recovering-scripture-january-february-2010 by Modern Reformation

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE ❘ BIBLICAL ILLITERACY ❘ INTERVIEW WITH PETER BERGER

MODERN REFORMATION Recovering Scripture

VOLUME

19, NUMBER 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010, $6.50

MODERN REFORMATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS j a n u a r y / f e b r u a r y

2 0 1 0

v o l u m e

1 9

n u m b e r

Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud, Reviews Michael Horton, Final Thoughts Staff | Editors Jason Ching, Digital Production Assistant Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Elizabeth Isaac, Proofreader Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Contributing Scholars Michael Allen Peter D. Anders James Bachman J. Todd Billings John Bombaro Jerry Bridges John N. Day Adam S. Francisco David Gibson W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm John A. Huffman, Jr. Daniel R. Hyde Ken Jones Julius J. Kim Philip J. Lee Jonathan Leeman Richard Lints Korey Maas Keith Mathison R. Albert Mohler, Jr. John Warwick Montgomery Kenneth A. Myers Roger R. Nicole Robert Norris J. I. Packer Craig Parton Mark Pierson Lawrence R. Rast, Jr. Donald P. Richmond Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie David Robertson Rod Rosenbladt Justin Taylor Kate Treick David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith David F. Wells Donald T. Williams William Willimon Todd Wilken Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2010 All rights reserved. 1725 Bear Valley Pkwy. Escondido, CA 92027 (800) 890-7556 info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org ISSN-1076-7169

Recovering Scripture 10 The Problem of Evangelical Illiteracy With rampant biblical illiteracy on the rise, is it any wonder youth today default to pop-cultural platitudes in their attempt to make sense of their faith? A New Testament professor suggests a way to produce readers of the grand story of God. by David R. Nienhuis

14 Without the Word Are we in a culture where the church no longer bases its teachings on the Bible or where Christians are completely ignorant of God’s Word? Without the Word, aren’t we sitting ducks for all sorts of trouble? by Charlie Mallie

18 The Authority of the Bible: “It Ain’t Is Necessarily So!” How does the Bible still speak authoritatively to a world that does not recognize its authority? Moreover, how can the Bible be an authority for Christians if we don’t recognize it as such? by Jacob Smith

22 Recovering Vox Dei While godly authors are a benefit to us, do we allow their writings to be a substitute for our own pursuit of God’s voice? How we can recover the supremacy of the personal pursuit of God’s Word? by Nate Palmer Plus: To Have and to Hold: A Look at the Importance of Scripture

27 Hearing Is Believing Can preaching be replaced with media better suited to our current culture? Or is there something intrinsic to the preached Word essential to the ministry and mission of the church? by Michael Horton PHOTO BY SEAN WARREN/PHOTODISC

S UBSCRIPTION I NFORMATION US US Student Canada Europe Other

1 YR 1 YR 1 YR 1 YR 1 YR

$32 $25 $39 $58 $65

2 YR $58 2 YR $70 2 YR $104 2 YR $118

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3

IN THIS ISSUE

Epic Fail

or years, we have sought to ground in the pages of Scripture all of the rich resources emerging from the Reformation, so that the recovery of those resources wouldn’t be called into question as a sort of idiosyncratic advancement of a particular theological agenda. We believe the Reformation recovered the central themes of Scripture that the church slowly had abandoned (as it tends to do in every generation, including that of the apostles). Over these years, we have identified movements and ideas we believed put the evangelical church in America in danger: the culture war that put politics into the pulpit; the “evangelical megashift” that replaced theological themes with therapeutic and relational themes; postmodernism—both the challenges and the opportunities of a new era; the “higher life” theologies of Arminianism and Pentecostalism; the devolution of evangelical media outlets; contemporary Gnosticism; Open Theism; the Church Growth Movement; the New Perspective on Paul; the Federal Vision; the emerging church; the new Atheism. Each of these issues (and many more) strike at the heart of reformational Christianity because they strike at Scripture. It isn’t just that they take a different theological position or emerge from a different historical era; the problems in evangelical churches (and our own reformational churches) all stem from a failure to submit our churches, our theology, and ourselves to Scripture. So, for the first time we are devoting an entire year to Scripture: why it needs to be recovered; how we understand its divine and human authorship; how its different books were recognized as being truly God’s Word; how the church relates to it; how we should interpret it; how to understand its two big words of law and gospel; and why the recovery of sola Scriptura is, finally, the church’s only hope. In this issue, we’re starting the conversation with an article by David Nienhuis, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, an institution recently awarded a Lilly Grant to determine why its students (nearly all from solid, evangelical homes) arrived at this Christian college with nearly no grasp of the Bible. Following is a pastoral meditation from Lutheran minister Charlie Mallie, who counts the cost of our ignorance of Scripture in the lives of those who gather to worship each week in our churches. Jacob Smith, a young Episcopalian minister in New York City, takes up the question of our secular culture’s view of the authority of Scripture: can Scripture ever be said to be an authority over those who refuse to recognize it as such? Nate Palmer, an evangelical layman, helps us to remember and recover the joy of hearing God speak through Scripture. Finally, Michael Horton, our editor-in-chief, finishes off with an appeal for Scripture (sung, read, and preached) to be central in our churches again. The theme for this year was born out of the conviction that we all need to recover Scripture: in our churches, in our devotional lives, as the source of our theology, and as the living voice of God today. If you share this conviction, I’d like you to join the conversation by sending in your own thoughts—as letters to the editor, as longer responses in our “Open Exchange” column, and as comments on our blog at www.whitehorseinn.org. Make photocopies of the articles that resonate with you and distribute them to your Bible study or fellowship group. Use the social networking tools on your computer to help recover Scripture in your own circles of influence. Modern Reformation isn’t just our name—it’s our mission and we want you to partner with us in the pursuit of it.

Eric Landry Executive Editor 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

NEXT ISSUES March/April 2010 Inspiration and Inerrancy May/June 2010 Canon Formation

LETTERS y o u r

Many thanks for Don Williams’ piece “Excellence and the Worship Wars” (September/October 2009), detailing criteria for recognizing “good” music. The loud amplification of electric guitars and drums of today’s rock genre “praise band” unfortunately have the opposite effect on worshippers. As T. David Gordon (in a footnote on page 59 of Why Johnny Can’t Preach) points out: “Pop music, as an idiom, simply cannot address that which is weighty, its idiom is faddish, glib and superficial, therefore serious lyrics don’t fit.” Our experience would add: (1) often the voices of the performers on stage are the only ones heard as the amplification drowns out congregants’ singing; (2) lyrics increasingly focus on us and how we feel instead of the objective and lasting truths of the gospel; (3) choruses are repeated within a limited range of notes; and (4) electronic projection of verses and choruses are often displayed out of order and with words misspelled as opposed to a hymnbook with both words and music to read. Something is definitely being lost or abandoned as music from past generations written by faithful brothers and sisters is put on the shelf for what seems increasingly trivial and light to fit today’s culture. Can we imagine what would have been lost had the apostle Paul’s preaching been of the “infomercial” variety, plugging the gospel in two minutes over and over in Antioch, Berea, Athens, Ephesus, etc., instead of the tailored (by the Holy Spirit) messages by which many were saved? That’s the level to which this new music is falling and losing much of the rich drama and texture of the great truths of Scripture.

t h o u g h t s

a n d

o u r s

Modern Reformation’s review (September/October 2009) on Frankie Schaeffer’s book—Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back—was way out of line. I need not say more. Sandra Murrah (Mrs. C. Boyd Murrah, Jr.)

D. G. Hart's gracious response to my critique (November/December 2009) usefully clarified his own position but failed to address my biblical argument that it was Nicodemus who needed to be born again. Hart wants me to concede that conversion does not need to be dramatic. Gladly: I never said it did. Then he asks whether I think the young Charles Hodge needed to repent of obedience to parents and faithfulness in church. Of course not. But does Hart really think the young Hodge had nothing he needed to repent of? When I was a pious lad very similar to his description of Hodge, I certainly did! I appreciate Hart's ministry. He is saying things that evangelicals need to hear. But his response to my critique only serves to reinforce my belief that, at their best, they are also saying things that we all need to hear. Dr. Donald T. Williams Professor of English Toccoa Falls College, Georgia

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido CA 92027 760.741.1045 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

Wayne and Linda Dove Stirling, Ontario

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 5

EX AUDITU e x a m p l e s

o f

c h r i s t - c e n t e r e d

s e r m o n s

Purple Penguins

he title of this sermon is: “Whatever you do, don’t think about purple penguins!”

In 1 Timothy Paul writes, “We know that the Let’s begin with a thought experiment. I’m going to give you a command, and I law is good.” Again, the law is good. Doing what you want you to do exactly as I say. Ready? Okay, here goes: Don’t think about purple should do is a good thing, and knowing what you penguins. I want all of you to think about anything except should do is important. But then he says, “We know that the purple penguins. [Five seconds of silence.] I presume that a law is good if one uses it properly.” He then goes on to say purple penguin popped into your mind right after I forbade something really strange, “We also know that the law is it? And up until my sermon began this morning, you hadmade not for the righteous, but for lawbreakers and rebels, n’t thought about purple penguins at all, right? Well, that the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious.” And predicament is what this sermon is about. finally, “Through the law we became conscious of sin.” In Let’s begin with the reading we heard earlier from other words, through being told what we needed to do, we Colossians 2:13–14: “He forgave us all our sins, having canbecame aware of how we weren’t doing it, how maybe we celled the written code, with its regulations, that was against don’t want to do it, and how even when we wanted to do us and stood opposed to us. He took it away, nailing it to the it, we tried and couldn’t. In Romans 5 Paul writes, “But sin is not taken into cross.” What is this thing, “the written code with its reguaccount when there is no law. The law was added so that lations, that was against us, that stood opposed to us”? the trespass might increase.” And again, in Romans 7, “I The apostle Paul often refers to the written code by would not have known what sin was except through the another name: “the law.” You’ve probably run across this law.” If you don’t tell me what to do, I am not going to term before in the Bible. It’s a somewhat difficult one to know how I am doing wrong. It’s obvious; I am not going come to grips with, mainly because most of the time when to have a standard by which to measure myself. we hear or use that word, it is in reference to speeding or to Let me try to break this down in simple terms. I’ve menpolice officers, or something like that. But Paul didn’t have tioned before that I recently got married. It’s a whole new a car, and he understands it very differently from how you life, and so I’m kind of caught up in it—in a really good way. and I have been taught to understand it. Now, my mother, who is sweet, wanted to get my wife and So what is he referring to, and what did he teach about this thing called “law”? First, let’s clarify what the law is, me a housewarming present. She said, “John, I was thinkwhich will only take a moment. After that, we’ll look at how ing maybe I would get Deirdre”—that’s my wife—“a cookit works, which will take a little longer to explain. book.” You see, we recently moved here to Charleston from The law is simply this: What you should do. And it is good. New York City, and in New York City nobody cooks. We’re The world out there agrees with Paul that knowing what no exception; we don’t know how to cook. We have a nice you should do is a good thing and that doing what you kitchen in our new apartment, but we don’t really know should do is a good thing. The question is how it works, and how to make use of it properly; we are total novices. that’s where an important insight from Paul comes in. By So how did I respond to my mother when she offered to the way, I think you will find that you already know this get Deirdre a cookbook? I said, “Mom, do not give her a stuff from your experience in life, but I also doubt you’ve cookbook!” Why? Is it because I don’t want my wife to learn heard it explained outside of the Bible. how to cook? No, of course not. I want her to learn how Here’s what he says: when you’re told what to do, a to cook, and I want to learn how to cook. But I knew that strange thing happens. You don’t necessarily think to yourbecause my mother is a really good cook, if she had given self, “Oh goodie.” Instead, the opposite of the thing you’ve Deirdre a cookbook it might have been interpreted in a difbeen told to do springs into your head. Don’t think about ferent way than my mom intended. It might have been purple penguins—a purple penguin pops up. The person interpreted like this: “Are you saying I’m not a good cook? who says, “Don’t tickle me” is the person you want to tickle, Are you telling me what kind of a wife I need to be to your right? It sounds a little weird, I know. But he says this son?!” dilemma is present whenever something that should be So she didn’t give Deirdre a cookbook, but guess what? done (“the law”) is being discussed. This happens not Her friend did. Her friend gave her a Martha Stewart cookbecause of the content of the command; it happens because book. I don’t know how familiar you are with Martha of the way the human heart is wired to receive commands. Stewart, but she is a great contemporary example of “the 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

law.” Up until recently, at least, she was so darn perfect. Too darn perfect. The first thing we did when we got the cookbook was to pick out a recipe. My wife was very excited. She finds this great recipe with a great photo—it had artichokes and butter and some interesting fish—and she gets busy. She buys all the ingredients and starts “cooking.” I don’t know if you know this, but Martha Stewart’s recipes are kind of complicated, especially for a new cook. My wife tried to do everything it said. At one point, I walked into the kitchen and found her rubbing lemon on each leaf of an artichoke, which the recipe then told her to sauté. But we don’t even know how to sauté! How long do you cook each side? How hot do you get the pan...? You get the idea. What happened? The food came out on the plate not looking like it did in the photo. I also doubt it tasted exactly the way it was supposed to taste. Deirdre admitted it too. And what happened after that? Did she feel excited? Did she feel psyched to try again? No, she felt discouraged. She thought, “I’m not a good cook. I am never going to be a good cook. I tried to follow the recipe and look what happened.” This is Paul’s insight; he says the same thing in Romans 7. He gives his own example: “For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said ‘Do not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire….When the commandment came, sin sprang to life, and I died.” It’s very simple. “I found that the commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.” I found that the cookbook that was supposed to teach me how to cook well only discouraged me and convinced me that I was never going to be a good cook. This is not just true of cookbooks and specific biblical principles that are extremely rigorous in their moral challenge; this is true on all counts in life, wherever there is an imperative. It is for this reason that Paul refers to the law by another name in 2 Corinthians: “The ministry of death.” Consider another example. I remember when I was working as a youth group leader at a church in New Canaan, Connecticut, I took a large group of teenagers to see The Blue Man Group. Teenagers are amazing because they are especially adept at sensing when the law is present. They know how to rebel better than anybody. In fact, often our teenage years are defined by the extent to which we’re rebelling; i.e., receiving law and sensing it and reacting to it, etc. Well, as we walk into The Blue Man Group performance in New York City, there is this guy right there at the entrance, standing at the rail, saying, “No flash photography. No flash photography. Do not take any photos. No cameras allowed inside. No flash photography.” Over and over and over. He says this to every single person as they enter the theater. We get in, we get to our seats, and we sit down. The kid next to me leans over and whispers, “I wish I could give every person in here a camera with a huge flash, and we’d all take a photo at the same time.” Now, it is a good and sensible rule not to allow photos to be taken in off-Broadway and Broadway shows, right? But suddenly, when he was

told not to bring a camera in, this kid wants a million cameras. That is what Paul is saying. He is told “Do not covet” and suddenly a million kinds of coveting rise to the surface. Unfortunately, the world out there doesn’t have anything better to offer you. The world says, “Do this! Try harder! Be more!” Paul says, even if you know what you need to do, you are not going to be able to do it all the way, even if you want to. And then he says, if you don’t want to know what you are doing wrong (which is usually the case most of the time), and somebody interjects with unsolicited advice to tell you what you should be doing, you are going to hate them and judge them right back. If nothing else, your walls will go up whenever you’re around them, and you’ll avoid all personal conversation as best you can from there on out. Isn’t this true in life? Somebody tells you what you should be doing, and do you appreciate it? Do you say, “Oh, thank you so much for that insightful word that has probed my soul and changed me forever”? No, that’s not what you say. In fact, if you want to end a friendship quickly, just add a dose of unsolicited advice into your conversation every time you talk to that person. Suddenly you’ll notice that you get their voice mail a lot and that they always seem to have an excuse for why they can’t meet up. But wait, Paul says something else. He tells us that there is a different fuel, that our relationship to the law has changed. We still need the law, but we need it in a different way: we need to know what is good because the moment we know what that is, we are going to become aware of where we are lacking. We will start looking beyond ourselves for help. We will look to God. After all, the Bible tells us that we need a savior, right? And how do we know we need a savior? Because we know how incapable we are of saving ourselves. The world says, “Just find out what you need to do and do it.” And then you get to church and say, “If only I had done differently.” Paul says instead that once you heard the law, the cards were—at that moment—stacked against you. Even if you hid your feelings and held them inside and did everything you could to keep your frustration and anger from pouring out, the distance was still established there in your heart. Am I right? It is no coincidence that Jesus emphasizes the heart above all else. So again, you need the law. You need to know what is good. You need to know what is right. Because only then are you going to understand who Jesus was, his significance, what he did that you can’t do, what he has that you need. When people pray for mercy and help and saving, they are being honest about the thing the law has taught them. But the law, as Paul explains, works in this backhanded way. This is why, at the beginning of our Rite 1 service each week, the minister reads Jesus’ summary of the law to the congregation (the love of God and neighbor stuff). Do you remember how the entire congregation then responds? They say: “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We don’t say, “Thanks for the helpful tips. I’ll see you next week!” (continued on page 35) J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 7

AD EXTRA a r t i c l e s

a s i d e

Funerals from Hell: Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?

