a graphic, public display of the power of the Almighty God. The Gospel is the message that Jehovah is the King, that He will flex His regal muscles so that all the world can see His greatness. How precisely does He do that? Well, He does it by rescuing His people in the face of their oppressors throughout history, but the New Testament doesn’t leave us in suspense about the most spectacular aspect of this rescue. Paul tells us in Colossians that in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, God not only canceled our sin debt (v. 14), but also “disarmed the [Satanic] rulers and authorities, [a]nd put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in Him [Jesus Christ]” (v. 15). In Jesus, God did precisely what Isaiah promised He would do: He rescued His people from their own oppression; and He exhibited His great power for the entire world to see (“put them [demonic powers] to open shame” [v. 15b]). In Ephesians 1, Paul says much the same thing: God has redeemed His people by Jesus’ bloodshedding (v. 7), which was preached to them in the Gospel (v. 13), and God has exalted the risen Messiah as vanquishing all powers in heaven and earth over which He rules (vv. 19-23). We must be careful not to evade the full force of Paul’s statements. Jesus didn’t only pay our sin debt on the cross, suffering the punishment for our law-breaking (v. 14). In addition, He nailed the power of sin to the cross, overcoming the diabolical powers that plunged the earth into depravity (vv. 14c-15). We immediately think of when that depravity first entered human society, in the Garden of Eden. Satan seduced Eve into acting autonomously. And what is the root of sin, but autonomy, relying entirely on our own devices and turning our back on God? This is Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Gospel & Gnosticism
how humanity fell into sin. It is this sin in all of its hideousness that the Gospel is calculated to crush. CREATION
But we won’t grasp the significance of the Gospel if we don’t grasp the significance of the Fall, and we won’t grasp the significance of the Fall until we understand the significance of the Creation. The Gospel doesn’t start with the cross, or resurrection, though these are its high points. The Gospel starts with the Creation and Fall. There’s much to consider here, but I’ll mention just two points. THE GOODNESS OF CREATION
First, at the conclusion of each creation day, God declared as recorded in Genesis 1 that His work was “good.” At the end of the sixth day, He pronounced that everything He made was “very good” (1:31). Creation is inherently good. What does this truth have to do with the Gospel? Simply this: the created universe isn’t man’s problem. Creation isn’t sinful; it’s presently under sin’s curse (3:17-19), but it’s not sinful. Creation is not a drag on man; it’s not something he needs to overcome.
the Bible teaches that there’s nothing inherently wrong about creation, though there’s plenty wrong with the (post-Fall) heart of man. God did curse creation for man’s sake, but creation is not of itself sinful. It bears the marks of sin’s pollution, but creation’s not the problem. The Gospel doesn’t save us from creation. This fact dictates an important implication for the Gospel: if creation didn’t cause the Fall, getting rid of creation won’t get rid of the effects of the Fall. Moreover, since God’s work in Jesus Christ on the cross is designed to redeem everything presently under the domain of sin,4 and since this includes creation, creation should be redeemed. This means that all elements of culture, which is man’s creative interaction with creation,5 including money and food and technology and education and the arts and politics presently burdened under the weight of sin are designed to be redeemed (Rom. 8:22). Salvation isn’t liberation from creation; it’s liberation from sin. The Gospel is calculated to redeem not just individuals, but all of human life and culture and creation. But if we think that creation is the problem, we’ll think that we can get rid of man’s problem by getting rid of creation. That is precisely wrong. Creation must be redeemed, not avoided. The same is true of culture.
Why is this point important to make in discussing the Gospel? Likely the earliest heresy in the Christian church was Gnosticism.3 This included the popular idea that the material universe, including man’s body, is a prison, and that salvation is the escape. Materiality is evil or, at least, undesirable. In its most crass forms, some people believed that the god of the material world is evil and the god of the spiritual (non-material) world is good. Salvation, then, is salvation from creation. The Fall is (re-)defined as the fall from spirit into matter.
THE CULTURAL MANDATE
This is heresy. In philosophical terms, it understands the Fall as metaphysical, not ethical. In other words, it sees the source of the great problems of the world in the corporeality of creation and not in the heart of man. That’s certainly a convenient argument, isn’t it? But
When sinful man is redeemed, he’s restored to his original place as God’s deputy over creation. This is why God re-issued His commission to Noah and his descendants. God didn’t abandon His cultural plan for the earth; He re-issued it to a newly redeemed people. “Because of the
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The first implicit act of atonement in the Bible was when God made skins to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness (Gen. 3:21). He had to shed an animal’s blood to do this. Fig leaves wouldn’t suffice to cover their shame. Only the product of blood shedding could do that. This act pointed to the one final and enduring sacrifice of Jesus Christ, whose blood-shedding on the cross can alone take away the guilt and corruption of sin (Heb. 9:13-14).
“The Gospel is both a joyful emancipation of God’s people, as well as a graphic, public display of the power of the Almighty God.”
“He nailed the power of sin to the cross, overcoming the diabolical powers that plunged the earth into depravity.”
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“The Gospel is that everything wrong in this world God is setting right, and He is using His people to set it right.”
atoning consequences of the cross,” writes Scott J. Hafemann, “God is finally fulfilling His mission of revealing His glory through (re)creating a people who will exercise dominion in His name by keeping His commandments.”6 This is our calling as God’s people, washed in the Lord’s blood. We are His dominion people, our Lord’s new humanity. This, to put it bluntly, is the goal of the Gospel. The Great Commission, therefore, the command to preach the Gospel and disciple the nations (Matt. 28:18-20), is actually the cultural mandate adapted to the post-Fall world. God’s plan for man hasn’t changed. Properly fulfilled, the cultural mandate – the Great Commission, the Gospel – means that Christians self-consciously create a culture in harmony with God’s will revealed in His word. “Culture,” writes H. Henry Meeter, is the execution of this divinely imposed mandate. In his cultural task man is to take the raw materials of this universe and subdue them, make them serve his purpose and bring them to nobler and higher levels, thus bringing out the possibilities which are hidden in nature. When thus developed man is to lay his entire cultural product, the whole of creation, at the feet of Him Who is King of man and of nature, in Whose image man and all things are created.7
This means that the Gospel is not simply about merely individual deliverance, Jesus dying and rising so that He can take us to Heaven when we die. This is a significant part of the Gospel, but it’s not the Gospel itself. Simply put, the Gospel, the good news, is that God in Jesus Christ has dealt and is dealing decisively with the problem of sin and gradually reinstalling His righteousness in the earth. The Gospel is that everything wrong in this world God is setting right, and He is using His people to set it right. His prime instrument for a righteous world is the redemptive work of His Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. His secondary instrument is godly, redeemed people, His ambassadors, imploring sinners to turn from FALL 2015
their ways and give their hearts and lives to the Triune God (2 Cor. 5:19-21). This is, quite simply, the Gospel. In the words of Cornelius Van Til, “The sweep of redemption is as comprehensive as the sweep of sin.”8 Paul writes: “[W]here sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom. 5:20). But where does sin increase? It begins in the human heart, but it moves outward to culture, to art, education, science, music, architecture, technology, economics, and politics. The Gospel is about (incrementally) getting rid of sin, including cultural sin, because each of these spheres and all others have been corrupted by sin. “To confess Christ as savior from sin, but to deny his relevance and power in the realm of culture, is a denial of his kingship over the believer and over the world.”9 This is why the task of redeeming culture is itself Gospel ministry. THE GOSPEL MINISTRY REDUCED AND REVIVED
In contrast, a shrunken Gospel shrinks Gospel ministry, and so one of our tasks is to recover a robust Gospel and a robust Gospel ministry. THE UNEVANGELIZED MIND
First, think about the problem of the unevangelized mind. Sinners are depraved in every part of their being.10 There’s perhaps no clearer statement of this fact than Romans 3:1018, where we find that sinners (both Jew and Gentile) are depraved from head to toe, inside and outside. This depravity includes the mind. This doesn’t just mean that they think immoral and cruel and faithless and covetous and lustful thoughts. It means, even more fatally, that sinners’ entire way of thinking is oriented in rebellion against God. In the words of Paul, they don’t like to retain God in all their thoughts (Rom. 1:28). Sinners want to live a life without God, and this rebellious desire begins, as all desires begin, in the mind. This is intellectual rebellion. It started in the Garden of Eden and is passed down to Adam’s entire race. And Jesus died to save us from Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Reclaiming Culture
it, just like He died to save us from our moral and emotional and physical rebellion. In fact, I want to say that our intellectual rebellion is the root of all of our rebellion. If this is the case, and if the Gospel confronts sinners in rebellion, it must confront their intellectual rebellion. This is the intellectual challenge of the Gospel.11 We need to repent of rebellious ways of thinking, not just for lying and fornication and theft and greed and slandering and so forth, which are evidence of that rebellion. For too long evangelicals have seen rebellion in terms of lying and alcoholism and pride and covetousness and drug addiction and lust and intemperance, but they tend not to see humanism and socialism and self-justification and misdirected ambition and Darwinism and modernism and pragmatism as equally rebellious. But intellectual rebellion is no less sinful than any other kind, and the Gospel is calculated to purge it, too. THE GOSPEL WORLDVIEW
This fact introduces us to an arresting theme. The Gospel presupposes a worldview. The fact that this idea sounds unsettling to us shows how far we’ve come from the Bible’s teaching. A worldview is a set of assumptions that everybody has by which we interpret what goes on around us and inside us.12 There’s a Christian worldview and a Buddhist worldview and a Hindu worldview and a secular worldview and New Age worldview and Marxist worldview and variations and combinations of each. Whatever we experience in this world, you and I interpret through the grid of our instinctive assumptions. Those assumptions comprise our worldview. Worldviews are like pancreases: everybody has one, even if we don’t know it or think about it. The Gospel assumes that we grasp certain truths, that we adopt a basic worldview. We don’t preach the Gospel in an intellectual vacuum. The minute we say, “Jesus saves,” we must ask, “Who is Jesus?” and “Saves us from what?” and then we must face the fact that the Gospel presupposes a worldview.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
This is why David Wells is correct to observe that the “gospel makes sense only in a moral world.”13 The Gospel doesn’t harmonize with a conceptual universe in which man is his own god, in which truth is relative, in which guilt is merely subjective, in which there’s no final judgment, in which all religions lead to the same place, and in which Jesus is one great religious figure among many. The Gospel is simply incompatible with these ideas, this worldview. This is another way of saying that the Gospel demands that sinners give up certain false ideas before they can be saved. So, when we preach the Gospel to poor, hellbound sinners, we’re preaching a Gospel that demands they repent of their rebellious thinking, not just their rebellious emotions, their rebellious morals, their rebellious will, and their rebellious instincts.
