The Rule of Faith

M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N

The Rule of Faith

T H E R U L E O F FA I T H

12 The Rule of Faith Illumines the Bible by the

Bible’s Own Light | by Todd R. Hains 20 Doing Theology with the Global Church

| by Brannon Ellis 28 You Are What You Believe: How the Creed

Defines Our Identity in Relation to God, Ourselves, and Others | by Joshua Pauling 40 The Communion of Saints in the Digital

Age | by Jared L. Jones NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023

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Contents

I. RETRIEVE

08 R EFOR MATION OUT TAKES | Heidelberg, the

British Catechism | by Zachary Purvis

Modern Reformation November/December 2023 Vol. 32, No. 6

12 ESSAY | The Rule of Faith Illumines the Bible

by the Bible’s Own Light | by Todd R. Hains II. CONVERSE

20 INTERV IEW | Doing Theology with the Global

Church: An Interview with Adam Smith and Michael Horton | by Brannon Ellis III. P E R S UA D E

28 ESSAY | You Are What You Believe: How the

Creed Defines Our Identity in Relation to God, Ourselves, and Others | by Joshua Pauling I V. ENGAGE

40 ESSAY | The Communion of Saints in the

Digital Age | by Jared L. Jones 48 BIBLE STUDY | Something Beautiful: More

Than Conquerors | by J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury 55 BOOK R EV IEWS

The Rule of Faith and the Nomina Sacra: 05 F RO M THE E D ITOR

| by Brannon Ellis

A Brief Bibliography | by Tomas Bokedal

The Nicene Creed: An Introduction,

by Phillip Cary | reviewed by Simonetta Carr

P O E TRY 25 Snowstorm at midnight

| by Joseph E. Keysor 54 In Between

| by Herbert H. Vann, Sr. 60 B AC K PAGE

The Rule of Faith Isn’t Western | by Michael Horton

Endsheet illustration by Raxenne Maniquiz

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From the Editor

O

NE OF MY favorite

moments in church is when the congregation recites the Apostles’ Creed after the sermon. It’s beautiful when the preaching of God’s word is followed by a collective congregational affirmation: “We believe it!” But there’s something else supremely fitting about this common practice of confessing a creed after the sermon. The creed not only embodies what all Christians believe in response to God’s word; it embodies what God’s word says in the first place. In the creeds, we confess what we believe God’s word means.

The phrase “rule of faith” occurs as early as the second and third centuries in the writings of church fathers Irenaeus and Tertullian. In one of the most famous examples of the rule, Irenaeus appeals against the gnostics to the church’s universal faith “in one God, the Father Almighty, who made the heaven and the earth and the seas and all the things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation.” He goes on, summarizing orthodox belief in words largely identical to the later—but still ancient!—Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds we all know and love. (You can find the rest of Irenaeus’s summary of the rule in Josh Pauling’s essay in this issue.)

Secular historians often assume the ancient creeds were invented and imposed by church authorities to maintain theological conformity and thus control. Even Christians sometimes assume that the creeds, as an interpretive summary of inspired biblical teaching, are something purely human that the church came up with by ourselves. But the early church fathers are adamant that the church didn’t determine its own rule of faith. The church didn’t add to Scripture our faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and their work of creation and redemption. The

church received this faith from Scripture. In The Canon of Scripture (IVP, 1988), biblical scholar F. F. Bruce puts it this way: If at times [the rule of faith] is formally distinguished from Scripture in the sense that it is recognized as the interpretation of Scripture, at other times it is materially identical with Scripture in the sense that it sums up what Scripture says. (117) Let me put a finer point on Bruce’s insight: The rule of faith isn’t the Bible, but neither is it something other than the Bible. We faithfully interpret the Bible according to the rule of faith because the rule, given by the Spirit in and through Scripture, is the Bible’s way of interpreting itself.

So when you confess the Apostles’ Creed or Nicene Creed at church on Sunday morning, you’re not only expressing the who and the what—your solidarity with the global church regarding the fundamental content of the Christian faith. You’re also expressing the how, because in the rule of faith God has shown us the way to faithfully understand his word.

Our God is Lord of both the speaking and the hearing.

Brannon Ellis Executive Editor

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Retrieve Learning from the wisdom of the past

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R E F O R M AT I O N O U T TA K E S

Heidelberg, the British Catechism

by Zachary Purvis

IN THE LATE 1590S, BEFORE HE BECAME CHAPLAIN TO KING JAMES , a translator of

the Authorized Version, a British delegate to the Synod of Dordt, or Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Samuel Ward was a twenty-something student at Christ College, Cambridge. In those supposedly happy days, he kept a little volume in which he recorded both his lecture notes and his misdeeds. Selfexhortations based on talks from Laurence Chaderton and William Perkins— towering Cambridge theologians under whom Ward studied—jostle on each page with long, detailed lists of transgressions: overeating, oversleeping, spending more time in bowling and tennis than in worship, being prideful and sharptongued, and sluggishness in prayer.