’ve concluded that the typical evangelical funeral can go quite a ways to making a per-

departed this earth for the next world. What was son an atheist. I’ve also concluded that the church needs to reclaim the fundamental clearly nonnegotiable was anything upbeat—upbeat truth that Christianity is primarily for dying. Not primarily for living, but for dying; and stories, upbeat music, upbeat pictures, and an because it is primarily about preparing to die, it has someupbeat Pelagian theology. Oh, and a pastor who himself was thing profound to offer about living. Funerals need to upbeat the whole time because after all this was not a negrediscover death and thus once again have something to say ative, pessimistic, gaudy, legalistic, liturgical “funeral” but a to the living. “celebration of life.” Before looking at the causes of the death of the funeral, The phrase “celebration of life” is like the words “healing” a true confession about a funeral—oops, sorry, a celebration and “closure,” all terms that have the scintilla of truth in of life—I recently attended. (I am just getting out of theothem necessary to often mask the primal smell of sulphur. logical therapy from the experience.) The obligatory testimonials (the raising up of Bob’s good My rescue came from the Christian funeral and burial of deeds for all to see) were the center of Happy Pastor’s funmy mother, who died on Epiphany. All I can say is thanks time celebration—and they went on ad nauseam. I was starkly reminded of their numbing repetitiveness by the be to God for a Christ-centered burial liturgy, for a graveside comment of the Uncle Fester-like (of Adams Family fame) service providing the godly focus on the death of death, and mortician I dealt with for my mother’s burial. When I for a faithful pastor bringing Jesus in his forgiving and savexplained to Fester that we were doing a graveside funeral ing office to all present. for my mother with only her solidly orthodox pastor speaking and zero “testimonials,” his paste-white body sighed A Fun-eral from Hell with groans too deep for words. “Those testimonials are a “Bob” was a prominent evangelical businessman. He total waste of time at a funeral,” he said as we flipped surfed. He married. He procreated. He made barn loads of through the casket catalogues. “I have heard thousands of money. And so the assembly was treated to body-length them. Everybody says the same thing: ‘Mary Margaret was photos of Bob the Action Figure. Of course, this celebration a nice person and here is why.’ I just hate those things.” And lacked a few things that definitely would be a downer at any celebration—distractions like a dead body or that troubling Uncle Fester the Mortician shall be their guide. casket. Come to think of it, the words “dying,” “dead,” or The testimonials at Bob’s fun-eral reminded me of the “death” were real no-nos during the whole celebration, toasts I recently endured at another “cool” celebration for an which was led by a man whom my wife refers to now as evangelical I will simply call “Ed.” Ed, tragically, took his own simply “Mr. Happy Pastor.” life—committed suicide in his garage and was found by his Happy Pastor is one of those cool, laid-back, California son. Yet not one of the toasters at Ed’s funeral mentioned the surfer-dude, Hawaiian-shirted, Plexiglas pulpit, megachurch sin of suicide at the celebration of the life of Ed. That would guys who is well prepared to be a personal assistant to a have been a true bummer to the party atmosphere. What we Hollywood celebrity or to work in a hip music studio as the got treated to was, “He was a great, great, funny, great, cool, sound board operator. He has the spiritual gifts of being great guy.” I wondered what his son thought who had funny, relevant, and cool. He just was not into bringing the found Ed hanging from the rafters in the garage. The boy pure gospel of grace and forgiveness of sins in Jesus. He deserved hearing it straight from the MC of the celebration worked relentlessly hard that morning to eliminate any (I mean, another Happy Pastor) that his dad sadly had fallen confrontation with the deadly duo of sin and death. Into that into the grievous sin of despair and that Christ in his mercy vacuum, he put Bob’s really cool life and a really cool celecan cover all sins including that one. The death of Jesus bration. reaches even to that level of despair as we remain simul jusThis may come as a shock, but Jesus of Calvary was not tus et peccator till death kills one half of that equation. But we part of Happy Pastor’s fun-eral. And you do show what is heard not one word about Ed’s sin being terribly grievous. indispensable to you theologically (and in every other way) Instead, the message could have at least tried to call for when you gather that last time over someone who has all of us to repent of our sins and to believe on Christ, to get 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

under that shed blood flowing from the riven side, and to find there the salvation of our souls; and to be careful, for our adversary the devil wishes to lead us into temptation, chief among them, as Luther says in the Small Catechism, are false belief and despair. All I could think of during the celebration was William Blackstone’s line about suicide as “appearing before God uninvited.” Bob’s fun-eral had Happy Pastor doing what I guess he does when, as he himself puts it, he “does church.” He made it fun. The fun time hosted by Happy Pastor was complete with a whopper of a theological closing that would have made Shirley MacLaine blush with pride: Happy Pastor told us to pray and tell Bob goodbye because Bob was watching his own celebration “right now.” Boy, do I see through a glass darkly I guess because I never got from Scripture what was now revealed: Christians who die are watching their services here on earth and they are, frankly, real tired of traditional negative funerals. They want us to have a good time, and they want us to reach out and talk to them before they go permanently over the river. Celebrations and the Loss of Sadness If we are anything, we are a culture of entertainment and denial that has sanitized dying and death and put it in a world hopefully far, far away. Sadness, if prolonged or of a disturbing depth, is to be diagnosed and medicated. Even sadness that might, God forbid, lead to repentance. And entertainment is the mother’s milk from which today’s evangelical celebrations gladly feed. We want our funerals to mirror our church services and our church services to mirror our virtual lives—fun, interesting, enlightening, moving, and upbeat. Whether it is faithful to Christ and his Word is, well, nice if you can actually pull that off and stay cool, but it is not obligatory. If your religious life is fun, interesting, enlightening, moving, and upbeat, then it is clearly faithful to Christ and his Word. The church used to pay less heed to the impacts of secular culture on its people—in fact, the church was culture. The church’s fights were more with the sinful flesh and with the devil. The world, or culture, and Christianity were nearly synonymous, and in many ways secular Greek culture provided support and a springboard for the advancement of Christian intellectual and artistic life. The church also had good reason for absolute confidence in its liturgical forms grounded in the highly regulated Old Testament worship centering in the Temple. The church had particular confidence in the forms that surrounded the death of the Christian. The church knew what dying sinners must hear from her, and one was on the cusp of entering the Church Triumphant. The dying sinner needed to confess his sins and hear the words of absolution spoken by the called minister of Word and Sacrament, and the dying needed to receive the body and blood of Jesus unto the forgiveness of sins from that called servant. This was serious business not given over to talk-show hosts who might well deliver themselves rather than Jesus and him crucified to those in the throes of death.

The church also recognized the important humanity connected to the grieving and sadness that surrounds dying and death. The Scriptures are replete with examples of courageous men weeping over death (the grief of Job over his personal Armageddon, the grief of David over the death of his child, the grief of Jesus over Lazarus). Indeed, Psalm 6 tells us David wept all night over his sins. This affirmation of the masculinity of grieving and the proper place for sadness (both in the death of a loved one or in repentant sorrow for sin) has now been replaced by the “celebration of life” that eliminates the dead body, the casket, the burial, and the sadness and grieving that once accompanied death. The church’s romanticizing of death is a consequence of its substitution of the Man of Sorrows with a Teenager of Fun. This is another reason why men don’t waste their time coming to our churches. When you sentimentalize death and make it “fun,” skeptics will find something else to do on Sunday. If this Jesus can’t deliver at death’s portal, he surely is not worth consulting on the issues of this life. For centuries, the church had forms for grieving over death too. The Irish Catholics and the Jewish people still do. The Irish have their wake: a time for the body of the dead to be reckoned with, for family and friends to reckon with (and be reconciled to) one another, to hoist a brew together one last time in the presence of ole’ Charlie, and to reminisce about the time Charlie astounded everyone by winning the Dublin Dart Faire while consuming eight ales. When the moment came for the committal of Charlie’s body back to the dirt, it was clearly time for God to speak and for man to be silent. Without the wake, or the Jewish observance of “sitting Shiva” together for a week of grieving and solitude after death, we see everything happening at the “celebration of life.” Now the wake and the funeral get put into the blender together. Except what comes out is neither. We don’t get the validation of grief and sorrow anymore. We don’t deal with the body. We don’t get the grittiness of a wake. And we don’t get the comfort of a funeral. We get a tacky party. The gospel is harmed when we fail to deal seriously with death. The goal of celebrations (and their stepchild, the “memorial service”) is not to proclaim Christ and him crucified and risen again for our justification. Instead, the celebration of life is designed to magnify all the good qualities of the one memorialized and to maybe tack on Jesus at the end as a nice helper in one’s corner in tough times who saw this really good man over the river. Where are the funerals with a good, solid, gospel-driven liturgy that centers on Christ and on all his strong words about his victory over sin, death, and the devil? Where are the funerals that are testimonials to him? Where are the funerals that talk about grief and sadness? Where are the funerals that are not embarrassed to have a body present? Where have all the graveyards gone? Getting the Body Back into Funerals Having gone through the process of death and burial recently, I have some strong suggestions that might help J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 9

Get a faithful pastor to visit the dying: one who will take confession, give absolution, and administer the Sacra-

ence should be of the Christian in dying (and so in living):

When the hour comes when our life and work must cease, when we have no longer to stay here, and the question arises, where do I now find a plank or bridge by which I can pass with certainty to the other life—when you reach that point, I say, do not look around for any human way, such as your own good, and holy life or works, but let all such things be covered by the Prayer of our Lord and say of them: “Forgive us our trespasses” etc., and hold fast to Him who says: “I am the Way.” See that in that hour you have this Word firmly and deeply engraved in your heart, as though you heard Christ really present and saying to you: “Why should you seek another way? Keep your eyes fixed on Me, and do not trouble with other thoughts about how you may get to heaven. Thrust all such thoughts entirely away from your heart and only think of what I say: ‘I am the Way.’ “Only see that you come to Me, that is, hold on to Me with firm faith and the complete confidence of your heart. I will be the bridge and carry you across, so that in a moment you will pass out of death and the fear of hell into everlasting life. For I am the One who Myself built the way or path, and I Myself have trodden it and passed across, so that I might bring you and all who cling to Me across. “But you must put your trust in Me, nothing doubting, must venture all on Me, and with a joyous heart go and die confidently in My Name.” (Luther’s Works, Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 45, 498 ff.)

ment—someone who will speak Jesus and the forgiveness of sins into their ears. combat what a friend of mine calls the “Gnostic Vaudeville Show,” known as the “Celebration of Life.” 1. Write out your own funeral service now—or, more simply, make it clear you want the solid liturgical burial service found in hymnal “X.” At a minimum, tell your pastor what you want at your funeral and what you don’t want (e.g., “If Aunt Brittany demands to sing ‘Majesty’ at my funeral, I direct that there will be no funeral—take my body immediately to be buried”). This takes the onus off family members who want a biblical, gospel-driven burial liturgy but must fight against the purveyors of the fun-eral. You could well avoid a number of potentially very weird things from happening around your (or any) funeral because others (or you) can always say, “But this is what Dad told his pastor he wanted.” 2. If you can, choose the venue for the funeral carefully. If your choice is between the basketball court/worship center versus the graveside, go with the graveside. It keeps the service short and focused and emphasizes all the biblical themes (dust to dust and that a real body is present instead of the disembodied “spirit of Bob”). Long funerals are inevitably fecund sources for “speeches” and other results of the Fall, including Ms. Amy Grant Wannabe who suddenly appears to sing, at no cost to the family, “You Are My Hero” complete with her own Christian lyrics. 3. Go with a tried-and-true funeral liturgy that has Christ and his words at the center. The Lutheran burial liturgy our pastor used gave wonderful comfort knowing that these same words have been spoken to Christian believers at countless gravesides for centuries. 4. Most importantly, let a faithful pastor of the Word do all the talking. Testimonials are for before and after the service when there are no time or “appropriateness” restrictions. Build in a time for storytelling, but let it be with the bar open and smoke in the air. 5. Last but not least, get a faithful pastor to visit the dying: one who will take confession, give absolution, and administer the Sacrament—someone who will speak Jesus and the forgiveness of sins into their ears. If no pastor is available, be prepared to deliver those goods yourself to the dying. To better equip yourself to do so, bring to the bedside a rock-solid liturgical hymnal that has reformational prayers, liturgies, and hymns. You will very likely not know what to say, so do what anyone can do: read the prayers and passages from the hymnal! Luther on Preparing to Meet Your Maker Luther puts it well as to what the center and circumfer10 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Applying the Blood to the Sting I could have guarded my mom’s room much better during her last hours of deep suffering (Old Adam rarely goes without a fight). I could sense that her being continually told what a wonderful person she had been was driving her to deeper agony—words designed to comfort had become words of torture. Finally, mercifully, we were alone in that room. Death was moving in for its kill. Her breathing became more and more labored, and she had not spoken for some time. This was the final episode where the body has given up and refuses all nourishment but the system continues to function on autopilot. I knew the end was here. I spoke only of Jesus and the shed blood and forgiveness of sins. She died as I held her hand and sang over and over one of the many strong verses from The Lutheran Hymnal: Jesus sinners doth receive Also I have been forgiven. And when I this earth must leave

I shall find an open Heaven. Dying, still to Him I cleave— Jesus sinners doth receive.

Join the Conversation!

The regaining of Christ-centered funerals will be true evangelical medicine to a culture that can’t help but be entertainment oriented even when supposedly committing the dead to dust. I for one am ready to bury the modern fun-eral and instead to die confidently in Christ, absolved of all my manifold daily sins, and saved solely by the fully imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. That truth comforts me in dying—and so in living.

Craig Parton is a trial lawyer and a partner in a major law firm in Santa Barbara, California, and U.S. director of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France (www.apologeticsacademy.eu). He is also the author most recently of Religion on Trial (Wipf & Stock, 2008).

Speaking Of… “They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize I’m going to miss mine by just a few days.” —Garrison Keillor “If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.” —Michelangelo “The Lord God will wipe all tears from all their faces.” —Isaiah 25:8 “If God hath made this world so fair, Where sin and death abound, How beautiful beyond compare Will paradise be found!” —James Montgomery

Have you ever considered writing for Modern Reformation? Here’s your chance! We’re continuing these departments in 2010 and we want your words to be featured in them. “Open Exchange”: A forum for reader response. If you’ve ever read an article printed in our pages and thought that something else needed to be added, this is the place for your contribution. “Ex Auditu”: Examples of Christ-centered sermons. Christ-centered preaching is sadly rare in all our circles. Have you heard or preached a good sermon? Send in the transcript to give others a model to follow. “Preaching from the Choir”: Perspectives on music in the church. Beyond the old “worship wars,” we want to give people a way to think about the music we sing in formal worship contexts and in our private worship. Draw attention to the resources that matter. “Family Matters”: Resources for home. Catechism resources, ways of teaching theology to children, help with holiday themes: this is the place to direct others to resources you’ve found helpful in your efforts to be faithful at home. “Borrowed Capital”: Witnessing to Christ in our age. Where do you start in your witness for Christ? How do apologetics play a role in your evangelism? Got a story or a helpful idea? Share it with others in this space. “Common Grace”: God’s truth in art and culture. God gives gifts to both believer and unbeliever. How do we see those gifts expressed in the art and culture surrounding the church? In this space, we want to hear from artists and cultural observers looking for glimpses of grace in life. Intrigued? Ready to write? Send your 850-word essay (Ex Auditu sermons can be longer) to editor@modernreformation.org. Be sure to tell us in which department you think your essay belongs and send all your contact information. If we decide to run your work, we’ll extend your subscription by one year.

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 11

RECOVERING SCRIPTURE

10 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

The Problem of Evangelical Biblical Illiteracy: A View from the Classroom We revere the Bible, but we don’t read it. — George Gallup

or well over twenty years now, Christian leaders have been lamenting the loss of general biblical literacy in America. No doubt you have read some of the same dire statistics that I have. Study after study demonstrates how nearly everyone in our land owns a Bible (more than one, in fact) but few ever take the time to read it, much less study it closely. Indeed, while the Exploring Religious America Survey of 2002 reports that over 84 percent of Americans consider the Bible to be “very” or “somewhat important” in helping them make decisions in life, recent Gallup polls tell us that only half can name even one of the four Gospels, only a third are able to identify the individual who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and most aren’t even able to identify Genesis as the Bible’s opening text. Upon hearing these figures (and many more are readily available), some among us may be tempted to seek odd solace in the recognition that our culture is increasingly postChristian. Perhaps these general population studies are misplaced in holding secular people to Christian standards. Much to our embarrassment, however, it has become increasingly clear that the situation is really no better among confessing Christians, even those who claim to hold the Bible in high regard. Again, numerous studies are available for those seeking further reason to be depressed. In a 2004 Gallup study of over one thousand American teens, nearly 60 percent of those who self-identified as evangelical were not able to correctly identify Cain as the one who said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and over half could not identify either “Blessed are the poor in spirit” as a quote from the Sermon on the Mount or “the road to Damascus” as the place where Saul/Paul’s blinding vision occurred. In each of these questions, evangelical teens fared only slightly better than their non-evangelical counterparts. These numbers serve to underscore the now widespread recognition that the Bible continues to hold pride of place as “America’s favorite unopened text” (to borrow David Gibson’s wonderful phrase), even among many Christians. As a professor of New Testament studies at Seattle Pacific University, I know this reality only too well. I often begin my survey of the Christian Scriptures course by asking students to take a short biblical literacy quiz, including questions of the sort mentioned above. The vast majority of my students—around 95 percent of them—are Christians, and half of them typically report that they currently attend

D AV I D R . N I E N H U I S

nondenominational evangelical churches. Yet the class as a whole consistently averages a score of just over 50 percent, a failing grade. In the most recent survey, only half were able to identify which biblical book begins with the line, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Barely more than half knew where to turn in the Bible to read about the first Passover. Most revealing in my mind is the fact that my students are generally unable to sequence major stories and events from the biblical metanarrative. Only 23 percent were able to order four key events from Israel’s history (Israelites enter the promised land; David is made king; Israel is divided in two; and the people of Judah go into exile), and only 32 percent were able to sequence four similarly important events from the New Testament (Jesus was baptized; Peter denies Jesus; the Spirit descends at Pentecost; and John has a vision on the island of Patmos). These students may know isolated Bible trivia (84 percent knew, for instance, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem), but their struggle to locate key stories, and their general inability to place those stories in the Bible’s larger plotline, betrays a serious lack of intimacy with the text—even though a full 86 percent of them identified the Bible as their primary source for knowledge about God and faith. There are, no doubt, many reasons for the current predicament. In general we spend far less time reading anything at all in this culture, much less dense and demanding books like the Bible. Not long ago I met with a student who was struggling in one of my courses. When I asked her what she thought the trouble was, she replied, in a tone suggesting ever so slightly that the fault was mine, “Reading a lot is not a part of my learning style.” She went on to inform me that students today learned more by “watching videos, listening to music, and talking to one another.” She spoke of the great growth she experienced in youth group (where she no doubt spent a lot of time watching videos, listening to music, and talking with people), but her ignorance of the Bible clearly betrayed the fact that the Christian formation she experienced in her faith community afforded her little to no training in the actual reading of Scripture. Indeed, a good bit of the blame for the existing crisis has to fall at the feet of historic American evangelicalism itself. In his book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, Stephen Prothero has drawn our attention to various religious shifts that took place as a result of the evangelistic Second Great Awakening that J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 11

teens are generally quite happy to follow the faith of their parents, the de facto religion they cation that a merely cognitive level of biblical literacy practice is best characterized as a kind of “Moralistic Therapeutic does not automatically result in the formation of a Deism” (MTD). In their book Soul Searching: The Religious and Christian character. Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, they describe MTD as shook American culture in the first half of the nineteenth a vaguely Christian set of convictions that result in a view century, key characteristics of which continue to typify of God as a divine butler-therapist figure. The majority of contemporary evangelical attitudes. For instance, there teens interviewed reflected the belief that God is primarily was a shift from learning to feeling, as revivalists of the concerned with making people happy, bailing them out period emphasized a heartfelt and unmediated experiwhen they get in trouble, and providing them with the ence of Jesus himself over religious education. While this necessary goods to enjoy life. Apart from these activities, strategy resulted in increased conversions and the creation God is uninvolved in the world. In other words, God is of numerous popular nondenominational voluntary assobasically a nice, permissive dad with a big wallet. ciations, it also had the effect of requiring Christians to These same teens could be profoundly articulate about agree to disagree when it came to doctrinal matters. There drinking, drugs, and sexually transmitted diseases, but was a corresponding shift from the Bible to Jesus, as more were generally stumped when asked to talk about their and more Christians came to believe that the key test of faith. “Most U.S. teens have a difficult to impossible time Christian faithfulness was not the affirmation of a creed or explaining what they believe, what it means, and what the catechism, or knowledge of the biblical text, but the capacimplications of their beliefs are for their lives,” Smith and ity to claim an emotional relationship with what Prothero Denton report. There is more at stake here than a lack of calls “an astonishingly malleable Jesus—an American basic biblical and theological knowledge, of course. The Jesus buffeted here and there by the shifting winds of the authors go on to say: nation’s social and cultural preoccupations.”1 The most important shift, according to Prothero, was Philosophers like Charles Taylor argue that inarticuthe shift from theology to morality. The nondenominalacy undermines the possibilities of reality. So, for tionalist trend among Protestants tended to avoid doctriinstance, religious faith, practice, and commitment nal conflicts by searching for agreements in the moral can be no more than vaguely real when people canrealm. Christian socialists, such as Charles Sheldon, taught not talk much about them. Articulacy fosters reality. us to ask not “What does the Bible say?” but “What would A major challenge for religious educators of youth, Jesus do?” Advocates of the Social Gospel, such as Walter therefore, seems to be fostering articulation: helping Rauschenbusch, taught that it was more important to teens practice talking about their faith, providing praccare for the poor than to memorize the Apostles’ Creed. tice using vocabularies, grammar, stories, and key Christians schooled in this rather anti-intellectual, commessages of faith. Especially to the extent that the mon-denominator evangelistic approach to faith language of faith in American culture is becoming a responded to the later twentieth-century decline in church foreign language, educators, like real foreign lanattendance by looking not to more substantial catechesis guage teachers, have that much more to work at but to business and consumer models to provide strategies helping their students learn to practice speaking that for growth. By now we’re all familiar with the story: other language of faith.2 increasing attendance by means of niche marketing led church leaders to frame the content of their sermons and Inarticulacy undermines the possibilities of reality. If Smith and liturgies according to the self-reported perceived needs of Denton are correct in their analysis (and I think they are), potential “seekers” shaped by the logic of consumerism. then it means that even those teens who are able to Now many American consumer-congregants have come to answer isolated Bible knowledge questions will not autoexpect their churches to function as communities of goods matically be enabled to make the biblical story a constituand services that provide care and comfort without the tive element of their daily existence. Knowing that Jesus kind of challenge and discipline required for authentic was born in Bethlehem will not in and of itself empower Christian formation to take place. them to speak the language of faith. Satan’s use of Is it any wonder that Christian youth have had little Scripture in tempting Jesus is clear indication that a merely option but to default to thin, pop-cultural platitudes in cognitive level of biblical literacy does not automatically their attempts to make sense of their faith? In the largest result in the formation of a Christian character. study to date of the religious lives of American youth, the To make a real difference in people’s lives, biblical literNational Study of Youth and Religion, Christian Smith and acy programs will have to do more than simply encourage believers to memorize a select set of Bible verses. They will Melinda Lundquist Denton found that though American