“Sinners want to live a life without God, and this rebellious desire begins, as all desires begin, in the mind.”
The Gospel presupposes a worldview. This is why the Bible starts with Genesis 1:1 and not John 3:16.14 The Gospel requires a worldview for it to make sense. Part of the problem is that we don’t really believe that the mind actually is depraved. We understand that the Gospel needs to reshape our morals and our tongue and our will and our sexuality and our affections. But we don’t see that our entire life orientation is twisted. The Bible says that the natural (i.e., unbelieving) mind is at war with God (Col. 1:19-22). We are born with a sinful mind – not just sinful in that it wants to say and do bad things, but in that its very orientation to life is rebellious. Jesus didn’t die to save us and clean us up only from gossip and hatred and lust and unbelief and self-centeredness. He also came to save us from our entire life outlook – He came to save us from an evil worldview and instill in us a godly worldview. We evangelicals haven’t generally understood how wide-ranging depravity is, and therefore we haven’t understood how wide-ranging the Gospel is. And this is why the Gospel should be preached in the church, too, because our minds constantly need the work of redemption. When the mind of the church isn’t “inwardly formed by the
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“We need to repent of rebellious ways of thinking, not just for lying and fornication and theft and greed and slandering and so forth, which are evidence of that rebellion. ”
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“We evangelicals haven’t generally understood how wide-ranging depravity is, and therefore we haven’t understood how wide-ranging the Gospel is.”
“The office of priest or the calling of a monk or nun was not a higher or more spiritual calling than a jewelry peddler or shoe cobbler. ”
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Gospel,”15 it perpetuates ideas and practices alien to the Gospel all the while assuming they’re acceptable. The church usually assimilates popular notions from the surrounding culture and shrouds them in a Christian veneer. In other words, the unevangelized mind makes for a worldly church. Fundamentalist churches can be just as guilty as “liberal evangelical” churches. The fundamentalists think that because they don’t drink and smoke and dance, they’re unspotted from the world. But worldliness involves more than worldly actions. The most fatal form of worldliness, in fact, is worldly reasoning – a worldly life orientation. The church in this way embraces what Francis Schaeffer called “forms of the world spirit.”16 SPIRITUAL CASTE SYSTEM
Second, there’s the problem of a spiritual caste system. One of the main criticisms the Reformers leveled at the Roman Catholic Church was its dualistic scheme of spirituality. The truly spiritual ones were the priests and others in church leadership, the monks and nuns sequestered from ordinary life, and after death, the saints, who were super-exalted Christians. The Reformers didn’t consider this caste system biblical. It created a dualistic spirituality. The priesthood was called to be entirely committed to God, but the laity could live a life of mediocre commitment as long as they came to confession and mass. The Reformers knew that Rome got this point all wrong. Every Christian should be a committed Christian, and the only difference between church leadership and the laity is over giftedness, not over a qualitative level of spirituality. 17 This meant that vocation itself could be, and should be, holy. The office of priest or the calling of a monk or nun was not a higher or more spiritual calling than a jewelry peddler or shoe cobbler. We might call this the Protestant sanctification of vocation, and it had a profound effect on culture. It meant that the cobbler or wool merchant could look on his or her work as distinctively Christian. It wasn’t simply that the culture itself is Christian; every person’s calling within that culture should be Christian.
This sanctification of vocation is essential to a truly consistent Christian Gospel. Unfortunately, evangelicals have developed their own version of spiritual dualism. In these quarters, they have tended to exalt the work of the pastorate and missionaries and Christian day school teachers as somehow “the Lord’s work,” while everything else is acceptable, but secondary. If you really wish to serve the Lord without qualification, you must “surrender your life” to the ministry. Oddly, no one ever speaks of “surrendering his life” to writing computer code or selling or repairing automobiles or piloting commercial aircraft or making millions of dollars investing prudently in the stock market. But in biblical terms, if in whether we eat or drink and in whatever we do we, we do all to God’s glory (1 Cor. 10:31), if God has called us to one of these vocations or another outside “full-time ministry,” we surrender our life to that vocation. To the extent that we faithfully serve God in that vocation in terms of God’s word, this is our highest possible calling. EMBASSY-ROOF CHRISTIANITY
Finally, there’s the challenge of what I’d like to term embassy-roof Christianity. Perhaps you’ve seen the photos or video of the United States’ evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Vietnam in 1975 as the Viet Cong overran South Vietnam. It was a great disgrace and embarrassment to the United States to have, in effect, lost its first war, diplomats and soldiers and civilians squeezing into helicopters on the embassy roof and even dangling from its underneath skids; but it’s a suitable metaphor for how many Christians today see the church in relation to culture. The church is thought to be God’s embassy in an increasingly hostile culture that it can never hope to recapture for Christ the King. The best we can hope for is to win over a few of the locals to our otherworldly Gospel. As time goes on, even that influence will increasingly wane, and in the end, like Saigon’s U. S. embassy in 1975, we’ll dispatch diplomatic buses to collect our citizens and their friends for the final evacuation. From the embassy rooftops the divine helicopters will rescue the faithful and take them to safety on God’s heavenly aircraft carrier – this is sometimes Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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called the “rapture,” or thought to be coincident with the Second Coming. My metaphor may be dramatic, but it’s not, I believe, inaccurate.
coincident with the present age, not only the age to come19 – will gradually overwhelm Satan and sin in all areas of life and thought.
This embassy-roof Christianity is strange, because most who hold it also champion the Great Commission, at least in theory: our calling is to get the Gospel to, and baptize and disciple, all the nations. But it’s not clear how they reconcile the Great Commission with their embassy-roof Christianity.18 The Great Commission is robust, outward-looking, Gospel-disseminating, cultureredeeming. Embassy-roof Christianity, on the other hand, is insular, inward-looking, Gospelshrinking, and culture-rejecting. If, as I’ve suggested, the Great Commission is the cultural mandate adapted to the post-Fall world, embassyroof Christianity simply isn’t compatible with the Gospel.
For this reason, Great Commission ministers pray for power to cast down satanic strongholds and all that exalts itself against Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). They address all areas of life presently corrupted by sin. They encourage Christians to influence society for divine truth wherever God has placed them: selling automobiles, writing code, teaching children, designing or painting houses, making coffee, or leading an international corporation. “[W]here sin increased [wherever!], grace abounded all the more.” Full-fledged Gospel ministry is one of cultural engagement and conquest, not abandonment and defeat.
Gospel ministry, as you might imagine, is conceived very differently in these two viewpoints. Embassy-roof ministry gets a few souls saved and into the church. It teaches them (rightly) to live a life of surrender to the Lord – prayer, Bible reading, personal evangelism, resisting temptation, rearing a godly family, and, at best, expanding the church. But even in its church expansion goals, it always conceives itself as fighting a defensive battle. It can’t expect any great revival or reformation in society, any culture-transforming Gospel victories.
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In fact, the church is likely destined to lose its effectiveness as apostasy engulfs the culture. Ministry is intensive (sanctifying Christians), but not extensive (expanding Christianity). They’re preparing the faithful for that rooftop helicopter rescue operation. But Great Commission ministry is quite different: it plans for victory, to reverse the enemy’s advance and retake the territory presently under satanic control. It takes God’s Gospel promises seriously. Make no mistake: Great Commission ministers know they’ll suffer Satanic assault and setbacks, and that their task won’t be easy, just as Jesus’ wasn’t, but they are buoyed by the confidence that our Lord’s kingdom in human history – Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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“Great Commission ministry is quite different: it plans for victory, to reverse the enemy’s advance and retake the territory presently under satanic control.”
Though never completely in this life. For a succinct but rigorous explanation of these aspects of the gospel, see John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955). 3 Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984), 42–60. 4 Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1974, 1982), 133. 5 “Creation is what God makes; culture is what we make,” John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P & R, 2008), 854. 6 Scott J. Hafemann, “The Kingdom of God as the Mission of God,” in For the Fame of God’s Name, Sam Storms and Justin Taylor, eds. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2010), 348. The entire essay is well worth reading. 7 H. Henry Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1960 edition) 80–81. 8 Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theistic Ethics (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), 86-87. 9Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1959, 2001), 213. 10 This doesn’t mean they are as evil as they could be. It only means that sin has corrupted every part of their being. Total depravity isn’t utter depravity. 2
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Cornelius Van Til, The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1977). 12 James H. Olthius, “On Worldviews,” Christian Scholars Review, Vol. XIV, No. 2 (1985), 155. 13 David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 138. 14 Ibid., 45. 15 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Reconciliation of Mind: A Theological Meditation upon the Teaching of St. Paul,” in Theology in the Service of the Church, Wallace M. Alston Jr., ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 197, emphasis in original. 16 Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1984). 111–140. 17 Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 335–338.
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Many embrace excessively pessimistic eschatologies. One of the most influential proponents in recent memory of this viewpoint and its consequently diminished Gospel was D. M. Lloyd-Jones. See, e.g., his 2 Peter (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1983), 81, 231. 19 Roderick Campbell, Israel and the New Covenant (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1954).