Satan’s use of Scripture in tempting Jesus is clear indi-

12 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

T H E

have to teach people to speak the language of faith; and while this language is of course grounded in the grammar, vocabulary, and stories of the Bible, living languages are embedded in actual human communities that are constituted by particular habits, values, practices, stories, and exemplars. We don’t memorize languages; we use them and live through them. As Paulo Freire reminded us, literacy enables us to read both the word and the world. Language mediates our reality, expands our horizons, inspires our imagination, and empowers our actions. Literacy therefore isn’t simply about possessing a static ability to read and write; it is a dynamic reality, a never-ending life practice that involves putting those skills to work in reshaping our identity and transforming our world. Biblical literacy programs need to do more than produce informed quoters. They need to produce transformed readers. This is part of what I find troubling about what appears to be the dominant model of biblical literacy employed among evangelicals in their attempts to raise children of faith. This approach emphasizes the memorization of discrete Bible verses and “facts,” mostly in the service of evangelism and apologetics. By mastery of passages that are deemed doctrinally relevant and emotionally empowering, it is hoped that believing youth will be equipped to own their faith, share it with seekers, and defend it against detractors. Most of the students in my classes who consider themselves “familiar with the Bible” have been trained to approach Scripture in this fashion. Before I go on, let me be clear that I have a deep respect for the venerable and immensely valuable tradition of memorizing Scripture. Indeed, it is a central component in learning the language of faith. The deliberate, disciplined, prayerful repetition of those texts the church has come to especially value has long been a strategy for inscribing the Word of God directly on the heart and mind of the believer (Jer. 31:31–34). My comments thus far, however, should make it plain that I do not see how a person trained to quote texts out of context can truly be called biblically literate. I observe two common problems with students who have become “familiar with the Bible” in this way. First, many of them struggle to actually read the text as it is presented to them on the page. Just last week, several of my Bible survey students expressed their surprise and disappointment that “years of church attendance and AWANA Bible memory competitions” never trained them to engage the actual text of the Bible. They weren’t trained to be readers; they were trained to be quoters. One in particular noted that all these years she had relied on someone else to tell her what snippets of the Bible were significant enough for her to know. But whenever she was alone with the text, she felt swamped by its staggering depth and breadth; so if she read the Bible at all, her method typically involved skimming the Scriptures in search of the passages she already knew and loved. This method of “reading” (if it can be called that) is seriously limited, if not dangerous, because it reduces the Bible to a grab-bag repository of texts that reaffirms the reader’s prior commitments.

P R O B L E M

O F

E V A N G E L I C A L

B I B L I C A L

I L L I T E R A C Y

Second, this method leads students to uncritically assume that doctrinal reflection is exhausted by the capacity to quote a much-loved proof-text. In doing this they suppose not only that the passage they are quoting is entirely perspicuous as it stands (in complete isolation from its literary and historical context), but also that the cited text is capable of performing as a summary of the entire biblical witness on the matter at hand. In this they are sometimes led to uncritically conclude that Christians who believe differently from them are either incompetent or willfully disobedient. They are therefore often surprised (and occasionally profoundly demoralized) when they read the verse in its actual literary context and discover that the meaning they had come to invest in it is not completely commensurate with the plain sense of the text on the page. Those of my students who are quick to quote Ephesians 2:8–9 (“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast”) are sometimes shocked to read the subsequent verse 10 (“For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life”). Those who have memorized Romans 10:9 (“If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”) are often horrified to read Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:21 (“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven”). In fact it requires both a far more substantive grasp of Scripture and a capacity for careful doctrinal reflection to know how to negotiate the rich plenitude of the biblical witness. Unfortunately my students’ encounter with the Bible’s depth and breadth often leaves those who have been raised to quote verses feeling very insecure in their faith. So what then shall we do? What is biblical literacy? Coming to an agreed-upon definition is itself part of the problem. I think all would agree that, at base, it involves a more detailed understanding of the Bible’s actual content. This requires: (1) schooling in the substance of the entire biblical story in all its literary diversity (not just an assortment of those verses deemed doctrinally relevant); (2) training in the particular “orienteering” skills required to plot that narrative through the actual texts and canonical units of the Bible; and (3) instruction in the complex theological task of interpreting Scripture in light of the tradition of the church and the experience of the saints. The survey courses we teach at SPU seek to do these very things. But in the end we want to do more than fill believing heads with objective knowledge about the Bible; we want to empower our whole community—students, faculty, and staff—to buck the cultural trends and take up the spiritual discipline of reading Scripture. It is not enough for a Christian university to function as an outpost of the academy; it must also take up the task of serving the church by becoming an abbey for spiritual growth and an (continued on page 17) J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 13

RECOVERING SCRIPTURE

Without the Word by Charlie Mallie

can barely open my eyes this morning as I stumble out of my car into the pre-dawn mist and try to get my bearing. The wonderful aroma of freshly brewed coffee hits my senses and my body turns as if on autopilot. I reach for the door, tripping over the threshold as I step into the soft light and the morning sounds of beans being ground and the espresso machine giving birth to that mysterious dark elixir. The birth pangs continue as ordinary milk is transformed into a magical delight added to the more superior of coffee possibilities. Dr. Rosenbladt once posited that coffee was an ontological argument for not only the existence of God but also that he wanted us to pay attention. I am in complete agreement. I order my usual “Vente Mocha, triple shot with whip.” “$3.87, Charlie. How’s it going today?” a friendly voice offers. “Mm,” my words stick to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. Plumbing the depths of my pocket I manage a “Good, thanks,” as I hand John $4.12. He looks utterly confused by my accounting, as if someone took a big monkey wrench and jammed it straight down into the gears of his mental machinery. He looks at the coins and then at the register and then at me. He tries to give back the change and says, “It’s only $3.87.” There’s a bit of an uncomfortable pause. “I know,” I say, “but I need quarters for the meter,” but still there’s no understanding. It’s pointless. In my mind a voice is yelling, “I’m not even going to think about what 14 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

they didn’t teach you in high school math.” “Never mind, just keep it,” I say, smiling. I grab my beverage and walk over to the corner table and take a seat. As I take my first sip I think, “What if the world becomes like this?” More thoughts like these begin to swirl behind my eyes as I imagine a culture in which the ability to read becomes a lost art, math is treated like magic, and anyone who can make change at the cash register a modern magician. Can you imagine a world where doctors no longer have a competent grasp of human anatomy and physiology? Would you go under the knife knowing it was a gamble? How about a world where lawyers no longer understand the concept of justice? Wait—scratch that last one. Or what about a world where the church no longer bases its teachings on the Bible, or where Christians are completely ignorant of God’s Word? It’s that last thought that preoccupies the rest of my morning, and the issue that seems to be every solid pastor’s challenge these days. Some would argue that we’re already there. I know, I’ve had those arguments with fellow pastors. I don’t think that all is lost, not completely, not yet. Things may be bad, but I know some real oases in this wasteland of American Christianity, and for them I give thanks. I hope and pray that all of you reading this are at some such place, a bastion of orthodoxy of some sort. But I also realize that in surveying the landscape, things are not as well as they could be among the Christians in this country.

W I T H O U T

Trying to find water in the desert is becoming more of a challenge. As an adult convert I can say that my first hundred or so encounters with Christians or with various churches didn’t impress me much. When I had courage enough to darken the doorway of some assembly, often I found the teachings shallow and gimmicky. There was so very little of the Word, if at all. I remember one mega-thon in Southern California where the “youth dude” was standing in for the main pastor one particular Sunday. When it came time to “do the Supper,” he had us all bow our heads and “in our hearts intensely remember Jesus,” and then he looked up and yelled, “Here’s to Jesus,” as if toasting the skylight with his little plastic cup filled with Welch’s. That was the last church I walked out of with five-thousand-plus people watching. So began the years of my church fast—and my struggle to find genuine biblical Christianity, one that was saturated through and through with the Word of God. It occurred to me back then (now over fifteen years ago) that the very aspect of what pulled me with great velocity out of those churches seems to be what draws so many others to them. The emphasis on marketing rather than teaching, offering choices, rather than calling for commitment, entertainment rather than substance flows like a chapter out of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. If you look at it from 40,000 feet, regardless of the individual manifestations of the malady, the source is always the same: a lack of teaching founded on the whole counsel of God or at the very least an inoculation against such teaching. Why, in some places, you can have solid biblical teaching and have it be rejected wholesale remains, for the most part, a mystery to me. The parable of the sower may offer some explanation with the seed that falls upon the side of the road. How dangerous is it to have a church that isn’t completely shaped by the Holy Word of God in doctrine and in practice? What’s the big deal? Can’t we just form a group of Christians based on whatever we feel will best serve our needs? We need to be culturally relevant and sensitive. As we look at the way the church has operated in the history of Christianity we can certainly say that there are more efficient models for conducting business. We’re modern thinkers; look at all the advances in science and technology—look at how much we now know about this human condition called life. Surely the church cannot operate as it has for the past two-thousand years. Surely the times have changed—and the church must change with it, right? Maybe not. I hope you wholeheartedly disagree with the previous sarcastic statements. If you do in fact disagree, it is unquestionably the result of a particular thing in your history. Somewhere in your background the Word of God came to you. A passage that you read or that someone spoke stuck with you. Some pastor preached on a given text and it took root. You read your Bible and the Word was implanted. That living and active Word, the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, was buried in the soil of your

T H E

W O R D

heart and it grew. As that seed did its seedy thing, a small part of you was conformed to the image of the Sower. In that moment you were given discernment by the Word and the Word became a part of you. Because of that gift of being taught by the Holy Spirit through his Word, you can look at such silly assertions and say, “I think not.” But that’s really the key, isn’t it? The Word. It all turns on the Word of God. Not just a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path, but the very means that guard our steps as we walk with Christ who is the Way, the Truth, the Life. The Word, the Word, the Word! Sola Scriptura we Reformation folk like to say. Once upon a time, people thought it a principle worth fighting for and even dying for. But why? They thought it that important because they knew it was the Word that must be their foundation. They took passages such as Matthew 7:24–25 to heart. They believed 2 Timothy 3:16. They held fast to a whole host of testimony that if condensed said, “Sola Scriptura!” Without the Word, we are sitting ducks for all sorts of trouble. If it is true that the devil roams about like a lion seeking to devour whomever he will and that the only weapon we are given is the Word of God—that doubleedged sword of the Spirit that proceeds from the mouth of Christ—then without the Word we are truly vulnerable. Worse than that, we are helpless against whatever wind of doctrine blows through our doors. But I can only know such things from the Word. I will not come to the conclusion of such things by a careful contemplation of the starry sky—sorry, Mr. Kant. Without that transcendent eternal Word dropping down from the lofty realm of the neumena confusion, heresy, even apostasy becomes commonplace and talk of absolutes degrades into discussions of preference. Without a raft of revelation to sail me through this sea of doubt, there is no distilling ought-ness from is-ness. We are adrift in this sea of doubt, seeking and never finding, grabbing hold of whatever promises a remedy, even if it is just a temporary distraction from the pain upstairs that makes our eyeballs ache. The idea of victimhood gives credibility to this destructive narcissism as we become so singularly focused on our own needs to the exclusion of culture, community, and even family. The church fares no better, for it is filled with such individuals who are without the Word to straighten their inborn crookedness (in curvatus se), and instead it panders to their felt needs. The recognition of this total depravity, without the mirror of God’s law, is merely an optimistic attempt to place bandages on the devastating cancer of our sin, topically treating an inborn propensity for death with modern-day snake oils, peddled by religious carnies. Without the salve of the gospel, the message of God’s salvation in Christ pro nobis (!), these souls are merely relegated to a hot and hopeless eternal existence, and an earthly life where meaning isn’t given from above but must be mined from the depth of the human condition. Tell me I’m wrong! But if this were not the state of things in these latter days, there would be no need of a publication such as this calling for J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 15

came. I will be drawn to messages and teachings that through which the Holy Spirit delivers God's law, illumi- anesthetize and comfort my ignorance. I will do this nating our sin, and thereby showing us our need for our because it is easy, comfortable, and familiar. What I Savior, but it is also the means of communicating the will not do in this is confront my sin. At best, I will define my sin not in biblical terms gospel. but in humanistic ones, ways a modern Reformation and a return to the solas! We are in in which I can make progress and chart my ascendance. At dire need of the Word of God to be present in our worst, I will ignore it and bury it where it cannot be conchurches. fessed and it cannot be forgiven. I will, given the inclinaAnd it’s not just that the Word be present but that we tion of my heart, rank myself among my peers and as the body of Christ persist and remain fluent in that Holy compare my “progress in enlightenment” to that of my Word of God. The old Lutherans called this catechesis: the associates. I will be a bigger Pharisee than I am already— teaching, or the passing on of the teachings of the apostles, and not just me, millions like me, all who call themselves specifically those concerning Christ’s death and resurrecChristian. Where will it end? tion for the forgiveness of sins. This we did from the pasIt’s one thing when a lack of biblical acumen affects my sages and we believed catechesis was to be lifelong. The course in this life, but what happens when the problem best of Lutheran orthodoxy on the subject reveals a deep becomes so widespread that it pushes the entire Christian understanding that the Word of God is to be understood church on earth off her intended heading? Students of as living and active. It is the creative, redemptive Word history well realize this has happened before. The last, that is the vehicle through which the Holy Spirit delivers most significant realization perhaps, called for reformation God’s law, illuminating our sin, and thereby showing us when a young Augustinian monk, who, having had the our need for our Savior, but it is also the means of comstage set for him by a previous generation of humanists, municating the gospel. That gospel, delivered by the heard the cry ad fontes and returned to the Holy Word of Word, was the thing that got into your heart, soul, mind, God for teaching and direction. We know the result; it’s and body, straightening you up to look anew at Christ’s a matter of history. For a time there was division, disdeath for you, absolving you of guilt and shame—forgivsention, and destruction; but there was also life and as a ing your very sins—and that’s how you were conformed direct result, after a while, real peace in a land marked by to his image, by putting to death the deeds of the old civil unrest. The gospel of Jesus Christ through Reformers Adam in you. It was the gospel, the forgiveness of sins, the likes of Luther, Calvin, and others, came to the forethat delivered the Holy Spirit to you personally; and once front in the life of the church. Because the gospel of the gift was given, faith was created ex nihilo or, as the old Jesus Christ, understood as the real rescue of sinners sola Lutherans said, what was delivered was “forgiveness of gratia, came to be the center and the circumference of the sins, life, and salvation.” public life and expression of the church, the benefits of Once upon a time every young Lutheran was expected that gospel flourished as well. God’s Word being given its to have memorized about twenty pages of questions with rightful place did what God’s Word always does: it creates answers that were verses from the Bible in Luther’s Small life. Catechism. These days, many Lutheran churches no longer But if it is God’s Word that creates life, then what about use the catechism at all. Don’t even ask me about their its absence? Well, if it is true that through one man sin use of the Bible. Because of this, whether it was laziness entered into the world, and death through sin, and so on the part of the pastors or resistance on the part of the death spread to all men because all sinned, and that death people, biblical ignorance abounds. Within my own reigned from Adam until this present age, and that church body, it is a huge struggle to try and teach out of through the one man’s disobedience the many were made several generations that took so much for granted. sinners, then through the one transgression there resulted Scriptural familiarity is at an all-time low. That’s a dancondemnation of all men. That condemnation of sin gerous place to be for a church body that claims to be reigns in death. Without the Word there is only death; roundly and soundly about Jesus. It leaves us open to all without the Word of the gospel, that death is eternal. sorts of things that range from just plain silly to the outWithout the Word of God—it matters little how you dress right demonic. it up, market it, or in what words you couch it—it is For without the Word to inform my life in Christ, what merely the dry dusty breath of a dead man on his way to do I have? I will almost certainly clench tightly to flowthe valley of dry bones in the desert. To be without the ery or fiery words that sound conservative or wholesome. Word is to be without Christ. To be without Christ is to be The prophets to whom I give ear will be of my choosing, without a Savior. To be without a Savior is to succumb to certainly not those of old to whom the Word of the Lord that insidious hereditary darkness that results in our ulti-

It is the creative, redemptive Word that is the vehicle

16 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

W I T H O U T

mate demise without hope of resurrection. The question is, “Son of man, can these bones live?” What can we say? Our own words fail, even here, “You alone, O Lord, know.” What we do know, and that again from the Word, is that the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one death reigned through the one, how much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:17). But here again, what I’m trying to show through example is that it is only a fluency in the Word and with the Word that best provides protection against all forms of this death that manifests itself both in the world and in the church. I don’t think there are many in the various camps of the orthodox who would argue that American Christianity has drifted away from Scripture. The signs are too clear, the marketing too effective, the billboards are everywhere. If space permitted, a contrasting of a knowledge of Scripture over and against the smooth-tongued seductive attacks against the Word would make the case even clearer and the need and urgency to return to the Word rather stark; but this article merely paints with a broad brush, leaving the detail work to more competent individuals. Before I close, I’d like to leave you with just a few thoughts. The Reformers understood very well that the entire Scriptures were about Jesus. He himself says as much in Matthew. But in addition to that, Luther and those who followed understood that the Word was not just casuistry concerning Jesus, but that it was about Jesus in a particular way. Holy Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, described in infinite detail the scarlet thread of redemption—Jesus primarily in his dying and saving office for sinners, of which you and I are included. Should we lose that message in its particulars and its entirety, we lose the ability to communicate our very salvation. Apart from God’s Word, the only knowledge of God we have is one of power and might, of justice and of law. We lose Jesus, we lose the Christ, and we lose our very salvation. Can we have a church that is completely devoid of Scripture? Will it still be church? I’m afraid, given the current trend, this question might be answered for us all. May it never be, but nevertheless, come Lord Jesus. ■

Charlie Mallie (M.Div., Concordia Theological Seminary) is associate pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Tombal, Texas. When not evangelizing at Starbucks, Pastor Mallie is a scuba instructor for a local dive shop.

T H E

W O R D

The Problem of Evangelical Biblical Illiteracy (continued from page 13) apostolate for cultural change. Through our newly established Center for Biblical and Theological Education, we are working to create a reading program—a lectionary of sorts—that will contribute to the formation of readers who come to cherish a relationship not with the “astonishingly malleable Jesus” of American culture, but with the particular God whose story is related in the Bible and celebrated in the Christian church. We want to create a community ethos of habitual, orderly, communal ingestion of the revelatory text. We do so in the hope that the Spirit of God will transform readers into hearers who know what it is to abide before the mirror of the Word long enough to become enscripturated doers; that is, people of faith who are adept at interpreting their individual stories and those of their culture through the grand story of God as it is made known in the Bible. ■

David R. Nienhuis (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) is associate professor of New Testament Studies at Seattle Pacific University and interim director of SPU’s Center for Biblical and Theological Education. He is the author of Not by Paul Alone: The Formation of the Catholic Epistle Collection and the Christian Canon (Baylor University Press, 2007).

Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 111. 2Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 268. 1

Speaking Of… “Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the Book widens and deepens with our years.” —Charles H. Spurgeon “I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.” —William Tyndale “The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.” —Northrop Frye

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 17

RECOVERING SCRIPTURE

The Authority of the Bible: “It ain’t IS necessarily so!” By Jacob Smith

he world seems to be screaming the same question Pilate posed to Christ in the Gospel of John: “What is truth?” And naturally, people seem to be looking for the answer to that question in all the wrong places. When confronted with the content of the Bible and its authority as the answer to the question of truth, most people recoil and like Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s great opera Porgy and Bess scream, “It ain’t necessarily so!” This is especially true in a society where feelings and emotions possess as much influence, if not more, than objective facts. People, when confronted with biblical authority, are either outraged or they glare at you with indifference and throw back the old cultural defeater, “How can an ancient and frankly offensive book be in any way authoritative over me, especially if I don’t make it authoritative?” The 18 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

great battle facing the church today, from within—as the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have recently demonstrated—and without, is one of epistemology: What is and where can one find truth? Therefore, the great question facing the church today is: How does the Bible, as believed by Bible Protestants,1 still speak authoritatively to a world that does not recognize its authority? Before we answer that question, let’s explore two significant reasons why the world does not recognize the authority of the Bible. The first reason is, as the Bible illustrates, that humankind loves darkness; we love sin. Humanity is born in darkness and, left to its own devices, blinded by sin is exactly where it stays. The blind and dark state of humanity is illustrated clearly in John’s Gospel

T H E

when Jesus tells Nicodemus, “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to light lest his deeds should be exposed” (John 3:19–20). On this passage, the nineteenthcentury Anglican bishop J. C. Ryle writes, “The darkness in this sentence means moral darkness and mental darkness, sin, ignorance, superstition, and irreligion. Men cannot come to Christ and receive His Gospel without parting with all this, and they love it too well to part with it.”2 One of the countless demonstrations of humankind’s sinful blindness to the authority of the Bible is the idea that humanity improves over the course of each generation. In the words of renowned Christian apologist Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, “A common failing of men in every era is their naive belief that their own time constitutes a qualitatively different situation from all others, thereby rendering the biblical Word something irrelevant for them.”3 Joss Whedon, the creator of successful television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, provides an example of our tragic blindness. Upon receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism from the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, Whedon argued that the world is “evolving” and that what the world really needs, in order to break down the systems that have shackled and held it back from reaching its full potential, is education.4 Often it is argued that sin is becoming less of an issue as people become more self-actualized. We reduce sin to simply bad behavior, the characteristics of an uncivilized society that can be overcome with time and education, as opposed to the desperate state humanity finds itself unable to surmount through its own willpower. Many would argue that what the Bible authoritatively offers—a need for saving and for redemption—is simply an archaic crutch that represses people and prevents them from discovering their full potential, the savior within. Mired in darkness, a darkness that we love, we believe that we are our own saviors, that we can overcome sin through our own actions. We trust in our own ability to cure our sin, to get better, to move upward along some sort of moralistic scale. This belief strips the Bible of its authority and according to the Bible is to sit in darkness. A second reason the world does not recognize the authority of the Bible is that in many churches the Bible has become nothing more than an instruction manual. This reason finds its roots in the darkness of the first: the tragic notion that humanity is somehow free to make itself better. I have heard sermons delivered from the pulpit that “BIBLE” is an acronym for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” For many Christians, the Bible serves as simply the authoritative handbook for everything in life, from dating that honors God to raising happy kids. Tragically, many sermons given in churches that affirm the authority of the Bible revolve around, for instance, fourteen crucial steps to being a person of integrity. The

A U T H O R I T Y

O F

T H E

B I B L E

church enables and promotes entire industries selling study Bibles for every subculture on the planet; and it has turned the Bible into a leadership manual in which we are encouraged to mine every figure of the Old Testament as a model for leadership, following Jesus as our CEO.5 Sadly, the church wants to be so helpful in people’s dayto-day lives that it has grown increasingly pragmatic in its approach to almost everything. In so doing, it has relinquished the authority of Scripture in order to make the Bible more didactic. It has turned the Bible into merely another self-help book to join the stacks weighing down our shelves with ought-to goading and guilt. (The next time you visit your local bookstore, take a look at the Christian section. It bears a striking resemblance to the nearby self-improvement aisle.) This is extremely telling of the way the world views the Bible and its authority. Unfortunately, in part due to the church, the world sees the Bible, like Jesus, at best as one of many great teachers. It is nothing more than a helpful book in a sea of other helpful books. The thought goes, however, even among self-help books, that the Bible languishes—when it comes to managing money or dreams, there are hundreds of other books more specific, cocksure, and engaging. By focusing on application and didacticism, the church has actually helped lessen the authority of the Bible in the eyes of people. The Bible does speak to finances (and it does have a lot to say about sex, oftentimes even too scandalous for your local evangelical megachurch). Yet, when churches focus on “fixing” a part of life, they misuse the Bible to address only our symptoms as opposed to our disease. The idea that Scripture is in any way self-help is a flawed premise; rather, the biblical diagnosis of humanity is that we are beyond help. Our mismanagement of money, our flawed relationships, and our failure as leaders are simply the symptoms of the disease called sin. As Luther would say, they are the fruit of a bad root. To offer people five steps from the Bible to a better youfill-in-the-blank is like a hospital offering the victim of a lethal gunshot wound a tissue: after a while, no one would recognize the authority of the hospital either. The Bible possesses authority even if the world does not recognize it. There are some things that just cannot be left up to subjectivity. For example, traffic lights are authoritative whether or not we give them authority. If one does not go on a green light, people will scream and honk their horns; and if one does not heed a red light, one runs the risk of an accident. Sin and its effects are not subjective either. They are tangible, and it is to the matter of sin that the Bible speaks clearly and with authority. In Ephesians 6:17 Paul refers to the Scriptures as the “sword of the Spirit,” and in Hebrews 4:12–13 the author says that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of Spirit, thoughts and intention of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” The Bible is authoritative not because it is a manual for living, J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 19

Hermeneutically then, as Jesus declares, how do the texts of the Scriptures authoritatively bear for living, but because it reveals to us Jesus who has witness to Christ? One of the great gifts of the Reformation was the power to cut through all of humanity’s baloney. the return to—rightly handling the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15)— making the proper distinction between the law and the gospel. but because it reveals to us Jesus who has the power to cut John Calvin’s student, the Reformer Theodore Beza through all of humanity’s baloney. He not only cuts (1519–1605), wrote in his famous work The Christian Faith: through all our attempts at self-improvement and social evolution, but reveals himself as God’s only authoritative We divide this word into two principal parts or kinds: solution to sin, humanity’s disease. the one is called the “Law” and the other the I love the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan “Gospel.” For all the rest can be gathered under the woman in John’s Gospel because in it we see Christ cut one or other of these two headings….Ignorance of through her socially and self-constructed isolation to offer this distinction between Law and Gospel is one of the himself as the solution to her deep need (John 4:1–29). principal sources of the abuses which corrupted and This woman is a complete mess. She did not recognize the still corrupt Christianity.8 authority of the Scriptures, since Samaritans worshiped on Mt. Gerizim and believed that there were no prophets after It is as if the man were writing today! The law and the Moses.6 Also, she was fetching water in the heat of the gospel are found both in the Old and New Testaments. day, an obvious sign that she was an outcast. In fact, her Grammatically, the law takes the form of the imperatives outcast status was particularly notorious: not only had she in the Bible, informing us what we shalt and shalt not do. had five husbands but was living with a sixth man who The law, given by God, is perfect. Humans are not perfect, was not her husband. Jesus, however, does not respond to and the law always demonstrates that we are not perfect. her by being helpful. In John 4:7, Jesus actually asks her As the Reformers would say, the law always accuses. St. to get him a drink of water. Nor does Jesus present to her James conveys the mercilessness of the law when he five easy steps from Isaiah so that she might have more writes, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one fruitful relationships. Rather, by communicating to her point has become accountable for all of it” (James 2:10). who he is, Jesus authoritatively cleaves the scar tissue of This is a demand that leaves no room for our best shot. The law conveys to us that God is completely perfect and he her life and offers himself as the solution to her deep need, her eternal thirst. Her overwhelming encounter demands utter perfection. The law dictates how people with Christ moves the woman to return home as an evanshould act and clearly delineates how completely wrecked gelist. She tells her town, “Come, see a man who told me humanity is. When brought before the law, the only all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” Through her, proper response is to drop to our knees and cry out like St. many came to believe in Jesus as the Savior of the world. Paul, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me This encounter clearly illustrates that the authority of the from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). Bible comes from its revelation that Jesus is the Lord who The second word, the gospel, provides the answer to meets her deepest need for forgiveness and absolution. that question. The gospel is found in the indicatives in the From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible derives its Bible, and they let you know who you are because of authority from bearing witness to Jesus Christ. Martin what God has done for you in Christ. The gospel, when seen in light of the heavy demand of the law, is a gloriLuther once said, “The Bible is the cradle wherein Christ is lain.” The Bible is the only place where God conveys to ous word because it says that God has provided and the world knowledge of his will, the solution to sin, and accomplished all that is demanded of you in Jesus Christ. the hope of eternal life. Article VII of The 39 Articles of This word says that Christ has not only died for your failReligion, the defining statement on Anglican doctrine, ure before the law, but has been raised so that you might states, “For both in the Old and New Testament everlaststand completely justified before the law as if you had ing life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only never done nor will do anything wrong again. Because Mediator between God and Man, being both God and of Christ’s death and resurrection, God is completely just Man.”7 The authority of the Bible is found—and for no in this pronouncement. When the law and the gospel are other reason than—in the fact that it gives us Christ. As properly distinguished, Christ is always presented clearly Jesus tells the Jews, “You search the Scriptures because as not only holy and righteous but also as forgiving and you think that in them you have eternal life [managing merciful. your money, helping you raise happy kids, etc.], and it is Evangelistically, this presentation of Christ from the they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come Scriptures carries the authority to respond to the cultural to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40). throwback: “The Bible is not authoritative over me if I

The Bible is authoritative not because it is a manual

20 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

T H E

don’t make it authoritative.” By distinguishing the two words, one can enter into the murkiness of the world’s subjectivity and make sense of it. As St. Paul points out in Romans, the law is so much more than simply the Ten Commandments: it is written upon our hearts, it is found in our conscience, and manifests itself in our conflicting thoughts (Rom. 2:15). The law explains why people feel the way they do, what keeps them up at 3:00 a.m. No one is immune from its accusations. In light of humanity’s failures, the law always says that our effort is never enough. People’s subjective failures, for they are different with everyone, are ultimately rooted in the objective truth that we have failed before God and his Holy Law. When this is properly understood, the gospel—Christ crucified for you—objectively and authoritatively becomes the ultimate answer to all of the world’s subjective angst. The Bible is authoritative whether one trusts or does not trust in its authority. As Bible Protestants, we believe this is objective truth. The point and authority of the Scriptures are lost, however, when we make the Bible about anything else other than Jesus Christ and him crucified for the sins of the world. When the Bible becomes a guide to selfimprovement or some sort of mandate to humanly save the world, the church finds itself in a standoff against the world, which argues that even though it works for you, “it ain’t necessarily so.” When the words of the law and the gospel are rightly distinguished in the Scriptures, however, Christ is always presented in the fullness of his glory as both Judge and Savior. This is where the Bible’s authority lies and, like a sword, cuts right through all of humanity’s subjective objections. When the law and the gospel are distinguished, they reveal humanity’s blindness caused by sin and give Christ as the solution. As a result, we can trust that God will work through his Word. It shall not return empty and “shall succeed in the thing for which He sent it” (Isa. 55:11). ■

Jacob Smith is the assistant rector at Calvary/St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York City. He is also a founding board member of Mockingbird Ministries, a reformational resource ministry and co-host of Two Words, a theology program that airs on Pirate Christian Radio.

The term “Bible Protestants” is used by A. A. Hodge in his work Outlines of Theology in order to describe and distinguish those Protestants who hold to a confessional standard. 2J. C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, vol. 1 (East Peoria: Versa Press, 2005), 165. 3John Warwick Montgomery, The Suicide of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1970), 360. 4Unlike Renaissance Humanist, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard simply seeks to nurture and develop atheists, agnostics, and other nonreligious students at Harvard and beyond. 5Jesus, CEO Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership was a national best-seller by Laurie Beth Jones. 1

A U T H O R I T Y

O F

T H E

B I B L E

Except for the one Moses foretold in Deuteronomy 18:18. The Book of Common Prayer (New York: The Church Hymnal Corporation), 869. 8Theodore Beza, Two Parts of the Word of God: Law and Gospel. Reformation Ink, http://web.archive.org/web/20030210190726/ www.markers.com/ink/tblawgospel.htm. 6 7

“O Word of God Incarnate” O Word of God incarnate, O Wisdom from on high, O Truth unchanged, unchanging, O Light of our dark sky: we praise you for the radiance that from the hallowed page, a lantern to our footsteps, shines on from age to age. The church from you, our Savior, received the gift divine, and still that light is lifted o’er all the earth to shine. It is the sacred vessel where gems of truth are stored; it is the heaven-drawn picture of Christ, the living Word. The Scripture is a banner before God’s host unfurled; it is a shining beacon above the darkling world. It is the chart and compass that o’er life’s surging tide, mid mists and rocks and quicksands, to you, O Christ, will guide. O make your church, dear Savior, a lamp of purest gold, to bear before the nations your true light as of old. O teach your wandering pilgrims by this their path to trace, till, clouds and darkness ended, they see you face to face. —William W. How

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 21

RECOVERING SCRIPTURE

Recovering Vox Dei

lmost every sector of business across the globe has been adversely affected by the current economic recession. But according to a recent article in BusinessWeek, one type of business is still flourishing: outsourcing.1 Companies looking to reduce costs often hire other companies—usually in a more cost-effective part of the world—to manage or to execute a service. Today, everything from customer support to Human Resources or manufacturing can be outsourced to almost any developing country. Outsourcing’s attractiveness, however, is not limited to commerce. The current popularity explosion of sermon-sharing websites, which encourage pastors to download and reuse other teachers’ sermons for a fee, has drawn the attention of various publications such as The Wall Street Journal.2 Personal prayer package services allow busy Christians (again, for a fee) to send in a prayer list so that someone they don’t know can pray to God on their behalf. We may scoff at these notions, yet the truth is that we often outsource other aspects of our spiritual life. 22 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Recently, my four-year-old daughter had an epic meltdown. My wife and I were at our wits’ end on how to help her. My first instinct was to grab my copy of Shepherding a Child’s Heart to find out what author Ted Tripp would say. Instead of studying God’s Word to hear what God would say to me, I hired Ted to do it for me. There is nothing inherently wrong with turning to a book for help. In fact, biblically based books are beneficial to Christian growth— especially one as excellent as Tripp’s. Yet when I completely skip the personal study of God’s Word, I am basically declaring that either God can’t speak to me directly or that I am not willing to put the effort into hearing him. I have, in effect, outsourced the study of Scripture. Hebrews 5:11–14 explains that God’s Word is like solid food, good for nourishing the soul. If I believe that, then why, when a trial comes, is my first impulse to go to my favorite Christian author or newest Christian living book? Why do I feast on a diet consisting of mostly predigested

by Nate Palmer

R E C O V E R I N G

food (tasty as it might be), rather than food directly from God’s table? Businesses look for cost-saving solutions to justify outsourcing; I do it because I am lazy or because I want people to think I am smart and savvy since I read all the must-read books. I am usually more excited about the newest book release than about the next Bible passage in my daily reading. It just seems more efficient to let other people study the Bible and then tell me what it says. They are smarter and godlier than I am, and they do a better job figuring out what God is saying. Plus, there are catchy and poignant stories that help make the topics more interesting. What’s wrong with wanting R. C. Sproul or John Piper to help me understand and apply biblical truths? While godly authors are a benefit to us, their books should never be a substitute for our own pursuit of Vox Dei, the voice of God. In reality, what is the difference between solely relying on someone else to pray for us and solely relying on someone to read God’s Word for us? Not much. Yet while I recoil at the former, all too often I indulge in the latter. It is in these moments that we subcontract out God’s voice by turning primarily to other sources for help and direction, regardless of how biblically based they are, instead of principally to the Bible. We let ourselves become consumers of someone else’s Christian life. We tap into and adopt their meditation, study, and pursuit of God as our own. They have unintentionally become mediators between us and God. So how do we recover the supremacy of the personal pursuit of God’s Word? We look to the Scriptures themselves. God uses his very Word to help us find the passion and the power both to read and apply it. This may seem like circular logic in that God uses his Word to create a desire for his Word, yet this is exactly what God does. Consider the passion for God’s Word in Psalm 119:9–16: How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart I seek you; let me not wander from your commandments! I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you, O Lord; teach me your statutes! With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth. In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word. A passionate pursuit of God’s Word comes from God’s Word, for it is from God’s Word that we know of God, his ways, our condition, and the eternal hope of Christ (1 Cor. 15). Paul writes in Romans 15:4, “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” The Scriptures themselves contain the basis for our passionate pursuit of their preeminence in our lives. As we study the Bible, we discover that God establishes a relationship directly with us. God can and does enter into