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
the GOSPEL of LIFE vs
The Culture of Death DOCTOR DEATH AND JUDGE DREDD
THE LATE-MODERN WESTERN WORLD has a sordid history when it comes
to the weak and the sick. Before the advent of Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, there was no significant debate in the European countries regarding the sanctity of human life – it was taken as a given and deeply entrenched in European thought and law.1 Not only the churches but classical liberals under the influence of Christian faith enshrined the ‘right to life’ as a basic right for the individual. The ideas and forces that brought about a change in this perspective are complex, but as modern European historian Richard Weikart notes: A rather uncontroversial part of the law code for the newly united Germany in 1871 was the prohibition against assisted suicide. Only in the late nineteenth and especially early twentieth century did a significant debate erupt over issues relating to the sanctity of human life, especially infanticide, euthanasia, abortion and suicide. Darwinism played an important role in the debate over the sanctity of life, for it altered many people’s conceptions about the value of human life, as well as the significance of death. Many Darwinists claimed that they were creating a whole new worldview with new ideas about the meaning and value of life based on Darwinian theory. Darwinian monists and materialists initiated public debate and led the movements for abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, and even involuntary euthanasia. Many of them also considered suicide a private matter beyond the scope of Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
morality.... Recent scholarship on the history of American and British euthanasia movements also emphasizes the pivotal role Darwinism played in devaluing human life and giving birth to the euthanasia movement.2
The first leading advocate in Germany for killing the ‘unfit’ was the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. He favored abortion, infanticide for the congenitally disabled, involuntary killing of the mentally ill, and since newborn infants were in an evolutionary stage equivalent to animal ancestors, they have no soul and killing them, he argued, was no different from killing an animal and cannot be equated with murder. Like our contemporary justices who don’t like the term assisted ‘suicide’ and prefer ‘assisted death’, since they think the term suicide is derogatory, Haeckel objected to the German term for suicide meaning ‘selfmurder,’ because he believed suicide and assisted suicide were not murder but what he perversely termed ‘self-redemption.’ In fact, Haeckel argued we are morally obligated to help people find ‘selfredemption.’ He wrote: We have the right – or if one prefers – the duty, to end the deep suffering of our fellow humans, if strong illness without hope of recovery makes their existence unbearable and if they themselves ask for ‘redemption from evil.’3
To ‘safeguard’ these practices from abuse Haeckel proposed that a commission of physicians make the final decision in each case. Thus, Germany’s leading Darwinist put his scientific stamp of approval on the murder of the terminally ill and disabled. His books were widely read and deeply
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REV. DR. JOE BOOT REV. DR. JOE BOOT is the founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias for seven years as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. A theology graduate of Birmingham Christian College, England, Joe earned his M.A. in Mission Theology with the University of Manchester and his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought with Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His latest book, The Mission of God, is a tour de force of biblical cultural theology, expounding the mission of the church in the 21st Century. He is Senior Fellow of the cultural and apologetics think tank, truthXchange in Southern California and lives in Toronto with his wife Jenny and their three children Naomi, Hannah and Isaac.
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“Dignity on this view is rooted not in the biblical view of man as the imago dei, but in radical human autonomy, where man is not God’s creature but a product of mindless evolution. ”
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impacted future generations of the intelligentsia. The view was growing that man was little more than an advanced animal, not a creature made in God’s image, and that assisting people killing themselves was an act of virtue in helping them achieve redemption.
of certain ‘rights’ or ‘freedoms’ basic to human dignity. In the name of well-being, doctors must again become executioners. Dignity on this view is rooted not in the biblical view of man as the imago dei, but in radical human autonomy, where man is not God’s creature but a product of mindless evolution.
It was not long before Haeckel’s proposed commission of physicians were enthusiastically pursuing this course in Hitler’s Germany. It is a startling fact to note that medical doctors were among Hitler’s strongest and earliest supporters – history shows they were over-represented in the Nazi Party.4 The idea that our courts give us any comfort in assuring us of their ‘safeguards,’ that killing will be humane, voluntary and only after review by physicians, offers no reassurance to those familiar with twentieth century history. Germany’s euthanasia program and Nazi death camps were largely manned by medical doctors and scientists. Bergman notes that “Fredric Wertham, in a study of Nazi eugenic programmes concluded that doctors, ‘were directly responsible’ for the ‘unprecedented occurrence of mass violence and the deliberate killing of large numbers of mental patients.’”5 There were so many intellectuals and academics that supported mass killings that the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals held a separate trial for those involved in torture and murder. One of very few physicians who opposed the Nazis even before they came to power was Julius Moses, a Jewish doctor. On reading the calls of the National Socialist Welfare Organisation for the killing of the disabled, he gave the chilling warning in 1932 that this program of killing would be left to the physician: “it is the physician who must carry out this extermination.... He is to be the executioner.”6
By the humpty dumpty logic of modern intellectualism, the court concluded that “the right to life protects personal autonomy and fundamental notions of self-determination and dignity, and therefore includes the right to determine whether to take one’s own life.”7 In the name of freedom, security of person, dignity and life the historic ban on physician-assisted suicide in Canada that sought to protect life and the most vulnerable has been lifted, and Parliament has just a few months to decide how it will regulate the practice and how permissive the law should be. For these justices, there is no difference between suicide and assisted suicide and the right to life somehow means an entitlement to kill oneself – with the help of a doctor if you can’t manage it yourself.
So what have we learned from that murderous century about the application of the godless ideas of intellectual elites to matters of life and death? Clearly not very much, for we are again being told by judges, intellectuals and the political class in Western society that it can be an act of lawful kindness for state actors (state-funded and regulated physicians) to kill people, or help them kill themselves (voluntary euthanasia), and that not to recognise this is to rob them
This notion of radical autonomy means that one’s life and liberty are supposedly infringed by laws for the protection of life. The interests of God, a person’s family and loved ones, and the common good of society are all callously overlooked in favor of secular individual sovereignty. For over 2000 years, consistent with the Hippocratic Oath, any form of deliberate euthanasia (originally meaning ‘good death’ by palliative care, but now meaning intentional killing) was never
In the United Kingdom, on September 11th 2015, Parliament heard second reading of a bill to legalise assisted suicide, and MPs will vote on the matter. Canada is once again ahead of the U.K in this social trajectory. In Carter, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a unanimous judgment declaring section 241 (b) and section 14 (banning assisted suicide) of the criminal code of no force or effect because those sections allegedly infringe section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Those who cannot kill themselves are now entitled to constitutionally mandated assistance from a physician.
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considered a ‘treatment’ and physicians have thus been largely prohibited from killing. Given the shocking fact that in Canada only 1630% of patients who need palliative care actually have access to it8 – despite all our boasting about our tax-funded and state-controlled health care system – and even though we also know that many people who ask for euthanasia change their minds, none of this seemed to penetrate the ideological mindset of our leading jurists; for them, the right to life can be waived...period. Yet if in 70-85% of cases very ill people are not receiving proper pain relief, rather than killing them at their request, isn’t true medicine, true compassion, about relieving their suffering to give them a better quality of life? How would we want to be treated? How would we want our children treated? Of course, whilst actively undermining it, the court paid lip service to the sanctity of life and the freedom of conscience of a physician not to participate in killing patients (saying this freedom was protected by the Charter), but they did not provide any specific language regarding freedom of conscience, religion and the right of faith-based healthcare institutions to maintain theological integrity and Christian identity.9 As such the court’s assurances are empty, because now, if a physician refuses to participate in killing a ‘qualifying’ patient they are actually interfering with that patient’s Charter right, which is currently not the case with abortion. And we know what happens in the hierarchy of rights when freedom of religion comes up against radical autonomy in the courts. How long will it be before a case is brought against a physician on just such a charge? To illustrate the vacuity of such assurances, currently physicians’ regulatory colleges in Ontario and Saskatchewan have introduced draft policies that would require physicians, who on grounds of conscience object to abortion, to take active steps to refer patients to a physician with no scruples about murdering the unborn. In fact the Saskatchewan draft policy requires physicians to violate their faith and conscience in the interests of the patient’s ‘health or well-being.’ If this stands in the case of abortion (a nonEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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Charter entitlement), what is potentially coming regarding physician-assisted suicide? The truth is, the genie is out of the bottle; all the implications of this decision may not be felt for some time, but we can be sure that it will affect not just how people die, but how Christian chaplains and ministers are permitted to interact with the sick and dying, and how Christian counselors are officially permitted to deal with depressed and troubled people. We are presently not free to stand peacefully outside Canada’s child killing facilities (abortion clinics) to speak with those entering without risking arrest. For how long will Christian pastors and chaplains have access to the suicidal in our state facilities of ‘health’? The Physicians Colleges’ draft policies already presuppose that the Christian faith is inimical to the ‘health and well-being’ of those considering abortion. How long before Christian doctors and pastors are considered a health hazard? EUTHANIZING GOD
In the mid-twentieth century, American Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes noted that “the essence of religion is belief in a relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation.”10 He was right. Man is not autonomous but God’s creation and imagebearer. As such he sustains a relationship to God that involves obligations that transcend personal desires, filial relationships or human social contracts. This means that even if I want to kill myself, my family supports it and the state will gladly do it, I am not entitled to do so, because I belong to God – self-homicide is still a form of murder. However, Western courts in recent decades have been primarily committed to legal positivism, which denies legal and moral absolutes and is essentially relativistic. The locale of justice for the social order itself is shifted from God to man and the humanistic state. This has been a long process and not one whose fruit was immediately apparent. Robert Strausz-Hupe has observed:
“Even if I want to kill myself, my family supports it and the state will gladly do it, I am not entitled to do so, because I belong to God ”
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“Amidst all the human misery Christ encountered, he never helped any hopeless soul kill themselves”
The Prince could now persuade himself that he incarnated the State: he no longer held his power as a sacred trust, but possessed it as he possessed his body. The secular theory of the State did not allow for the existence of independent social units, members that, so to speak, were not attached to the body. The centralizing tendencies that swept the bits and pieces of the crumbling medieval order into the hamper of the secular state, found in scientific analogies their convenient rationalizations. Just as the limbs obey the command of a central and superior organ – presumably the brain – so the body politic must naturally obey the Prince.11
This is a revolutionary faith, one that our courts now reflect. Power and authority is no longer a sacred trust under God, but something the state and its actors embody in themselves. God is dead for them. There can be no independent units like the church and Christian institutions that are not under the government and authority of the secular body politic. This faith calls for the de-Christianization of the world and so the dehumanization of man as God’s image-bearer. The libertarian police state and its reasoning is the measure of all things, even life and death, and since their reason is the source of legitimacy, they assert the right to govern and command in terms of human law.