V O X

D E I

a relationship with mankind not only because he is capable of such an act but because he desires it. In Genesis, he is personally involved with creation and oversees every aspect of the work. Then, after he creates Adam in his own image, God speaks to him, blesses him, starts a relationship with him in Genesis 1:26–29, and speaks directly to him in Genesis 2. Later, in Genesis 17:7, God tells Abraham his plan for his people: “And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” Here, Scripture reveals that God plans to be in a relationship with his people forever. The relationship God has with us, however, is not merely that of a caretaker for his charges; it is much deeper than that. It is one of a loving Father who adopts us as sons and daughters by sacrificing his own son on our behalf. Paul writes in Ephesians 1:5–10: In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. Even Jesus’ name—which is Hebrew for “the Lord rescues,” as Immanuel means “God with us” (Matt. 1:23)— suggests the relational nature of God. God is not some distant, unapproachable, uncaring figure; he is capable of having a real, meaningful, and direct relationship with us. God establishes and fosters his relationship with us through his Word. The apostle John explains in 1 John 2:14 that God’s Word lives within us: “I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.” In John 8:47, he explains that God uses Scripture to talk to his people and that “whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” In Luke 6:47–48, Jesus encourages us to read and to build our life on God’s Word. The Scriptures teach that they are God’s voice to his people and that God encourages us to listen. He does so because he loves us. The incarnation of Christ was the single greatest proof that God loves and desires a relationship with us; it also shows how personal God is willing to be. John writes, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9–10). If God loves us enough to offer his Son as a sacrifice for us, does J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 23

God can and does speak clearly to his people. In 1 John 2:20, the apostle and more than just a “love letter”; it is the primary means explains that when God regenerates us he simultanethrough which he imparts knowledge, provides care, and ously grants us the ability through his Spirit to underconforms us into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18). stand his Word. John writes, “But you have been anointed it not stand to reason that he would clearly record this so by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.” The that future generations could read about it? Without God’s Scriptures are clear and sufficient for those who have Word, would we some two-thousand years later know trusted Christ and who have been given the Holy Spirit. what God did for us? How would we know the gospel? We can’t have a real and loving relationship with God I am currently reading a biography on Daniel Boone. It unless we first understand him—or he makes himself is a fascinating account filled with adventure, hardship, understood. God uses the Holy Spirit to help us grasp and and perseverance. As enlightening and entertaining as desire his Word. Jesus explains to his disciples that unless the book is, it’s still merely a history book without any real the Holy Spirit comes, they cannot otherwise understand impact or authority on my life. The Scriptures, however, the gospel: “I still have many things to say to you, but you are not merely a history record. They are God’s very words cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he to us and are meant to be a primary source of grace in our will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on lives. Luke 6:47–49, Hebrews 5:11–14, and Colossians his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, 3:16 show us the amazing impacts of which the Scriptures and he will declare to you the things that are to come” are capable. Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16–17, “All (John 16:12–13). Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teachGod uses the clarity of the Bible not only to communiing, for reproof, for correction, and for training in rightcate who he is but also the hope and power he extends eousness, that the man of God may be competent, through Christ. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the equipped for every good work.” Paul explains how the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but Bible is not only directly authored by God, but that it is his to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” God’s tool for equipping and changing us for the Christian life. Word cannot be power to us if we are unable to discern it. God uses his Word not just to inform us but to care for us Or do we think that God separates us into two groups of and to transform us. believers: those with whom he chooses to have a direct God also extends care through his Word. Psalm 73:24 relationship, and those to whom he will only talk through states, “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward a third party? Do we think that Hebrews 4:16, “Let us then you will receive me to glory.” Proverbs 30:5 declares, with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we “Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need,” who take refuge in him.” His Word provides wisdom, prois meant only for those with a seminary degree? tection, and hope. Passages like Romans 15:4 and John Ironically, the idea that we need a mediator between us 5:24 explain how God uses the Bible to provide for our and Christ is an entrenched Roman Catholic notion, the assurance of salvation. Scripture is more than just an very conflict at the heart of the Reformation. At the account of God’s actions and more than just a “love letter”; Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church issued a it is the primary means through which he imparts knowlstatement saying no one except the church had the right edge, provides care, and conforms us into the image of to interpret Scriptures. They forced the ordinary believer Christ (2 Cor. 3:18). to outsource the Word to the church, making the priests When I was seventeen, I left my home in California to the only ones who legally could study the Bible. The move to Germany in order to “find myself.” I barely Roman Catholic Church effectively changed Matthew 4:4, spoke German and my guest parents understood hardly which says, “But he answered, ‘It is written, “Man shall any English. Communication was a confusing and laborinot live by bread alone, but by every word that comes ous undertaking with frustrated expressions, convoluted from the mouth of God,”’” by adding a qualifier on the hand gestures, and unmet expectations. For example, the end, “as interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church.” confused look I got when I said I wanted pepperoni pizza While we stand with the Reformers who rightfully was matched by my reaction when they gave me a pizza rebelled against this, we often functionally agree with it. with various peppers on it. Fortunately for us, we have a Instead of the qualifier of the church, we add “as interGod who is all powerful (Mark 10:27), all knowing (Prov. preted by Piper or Frame or Bavinck.” We think that the 9:10), and who understands our thoughts and desires Bible is too complicated, too labor-intensive, or too boring completely (1 Chron. 28:9). for us to deal with. Instead, we let other authors be our Given his power and the fact he also desires and estabpriests; we carry out our relationship with God vicariously lishes a loving relationship with his people, it is logical that through them. Yet God would have us come to him

Scripture is more than just an account of God’s actions

24 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

R E C O V E R I N G

through his Word and find hope, power, and encouragement (Rom. 15:4). In 2 Samuel 22:31 it says, “This God— his way is perfect; the word of the Lord proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.” A new and passionate emphasis on Scripture does not preclude us from reading other biblically based books. Just because the Bible offers clarity does not remove the mystery or complexity of it. Not all of the concepts contained in Scripture are equally clear. Things like how Christ can be both fully man and God at the same time and the Trinity—not to mention how the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility works—are hard for our finite minds to fully comprehend. While we can clearly see these concepts in the Bible, they still perplex us. So we need brilliant guys like Piper or Frame or Bavinck to help us understand our own study of Scripture. Proverb 11:14 states, “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” As we seek wise counsel, we must be like the Bereans in Acts 17:11 and constantly evaluate their words and conclusions against the Scriptures themselves. How can we do that if we have little idea what the Bible actually says? In fact, we need more than just these authors to help us read and apply the Scriptures; we need a community of believers. We were not saved into a lone ranger Christianity but into God’s people. In Ephesians 2:18–22, Paul explains that Christ brought us not only individually to him but he also created a people bound together through his blood. This means that Scripture is to be pursued and applied both personally and publicly. In 1 Timothy 4:13–16, Paul encourages the public reading and teaching of Scripture by telling Timothy to be not just open to it but rather devoted to it. Many of the New Testament Epistles such as Romans and 1 Corinthians were written and read aloud to the entire church. Passages like 1 Corinthians 1:10 and 1 Thessalonians 2:14 address and encourage communal actions to be taken by the whole church. Many verses, like Ephesians 5:2, instruct the church to be in community and service to one another: “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Yet, we cannot comprehend what these statements mean, or even be faithful and effective, if we are not living in community with other believers. God did not intend for us to read, study, and apply his Word in isolation, with only our own capacities and knowledge to guide us. We are not merely dependent on our own personal interpretations. We benefit from those around us such as our pastors, Christian authors, and our brothers and sisters in Christ in the local church. Even those who have gone before us contribute to our pursuit of God’s Word, through their writings and through the confessions. Not that these are to take away the hard work of reading the Bible ourselves, but they are to give us the tools to properly understand what we have before us. While we should lean on exterior works for understanding, we should never substitute them for our own study of Scripture.

V O X

D E I

God wants to speak to you. He wants to assure you of his love and of the hope of Christ. He wants to instruct you on how to live a life that glorifies him. The Scriptures are his context by which he does all of this. So don’t outsource his Word to you; instead, passionately pursue the preeminence of Scripture. But don’t take my word for any of this. Read the Bible and discover what God is saying to you. Recover Vox Dei, the voice of God. As Psalm 1:1 states, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” ■

Nate Palmer, currently pursuing his masters from Reformed Theological Seminary, is a solution manager for manufacturing with a software firm. His website (www.biblicalservanthood.com) is a resource warehouse and blog targeted to laypeople serving in their local churches. Nate attends Grace Church Frisco in Texas, a Sovereign Grace Ministries affiliated church. He is currently working on his first book, Now Serving: Worship in Action.

Mark Scott, “Outsourcing: Thriving at Home and Abroad,” BusinessWeek (4 May 2009). 2Suzanne Sataline, “That Sermon You Heard on Sunday May Be from the Web,” The Wall Street Journal (online.wsj.com, 15 November 2006). 1

Speaking Of…

hus, the highest proof of Scripture derives in general from the fact that God in person speaks in it....For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit....Let this point therefore stand: that those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is selfauthenticated: hence, it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning. And the certainty it deserves with us, it attains by the testimony of the Spirit. For even if it wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, it seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts through the Spirit. Therefore, illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by any one else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men....By this power we are drawn and inflamed, knowingly and willingly, to obey him, yet also more vitally and effectively than by mere human willing or knowing! —John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 25

To Have and to Hold A Look at the Importance of Scripture by Patricia Anders

nce upon a time, but not so long ago, people had to smuggle Bibles and Christian literature into Eastern Europe and what was then the Soviet Union; border guards would ask travelers if they possessed any “guns, drugs, pornography, or Bibles”; and entire villages shared one copy of Holy Scripture, carefully tearing out pages and passing them around from family to family. On one occasion in the 1980s, an old Romanian man wept and hugged the person who had just delivered a stack of Bibles to their underground church, protected by night’s cloak from the watching eyes of secret police. Not only was it illegal to possess a Bible, it was illegal to teach the Bible to children under the age of seventeen. Many Christians went to prison and to labor camps or had property confiscated—all for the Word of God. The Communist authorities knew the power of the Scriptures— even though they may not have believed in it, they knew the Bible was dangerously influential in people’s lives. Although the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Bloc are now a part of history, there are many countries in the world today where religious persecution remains strong and the Word of God is considered a risky but precious commodity. It may seem hard to believe, but there are more persecuted Christians in the world today than ever before—including the days of the early church. Places such as North Korea, China, Iran, Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan, Burma, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Belarus, Turkey, Colombia, Peru, Cuba—the list goes on. We need to remember and support these brothers and sisters, especially in prayer—those who languish in prisons (and sometimes suffer torture and death) and the families they leave behind. Hopefully, these stories encourage us to embrace our own religious freedom—to embrace the fact that we have Bibles and can meet openly as a church on Sunday mornings. We do not fear soldiers barging in at any moment. This is something I learned from my experiences in taking Bibles into Eastern Europe back in the 1980s. I met people who suffered for the Word of God, which caused me to take my own faith more seriously—and to appreciate the Bible my grandparents gave to me on Christmas Day 1985 and which I still cherish (although the binding is beginning to tear apart and tape patches some well-worn pages). Soon after these experiences in restricted countries, I began having a daily devotion time each morning before going to work—unfortunately it took such dramatic events to make me finally understand the importance of Scripture to my own life! Even taking five minutes to read a passage was enough to prepare and strengthen my heart for the day. Over the years, this evolved into a fuller daily 26 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

reading. Some years, I’ll read through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation—or I’ll follow the church liturgical calendar, such as reading portions of the New Testament during Pentecost (the long church season between Easter and Advent). And every time, there is something new and wonderful—the great and awesome love of God manifesting itself on each page. Martin Luther once said, “The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.” I do believe the Scriptures are alive and that the Holy Spirit is present in the reading of the Word and through the preaching of the Word. At our church in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, we are blessed to have a pastor who loves the Scriptures and who presents the gospel to us in every sermon. That’s another blessing we should never take for granted! From the Scriptures, we know that the first and greatest commandment is “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” In 1 John 4:7, the apostle writes: “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” This sounds very nice, but how can I actually know God? In the special revelation he gives of himself to me through his Word. As Jesus prays in John 17:25–26: “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” I teach a class at a small Christian liberal arts college, and we recently looked at those particular Scripture verses in our discussions on love. We also read C. S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves and watched the BBC film Through the Shadowlands—the love story of C. S. Lewis and Joy Gresham. There was a line in the film that really hit home with us: Jack—as he was known to his friends—says to his brother Warnie before ever meeting Joy that she seemed to know him already; that is, she knew him through the books he wrote and through his personal correspondence to her. She came to love him without ever seeing him. My students were struck by how similar that is to our relationship with God. We believe and we love although we have never seen him. We know him through his Word. Of course, the story of Jack and Joy turns sad when she dies only a few years after their mutual confession of love and marriage. On her hospital bed, she says to him: “I’m a Jew, divorced, broke, and I have cancer. What I want to know is, do I get a discount?” But she had become a (continued on page 34)

Hearing Is Believing: Sound Advice

RECOVERING SCRIPTURE

By Michael Horton

reaching is too intellectual. It aims at the mind but doesn’t really transform the whole person. Besides, we live in a culture that disdains authorities who tell us what to believe and what to do. It gives the pretense of someone having all the answers. What we need are more conversations. The truth emerges in dialogue, not from a monologue. Besides conversations, we need more practices in community gatherings that envelop all of the senses. Preaching is too static. We need more visual movement and imagery, dance and drama, video clips, and the like. More sounds besides words. Even smells, like incense. You may have heard some or even all of these criticisms of the centrality of preaching in the church. And minus the video clips, you would have heard a lot of the same criticisms in the medieval church, where the Mass was an awe-inspiring theatrical performance. Is preaching an indifferent medium that just happened to be available in the era of Jesus and the apostles but can be replaced with more effective media in our day? Or is there something intrinsic to the preached Word that makes it essential to the ministry and mission—indeed, the very existence—of the church? God’s Effective (Not Just Educative) Word t is true that sometimes preaching is treated merely as a method of transferring information from one mind to another. Of course, any commu-

nication addresses our minds as well as our hearts and bodies. Preaching, however, is not God’s chief means of grace because of any preference for intellectualism. Rather, it is because God gets all of his work done—in creating, sustaining, redeeming, calling, and restoring—by speaking his Word. Forgetting the sacramental effect of the Word as a means of grace, an intellectualist approach reduces preaching to teaching (its pedagogical function). In these settings, the most we can expect is a transfer of timeless information from one mind to another mind. This, however, is not an adequately biblical view of how the Spirit delivers Christ to us through the Word, creating the world of which he speaks. Throughout Scripture, God’s Word is characterized as “living and active” (Heb. 4:12), the means by which the triune God created the world, upholds it, redeemed it, and brings it into his everlasting rest. And it is this Word that we must hear if we are to be saved. In Reformation teaching, the Word is not only written but preached and not only preached but sung, prayed, and administered in the Sacraments. The preaching of the Word is itself a means of grace. In this sense, Calvin called it “the sacramental Word” (Institutes 4.14.4). B. A. Gerrish observes, “Calvin felt no antagonism between what we may call the ‘pedagogical’ [teaching] and the ‘sacramental’ functions of the word.”1 He continues, “God’s word, for Calvin, is not simply a dogmatic norm; it has in it a vital efficacy, and it J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 27

is the appointed instrument by which the Spirit imparts illumination, faith, awakening, regeneration, purification, and so on.…Calvin himself describes the word as verbum sacramentale, the ‘sacramental word,’”2 that gives even to the Sacraments themselves their efficacy. “It therefore makes good sense to us when we discover that in Theodore Beza’s (1519–1605) edition of the Geneva Catechism, the fourth part, on the sacraments, actually begins with the heading ‘On the Word of God.’”3 As with baptism and the Supper, the Spirit creates a bond between the sign (proclamation of the gospel) and the reality signified (Christ and all his benefits). The Word is a ladder, to be sure, but, like the incarnation, one that God always descends to us (Rom. 10:6–17). Gerrish further states: “It is crucial to Calvin’s interpretation that the gospel is not a mere invitation to fellowship with Christ, but the effective means by which the communion with Christ comes about.”4 We gather each Lord’s Day to hear God, not to see inspiring symbols, express our spiritual instincts, have exciting experiences, or even merely to hear interesting and informative discourses. Furthermore, we come not only to hear this Word proclaimed in the sermon but to hear God address us throughout the service: in the votum (or “God’s Greeting”), in the law, in the absolution (or declaration of pardon), in the public reading of Scripture, and in the benediction. This is why Reformed and Presbyterian churches privilege the singing of Psalms: God not only gives us something to respond to but also our proper lines of response in the script. The purpose of singing in church is not to express our individual piety, commitment, and feelings (though it enlists these). Rather, according to Paul, we “sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” so that “the Word may dwell in you richly, in all wisdom and understanding” (Col. 3:16; cf. Eph. 5:19). Even the Sacraments are “visible words,” ratifying before our physical eyes the promise that we have heard with our ears. The ministry of the Word involves all of these elements and encompasses our whole being in a communion of saints. Although private reading of the Bible is of enormous value in strengthening our faith by deepening our understanding, God has chosen preaching as a social event of hearing that makes strangers into a family. The Church is a “Creature of the Word” rom this line of thinking it has been rightly claimed that the church is the creation of the Word (creatura verbi). The new birth, as part of the new creation, is effected in the church (that is, through its ministry of the Word), but not by the church. Neither the individual nor the community gives birth to itself, but is born from above (John 3:3–5). The origin and source of the church’s existence is neither the autonomous self nor the autonomous church: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom. 9:16). As an external Word, God’s speech breaks up the presuppositions, attitudes, longings, felt needs, pious

28 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

impulses, speculations, and ideals of individuals and even of the church itself. Yet as public communication, it is inherently social and reorganizes the creation that it disrupts into the new creation of which it speaks. Conceived in the event of hearing, the church always remains on the receiving end of its redemption and identity. Preaching involves teaching, but it is much more than that. The sacramental aspect of the Word—that is, its role as a means of grace—underlies Reformation teaching. The preaching of the gospel not only calls people to faith in Christ; it is the means by which the Spirit creates faith in their hearts (as expressed in Question 65 of the Heidelberg Catechism). In evangelical theologies, this sacramental aspect of God’s Word is often marginalized by a purely pedagogical (instructional) concept. It is therefore not surprising that when the Word is reduced to its didactic function, there arises a longing of the people to encounter God here and now through other means. By affirming its sacramental as well as regulative (canonical) character, however, we can recognize the Word as God’s working and ruling, saving and teaching. If faith comes by the preaching of the gospel, and preaching is an inherently social event, then the effect of the preached Word as the primary means of grace is not individualism but real community. Faith does not arise spontaneously in one’s soul, but in the covenantal gathering of fellow hearers. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains, If there were an unmediated work of the Spirit, then the idea of the church would be individualistically dissolved from the outset. But in the word the most profound social nexus is established from the beginning. The word is social in character, not only in its origin but also in its aim. Tying the Spirit to the word means that the Spirit aims at a plurality of hearers and establishes a visible sign by which the actualization is to take place. The word, however, is qualified by being the very word of Christ; it is effectively brought to the heart of the hearers by the Spirit.5 In public proclamation, distinct even from my reading of Scripture, “it is another who speaks, and this becomes an incomparable assurance for me.” Total strangers proclaim God’s grace and forgiveness to me, not as their own experience, but as God’s will. It is in the others that I can grasp in concrete form the church-community and its Lord as the guarantors of my confidence in God’s grace. The fact that others assure me of God’s grace makes the churchcommunity real for me; it rules out any danger or hope that I might have fallen prey to an illusion. The confidence of faith arises not only out of solitude, but also out of the assembly.6 This emphasis on the external Word as the medium of God’s saving action is the line that separates the Reformers

H E A R I N G

from what they regarded as the “enthusiasm” common to Rome and the radical Protestants.7 Though highly esteemed as divine revelation, Scripture was regarded by both groups as a dead letter that had to be supplemented by ongoing revelation: the living voice of the Spirit through the living church or prophet. With their sharp antithesis between outer and inner, visible and invisible, divine and human, enthusiasts through the ages have appealed to John 6:63 for an alleged contrast between the Spirit and the Word, as if the latter were a “dead letter”: “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” And yet, Jesus immediately adds, “The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.” The Spirit’s role is to make the external Word an inwardly experienced and embraced reality, not to offer a superior gnosis to the Word itself. “For Calvin as for Luther,” John H. Leith observes, “‘the ears alone are the organ of the Christian.’”8 Calvin summarized, “When the Gospel is preached in the name of God, it is as if God himself spoke in person.”9 Leith elaborates, “The justification for preaching is not in its effectiveness for education or reform….The preacher, Calvin dared to say, was the mouth of God.” It was God’s intention and action that made it effective. The minister’s words, like the physical elements of the Sacraments, were united to the substance: Christ and all of his benefits. Therefore, the word not only describes salvation but conveys it. “Calvin’s sacramental doctrine of preaching enabled him both to understand preaching as a very human work and to understand it as the work of God.”10 We are embodied creatures, not disembodied minds. Fair enough. That is exactly why God has condescended to us in the “baby talk” of ordinary human language and even now, each week, addresses us through the lips of a finite and fallen minister. It is an affront to God’s generosity to demand more interesting, relevant, and effective methods than he has chosen. God knows that our weakness not only requires him to reveal himself in terms that are far beneath his loftiness, but that our sinfulness generates idols in a multitude of forms and media. In clearly communicating to us through his living and canonical Word, God accommodates to our weakness without capitulating to our sinfulness. We need no other aids than the covenantal speech that God graciously gives us in preaching and its ratification in baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Everything else that we do in the public service—at least, if it is limited to the elements commanded by Christ and his apostles—is another form of that ministry of the Word. For us now, hearing is believing (Rom. 10:17). God still ratifies his covenant through his visible Word—baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless, until Christ returns to raise our mortal bodies to immortality, along with the wider creation, “we wait eagerly” (Rom. 8:23). “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (vv. 24–25). Even as God speaks this evangelical Word into this present age, the new creation dawns among us; but it is still largely hidden. For now,

I S

B E L I E V I N G

however, “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). With the Reformation came a revolution from visual metaphors for knowing—and the tantalizing vision of icons and visual theatrics that downplayed the mediation of Christ’s presence through his Word. Whereas even Augustine subordinated hearing God speak to contemplative vision, as Hans Blumenberg observes, Luther’s De servo arbitrio (On the Bondage of the Will) “plays metaphors of the ear against those of the eye.” The eye wanders, selects, approaches things, presses after them, while the ear, for its part, is affected and accosted. The eye can seek, the ear can only wait. Seeing “places” things; hearing is placed.…That which demands unconditionally is encountered in “hearing.” Conscience has a “voice,” not light.11 Luther shifted attention back to founding utterances going forth from God’s mouth rather than primordial ideas in the divine mind that remain eternally still. Oswald Bayer explains concerning Luther’s view, “The new creation is a conversion to the world, as a conversion to the Creator, hearing God’s voice speaking to us and addressing us through his creatures. Augustine was wrong to say that his voice draws us away from God’s creatures into the inner self and then to transcendence.”12 As the Westminster Larger Catechism teaches, it is “especially the preached Word” that is a “means of grace,” since by this method God confronts sinners in their self-enclosed existence, “driving them out of themselves, and drawing them unto Christ” (Westminster Larger Catechism, Answer 155). This Word calls us out of our subjectivity and renders us extrinsic, extroverted, and social creatures who hold fast to Christ in faith and to our neighbors in love. Stephen Webb goes so far as to suggest that the Reformation represents “an event within the history of sound,” an event of “revocalizing the Word.”13 Instead of a chiefly visual event—a theatrical display—that fills the spatial distance between transcendent Lord and the people separated by a screen, public worship became a verbal event. This ministry of the Word occurred not only in the sermon but in the public reading of Scripture, in the prayers and singing, in confession and absolution—indeed, throughout the entire liturgy from God’s greeting to the benediction. Even Communion was a vocal pledge from God that the whole covenant community received and to which it responded in celebration. As Webb notes, This follows from Calvin’s belief that God’s Word accomplishes what it commands. It is covenantal speech, active and full of life. Even in its stuttering, it has the power to give what it asks. God’s Word called the world into being, and it continues to uphold the world through the speech of the Spirit-filled church.14 Where medieval worship subordinated speech to sight, the Reformation (capitalizing on humanist concern for hisJ A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 29

to convey the actual content of the Scriptures. Regardless of our professed view of “And the word Scripture, do we have liturgies, songs, and sermons substantial enough to convey it to us? We have to be wise in the way we think through changes to the liturgy, the songs, the prayers, and other means through which the Word is communicated from generation to generation. Many people today raised in evangelical churches do not even have a stock of memorized passages. Will the snippets of verses sung repeatedly in choruses today make the Word of Christ dwell richly in us and future generations, with all wisdom and understanding? It is indeed a kind of intellectualism for a pastor to assume that his only job is to preach a sermon, while passing the rest of the service of the Word off to a worship committee. The Word is not only taught but caught, and those who grow up in the church often learn more by repeated exposure to the songs and liturgy than by any particular sermon they can recall. Not only are critics of preaching wrong when they look for “more relevant” media, we are wrong when we reduce the ministry of the Word to mere instruction. It’s a big day whenever God arrives to speak a new creation into being. Until Christ returns, faith will always come—and come again—through the hearing of the gospel. ■

Throughout the book of Acts, the advance of Christ’s kingdom is announced with the words, of God spread.” tory and exegesis in the original languages) sought to expose the people to God’s voice. “This was a verbosity caused not by the need to explain an image or to make a moral point. Rather, it was a verbosity intended to convey grace through sound.”15 Luther led the way in recovering this emphasis on hearing over seeing. “Our Western philosophical tradition has given the intellect prominence among our human faculties,” notes Oswald Bayer. “Luther, however, says that ‘there is no mightier or nobler work of man than speech.’ We are not rational beings first of all; we are primarily speaking beings.”16 This is not a slight point for Luther.17 “For Luther everything depends upon the Bible; hearing, using, and preaching it as the living voice of the gospel (viva vox evangelii).”18 This is in contrast to Augustine, for whom “the external Word is a sign (signum) that simply points us to the [thing itself] (res).”19 Webb reminds us, “For Augustine…the Word that God speaks is heard internally before we give it an external voice….Consequently, faith, like thought, begins in the interior recesses of the heart, where it is silent before it makes a sound.”20 In the words of the Second Helvetic Confession, “The preached Word is the Word of God.”21 In Scripture we find the canon of saving speech; in preaching, the ongoing means by which this saving speech generates a new creation, so that even in this present evil age we “taste of the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come” (Heb. 6:5). This is how the kingdom comes. The hypostatic Word became flesh—not a vision or a video clip or an experience, but a person. And the spoken Word comes to us normatively in the language of prophets and apostles, committed to a written canon, which is then proclaimed to the world. Throughout the book of Acts, the advance of Christ’s kingdom is announced with the words, “And the word of God spread.” More than the Sermon ne generation put all the emphasis on the sermon, as if it were not only the primary but the only conveyer of the Word. And now their adult children are wondering whether we need the sermon at all. Bit by bit, the Word of God is being heard less in our churches. Besides the sermon, “the public reading of Scripture” that Paul regarded as essential (1 Tim. 4:13) seems to have vanished from many services. It’s not surprising that there is so much ignorance of the most basic biblical stories, themes, and teachings. No one has to say, “We don’t believe the Bible anymore.” The point of even many niche “study Bibles” is to find relevant points rather than

30 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido).

B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 84–85. 2Gerrish, 85. His references to Calvin are from the Institutes 4.14.4. 3Gerrish, 84. His references to Calvin are from the Institutes 3.5.5. 4Gerrish, 84. His references to Calvin are from the Institutes 3.5.5. 5Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church,” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 1, ed. Joachim von Soosten; English edition ed. Clifford J. Green; trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 158. Emphasis added. 6Bonhoeffer, 230. 7See Willem Balke, Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals, trans. William J. Heynen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981). 8John H. Leith, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Proclamation of the Word,” in John Calvin and the Church: A Prism of Reform, ed. Timothy George (Louisville: Westminster, 1990), 212. 9Leith, 211. 1

(continued on page 35)

INTERVIEW f o r

d i a l o g u e

i n

a n d

o u t

o f

o u r

c i r c l e s

An Interview with Peter Berger

Choosing Our Religion Michael Horton, co-host of the White Horse Inn, recently spoke with Dr. Peter Berger, University Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University and director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. A member of many scientific societies, he has received honorary degrees from Loyola University and the Universities of Notre Dame, Geneva, and Munich. Professor Berger may be best known for his work on the sociology of knowledge and his profound alternative to the reigning secularization thesis, both of which we’ll be discussing in this interview as we try to understand our role as Christians in a post-Christian culture. The book you co-authored with Thomas Luckmann in 1966, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, became required reading across many disciplines; in fact, you introduced the phrase “social construction” into our vocabulary. Today, we have on one hand René Descartes, isolating himself in his apartment in a lonely project of discovering once and for all the absolute truth untainted by authority, tradition, community, or sense experience. On the other hand, we have postmodernism, which many people—especially conservative Christians—regard as just another word for relativism. We’re in a major cultural transition, which you’ve tracked significantly over your career. How do you navigate these extremes? I don’t think the way I navigate it is all that unique. We tend to think of relativism and fundamentalism as being opposed things. I see them as reverse sides of the same coin. The coin is modernization, and for reasons that can be fully explained, modernity brings about a loss of taking-for-grantedness in terms of what people think the world is like and what they think people should do. There are two reactions to it. Relativism is a kind of embrace of this: there is no truth, or if there

is, we can’t find it out; there is really no right and wrong; everything is relative. That’s one extreme that is very destructive, both in terms of society and in terms of individual lives. At the other extreme is fundamentalism, which is most easily explained as taking refuge from the relativizing effects of modernity in some claim of absolute certainty, whether it’s religious or political— it doesn’t have to be religious, it can be anything. This is equally destructive because it means that societies vulcanize into groups of people who can no longer talk to each other. One has to find a middle ground and that’s what this book is about. The middle ground is religious, it’s moral, and last but not least, it’s political. Early in your career, the secularization thesis held pretty generally in the academy; namely, that as the political support of religious institutions fell away, we finally graduated from the kindergarten of superstition and dependence on external authorities to the university of reason and autonomy. We still hear that in the culture, but you’re known as the leading critic of that thesis. How did your mind change? I don’t think that I ever used the term “kindergarten of superstition”

because I was a Christian then and I am a Christian now, and that suggests that all religion—Christianity included—is a kind of illusion, which I never believed. No, the change of mind had nothing to do with any theological or philosophical change; it had to do with my being a social scientist, which means you look at the evidence. It became increasingly clear to me, as indeed to most people who work in the field of studying contemporary religion, that the secularization theory was wrong, that the evidence was against it. You used the term “postChristian era” before. I don’t think we live in a post-Christian era at all, certainly not in the United States and not in most of the world—Christianity is growing enormously in much of the world. Since I changed my mind, which is a long time ago, the obvious mistake of secularization theory has become all the more clear. Could you describe that in terms for those not familiar with your work, such as The Sacred Canopy and A Rumor of Angels? What is the secularization thesis and why do you think it’s wrong? Basically, the secularization thesis says the more modern a society is, the less religious it will be. Some people welcomed it, which was certainly the belief of the Enlightenment in Europe. As reason and science progress, superstition— which they identified with religion—will decline. Except for two exceptions, this has not happened. One exception is geographical: western and central Europe are indeed

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 1

quite secularized societies, and it is an interesting question of why that is so. The other exception is sociological: there is a kind of international cultural elite that is quite secular. Again, this is another interesting exception. But most of the world is as religious as it has ever been and, arguably, even more so. In his recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has added another meaning of secularization; namely, the reduction of even religion to immanent, worldly felt needs. When you look at popular Christianity in America today, especially with the success of books with titles like Your Best Life Now, do you think that churches themselves to some extent are contributing to secularization in that sense? Some are, yes, and I think particularly in mainline Protestantism there has been a tendency to do what Charles Taylor describes; in other words, to translate the Christian message from having to do with transcendent realities: with God, with life after death, with angels, and the whole religious world. They translate this into a morality where Christianity is the golden rule and nothing else, or a kind of psychotherapy where religion is good for you because it makes you more wholesome and more authentic. Perhaps worst of all, it becomes politics where religion is about a particular political agenda. All of that, I would say, is a distortion of religion generally and of the Christian gospel particularly. So, ironically, in the attempt to make religion more relevant to a culture in the long run, it makes it more irrelevant? Absolutely. Dean Angel, who was a rather melancholy Anglican theologian in the 1930s and 40s, put it very well: He who wants to marry the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widower. Do you think in terms of religious authority that the idea of anything 32 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

standing outside of a person— whether it’s the church or the Scriptures—is undermined, even in evangelical contexts, when it becomes the Spirit within? That is a tradition actually within Christianity in general; it’s not only evangelicals. Many mystics in Christianity would say something like that. I wouldn’t call that secularization; it’s something rather different. And I wouldn’t hold to that. I’m not evangelical; I’m a Lutheran, which is not quite the same. But what I appreciate about evangelicals is that they understand that the gospel has to do with an interpretation of reality as such; it has to do with God, with redemption, with the resurrection of Christ. It’s a transcendent message, cosmic in scope. And that has been much lost in mainline Protestantism. One of your books I’ve found especially helpful is The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. Can you tell us what you mean by the “heretical imperative” and how this aspect of modernity makes it a little tougher to pass on the faith to others, especially to successive generations? The title in a way is a play on words. Although I wrote this quite a few years ago, I would still say the same thing. The original word for “heresy” is from the Greek word for “choice.” It means that the modern situation forces people to make choices where previously, when religion and worldview was taken for granted, they didn’t have to make choices. To be a Christian was a fate, not a choice. This can be explained rather easily when you take anything at all for granted. If you take for granted that Christianity is true, you don’t have to make a decision. You’re a Christian the way you’re an American, or you have hay fever or blonde hair. It’s not something you decided. When it is no longer taken for granted that you’re a Christian, or anything else in the realm of

worldview and norms, you have to make decisions, and I think that’s a good thing. What’s also very distinctive about evangelicalism is that it puts a decision at the very heart of being a Christian. You’re not born a Christian; you have to be born again to be a Christian. Now, I have a little difficulty with what evangelicals mean by being born again; it’s a bit too emotional for me. But the core of the message is very clear; and having to make a decision to be a Christian is the same thing as saying, “You need faith.” That I find important and good. What are the downsides, especially in our American culture, of almost enshrining choice itself as a value regardless of the object? That is almost inevitable when choice becomes that central in the lives of people. You’re right that choice has become a kind of icon. Feminists or liberals will talk about choice when they mean abortion. The conservatives will talk about choice when they mean homeschooling or charter schools. So choice has become a sort of okay word, which has problems. But on the other hand, I don’t deplore the basic fact that what previously was taken for granted now has to be freely chosen. It has to do with human freedom, and in the religious sphere, it has to do with faith. If I knew things for certain, I wouldn’t need faith. I don’t need faith to know that I’m sitting in Boston and you’re sitting in California, and we are talking to each other. I don’t need faith to know that. But to say that Christ is risen requires faith. It’s not something I know. And that, I think, is a good thing. Another phrase you’ve introduced into our general vocabulary is “plausibility structures.” What do you mean by that? I’m proud of coining that phrase—I like it, I embrace it, and I’ve said that when I die, inscribed on my heart will be the words “plausibility

structures.” This is an old sociological insight that I think is valid: that what we believe to be true or good depends very much on the consensus of people who surround us and who are important for us. So every statement about the world (except maybe things that are directly accessible to our senses) requires social confirmation. I don’t need social confirmation to know that I have a toothache. That fact imposes itself upon me no matter who I’m talking to. But most of what I consider to be my values or my worldview depends on the social consensus of those around me, which is really another way of saying (which is not a new truth) that human beings are social beings. We’ve become what we are through socialization, through social processes, and we remain what we are because there are people around us, important to us, who say that’s what you are. Can you apply this idea of plausibility structures to the practical lives of Christians in families, in churches, and in the wider society? In other words, when a believer participates in a community that practices preaching, baptism, Communion, public prayer and singing, fellowship, and outreach, does this network create its own plausibility structure for successive generations to be raised in the Christian faith? What happens if we abandon these external structures and practices because we find them stifling to the individual quest? I would say the short answer to that question is yes. You can put in general terms or sociological terms that for any statement about the world, for any value, any belief to survive over time, it requires an institution. Solitary individuals can’t do this, especially when you’re talking about passing something from one generation to another. Children require a community within which they can grow up and believe certain things and live in a certain way.

So I think it is necessary to have a community for Christian faith. It has to be that way.

people who live in Tibetan villages on top of a mountain, but there aren’t very many of those.