“The gospel is predicated on the identity of Jesus Christ as sovereign Lord, the creator and redeemer of his people and the King of all. ”
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The results of the disregard for God’s sovereignty today are startling. We do not need to look back to Nazi Germany to see the evil of autonomy. In the Netherlands, where euthanasia was legalised in 1984, the Remmelink report of 1991 found that 5,450 patients were killed without their consent. The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that one in ten deaths in the Netherlands in 2005 resulted from some form of suicide or euthanasia. In the same year 20% of cases of assisted suicide or euthanasia went unreported, despite the legal obligation to do so. Palliative care has been neglected in the Netherlands to the point that people feel the need to justify why they should not be killed, and the social attitude toward sickness, suffering and aging has radically changed from compassion and care to convenience and killing. In 2012 a major report found that euthanasia
had increased in the Netherlands by 73% in just eight years. From March 2012 mobile euthanasia units planned to administer death to people with chronic depression, disabilities, dementia and loneliness across the country.12 Sinful man may want to euthanize God himself, but his dream is an impossible one. When the human authorities cooperating in all the machinations of Satan had killed the Lord of glory, he simply shattered death and the grave, and saints long passed away were seen in the city, for Jesus Christ is life. One obvious feature of the ministry of Jesus in the gospels is that dignity and kindness never included killing vulnerable innocents! Instead we find the Lord Jesus sacrificially healing, restoring, delivering and cleansing people in seemingly hopeless situations – this was his constant work. Amidst all the human misery Christ encountered, he never helped any hopeless soul kill themselves, never euthanized a sick or infirm person, and never put anyone out of their misery by taking their life. This should alert us to the fact that there is something very wrong with the idea that we participate in the preservation of human sanctity, well-being or dignity when killing someone who says they want to die, slaughtering the unborn, or euthanizing someone whose life society says is not worth living. It is particularly wearisome to listen to many Christians today who seem ambivalent toward, or even tacitly supportive of abortion or assisted suicide and euthanasia, in part on the grounds that this is merely a matter of politics and that the defense of life is simply a ‘right wing’ issue – as though this constitutes an argument. It should be no shock to any biblically literate Christian that the sovereign God and his word are not subject to human political definitions or limitations. The omnipotent, immortal and invisible creator God sits neither on the left or right, but on the throne of the universe, and his word is the binding standard of judgment in all things. When the triune God speaks, his word has personal, familial, social, judicial, political, cultural and universal implications. Our concern
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should never be whether God’s word on a given matter veers to the modern political left or right, but rather how we might submit to and apply God’s word in all spheres of life. SOVEREIGNTY AND THE LOGIC OF LIFE
At the heart of the gospel is the reality that Jesus Christ is Lord, or sovereign. Indeed, the most common title in Scripture for Christ is that he is the Lord. Absolute sovereignty means ultimate rule, power and authority in every sphere and over all things. When we are introduced to the person of Christ in the New Testament we are told that he is the creator and author of life (John 1:1-18), with authority over death as the self-existent ‘I am’ who spoke with Moses at the burning bush (John 8:52-58). Jesus’ unprecedented ministry of healing, his authority over creation in the calming of the seas, turning water to wine, and even raising the dead by a simple word demonstrated to his disciples that he was ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matt. 16:16). As such, St. Paul tells us it is through Christ (contra Haeckel) that we have redemption and salvation, for the sovereign Lord not only made all things – thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, – they were created for him, and it is by him that all things visible and invisible continue to consist or hold together (Col. 1:13-20). It is by the same sovereign Lord alone that all things can be made new and whole in the fullness of redemption (2 Cor. 5:17; Rev. 21:5), as all things are brought into subjection to him (Heb. 2:8). Consequently, there is no understanding the good news of the kingdom without recognition of this foundational truth. The gospel is predicated on the identity of Jesus Christ as sovereign Lord, the creator and redeemer of his people and the King of all. Hence, St. Paul declares that the triune God is “the blessed and only sovereign, the king of kings and Lord of lords” (1 Tim. 6:16). This God has an absolute right to govern life and give law, and all the nations and their judges and rulers are subject to him (Ps. 102:15), including the British Houses of Parliament and the Supreme Court of Canada. In Jesus’ teaching about himself, he claimed to be the great and good shepherd – that is, the true Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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ruler, protector, provider and savior of his people. The coming of the sovereign Lord therefore heralded something new in history, prefigured in the great King David – the visible presence of life and truth in the shepherd King and his kingdom. Jesus characterized it this way: All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly (John 10:8-10).
As the Lord of life, Christ came to give life and life in true abundance. However, Jesus also points to false claimants to sovereignty – imposters masquerading as shepherds of the sheep who in fact come only to steal, kill and destroy. A mark of the Christian gospel is its orientation toward life under the Lord of life, whereas a mark of anti-Christianity is an orientation toward death under false sovereigns (Prov. 8:36). In every aspect of life, the gospel is a principle of life. Rebellion invokes the principle of death. This is inescapable, for if the gospel is true and Christ is the light that leads to life, then to turn against him is to move toward death and darkness. As our culture has steadily abandoned the true sovereign and his word of life, thieves or counterfeit sovereigns have declared their own word of death and destruction, advancing a culture of killing in the promotion of abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia and other destructive ‘freedoms.’ In a very real way, this is a fruitless pursuit; the generation that kills its children will be killed by its children. It is only within the framework of the gospel that we see the biblical logic of life! Being pro-life is inescapable for the Christian, from womb to tomb, for even at the graveside, resurrection life and hope is declared over the departed because the sovereign Lord has conquered the grave.
“A mark of the Christian gospel is its orientation toward life under the Lord of life, whereas a mark of anti-Christianity is an orientation toward death under false sovereigns.”
THIEVES OF SOVEREIGNTY
The recent dramatic progress of activists, judges and elites in advancing killing of the unborn, FALL 2015
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“The recent dramatic progress of activists, judges and elites in advancing killing must be understood primarily as a consequence of underlying beliefs about the source of sovereignty”
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infanticide (live birth abortion), the aged, disabled and sick, must be understood primarily as a consequence of underlying beliefs about the source of sovereignty. The prevailing attitude in any culture toward human life is not merely incidental but religious or ideological. We see this clearly in the differences between how the pagans regarded life and what God required of Israel in the ancient world. To disregard or abuse the poor, needy and the sick was a sinful disgrace for a Hebrew (Prov. 14:31; Ezek. 34:3-4) and to participate in the death cults of surrounding nations meant severe judgment. One of many evil kings in Judah and Israel, Manasseh, built altars to a pagan state deity Baal (meaning lord), and burned his own son in the fire as an offering (2 Kings 21:1-6) in keeping with pagan worship. He consulted mediums and necromancers in search of an alternate word and source of meaning. Judah’s rebellion against God’s law in doing ‘more evil’ than the heathen peoples within Canaan meant unavoidable judgment. King Josiah in contrast to Manasseh and in obedience to God, tore down the altars to Baal and various false gods, and “he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the Son of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech” (2 Kings 23:10). God’s sovereign law meant life, antinomianism meant death. In our time sovereignty or rule and authority has again been transferred from God to man and democratized for the masses – a crowd all too often manipulated by media and a cultural, political elite. As such, sovereignty and law is something that emerges from and expresses the general will of the people. The ‘people’ are thus typically ‘embodied’ in the state actors or ruling elite, sovereignty being delegated to them by the society. Consequently, law is disconnected from objective morality and the new arbitrary will of man becomes the sovereign arbiter of life and death. Yet, in the Christian faith that decisively shaped the Western world and our institutions, the identity of Christ as sovereign Lord meant the rule of law governing all men, law that was profoundly informed by the revealed law of God. Here law, justice and morality were religious matters and involved in each other. The reason for this is that the word of a sovereign is a law-
word and binding on the subjects. The lord or sovereign is the source of law in any society so the de-facto ‘god’ of any social order defines law and thus defines life. In our history, under the influence of the gospel, kings and parliaments steadily recognized their subordination to Christ and acknowledged his Word and sovereign supremacy. This meant a high regard for the sanctity of human life, since God’s law makes clear that people are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27) and to attack that image by lawless killing is to strike at God himself (Gen. 9:5-6). According to Scripture, all of life belongs to God (Ps. 24:1) and so life and death are in God’s hands alone (Ps. 31:15; Job 12:10). No one therefore has the right to usurp the sovereignty of Christ and become an autonomous arbiter of life and death. For the state, in the name of the people, to arrogate this power to itself or equate it with man’s autonomous will is evil and blasphemous. For judges and courts to legislate whose lives should be protected and whose may not be worth living is to reduce human life and personhood to a subjective legal definition and juristic interpretation – by this means anyone might be declared a non-person or ‘useless eater,’ and fit to be killed in a brave new world where evolution is cultural and state orthodoxy. But it was with the falsely-labelled ‘Enlightenment’ that a kind of scientism began to reorder people’s thinking into believing that reason and law were somehow inherent in the universe and so man’s selfconsciousness steadily became the ultimate point of reference in defining reality. By linking physical law and natural law, people were increasingly viewed as social atoms and politics seen as a social experiment to bring about an ideal order. This has led emphatically to the dehumanization of man – a fact that clearly marked the atheist states of the twentieth century. History proves time and again that if human beings are stripped of sanctity as God’s image bearers, precious lives under his sovereign law and sway, and are instead reduced to animals in a chain of being, units of collectivist society, existing only under the sovereignty of the humanistic state, the elitist tyranny of coercion is the imminent threat. In this view nature is the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Gospel of Life
substantive reality, so why should eugenic ideas and practices not prevail? Abortion is carried out today under the euphemism of reproductive health, and killing the sick, depressed, elderly and infirm is done in the name of mercy and dignity, proving that “even the merciful acts of the wicked are cruel” (Prov. 12:10). It is by the assertion of autonomy that modern man has sought to wrest sovereignty from the hands of God, and when this is pursued people suffer the terrors of the self-righteous. The courts profess to value human life and its sanctity, politicians assert their reverence for life, and yet their actions contradict their confession as they run with the elite group. The tender mercies of the modern intellectual, of humanistic man, mean tyranny and death. The noted historian Paul Johnson in his study of secular intellectuals from Rousseau to Chomsky leaves his readers with a telling warning: It is just about two hundred years since the secular intellectuals began to replace the old clerisy as the guides and mentors of mankind.... We have examined their moral and judgmental qualification for this task...the way they treat their friends, colleagues and servants, and above all their own families.... What conclusions should be drawn…? One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is - beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be the object of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.... Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action. Above all we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.13
When man seeks to usurp the sovereignty of God, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
and replaces God’s word with his own idea for humanity, irrationality and destruction follow, and people suffer. The modern antinomian idea of radical autonomy in a secular society governed by the ideas of a new priesthood of cultural elites has seen the West ‘legally’ destroying marriage and family, murdering millions of unborn children as nonpersons, and increasingly killing the depressed, sick and infirm – all in the name of life and kindness. This irrational evil is the despotism of fallen man’s vain imagination that sets itself against the knowledge of God. Only a return to Christ the sovereign Lord, to his law and gospel can bring life and hope again to our self-centred and dying age. “Come back to me and live” (Amos 5:4).