It’s not something you can do over the Internet. I doubt it. But, of course, choice remains here in an important way—especially in a society where there’s religious freedom and you can choose that community. Even if you are born into Religion A, you are free to change into Religion B, or to redefine what you mean by Religion A. So choice enters into that as well. But I think the choice to be a Christian all by yourself is a very difficult one, and I would not recommend it if you can possibly find a community within which you feel comfortable.

In 2003, you wrote Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity. How would you describe your own relationship to Christian faith and practice today? That was my fullest statement of where I stand theologically, which is Christian in a fairly traditional sense. The meaning of Christianity can be expressed fully in one sentence: Christ is risen. The rest is commentary, which obviously can be hundreds of books and articles and statements on what that is all about. I think this is something shared by people in different Christian communities, from Eastern Orthodoxy to evangelical Protestantism and everything in between. Beyond that, I would describe myself as a Lutheran, which is my background. I have some hesitations about Lutheranism—I’m not a dogmatic Lutheran—and so I would have to say I’m on the liberal side of the Lutheran view of Christianity. The book goes into that in considerable detail.

You’ve written much on globalization in recent years. How has globalization affected our consciousness, especially with respect to competing religious claims? Unless we live in a cave somewhere, we have become much more aware of how many different religious possibilities there are in the world. Again, that goes back to the heretical imperative. If you live in a mountain village where everybody around you is a Tibetan Buddhist, the idea that Tibetan Buddhism may possibly not be the ultimate truth may not even occur to you. But as soon as you come down from your mountain village into a city where you get everything under the sun living next door, you have to make a choice; and even if your choice is that you’re going to be a Tibetan Buddhist for the rest of your life, that’s a choice that’s no longer taken for granted. I think globalization has increased the heretical imperative and continues to do so, and I wouldn’t deplore that. So everybody has to make a choice, that’s the one thing that has changed for everybody, from fundamentalists to secularists? Nearly everyone. There are some

In terms of the social construction of reality, how do all pervasive features of our life today—such as technology and the commodification of reality—shape or misshape religious communities? In terms of what we’ve been discussing here, technology makes it much easier for everybody to talk to everybody else. If you want one picture of the world today, the most powerful one is somebody with a cell phone. Some years ago I was in Hong Kong and I happened to walk into a Buddhist temple. There was a guy in a business suit who held an incense stick in one hand and was talking on a cell phone in the other hand—and I don’t think he was talking to the Buddha. The picture of the globalized world is that everyone talks to everyone else, and that means that people increasingly become exposed

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 33

to alternative norms, values, and worldviews. Now, that can be quite disturbing, and people can get seasick from all of this. On the other hand, I think most people manage somehow and they find a community that sustains them and supports them in the choices they make— and I think that’s good. One way in which you’ve forever changed the landscape is this sense that it’s not all theory, it’s also practices. Of course, you have predecessors saying that as well, but you’ve really focused it for a lot of us on this sociology of knowledge. Do you think that there’s a danger in thinking on the one hand that truth is only about practices—that is, I’m shaped completely by being a white middle

class male growing up in Orange County—versus on the other extreme that I’m just a disembodied mind and I need to see myself as part of a context that has shaped me, not just that I have drilled down to reality but that I’m also part of a particular time and place that has shaped me? Is that really important for us as Christians to understand? I think it’s important to understand, yes. If you are a white middle class person having grown up in Orange County, obviously that shapes a lot of what you are. You are not a Tibetan Buddhist who lives in a mountain village. But on the other hand, certainly in the American situation today, whether it’s in Orange County or anywhere else, that accident of birth does not

To Have and to Hold (continued from page 26) Christian and found great solace in her faith, in the Scriptures, and in Lewis’s writings—especially when he says in The Last Battle, the final book of the Chronicles of Narnia, how this life is merely “in the Shadowlands” and that it is only the “cover and the title page” of the “Great Story which no one on earth has read.” While this is certainly true, we do have a history of the Great Story of God’s love and redemption during this life and in this world. Paul writes in Romans 15:4, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” The story—or testament—of God’s love toward us is shown from Genesis 1 when he said, “Let there be light!” to the beautiful end of the tale—or rather the true beginning—in Revelation, when the Bridegroom returns for his Bride and we live with him in this Light for all eternity. God’s promises are abundant and they are true. Until that great day of Christ’s return, while we live in this difficult yet exciting time of the already and the notyet, we suffer through daily trials and tribulations. Like Joy in a moment of overwhelming pain, there may be days when we ask if we can “have a discount.” This is another reason why the Scriptures are important—they are full of the struggles of very real people and of the hope and the faith that sustains them. Just reading the “Hall of Faith” in Hebrews 11 should be enough to give us immense encouragement! As the Scriptures teach, life is not easy, especially the Christian life, and certainly not for those under perse-

determine the rest of your life. You can move out—in fact, large numbers of people move out of the background that originally shaped them. So I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Of course, we are not disembodied free minds floating in a sort of social vacuum. That’s a mistake; that is not what life is really like. On the other hand, we are not robots. We don’t come out of a mint of our background where we are stamped a certain way in childhood and then have to stay that way for the rest of our lives. Some truth is in between. We have a degree of freedom and the degree can be considerable.

cution, and we all experience persecution in one way or another—anything that forces our attention away from God or causes our suffering because we remain true to him. But God always proves himself faithful. He has since Day One and there is no end in sight—not for those of us who believe. In the meantime, we have the Bible—God’s Holy Scripture—to help us, to encourage us, to guide us, and to keep us focused. We should cherish it always, to have and to hold from this day forward. As believers in the persecuted church throughout the years have found solace in the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 8, so let us also hold to them as if our very lives depend upon them—which, I believe, they do: In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation and teaches part time at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. She and her husband attend First Congregational Church of Hamilton, where she presented this as a talk at a recent church women’s event.

Ex Auditu (continued from page 5) Let’s look at the Bible again. In the third chapter of his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes, “So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ.” To bring us to our knees. “That we might be justified by faith.” In other words, so that we might say, “God, do it for me. You did it for me. Help me! Save me!” We have a God we can come to as we really are; and at that place, which is our point of need, we find a Savior. This is what we go over every single week at church. This is called forgiveness. This is called mercy. And it is the message that never gets old, the message we always need. This is why we celebrate Communion so often—so that we can be reminded and refreshed. We will not graduate until we die. Sometimes people respond to this insight by asking, “If you’re saying that the law doesn’t accomplish the good thing it commands, then maybe we just should have no law at all? Because you’re just going to make people sin more if you start telling people what to do.” I think it’s fair to say that this line of thinking is a bit silly and/or un-insightful. I’ll give you one last example to explain where I’m coming from in saying that. I went to a great restaurant a few weeks ago in Mt. Pleasant called The Wreck. My wife and I had this absolutely amazing meal—the freshest shrimp I’d ever eaten. (When we took my mother-in-law there a few weeks later, she realized she hadn’t eaten proper shrimp in fifteen years.) And key lime bread pudding! Well, we finish our meal, go to pay at the cash register, and the man tells us, “Actually we don’t take credit cards.” Then he adds, “Oh, but we do take checks.” I’m thinking, “Is this the Stone Age?! Who pays at a restaurant with a check anymore?” So I explain to him that I’ll just drive to the ATM and that he can have my wife as a security deposit. You see, at that point, I was guilty. I had eaten all this food that I didn’t have the money to pay for. But before I can go to the ATM, the Stone Age man behind the counter says, “No problem.” He puts a stamp on a piece of paper with the address, hands it to me and says, “Just mail it in.” And I’m thinking, “What? What?! What is this place?!” What did I do? Did I say, “Yes! I got away with it! A freebie! Sucker! Now I’ll just take off into the night and never come back here again.” No, of course not. I stopped by the next day with a check, and then I went back a few days later for another wonderful meal, and this time, I had my checkbook ready to go. Then I took my in-laws; and last week, when my parents were in town, I took them too. Suddenly I’m obeying the law excitedly, going back for more of it regularly; and I can’t wait to sign a check over to this guy! You get the idea. That is how the gospel works. That’s the fuel we get in church. That’s the goal of all of this: that you will realize where you need a savior and at that place you will find him—in the bread and wine, in the word of the gospel. (The world doesn’t have access to this message.) And at that place

you’ll be changed. You’ll want to come back to church. You’ll want to serve God with your whole heart. You won’t have to; you’ll get to. So I leave you with that, and I’ll close in prayer: Heavenly Father, thank you for your forgiveness and the way it changes everything. And thank you for your law, for showing us what we need to see about ourselves that we might the better connect with you. We pray all this in thanks for your Son, Jesus. Amen.

The Rev. John Zahl is pastoral associate of the Church of the Holy Cross, Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. This sermon was preached on July 27, 2007.

Hearing Is Believing (continued from page 30) Leith, 210–11. Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 48. 12Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 28. 13Stephen H. Webb, The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), esp. chs. 4 and 5. This is a superb treatment of the principal issues addressed in this article. See also Theo Hobson, The Rhetorical Word: Protestant Theology and the Rhetoric of Authority (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2002). 14Webb, 159 15Webb, 106. 16Bayer, 47. 17See, for example, Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1968) 35:117–24, 254, 359–60. 18Bayer, 45. 19Bayer, 48. 20Webb, 131. 21Second Helvetic Confession, chapter 1.4, “The Preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God,” in Creeds and Confessions of Faith in Christian Tradition, vol. 2, part 4: Creeds and Confessions of the Reformation Era, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 460. 10

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 35

REFORMATION RESOURCES too ls fo r

r e fo r matio n pacesetters

Rediscovering Daily Bible Reading Many Christians find it difficult to regularly read the Bible, yet despite the struggle the reward is immeasurable. That’s why The Good Book Company has created a range of resources to help ordinary Christians get serious about reading the Bible for themselves. For more details see pages 7 and 8 of the Good Book Company Resource Guide accompanying this issue.

Explore

Engage

For adults Explore contains 92 daily Bible readings to help you understand clearly the message and challenge of the Word of God. Each study takes around 15 minutes and there are extra passages to ponder if you can spare more time.

For ages 14 to 18 Engage is written to help young people understand and apply God’s Word. It also seeks to address relevant issues in teenagers’ lives and provide a Bible reading resource that is engaging and long lasting.

Discover

Table Talk

For ages 11 to 13 Discover takes young teens through the Bible in actionpacked, hard-hitting daily chunks. It delivers God’s truth in a no-nonsense way—and it’s fun! With puzzles, prayer and pondering sections, Bible reading has never been so gripping.

For families Table Talk is a book of daily Bible times for families or small groups to use together with children aged from 4 upwards. Based on just a few verses, each study takes about 5 minutes and can be used at the breakfast or dinner table, or whenever best suits you.

Open up the Bible A free 16-page magazine designed to motivate people to try daily Bible reading for themselves. Its tone is encouraging and positive, and it’s ideal for those who know they should be doing a quiet time but aren’t getting round to it, as well as those who have never even considered that it might be a good idea. Please pass them on!

In order to aid in the recovery of the primacy of Scripture, The Good Book Company is pleased to offer Modern Reformation readers a 10% discount on all orders placed through the end of February 2010. Simply visit www.thegoodbook.com and use the promotional code: ModRef0102 at checkout. You can order additional catalogs at www.thegoodbook.com.

36 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

REVIEWS w h a t ’ s

b e i n g

r e a d

Saving Protestantism from Itself?

ruce McCormack is the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. In recent years, he has contributed to the world of evangelical scholarship and is a familiar name and much sought-after speaker on the Christian college and seminary conference circuit. This new collection of essays, most of which were previously published as journal articles, comes as the prom-

ised companion volume to his only other major book, the groundbreaking (and very dense) Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909– 1936 (Oxford University Press, 1995). As the titles indicate, these books are not for the faint of heart, although the essay nature of this new collection—and the fact that McCormack is engaged in conversation with evangelical theology—suggests that a fairly wide readership Orthodox and Modern: will take interest. Studies in the Theology The most accessible of Karl Barth by Bruce L. McCormack chapter by far for those Baker Academic, 2008 uninitiated in Barth’s 317 pages (paperback), $35.00 theology is chapter eleven, entitled “The Barth Renaissance in America: An Opinion.” There, McCormack outlines a number of features of Barth’s theology that “excite the most interest” and helps to explain the longevity of the Swiss theologian’s appeal, beginning with the notion that Barth strove to be “comprehensive” in his “engagement with the Bible and the history of Christian theology.” This helps to explain the evangelical fascination with Barth as well. Put simply, many evangelicals turn to Barth because of the dearth of systematic theology in their own circles. Because Barth’s theology is a relatively more conservative option in the broader world of religious studies—given his engagement with Scripture and with the Reformed tradition—he continues to garner a great deal of interest. Chapters seven, eight, and ten will easily be the most controversial, for these are in fact tense days in Barth scholarship

and in evangelical assessments of Barth’s (and McCormack’s) theological program. Each of these chapters explores a different aspect of perhaps the hottest topic in systematic theology today, namely, how Barth understood God’s nature or “being,” and then how he understood the relationship of God’s nature to the doctrines of the Trinity, predestination, and Christ’s person and work. Here, McCormack’s interpretation of Barth seeks to stand on the master’s shoulders, so to speak, in a bold attempt to save Protestantism from itself by thoroughly revising our understanding of these doctrines from beginning to end. While it would be difficult to engage McCormack’s proposal in these few paragraphs, it should be noted that much of the discussion borrows from older historical and theological themes found in nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, and in fact it is part of McCormack’s stated intention to close the distance between Barth and the father of theological modernism, Friedrich Schleiermacher. In particular, McCormack shares with the nineteenth century (and with Open Theists today) a number of misconceptions about God’s impassibility, mistranslating the Latin to mean that God has no passions or emotions rather than, correctly, that God cannot be thought to suffer harm. The content that will likely be of the most interest for novice theologians, however, is McCormack’s introduction, specifically the way he frames these studies. The title of the

Modern Reformation invites you to submit a book review for publication in the Reviews section of an upcoming issue. We would like to give you the opportunity to critique, evaluate, and consider books both good and bad from your reformational perspective. Thoughtful Christians will examine the most important books of the day, and we want to encourage interaction with books that inspire and instruct, or maybe frustrate and concern. Submit your review of 1,000 words or less in an email to reviews@modernreformation.org. Please reference the guidelines and suggestions available at www.modernreformation.org/submissions.

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 37

book is translated into this provocative thesis: “‘Modern...and yet orthodox’: for many, such a description will seem to be a contradiction in terms. An explanation why this is not so will require close attention to each term.” With the first term, “modern,” McCormack acknowledges that Barth’s theology was heavily indebted to the basic assumptions of Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge, and also to a version of the Hegelian effort to historicize all of theology and philosophy. As such, McCormack allows that Barth’s dogmatics “constituted a variant within modern theology” rather than a rejection of Protestant liberalism. Readers familiar with Cornelius van Til will find it interesting that McCormack and other scholars, as a matter of coincidence, accept the substance of the Dutch apologist’s interpretation that Barth was and remained a critical (i.e., Kantian) and dialectical (i.e., Hegelian) theologian from his early to later years. Scholars differ, of course, on how to evaluate the merits of these philosophical presuppositions, or whether they are “philosophical” assumptions at all. For example, McCormack and others such as T. F. Torrance tend to argue (with great exaggeration) that Barth’s mature, critically realistic dialectical and actualistic theology was free of philosophical commitments, having been purified by “biblical” and “Christ-centered” reflection; in their view, his was the first truly “anti-metaphysical” theology to appear in Christian history. The notion that Barth’s theology is so pure, and the obvious appeal of these latter buzzwords, helps to explain once again some of the evangelical interest in Barth. Even so, discerning readers are right to wonder whether Barth’s theology is in actual fact the result of some new mixture of Enlightenment and Pietism, Kant and Hegel, and whether it truly represents the way forward for Protestant theology today, especially given the caricatures of classical Protestantism (as too indebted to “Greek” philosophy) on which it rests. With the second term, “orthodox,” McCormack brings something even more controversial into view. Whereas Modern Reformation readers will want to define “orthodoxy” in creedal and confessional terms, McCormack argues that “orthodoxy” belongs to an “unfolding and evolving history” that is “constantly in need of reevaluation.” In fact, McCormack goes so far to say that Barth was “orthodox” in the following way: by being completely free and unconstrained by the creeds and confessions of the church, even those of his own Reformed church. Barth took them seriously, McCormack insists, but “he did not follow them slavishly. His was a confessionalism,” McCormack writes, that was “of the spirit and never of the letter” (17). This understanding of “orthodoxy,” then, floats free from any past understanding of theology and is unhinged from creeds, confessions, or any written document. This allowed Barth, in the end, to reconstruct “the whole of ‘orthodox’ teaching from the ground up” and yet remain orthodox. In words that van Til could have used, McCormack acknowledges that “it is not the case that [Barth] simply tinkered with the machinery”; in fact, no doctrinal formulation of the ancient or the Reformation church was taken over “unchanged” (16). 38 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Here we might draw a connection to our earlier concern regarding McCormack’s revision of the doctrines of God’s being, predestination, and the person and work of Christ. Throughout the essays in this collection, McCormack’s rhetoric trades on a false dichotomy between “dynamic” (which is his preference) and “static” (which allegedly describes classical Protestant theology). In other words, both in his treatment of various doctrines and in his definition of the term “orthodox,” McCormack skewers any understanding of theology that isn’t open to wholesale revision and complete reconstruction—on the basis of Karl Barth’s theological ontology—as a theology or orthodoxy that is dead, fixed, slavish, narrow, philosophical, and “of the letter.” Meanwhile, his own approach that borrows from Barth claims to be alive, dynamic, free, ecumenical, biblical, and “of the spirit.” There are many good reasons to doubt this caricature that attempts to correlate classical Protestant understandings of orthodoxy, creedalism, and confessionalism to a dead letter, as well as to doubt the helpfulness of McCormack’s theological dynamism. Ultimately, confessional Christians will want to acknowledge that we are open to the development, not of doctrine itself, but of our understanding of doctrine as it is informed and reformed by God’s Word. But that task must be the slow and patient work of the church, specifically of church councils and committees, and not of one man’s say-so—not even brilliant thinkers such as John Calvin or Karl Barth. Our theology cannot arrive at “perfection” in this present evil age, but that doesn’t mean our corporate confession of the faith once for all handed down to the saints is a form of rigid dogmatism. In McCormack’s presentation, then, savvy Modern Reformation readers will be right to detect a certain kind of Anabaptist impulse, namely a desire that the spirit should in effect trump the letter, as Calvin feared was the case in radical Protestantism. In the final analysis, one can only think of McCormack’s enthusiastic view of God, revelation, and orthodoxy as very peculiar and idiosyncratic when it is described as “orthodox” and “Reformed.”

Ryan Glomsrud is reviews editor of Modern Reformation and a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Karl Barth at the University of Oxford.