1
Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 57. 2 Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, 145-146 3 Haeckel cited in Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, 148 4 See Jerry Bergman, Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (Kitchener, ON: Joshua Press, 2012), 133 5 Bergman, Hitler, 134 6 Cited in Bergman, Hitler, 143 7 Cited in Gerald Chipeur, Q.C, ‘Carter Case Comment,’ Christian Legal Journal, June 2015, Vol. 24, Issue 2 8 Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care, “Not to be Forgotten: Care of Vulnerable Canadians,” Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care, November 2011, 21, accessed September 2 2015, http://pcpcccpspsc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ReportEN. pdf. 9 See Albertos Polizogopolous. “Defending Life at the Supreme Court,” Christian Legal Journal, June 2015, Vol. 24, Issue 2, 12. 10 Rosco J. Tresolini, Justice and the Supreme Court (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1963), 95. 11 Robert Strausz-Hupe, Power and Community (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956), 97. 12 See John Scriven, Belief and the Nation (Exeter: Wilberforce Publications, 2013), 256-259. 13 Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 342. FALL 2015
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DENNIS DOTY
THE GOSPEL MESSAGE – THAT DENNIS DOTY grew up in Houston, Texas and attended Oklahoma Baptist University where he majored in Religious Studies, played collegiate level golf, and met his wife Alecia. He received a Masters degree in Leadership from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Dennis was first introduced to Classical Christian education at Covenant Academy in Houston where he taught American History, Bible, Literature, Logic, and Physical Education in the middle school and served as the school Chaplain. Recently he served as Principal and Dean of Faculty at Sayers Classical Academy in Kentucky. Additionally, Dennis was a member of the Advisory Council at Sayers Classical Academy and currently serves as the Vice President on the Board of Directors for The Connection School in Houston. Dennis and his wife enjoy outdoor activities such as running, hiking, and training for triathlons. Dennis and his wife have one daughter, Eva. They are honoured to serve Westminster Classical and the city of Toronto.
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is the news of the lordship of Jesus Christ, is wonderfully expressed in the following passage: He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross (Col. 1:15-20).
The foundation of a Christian classical education is the recognition and affirmation of this truth, and this ought to be the basis of education for any Christian. It is consistent with the model commanded by God in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. If at-home education is not possible, the Christian parent delegates this responsibility to the local Christian school. In extreme situations (not all “Christian” schools are healthy nor financially accessible) the Christian parent delegates learning to the government school but with full awareness that the parent must constantly intervene as an ambassador to reconcile knowledge with the gospel (2 Cor. 5:11-21). The Christian parent must also be ready to honour and defend the gospel message as it will undoubtedly be attacked in the secular context, either in subtle messages like the redefinition of the family or blatant predatory fashion of being bullied or mocked. Unfortunately, education – specifically education focused on the Word of God, has begun to be
derailed by “professionals” who use children as test subjects for current trends of educational pragmatism. Education since the 1500s under the influence of Empiricism in Francis Bacon, to Rationalism in René Descartes, to Romanticism in Rousseau, and Modernism in John Dewey, has transformed the way society views and values the child. In each of the above movements was a slow but progressive removal of absolute, unchanging truths towards universal multiculturalism — the acceptance and blending of any and all ideas for the undefined doctrines of acceptance and inclusion. It is important for the Christian parent to be “educated” in this brief history because this anthropology is now deciding how a parent is to parent their children, and the courts are also weighing in on the matter. For many Christians in North America—and increasingly worldwide—the solution is the repopularization of ancient practices and ideas found in the educational philosophy called classical education. Christian families appreciate a focus back on ancient truths and practices because, as was understood in classical times, Theology served as Queen of the Sciences—all other arts and sciences had to agree with and support theology. This movement focuses on cultivating wisdom and virtuous character through timeless truths and timeless teaching methods. It is a natural and organic philosophy of teaching that honours the mind and stirs the heart to tune knowledge back to its source — for the Christian this is ultimately found in Christ as the passage from Colossians proclaims. However, even non-Christian families are orienting themselves to a classical educational philosophy because they recognize something is flawed in the North American educational Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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system. They might not be able to identify or articulate the flaw but the common knowledge that North American education is consistently ranked low against other countries around the world is startling, and causing a search for something better. WHY CLASSICAL EDUCATION?
I must say upfront that I do not hold to classical pedagogy as I hold to the doctrine of salvation or my hope and belief in the resurrection. However, I am compelled to believe that classical education is staunchly beneficial to children, family, and culture; classical education leads a child closer to the realities and truths found only in Christ. It is unifying all knowledge by subjecting it to the authority of King Jesus. In short, it is a Gospel issue. In classical education a child will receive vast amounts of information. The chants, songs, recitations, presentations, deep discussions, Great Books, and articulate students one encounters walking the halls of a classical school leave parents saying, “I wish I had that education.” The information they acquire is truly impressive. However, according to the book of Ecclesiastes, God calls this vanity, meaningless, a waste of time. Why? Because information and knowledge that is separated from Christ is not grounded in anything; there is no goal or value. It is the gospel that adds value and transformation. Otherwise classical education is just another form of relativistic elitism. Paul, in his letter to the Colossians quoted above, rightly and deeply theologically identifies why knowledge, or education as a whole, must be Christ-centered. This means that even now, this moment, Christ is upholding every fact, piece of information, detail of knowledge, the rhetoric used to convey those thoughts, language, the creativity needed to create, innovate, execute, collect data, categorize, etc. Jesus is at this moment holding everything together! Therefore, under this amazing authority, a Christ-centered classical education then becomes Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
a humbling experience because you realize what you have acquired has only been granted to you by a sovereign God. The next astounding thought is that the good Lord grants this amazing knowledge to both the just and the unjust. This is why nonbelievers are able to do such amazing things using their God-given minds and proclivities — because God has granted it to be used in such a manner! The scientific advances made in the secular community should strengthen the faith, encouraging and convicting us in articulating God over all creation, not deflate believers in fear that secularism is gaining ground proving that God is dead. Christians ought to be shrewd and innocent and not fear what to say when opposition to Christian beliefs and convictions are expressed (Matt. 10:16).
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“This movement focuses on cultivating wisdom and virtuous character through timeless truths and timeless teaching methods.”
It is also being discovered, after over thirty years of seeking, learning, and implementing, that a classical education is beneficial to all and in various contexts. Students with special needs are blessed because of the structured environment, loving teachers, modified programmes tailored to their needs, and engaging classrooms and material that honours and cultivates the Godgiven gifts in each child. Inner city children also find a blessing in classical education because of the core commitment to excellence and not allowing any child to fail or waste their youth. Emphasis on character and virtue is beneficial to inner city life; many children relate well to the epic struggles, challenges, and even victories found in classical literature such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Dante’s journey from the Inferno to the Paradiso. A classical education for the inner city is liberating! Communities of faith are also finding a cure to the prevalent lack of interest and promulgation of that faith. Specifically the Catholic tradition is finding a resurgence of practising followers because “True Catholic education is fundamentally a moral education.”1 The classical school promoted by a faith community is designed to incorporate that faith in all aspects
“Information and knowledge that is separated from Christ is not grounded in anything; there is no goal or value. It is the gospel that adds value and transformation. ”
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“The ultimate goal in the study of the liberal arts is for free people, and for those free people to rule themselves under God.”
“After each day of creation, God declares the perfect blessing that it is all good; God is constantly speaking blessing because everything has a purpose.”
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of learning and make that faith compelling and enriching to the child. HOW CHRISTIAN CLASSICAL EDUCATION WORKS
Classical education can be understood in two ways: classical methodology and classical curriculum. David Hicks, author of Norms and Nobility, writes, “In his quest for the best education, the ancient schoolmaster possessed two advantages over the modern educator. First, he knew exactly what kind of a person he wished to produce. He shared with his contemporaries a prescriptive understanding of man inherited from the past and embodied in the Ideal Type of the Mythos”.2 And, “second, he agreed in form upon an inquiry-based or knowledge-centered—as opposed to child-centered—approach to education. Whether he was a philosopher hoping to elicit knowledge or a rhetorician hoping to implant it, he ignored the “child” and appealed directly to the ‘father of the man’ within his student”.3 This perspective is vastly different from today’s “child-centered” educational models. Childcentered, like current Montessori instructional methods, means children are given the reins of their education; they are drawn to what they want and when they want to learn. This education does not cater to the whole child — making them well-rounded — but focuses on increasing their strengths and not challenging or developing their weaknesses. So, if the child demonstrates a character flaw, (it must be noted, however, that the secular institution will not recognize “flaws” and therefore not be able to adequately address it) the teacher will guide the child to avoid the situation which reveals that weakness. Similarly, another educational approach called the Reggio Emilia, from post-WWII, established by Loris Malaguzzi from Italy, teaches that students and teachers are co-learners. They use self-guided curriculum and projects, starting at Pre-K & Kindergarten. This view of the child is that they are creative and capable. Teachers have goals and outcomes, but they don’t know the path they’re
going to take to get there, nor do they force this on the students; that would be oppressive to their natural ways and form of learning. In contrast, Christian classical education recognizes a child as made in the image of God and therefore able to demonstrate or imitate God’s character, creativity, beauty, goodness, and truth. It then becomes the aim of the classical educator to bring these characteristics into maturity. Aristotle, in his handbooks, describes that classical curriculum is to provide a foundation of tools for learning—the Trivium. This, combined later with the study of numbers became known as the Quadrivium—the seven liberal arts. The study of these arts was to lead individuals to complete freedom; freedom from contrivances and labour oppression of men to being free thinking and mature; to not be enslaved by false logic or political manipulation. The ultimate goal in the study of the liberal arts is for free people, and for those free people to rule themselves under God. HARMONY, NOT DISCORD
Every Christian ought to read Tolkien’s creation account found in his book, Silmarillion. His depiction of how the world and everything was made describes a beautiful picture of harmony. In fact it is the design of harmony that allows for unity and diversity. The creator begins with a note, eventually his heavenly beings begin to contribute to his note by adding harmony. It was by their listening that they came to more understanding. The music created is beautiful and coordinated. Even when one of the heavenly beings begins to stray off harmony, inserting his own notes, the creator weaves those unbalanced notes back into his perfect pitch and into harmony. In the end, the creator reveals all that the notes and harmony essentially creates—a fantastic world filled with life. This creation account is similar to the biblical creation account found in Genesis 1. Both begin with harmony. In contrast, all pagan mythological creation accounts begin with chaos. Notice Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Gospel & Education
that after each day of creation, God declares the perfect blessing that it is all good; God is constantly speaking blessing because everything has a purpose. Stemming from this idea, the Christian classical educator ought to consistently and increasingly design their lesson with a purpose. Then, this purposeful lesson and classroom is filled with love, kindness, and blessing because it points to the harmony found in Christ (Col. 1:15-20). In fact, all aspects of the academic institution should cultivate this truth of harmony. As a caveat, many Christian schools prepare students for the world, however, this thinking is dangerous because the world hated and continues to hate Christ. Instead, the Christian school ought to equip the student for the real world— one ruled by Christ. This is why classical educators pursue truth perception instead of pragmatism; academic institutions have moved from truth seeking to information knowing. I dare to state that if a student was taught timeless truths and the ideas found in the study of the liberal arts they will become dangerous to the state. Why? Because they have then transferred from dependence on others and information from others to the independence found in self-education. The danger is that the child is no longer slave to men, but able to articulate, honour, and defend truth, goodness, and beauty. The articulate individual described above will appear an anomaly—they have found peace and harmony where others not only find comfort in disharmony but seek to contribute to it by their own ignorance of the matter.
THE ART AND ACT OF IMITATION
Consider that in the first garden, God created man in his triune image. One of the beautiful attributes of this nature is the work of naming, identifying, classifying, arranging, tending the garden, with another responsibility of shepherdEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
ing. In the Garden, Adam imitates God. He sat under the direct instruction and paideia of God— in fact he knew nothing other than to imitate what his creator did. It was good, all good, and the only good thing Adam could do was imitate. In like fashion, in a classical school, this type of instruction is called mimetic instruction. The purpose is to guide students to think on concepts, types, and great ideas so they may embody what is true, good, and beautiful and apply such to their area of influence. Notice I did not say for a student to become a leader, as many schools like to propound in Vision statements. We must remember that Jesus called Christians to come and die. At its heart, mimetic instruction is summed up in the words of Jesus, “Follow me.” So there are two important truths to discuss there: 1. Are those who provide instruction in your life living and breathing examples worthy of imitation—do their lives embody the truth you are wanting your children to emulate. 2. What does the knowledge imparted have to do with the making of a wise and virtuous man or woman? How ought the schoolmaster to ensure his students embody those truths? By partaking and enjoying dialogues and conversations that stir the heart, soul, and mind to wisdom. Here are three points to implement in developing a rich culture of imitation.
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“The purpose is to guide students to think on concepts, types, and great ideas so they may embody what is true, good, and beautiful and apply such to their area of influence.”
1. Provide good examples and models that help train and define the task ahead of them. Classical education is not vocational
training as universities are now drawn to implement. In the late 1950s Winston Churchill was influential in establishing Churchill College at Cambridge University. Churchill was a master at language, brilliant with history and geography, and a prophet in foreseeing the consequences of ideas. So when he developed the scope for the college it was naturally, for him, an emphasis on science and technology. Students enrolled in this FALL 2015
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“When you consider all of the character, virtue, and academic growth you hope to see in your children, home, and school, then the first priority is to show genuine love for them.”
college of science & technology would receive an education in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, Greek, Latin, Ancient History (these are all first and core subjects), then modern languages, chemistry, biology, mathematics, physics, and other subjects. The reason for this is because he had just witnessed the immoral and devastating influence of modern science and technology put into the hands of wicked perverse men with evil intentions—Nazi Germany. He sensed that the continuation of these pursuits without wisdom leads to ill intentions. So then, our young men and women need to recognize that their minds have great potential for good or evil and they will be marked by how they use this in the task of life ahead of them. 2.Whether at home or in the classroom, strive to create a culture of love. When you
consider all of the character, virtue, and academic growth you hope to see in your children, home, and school, then the first priority is to show genuine love for them. Not the subject, not the material, not the discipline, not the school ethos, etc. To see those aspects done well in the life of the school and family, love must be the priority. To quote Samuel Coleridge in an essay titled The Education of Children, “In the education of children, love is first to be instilled, and out of love, obedience is to be educed.” 3. The parent and teacher must demonstrate genuine excitement and interest in all fields of study. That’s awfully overwhelming and
incredulous. The parent and educator do not have to teach all subjects or do them well but must have excitement and interest in all fields of study. Again, the challenge will be that we must strive not for competence, but a love for all of God’s design and creation. HOPES AND DREAMS
able to trace God’s faithfulness and covenant throughout history, recognizes failures and accomplishments in history with the resolve of not repeating previous injustices, morally sound and discerning in judgment, wise and virtuous, and ready to honor and defend what is true, good, and beautiful. A pursuit of this ideal student is within grip but certainly not for the faint of heart. It requires the mature Christian to remember the words of Jesus in John 16:33: “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” Jesus has overcome the world and, by his example, encourages us to go and do likewise. Start churches, start Christian schools, older men are to mentor young men to be selfless and wise, older women are to teach younger women to dignify and love the home, prepare and invest in Christian legal defense fellowships, prepare and anticipate further attacks on the definition of family and Christian orthodoxy, and finally, “take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.” (Eph. 6:13). I believe you will find such enthusiasm and resolve in most Christian classical schools—most especially in Westminster Classical Christian Academy4 in the heart of the city of Toronto—in the heart of the battle.
1
Gene Veith and Andrew Kern. Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, (Washington D.C.: Capital Research Center, 2015), 70. 2 David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education (Guilford, CT: University Press of America, 1999), 39. 3 Ibid. 4 www.westminsterclassical.ca
As is hopefully shown, a Christian classical education is one of the most consistent and faithful means of education that values the mind and stirs the heart. Consider the type of child this educational philosophy could develop: one who loves the Lord, is biblically literate and FALL 2015
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Prepare FOR Exile:
THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY This article is adapted and excerpted from an earlier publication. The original article can be found here: http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4797/full. Reproduced by permission. THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST AND CULTURE
IN 1996 I CHAIRED an ecumenical commission which produced a report called The Search for Faith. It quickly became a cause célèbre in the media, because of its treatment of contemporary spirituality which it described as “pick ‘n’ mix” and as reflecting attitudes in culture not only to faith but to relationships, values and much else besides. The report also examined the persistence of belief, and the need to believe, even if the need to belong is no longer felt with such intensity or felt at all. This is shown, again and again, in the large number of people who describe themselves as Christian when modest percentages of the general population go to church on a given Sunday. It gave considerable attention to what I have recently called “nothing-but-ery,” or a reductionist view of the universe and of the human condition – allegedly, but illegitimately, based on science. This is sometimes accompanied by an aggressive form of secularism which seeks to exclude religious discourse from the public sphere altogether, while continuing to espouse such values as the inherent dignity of human beings, equality, freedom, that have ultimately been derived from a religious and, more specifically, a Judaeo-Christian worldview. Such secularism favours individualism over community but also has a tendency to capitulate to culture. Not surprisingly, it is in thrall to scientific developments and can take a libertarian approach to how these are applied in the treatment of the embryo, the care of the person towards the end of life, or maintaining the integrity of the family in the face of assisted fertility technologies. In much Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
of this, there is an implicit utilitarianism at work, with neglect of other considerations that may arise from a spiritual or deontological1 view of morality. My participation in BBC1’s Soul of Britain programmes in 2000 revealed not only the emergence of «nothing-but-ery” but also the continuing popularity of New Age, karmic and astrological beliefs. The Church’s task cannot then be limited to responding to secularism, whether scientific or political, but must also take account of considerable credulity and even superstition in the country at large. On the one hand we have to uphold the God-given rationality of the universe. On the other, we must draw attention to its spiritual, even mystical, dimension. How is the Church to respond to such a complex cultural situation, and what is the Gospel or good news for the twenty-first century? Christian attitudes to culture have varied over the ages depending on receptivity to the faith or resistance to it. Thus, Pope Gregory writing to Abbot Mellitus tells him to advise the missionary to the Anglo-Saxons, Augustine of Canterbury, not to destroy pagan shrines but to purify them and use them for Christian worship.2 Such a practice also seems to have been a feature of the evangelisation of the Netherlands by Willibrord and others. On the other hand the English “apostle to the Germans,” Boniface of Crediton, destroyed pagan temples and his felling of the Great Oak of Thor at Geismar sealed the success of his mission. When the pagans saw that he came to no harm in doing these things, they realised the falsity of paganism and the truth of the faith that Boniface was preaching.3 Both Pope Benedict XVI and evangelical missionaries like Charles Kraft have drawn attention to the ways in which the Gospel addresses the deepest aspirations of cultures and, in fulfilling these, enables each culture to find its true centre. Kraft
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Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali BISHOP MICHAEL NAZIRALI was the 106th Bishop of Rochester for 15 years, until 1 September 2009. He was the first non-white Diocesan Bishop in the Church of England. Before that he was the General Secretary of CMS from 19891994 and prior to holding this position was Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. He holds both British and Pakistani citizenship and from 1999 was a member of the House of Lords where he was active in a number of areas of national and international concern. He has both a Christian and a Muslim family background and is now President of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue (OXTRAD).His interests have led him to research and study comparative literature, comparative philosophy of religion and theology at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and elsewhere. He has taught at colleges and universities in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. He is an Honorary Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He is Senior Fellow of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. He is Visiting Professor of Theology and Religious Studies in the University of Greenwich and on the Faculty of the London School of Theology (LST) affiliated to the Universities of Brunel and Middlesex, as well as the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. Michael is the author of eleven books and numerous articles on Mission, Ecumenism, the Anglican Communion, and relations with people of other faiths (particularly Islam).