The Church’s Book of Comfort Edited by Willem Van’t Spijker and translated by Gerrit Bilkes Reformation Heritage Books, 2008 291 pages (hardcover), $23.99 Few documents are as important to the history, theology, piety, and practice of the Reformed churches across the globe as the Heidelberg Catechism (1563). Although there are

many volumes offering an explanation of the catechism, most are pedestrian and obvious. Most fail to place the catechism in its historical context as they try to interpret it. This volume, a collection of seven essays by six contributors from various Reformed denominations in the Netherlands, proposes to remedy this problem by providing a comprehensive introduction and orientation to the catechism. The work opens with a brief survey of the German Reformation. Chapter two offers a helpful survey of the catechetical, religious, and liturgical context in which the catechism was composed. This section will interest those curious about the various sources from which the catechism draws. It reinforces the notion, known to Reformation scholars for some time, that the catechism was not utterly unique, that it drew from a number of sources, and that even its famous “guilt, grace, gratitude” structure was commonplace in Protestant catechesis before the creation of the Heidelberg Catechism. Chapter three introduces the reader to the personalities involved in the creation, revision, and adoption of the catechism. The reader will appreciate the brief biographies not only of Zacharias Ursinus, whom this chapter rightly identifies as the primary author of the catechism, but also (and unusually) of the other members of the Heidelberg theology faculty, the church superintendents, and the consistory who reviewed and edited the catechism. This chapter relates the catechism to the Palatinate church order, a key document often ignored by commentators. The fourth chapter offers a brief and generally fair survey of the key doctrines of the catechism. Readers familiar with the modern reassessment of the nature of Reformed orthodoxy will flinch at a few of Van’t Spijker’s characterizations of medieval (e.g., Anselm) and Reformed scholasticism (e.g., Beza). His account of the catechism’s relation to Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo struck this reader as less than obvious and even tendentious. Positively, however, confessional Protestants will be pleased to see a clear and unequivocal recognition of the distinction between law and gospel in the catechism. This chapter also recognizes the pan-Protestant nature of the doctrine of justification and of the definition of faith in the act of justification. Its treatment of the catechism’s doctrines of church and Sacraments is brief but illuminating. Chapter five tells the story of the reception of the catechism in the Netherlands, a point that illustrates the international nature of Reformed theology. The account also offers a particularly helpful window into an aspect of the relationship of the Reformed churches to the catechism that is not well known or often explored. The narrative of the Remonstrant (Arminian) reaction to the catechism is particularly useful. Those seeking a brief introduction to the Dutch Reformation will be thankful for this chapter.

Catechism instruction and preaching is a most important and even vital element of Reformed piety and practice that seems to be fading from the current picture. One step toward recovering this resource for reformation is understanding the history of catechetical instruction. Chapter six provides an excellent starting point for this endeavor as it covers, in some detail, the history of catechetical preaching in the Netherlands. This chapter also examines the Dutch Reformed practice of catechesis of young people. We live in a fallen world and our “go-go” culture does not encourage children to memorize the basics of the faith or even God’s Word. Thus, pastors, presbyters, and parents who continue to struggle to introduce covenant children to the riches of the faith will be instructed and encouraged to see how the church has addressed this problem in the past. The final section in the volume considers the contemporary relevance of the catechism. Appended is a bibliography of Dutch secondary and primary sources with English translations of the titles provided and a helpful index. This is a valuable work for the reasons already suggested, and even those who are well acquainted with the catechism will benefit from this volume. These commendations, however, must be tempered by four rather pointed criticisms. First, this volume is repetitive. This quality caused this reader to wonder why material covered in one section reappeared in a later section. It would have been more useful for the reader if the editor had consolidated these redundant sections. Second and related to the first criticism is the somewhat unfinished and syllabus-like feel of the volume. Third, this volume would be considerably improved with the addition of footnotes. The authors make numerous historical and factual claims, some of which are not obvious and others of which are controversial, all without the slightest documentation. Pastors, elders, and even scholars will be frustrated by the choice not to allow readers to check sources and follow trails of investigation suggested by the text. Fourth, some of the scholarship behind the volumes seems behind the times. For example, though the authors are aware of modern Dutch scholarship on the catechism, the volume does not consistently reflect modern developments in Reformation and post-Reformation scholarship. The omission of these perspectives is odd since the editor has participated in at least one English-language volume dedicated to the reassessment of Reformed orthodoxy. The omission of important English-language sources on the catechism, the Palatinate, and related topics is also puzzling. These criticisms are intended only to encourage the editor and publisher to improve the second edition of this volume. They are not intended to discourage laity, elders, pastors, and students from buying and profiting from The Church’s Book of Comfort. Churches and schools must add this valuable book to their libraries, and lovers of the catechism will certainly want to take and read.

R. Scott Clark is associate professor of historical and systematic theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido). J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 39

Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be By Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck Moody, 2008 256 pages (paperback), $14.99 I first heard the battle cries of the emerging church several years ago when I attended a conference for Christian publishers; although a publisher myself, I didn’t fully comprehend this at the time. A coworker and I sat in on a session led by two thirty-something publishing professionals: a woman who was a writer and a man who was an editor for a well-known Christian publishing company. Their message to us editors was that they no longer wished to “do church” the way their parents had. They wanted something more authentic, relevant, and relational than was typically on offer in American churches. Pressing things, if the church didn’t give them what they wanted, they insisted that they would just go “do church” elsewhere. The message to Christian publishers was this: If we continued to publish books the way we had been, they weren’t going to buy them. Shocked at their sometimes whiny ranting, my coworker and I rolled our eyes (admittedly in a similarly immature fashion) and jotted messages to each other: “It’s not all about you.” Afterwards, as we discussed the session, we imagined that this too would pass. The complaints registered by these two Emergent church leaders exploded into a theological movement that has the past few years captured the hearts and minds of many evangelical Christians. What a relief that two more voices have emerged from Generation X who write and insist in Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be that a Christian can be “young, passionate about Jesus Christ, surrounded by diversity, engaged in a postmodern world, reared in evangelicalism, and not be an emergent Christian.” In fact, the authors argue, it is far better not to be. Kevin DeYoung, a pastor in East Lansing, Michigan, and Ted Kluck, a member of DeYoung’s congregation, have done a great service in examining the ideas of the emerging church and sensitively showing why being Emergent is not the answer. The two authors alternate chapters, with DeYoung addressing the emerging church from a pastoral, theological perspective and Kluck offering a layperson’s onlocation observations about the emerging books he reads, churches he attends, and lectures he hears. I highly recommend this important book. In a thoughtprovoking, biblically sound way, DeYoung and Kluck point out some of the theological issues at stake in the writings of Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis, Sex God), Brian McLaren (A New Kind of Christian), and Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz). Most impor40 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

tantly, DeYoung and Kluck explain that Emergent church theology is guilty of sometimes regurgitating the ideas of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, especially in their understanding of the truth and authority of God’s Word and the possibility of real knowledge of God. DeYoung writes: I know that some in my generation have a hard time with truth claims. But I’m convinced that there are just as many of us—Christian and not—in our postmodern world who are tired of endless uncertainties and doctrinal repaintings. We are tired of indecision and inconsistency reheated and served to us as paradox and mystery. Some of us long for teaching that has authority, ethics rooted in dogma, and something unique in this world of banal diversity. We long for Jesus—not a shapeless, formless, good-hearted ethical teacher Jesus, but the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus of the church, the Jesus of faith, the Jesus of two millennia of Christian witness with all of its unchanging and edgy doctrinal propositions. These authors have done their homework. They’ve studied the literature of the Emergent writers and quote them at every turn, pointing out—from Scripture, which is also quoted at every turn—the mistakes in their thinking. It is also an enjoyable book to read, as it makes difficult concepts easily accessible for the lay reader. If there is a flaw, it may be the authors’ occasional attempts to sympathetically assess the Emergent leaders’ intentions. I think it would be better to avoid discussions of motives and let these writers’ words speak for themselves. This is an excellent book, one that all Christians would benefit from reading. Emerging Christianity does ask some valid questions, ones that should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, their own answers draw from sources other than Scripture. Like Jude in the New Testament, DeYoung and Kluck remind us that our comfort in life and in death is the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

Annette Gysen works as an editor at a Christian book publisher. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with her husband and two children.

“I

t takes no courage to sign up as a Protestant. After all, millions have done so throughout

the West. They are not in any peril. To live by the truths of historical Protestantism, however, is an entirely different matter. That takes courage in today's context.” —David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant

POINT OF CONTACT:

SHORT NOTICES

BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING

The Preaching of Jonathan Edwards

Olive Kitteridge By Elizabeth Strout Random House, 2008 270 pages (paperback), $14.00 This review column is subtitled, “Books Your Neighbors Are Reading,” but I’m thinking it might need to be called—at least in this case—“Books Your Neighbors Should Be Reading.” I doubt most people race to their newspaper on the day the Pulitzer Prizes are announced (and that goes for the Nobel Prizes as well— who do you know has read anything by the 2009 literature winner Herta Müller?). These are highly esteemed awards and for writers can mean a nice increase in sales (as these are books rarely found beforehand on The New York Times Best Sellers List). I’m wondering, however, how many of your neighbors logged online or ran down to their local bookseller to grab one of these prize winners? So, the question remains, how many of your neighbors have even heard of last year’s Nobel winner Herta Müller or the Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout, let alone have read their prize-winning books? But aren’t we curious to know why these writers have won? Surely, they have accomplished something worthy of our attention. Having said all that, let me recommend that you obtain the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge; read it yourself and then pass it along to your neighbors! This Pulitzer Prize is awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” According to the Pulitzer announcement, the prize was awarded to “Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House), a collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.” But what makes Olive so fascinating, and why do we want to read a story about a woman “blunt” and “flawed”? When we meet her, Olive Kitteridge is a cranky retired high school math teacher and her husband Henry, a kindly retired pharmacist. They seem to have a “normal” life, but this is the beauty and the power of this story: no one’s life is ordinary, especially Olive’s. What makes this book so compelling is the way Olive impacts the lives around her, whether it’s an in-class comment one of her former students remembers—“Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re

by John Carrick The Banner of Truth Trust, 2008 465 pages (hardback), $28.00 Every Reformed pastor should have a copy of John Carrick’s phenomenal treatment of the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. We live in a day when pastoral fidelity to the preaching of the Word of God is rare. Carrick reminds us that Edwards was not only a brilliant scholar but a pastor who loved God’s Word and was serious about teaching his flock the truths of the Reformation. As one of the few great preacher-theologians of his era, Edwards preached the sovereignty of God, the centrality of Christ, and the importance of godly affections to a New England congregation caught between Puritanism and the Enlightenment’s turn to the self. Carrick, however, presents not only the theology that manifested itself in Edwards’ homilies but also the style of preaching he acquired and honed throughout his pastoral ministry. No pastor today can afford to ignore the way Edwards used illustrations, imagery, repetition, exclamation, and most importantly, Scripture itself in his proclamation from the pulpit. Like his theological and philosophical skills, Edwards’ preaching was without comparison, and yet he never claimed the credit for himself but always aimed to magnify the glory, sovereignty, and power of God in saving sinners.

Matthew M. Barrett is a Ph.D. candidate in systematic theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 41

scared of your hunger, you’ll just be one more ninny like everyone else” (195)—or an encounter with Nina, a young woman suffering severely from anorexia nervosa. Nina’s story, located in the chapter “Starving,” is one of the most touching in the novel. Olive Kitteridge appears only in a brief scene, but it is a memorable one. Olive, normally a strong and rather offensive woman, shows a deep sympathy for Nina. Having stopped by a friend’s to collect money for the Red Cross, and breaking in upon what she calls “a tea party” in her usual sarcastic manner, Olive notices the thinness of Nina and says to her, “You’re starving.” The girl, quite aware of her condition, responds with an ungracious “Uhduh.” To which Olive responds, “I’m starving, too.” Nina doesn’t believe her, but Olive persists: “Sure I am. We all are.” A few moments later, we are told through the eyes of a middle-aged man who also is “starving”: Olive looked through her big black handbag, took a tissue, wiped at her mouth, her forehead. It took a moment for Harmon to realize she was agitated....Olive Kitteridge was crying. If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person. But there she sat, large and big-wristed, her mouth quivering, tears coming from her eyes. (96) Olive says to Nina, “I don’t know who you are, but young lady, you’re breaking my heart.” It’s not long before Nina is crying with her, leaning against her and whispering, “I don’t want to be like this.” This scene comes rather as a shock to the reader who is used to Olive’s off-handed insolence—there doesn’t seem to be a sensitive bone in her big body. She is of solid, hearty Maine stock, a schoolteacher for thirty-two years who thinks she has seen everything. Yet she is moved to tears by a young woman who compels her to disclose that she too is hungry—and perhaps even scared (although she will never confess that she may have become the much-maligned “ninny”). The rest of the story works out the reason for this hunger, and we come to realize that it is really all Olive’s doing. She is stubborn and can’t seem to show love to her husband and her son—at least in the way they need to be loved—and certainly can never admit when she’s wrong. Only too late in life does she finally realize this. Although she doesn’t seem to support or encourage her husband or son, she somehow gives strength to others— even if it’s merely sitting in the car with a former student whom she doesn’t realize has returned to his hometown to commit suicide, just as his mother had done years earlier. Strout does not resolve his story for us, and we are left wondering whether or not Kevin went through with it—but I like to think he didn’t. After he saves the life of an old friend (while picking flowers, she happens to slip down the cliff into the ocean while Kevin and Olive are sitting in the car), he says of Patty Howe who clung to him after he jumped into the water: “Oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on” (47). 42 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

In the chapter simply named “Tulips” (Olive is an avid gardener), after her husband Henry has suffered a debilitating stroke and her son Christopher has moved to California with his new wife (whom Olive does not like), Olive finally begins to understand: There were days—she could remember this—when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. (162) Once again, Strout says—now through Olive, echoing Kevin’s words above—that this is a “strange and incomprehensible world.” Olive had given permission to Henry to die, and now she pondered whether or not to plant her tulip bulbs “before the ground was frozen” (162). After some time has elapsed, in the chapter “Security,” Olive travels to visit her newly remarried son (we’re never quite sure if she likes the second wife), who now resides in New York City. As she flies over Maine, Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats—then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water—seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son’s life. (202–3) Although Olive appears to be a strong woman, we discover that she is frail—emotionally and spiritually. Only at the age of seventy-two, when she begins to lose those she loved, does she realize what she had. “Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did” (211). In the end, Olive reaches out for companionship but pictures it as “two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you” (270). Although there have been chapters of various characters and their thoughts (with Olive only popping momentarily into a scene), Strout gives Olive the last word: “Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept

waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet” (270). An interesting “interview” follows the end of the story with the author, the Random House Reader’s Circle, and Olive Kitteridge. Olive is her usual cantankerous self and when Strout asks Olive why there seems to be so many suicidal thoughts or even attempts in such a small town, Olive characteristically answers: “You may be the writer, Elizabeth, but I think it’s a wacky question, and I’ll tell you something else—it’s none of your damn business. Good-bye people. I have a garden to weed.” It is my sincere hope that you—and your neighbors— will eagerly look for the announcement this spring of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize fiction winner. If the next one is anything like Olive Kitteridge, we’re in for a treat—or as Olive would say, “That’s ducky.”

“This thought causes Olive to nod her head slowly as she lies on the bed. She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts.’ Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee’s, let’s say, or the waitress at Dunkin’ Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.” Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation.

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 43

FINAL THOUGHTS f r o m

t h e

d e s k

o f

t h e

e d i t o r - i n - c h i e f

God’s Authority: Better Caught than Taught

he Gospels relate the great works of God in Christ that justify our Lord’s claim: “All

and to love God. According to Paul, even authority in heaven and on earth is given to me” (Matt. 28:18). He had authority our singing is a ministry of the Word (Col. 3:16). Its over Satan and his minions, authority over disease and death, and most important purpose is not only to express our feelings to God of all, the authority to forgive sins. And he still possesses this (although that is involved), but includes mutual teaching authority, as the Ascended Lord seated at the Father’s right and encouragement, “addressing one another” with melohand. We affirm all of this as part of the verities of our dious thanksgiving (Eph. 5:19–21). Christian faith. Even the Sacraments are part of the ministry of the Word, Yet coming into direct contact with this authority is a difas God’s official ratification of the promises that are found in ferent matter. How can we, who have not seen Jesus’ miracChrist. When we move baptism and the Supper to the marulous signs, encounter his authority? Even when Jesus was gins, rather than as part of the regular public gathering of performing signs and wonders in person, the recognition of God’s people, we miss another important opportunity to his authority occurs mainly through his speech: “And when become persuaded by the authority of Christ in his Word: an Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his authority to forgive sins, to defang the powers of sin and death, and to insert us into his new creation. teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authorPaul also commanded Timothy to “devote [himself] to the ity, and not as their scribes” (Matt. 7). Throughout his minpublic reading of Scripture” as well as to expounding, teachistry, Jesus claimed the Father as the source of his teaching: ing, and applying it (1 Tim. 4:13). In traditional liturgies, the the Father always speaks in the Son and by the Spirit; it is the words of Scripture dominate from the votum (God’s greeting) Father’s word and work that he was bringing to the world. It’s to the benediction. By contrast, many churches today have no wonder, then, that Jesus spoke as one having authority. dispensed with Scripture-saturated forms of worship, and He not only spoke the Father’s words; he is the Father’s Word. even the sermon is often thin on Scripture. It’s no wonder If indeed all authority in heaven and on earth is given to people come away feeling as if they are not really being conJesus Christ, demonstrated by his resurrection from the fronted with the authority of the Living God. It’s no wondead, then it seems hardly appropriate for us to stand over der we now have generations of lifelong Christians who are the authoritative Word to which he, though God incarnate, so joyfully submitted. We speak more as the scribes and relinot prepared to hear expositions of Scripture because they gious leaders of Jesus’ day than as “one having authority,” do not know enough of the basic plotline and characters in because we have increasingly subordinated ourselves to the story to be able to make sense of what they are hearing. words that cannot liberate—words based on our own We need to recover the grammar of the faith, catechizing the authority or on principalities and powers of this present age. young as well as older believers in the mysteries of the Any recovery of the authority of Scripture in our day will gospel and the commands of Christ. have to involve more than theoretical formulations. Jesus In order to hear Christ speak today, and to become consaid that his sheep know his voice (John 10:1–5). It doesvinced that he speaks with authority, we need to be exposed n’t matter if we believe that the Bible is God’s inerrant and regularly to the Scriptures that testify concerning him. We authoritative Word if we trivialize, marginalize, or subordineed to memorize Scripture, wrestle with it, sometimes nate it to someone or something else. even agonize over it, sing it, and speak it to each other in all In our public worship, is the whole liturgy conceived as a wisdom and understanding. Only as we encounter his ministry of the Word? We know what it is like to hear God— authoritative words do we come to know the Savior who not just about God, but to actually hear God address us—in has the authority to break the reign of false words from false judgment and grace. Centrally, of course, this occurs in the serlords. Jesus said, “The words that I have spoken to you are mon. The whole service, however, is meant to be a covenantal spirit and life” (John 6:63). We need to hear them more. assembly in which God speaks and we respond. As we see in the Psalms, even our response is included in the script. There Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. is an appropriate way to lament, to praise, to petition, to adore, 4 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G