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“The Church has both to affirm what is godly in a culture but also to challenge what is mistaken or wilfully wrong.”
“The Church’s task cannot then be limited to responding to secularism, whether scientific or political, but must also take account of considerable credulity and even superstition.”
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describes biblical revelation as “receptor-friendly.” The (now) Roman Catholic West African scholar Lamin Sanneh refers to the “translatability” of the Gospel, i.e. its capacity for being rendered into the language, idiom and thought-forms of particular cultures.4 None of these distinguished scholars denies that the Gospel also challenges and transforms culture, but this can be gradual and from within. Such an approach reminds us of Richard Niebuhr’s classic “the Christ of culture” category, where the message of Christ is not only the means for underpinning the social order, but also provides the resources for a critique of it and points society towards its destiny. An approach to culture of this kind needs to be balanced, however, by the Christ who can be “against culture” (another of Niebuhr’s categories) and the Christ who is the “transformer of culture.” History is replete with those who, because of their faith, have stood up to the tyranny of monarchs, promoted basic freedoms, even at the risk of their own lives or liberty, struggled against slavery and on behalf of the poor. In our own day, we can think of Christian leadership against apartheid in South Africa, Anglican Archbishop David Gitari’s courageous resistance at the time of dictatorship in Kenya, and Bishop Emmanuel Gbonigi’s stand against General Sani Abacha in Nigeria who, it is said, admired the bishop for his integrity and courage. Just as these leaders had learnt much from the story of Christianity in Britain, so we can learn from it today as we seek not only to find receptivity to the Church’s message in our culture but also, from time to time, resist in the name of Christ what is false, unjust or hateful. A look at the Church worldwide also shows us how Christ can be the transformer of cultures. Again and again, we find despised, rejected and poverty-stricken groups of people who have been transformed by the Christian message of equal dignity. A change in their personal and social habits, love for the family and the neighbour, the pursuit of the good and honesty at the workplace have been shown to lead not only to personal transformation but to social change.
THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH
In such a situation, where the Church has both to affirm what is godly in a culture but also to challenge what is mistaken or wilfully wrong, how are we to recognise the Church’s mission and ministry? We are faced with an overwhelming loss of personal and social integration: it has long been recognised that people are alienated from one another. The more individualistic society becomes, the more distanced we are from our neighbours. We are alienated from the natural environment around us because we see it only as something to be exploited to fulfil our own needs and not, as the Bible does, as having a destiny of its own. There is even an inner cleavage in ourselves such that our moral, spiritual, emotional and intellectual aspects are not working in harmony. Most fundamentally, we are alienated from the very ground of our being, the source of our existence and the One who gives us meaning and direction. Alienation brings anxiety about life itself and the perceived threat to it. There is also, however, a sense of guilt, of not being what we have been called to be, of acting against our nature but being unable to atone for it. Such anxiety often leads to addiction. We seek to suppress it, to turn away from it and to deny it in enforced jollity and escapism. Addiction, whether to alcohol or drugs or to destructive behaviours or relationships, can be a way of forgetting, for a time, our real problems. The Church’s work has to address this personal and social situation which so many face. It cannot do this by simply repackaging the nostrums of social science or by imitating the methods of secular therapies. While the Church must be ever attentive to whatever is claimed as knowledge, it must also bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to bear on the opportunities and problems of contemporary culture. One of our great needs is to get out of the rut in which we are stuck and to start again. Repentance is a decidedly unfashionable term these days, but it is central to the Church’s call to people everywhere. To know that we are forgiven deals with one of the basic reasons for the anxiety experienced by so many. We are forgiven because Jesus Christ has, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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once again, opened the way for friendship with God. Instead of seeing the universe as indifferent or even as hostile to us, we can now see it as suffused and patterned by love. Such love is not only about the fulfilment of my desires or to do with my personal history, but with seeking the good, indeed, the best for the Other, whether neighbour or stranger, friend or enemy. It is this experience of forgiveness and friendship which leads to a greater integration of our own personalities, whatever our quirks, experiences or even traumas.
A basic assumption will be that the Gospel provides everything that a local church needs for its ministry and mission. The task of the wider church is to identify and enable those who are called to fulfil specific ministries in the local church, whether that is in serving the community, building up the faithful, teaching children or being prophetic about issues of justice and the proper use of resources.
Clearly, the Church’s role has both a personal and social dimension to it. One of the great mantras of the modern Church has been “every member ministry,” that is, a sense that God is calling each member of the Church to a particular ministry. The priesthood of all believers, as taught in the New Testament, is turned into the priesthood of each believer. This may be based on a misunderstanding of what the New Testament actually says, but whether or not every member has a ministry, every member certainly has to be a disciple of Jesus. In the business of making disciples, the Church will find that people have gifts which can equip them for particular kinds of service in the Church and in the world. How the local and national church discerns what the vocation of different members might be, how it prepares, commissions and supports them, will determine the Church’s effectiveness in local communities and in the nation. Such effectiveness cannot be “bought” by becoming trendy or simply reflecting contemporary values, as politicians want the Church to do, but by making sure that all of the gifts given to Christians are being exercised to make the Gospel helpful, intelligible and liveable in our age, our locality, our nation, our world.
In the recognition of gifts for ministry, how God is calling women and men to serve Him in the Church is a specific consideration. While men and women are equal because both have been made in God’s image and given a common task, they are also different and fulfil their vocation in distinctive ways. Just as families and communities need a proper recognition of the distinctiveness as well as the complementarity of genders for balanced flourishing, so also the Church needs this for ministries which are balanced and complementary. The modernist and protofeminist “one-size-fits-all” approach does not take difference into account and thus presses women into male patterns of work and recreation. The Church may be in danger of repeating this mistake just when the world is abandoning it.
For centuries the Church has been committed to a presence in local communities: rural or urban, prosperous or deprived, mixed or monochrome. This has meant that the Church has been present when other services have withdrawn or only come in from outside to complete given tasks in a particular village, town or ward. The Church’s presence must, however, be effective and this means a well-thoughtout and well-deployed ministry.
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MEN AND WOMEN: TOGETHER FOR THE GOSPEL
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“Repentance is a decidedly unfashionable term these days, but it is central to the Church’s call to people everywhere.”
“While men and women are equal because both have been made in God’s image and given a common task, they are also different and fulfil their vocation in distinctive ways.”
This should not be taken to mean, however, that women have not had hugely significant ministries in the Church. This is what the Orthodox Women’s Consultation in Istanbul in 1997 had to say about the ministries of women in both the Eastern Orthodox and the Ancient Oriental churches: “Throughout the history of the Church, we have the testimony of countless women saints who responded to Christ in many ways, such as apostles, evangelists, confessors, martyrs, ascetics and nuns, teachers, mothers, spiritual and medical healers and deaconesses. We Orthodox women of today, inspired through the prayers and examples of these women saints, now endeavour to continue in their footsteps.” From an evangelical point of view, we could add missionaries, counsellors, educationists and family-workers. The partnership of men and women in the Church is not the only partnership the Church needs. When I was the bishop of a diocese, we held a consultation FALL 2015
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“A missionary church will be light in its structures. At the very least, it will have the capacity to gather people.”
with our partners, and representatives of more than forty local and national organisations turned up. These included educational agencies, social workers, youth organisations, statutory bodies and others. As far as “establishment” is concerned, if this means a desire by the people of this country to hear the Church’s voice in the councils of state, there can be little objection to it, but this cannot be at the expense of compromising the essential message which the Church has been called to proclaim. The Church should have control over what it believes and teaches, its worship, and the appointment of its leaders. If such is not the case, there is always the danger of capitulating to the culture and to power structures, whether through seduction or coercion. In turn, the Church has an obligation to remind the nation of the JudaeoChristian basis of its life as set out, for example, in the Coronation Service and the Coronation Oath. Even if there is disestablishment, formal or de facto, two matters will still need to be borne in mind: the Church of England could remain the national church of the land to which people turn in national celebration or mourning and for the “hatching, matching and dispatching” rituals which any culture needs. Second, even if there is no established church, the moral and spiritual resources of the Judaeo-Christian tradition will still be needed in debate on policy and legislation over a whole range of issues such as the status of the embryo, the ethics of cloning, abortion, euthanasia and assisted dying, marriage and family, justification (or not) of armed conflict, the treatment of refugees, and many others. It would be very unwise to lose such a rich heritage which has provided our worldview just because of the disappearance of an established church and when there is no other viable worldview in sight. It may be that establishment is gradually being eroded by atrophy and attrition. The Church of England will have to decide whether to struggle to maintain it or to lose it gracefully, thus lightening its load for the sake of a clearer witness to the nation. As I have pointed out in my recent book,5 a secularist and secularising paradigm is being set in place in terms of the assumptions of policy, legislation, charity laws and the like. In such conditions, all the churches need to prepare for social exile – to begin
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to see themselves as gathered moral and spiritual communities which attract those in the surrounding darkness by their light and become centres for a Christian vision of society. A missionary church will be light in its structures. At the very least, it will have the capacity to gather people. Such a gathering must, first of all, be for the purposes of prayer and the giving of thanks (eucharistia). There should be the opportunity then to consult and to decide together. According to the pattern set by the very first Council of the Church at Jerusalem, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, bishops, clergy and the faithful will all have a presence and a say but in the decisionmaking they will have distinctive roles and duties. This is, in fact, the true meaning of “synod” or walking together in the same way. It is very far from mimicking parliamentary structures and procedures, not to speak of the considerable bureaucracy this requires. No one is an island and this is all the more so in the Church. We need one another so we can learn from one another, support one another, pray for one another and, when necessary, complement and even correct one another. What is true of Christians in the local church is also true of relationships between churches throughout the world. Every local church has the primary responsibility for mission in its area but it must carry this out mindful of its relationship with all the other local churches. It cannot relate to the state or to culture in such a way that its sister churches fail to recognise the Church of Jesus Christ in it. At the local level those with pastoral and teaching responsibility must declare the faith of the Church. This is one of the most important roles of a bishop in the diocese. Universally also, there will be occasions when, to settle a disputed matter or to situate the Church’s position in some crucial area, the faith of the Church has to be set out clearly. Those with such responsibility must only declare what the Church has always believed, even if it is being applied to contemporary issues. They must do it in manifest continuity with Scripture and apostolic teaching and, as far as possible, they must do it along with others who have similar responsibilities. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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The Church’s mission in society has two poles to it: that of embassy, of going out into the world, and of hospitality, of welcoming people to the Church’s proclamation, worship and service. Embassy can, of course, be a literal going out, as was the case with numerous young people who went out from the UK in the nineteenth century to open up the interior of West Africa to the Gospel, knowing that for many of them it would mean death from disease to which they had no resistance. Less dramatically, but also importantly, the ministry from Rochester Cathedral during the seemingly endless Dickens festivals is also an instance of embassy: whether through the singing of hymns, invitations to pray in the cathedral (which produce a staggering response in terms of numbers) or counselling those who find themselves in need, the Christian community is going out to those around it. Embassy need not just be a physical going to another part of the world or even into the local high street. For many Christians it is simply going to work and bearing witness to their faith there. The involvement of Christians and churches in public life or in the media (including new media), however difficult this is found to be, is another area where embassy is a necessity. Welcoming people in is as important as going out. Again and again, I am embarrassed at how the stranger, the person with special needs or the loner is simply left out at church. We must make sure that everyone is welcomed, made to feel at home and helped. Welcoming does not, of course, mean that we affirm or agree with everything people do or believe. The very distinctiveness of the Gospel that warms and heals cannot be compromised by an inclusion that does not challenge or change. CONCLUSION: THE WAY FORWARD
Too often debate about the future of the Church and of the Christian faith has been adversarial and polarised: tradition is set against innovation, authority against democracy and communitymindedness against “congregationalism.” Such polarisation is not always helpful and needlessly forces people into exclusive and excluding models of the Church’s life. We should be promoting a “both-and” rather than an “either-or” view of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Church so that tradition and renewal, order and spontaneity, leadership and consent, mission and maintenance can be creatively held together. An action plan for today’s Church will therefore include an understanding of the culture and context in which the Church is placed and how the Gospel can address its strengths and weaknesses. Local Christian communities should largely be responsible for mission and ministry in their neck of the woods with support from stipendiary clergy and specialists in education, youth work, worship, music, and particularly, the identification and preparation of leaders. This should lead to a streamlining of bureaucracy at every level, as should reinventing how churches gather for making decisions that affect them all.
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“The very distinctiveness of the Gospel that warms and heals cannot be compromised by an inclusion that does not challenge or change. ”
At the same time, local and national churches should be aware of the world-wide dimension of the Christian faith. Our partnership with brothers and sisters overseas should be mutually enriching but it may also involve waiting for one another and, from time to time, being willing to be corrected and extended in our particular reading of the Christian tradition. We should not be intimidated by the challenge of our times but see it as an opportunity for a vigorous engagement with the needs and questions of the day, confident that the good news of Jesus Christ remains just that. 1
That is, the idea that the morality of an action depends on its adherence to a rule. 2 Catholic Encyclopedia, “Augustine of Canterbury,” New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/02081a.htm. 3 Catholic Encyclopedia ”St. Boniface,” New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02656a.htm. 4 See Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Ossining, NY: Orbis, 2009), 5 Triple Jeopardy for the West: Aggressive Secularism, Radical Islam and Multiculturalism, (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
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MINISTRY INTRODUCTION
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Steven Martins STEVEN MARTINS is Staff Apologist & Junior Scholar in Residence at the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He holds an undergraduate degree in Human Resource Management from York University, and is working towards a Masters of Arts in Christian Apologetics at Veritas Evangelical Seminary. Steven founded Nicene International Ministries, a Canadian apologetic ministry, in 2012 and served as the director and chief itinerant speaker for academic debates, lectures and sermons. In the past few years he has spoken in Canada, the United States, Trinidad, El Salvador, and other places, equipping the English and Spanish Church communities and engaging Muslims in dialogues and debates. Steven lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife Cindy.
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I’M OVERJOYED TO JOIN the Ezra
Institute, and consider it a great privilege to work with the EICC to further advance the kingdom of God with greater efficiency. I served as the founder and lead apologist of Nicene International Ministries (formerly E&AM) for the past three years, an apologetic ministry, featuring in various debates, dialogues, and speaking at university campuses and churches in Canada, USA, Trinidad, and El Salvador. Joining the Ezra Institute provides me with the opportunity to work under the mentorship of Dr. Joseph Boot and Dr. Scott Masson, strategically equipping the church through tri-annual leadership roundtables, the annual Mission of God Conference, the Wilberforce Academy in England and other new projects that await on the horizon. I first heard about the Ezra Institute in 2010, from a friend who was familiar with Dr. Boot’s apologetic ministry and the church plant in Toronto, Westminster Chapel. Over the course of the years I began to gradually familiarize myself with the EICC and naturally gravitated towards the vision and mission of the ministry, consistent with Scripture. It wasn’t until the year 2015 that my wife, Cindy and I, felt the Lord directing us to plant ourselves at Westminster Chapel, and through a friend in the apologetics field we personally connected with Dr. Boot in 2014, after many years of learning from his lectures, sermons and writings. God had always been drawing me to the EICC, and it was the Lord’s will that I come alongside a strong biblical and reputable ministry, proclaiming and applying the Gospel of Christ as king and redeemer to all spheres of life.
Coming from an Ecuadorian and Portuguese background, I am hopeful to see the EICC resources translated into Spanish, contributing towards the initiative of bringing the Ezra Institute into Central and South America to equip churches in recovering their biblical mission. My wife and I have normally taken annual missions trips throughout the Americas, and we are looking forward to continuing our trips under the EICC banner, expanding the reach of our ministry resources. I also intend to expand the demographic reach of the Ezra Institute to a much wider and younger Christian audience in North America and beyond, preparing youth and young adults for their God-given callings. I can truly say that I passionately believe in the vision of the EICC, and am overjoyed to be a part of something special that God is doing in the midst of His church. With this I would like to say thank you to the board and staff of the Institute, for entrusting me with a great responsibility, the privilege to serve alongside them in ministry for God.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
2015 MISSION OF GOD CONFERENCE
saturday november 28th
REDISCOVERING
the beauty & the glory WESTMINSTER CHAPEL AT HIGH PARK 9 HEWITT AVENUE, TORONTO
conference speakers: R t . R e v. D r. B i s h o p M i c h a e l N a z i r- A l i , R e v. D r. J o e B o o t & R e v. D r. D a v i d R o b i n s o n TIME: 8:45am – 5pm LUNCH: will be provided
M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N : info@ezrainstitute.ca
registration: www.ezrainstitute.ca
RESOURCE CORNER How Then Shall We Answer - Hardcover This book represents Joe Boot’s summa apologetica. Bold, imaginative and instructive, it is written for a general audience rather than for a specialized one. The prose is remarkable not only for evident wisdom in the field of apologetics but also for the distinctive way the author does it. With various imageries and anecdotes, Joe provides a clear, engaging articulation of a fresh set of perspectives on several topics. Full of biblical and theological insights, and written with an evangelistic heart, this book serves to nourish the faithful, stimulate good arguments for the seeker and build a strong rational basis for the causative relation between faith and reason, the former being the presupposition of the latter. With rigor and relevance, Joe constitutes a seminal apologetic that enables readers to grasp the signs of divine transcendence, and to apprehend, or rather to be apprehended by the beauty of Christ. (Dennis Ngien PhD, from the foreword)
Why I Still Believe - Softcover In Why I Still Believe, apologist Joe Boot provides a readable introduction to presuppositional apologetics for the average layperson. This approach assumes that the Christian and non-Christian come to the discussion of faith with worldviews--sets of presuppositions--that are miles apart, so that there is little common ground on which to build an objective argument of rational proof. In this conversational survey of his own intellectual and spiritual journey, Boot invites the non-believer to step inside the Christian worldview to see whether or not it makes sense. Along the way he builds a coherent argument for the truth of Christianity. He also examines the non-Christian worldview, showing how it ultimately fails to make sense of the world.
Searching For Truth - Softcover (also available in Urdu) This book provides reasonable answers to questions asked by people who have vague but deep longings to know God. Starting with basic human convictions about the world and moving ultimately to the need for salvation through Jesus Christ, Boot also addresses questions about suffering, truth, morality, and guilt. He offers answers to those asking for a credible and logical explanation of the Christian faith.
How Then Shall We Answer Conference Series 2011 - CD Complete audio content from the second conference in the ‘How Then Shall We Answer’ Series. In this six disc audio CD package, Dennis Ignatius, Jeffery Ventrella, and Joe Boot tackle the question of Christianity and culture. Track titles are: The Meaning of Culture; Living in Sin...Well; Christ and Culture; The Greatness of the Great Commission; and the Closing Charge. Also included is an impromptu Q&A session with Jeffery Ventrella and Joe Boot.
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Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
How Then Shall We Answer Conference Series 2010 - CD The audio for the first conference in the ‘How Then Shall We Answer’ Conference Series. Topics covered in this six-disc set include: an understanding of the family in the context of God’s sovereignty and social design; the family’s calling under the Great Commission; the family’s history in Canada; bio-ethical issues, such as genetic engineering; the relationship between the Law of God and civil law; and the role of the State according to the Bible.
Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope – Hardcover The Mission of God is a clarion call for Christians and God’s church to awaken and recover a full-orbed gospel and comprehensive faith that recognizes and applies the salvation-victory and lordship of Jesus Christ to all creation: from the family, to education, evangelism, law, church, state and every other sphere.
The Trouble with Canada...Still! A Citizen Speaks Out - Softcover Canada suffered a regime-change in the last quarter of the twentieth-century, and is now caught between two irreconcilable styles of government: A top-down collectivism and a bottom-up individualism. In this completely revised update of his best-selling classic, William Gairdner shows how Canada has been damaged through a dangerous love affair with the former. Familiar topics are put under a searing new light, and recent issues such as immigration, diversity, and corruption of the law are confronted head on as Gairdner comes to many startling— and sure to be controversial—conclusions. This book is a bold clarion call to arms for Canada to examine and renew itself…before it is too late.
FOR PRICING AND ORDERING INFORMATION online: www.ezrainstitute.ca
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
FALL 2015