Modern scholars have suggested on the basis of Ward’s personal account book that he was not the usual college student, the kind in Cambridge today who in summertime pile onto punts and float down the River Cam carefree, Pimm’s in hand. Instead, they argue, he was excessively rigid, obsessed with self-scrutiny, even ridiculous—in every way a “Puritan.” When the talented twentieth-century English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper read the dozen references in Ward’s diary to overindulging in fruit—pale though probable imitation of the writing in Augustine’s Confessions, book two, on stolen pears—he dismissed Ward as “our old plum-guzzling friend.” Trevor-Roper cracked: “Was he of the Elect? Could he be in a state of grace? or had he eaten too much at dinner in college last night—had he tucked too freely into those plums, damsons, walnuts, cheese, to which he was so partial?” Yet there is one confession more intriguing than all these—namely, Ward’s lament from July 19, 1596: “My drowsiness in reading Ursinus.”

“Ursinus” was, into the seventeenth century, the catechism for all Reformed Protestants on both sides of the English Channel. Published in 1563, the Heidelberg Catechism is principally the work of Zacharias Ursinus, Heidelberg professor of theology, although other contributors from the Heidelberg theology faculty included at least Caspar Olevianus. Ursinus also wrote the so-called Smaller and Larger Catechisms, circa 1561–1562, but his name became a byword for the Heidelberg Catechism virtually from the beginning. The catechism was initially drawn up at the request of Elector Frederick III, ruler of the Rhineland Palatinate, the most important German province at the time. Several Dutch syn1

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ods subsequently approved it, including the Synod of Dort between 1618 and 1619, where it was adopted as one of the “Three Forms of Unity,” together with the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dordt. Even now it remains a doctrinal standard for numerous Reformed denominations that trace back to Dordt and to the Continental stream.

Ward’s entry points to the catechism reach well beyond its German and Dutch provenance. In 1565, Frederick III sent a copy of it to Elizabeth, queen of England, along with advice on her marriage, though she did not acknowledge the gift. The first English translation appeared in London in 1572 by William Turner, who gave it the title Catechisme for children. Then the spigot opened, not only for subsequent English editions of the catechism but also for new Latin editions and English translations, produced in England, of the commentaries on the catechism

by Ursinus and by his Heidelberg colleague, Jeremias Bastingius. An important 1588 edition of the catechism, produced by Thomas Sparke, expressed desire that the catechism be “generally received and used, both privately and publicly, in this church in England.” Sparke urged households to obtain copies of Ursinus’s lectures as well. He declared that “by the help of this book, and Ursinus’s Catechism in English, God has taken all excuse away, both from minister and householder, if they can but read English” to see their congregations and families catechized.

Sometimes English readers used the Heidelberg Catechism without even realizing it. For example, numerous works appeared in London and other cities with titles such as R. B.’s A Brief Catechisme (1601), G. E.’s The Christian School-Maister, or a Dialogue between the Maister and the Scholler (1613), and E. B.’s A Catechisme or Briefe Instruction (1617), the texts of which are lifted entirely from the Heidelberg Catechism. One of the most popular English books of the period was John Mayer’s The English Catechisme Explained (1621), a commentary on the short catechism in the Book of Common Prayer that went through multiple editions. He wrote it in conscious imitation of Ursinus.

Ward’s diary also provides evidence not of the soporific but of the cherished and beloved nature of the catechism, albeit the sort of love that students have for their favorite professor who happens to teach at 8:00 a.m. on a sunny, summer day—otherwise he would not have recorded his attempts to read with diligence. He probably read, and referred to in his notes, Ursinus’s lectures on the catechism in Latin. In fact, nearly all English students read the catechism itself along with one of the commentaries by Ursinus or Bastingius. In 1579, the University of Oxford prescribed the Heidelberg Catechism as a set text to be used by all juniors in the university and those without degrees, who were required to receive instruction privately by tutors and publicly in college by appointed catechists, with annual examinations. (Poor performers faced punishment by the vice-chancellor.) By contrast, both the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and the official Apology of the Church of England by John Jewel remained optional reading. The Heidelberg Catechism was the only catechism to be printed in Oxford, and two editions from 1588 bear the arms of the university on the title page. As Ward’s diary attests, similar use occurred 7

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in Cambridge. Thomas Dugard, a diarist and future clergyman, noted when he was in Cambridge between 1632 and1633 that all Cambridge students were regularly reading the catechism. Thomas Goodwin, one of the Westminster divines, recalled how college fellows at Cambridge “explained it to their pupils on Saturday night with chamber-prayers.” Goodwin himself dutifully studied Ursinus’s commentary when he prepared to take communion in college for the first time. College students in Aberdeen, among other Scottish universities, all studied both the Heidelberg Catechism and Ursinus’s lectures well into the seventeenth century, like their neighbors south of the Tweed.

Throughout Scotland, in fact, the Heidelberg Catechism received semiofficial status. King James VI of Scotland endorsed it in 1591 and had it published in another English translation by the royal printer in Edinburgh with the specific declaration on the title page that it was “authorized by the Kings Majesty, for the use of Scotland.” The book included extracts from Bastingius’s recent commentary. In 1615, the catechism was reaffirmed when it was published in a combined volume with a calendar, a psalter, and John Knox’s Book of Common Order. This second Scottish edition is particularly noteworthy. Not only does it bear the declaration that it was officially “appointed to be printed for the use of the Kirk in Edinburgh,” but it also shows how the Scots included the catechism among the primary liturgical documents of the church.

There were many more English editions of the Heidelberg Catechism created during the Long Reformation and more many deep connections that tied “Continental” and “Puritan” together—indeed, careful reading will confirm that both together comprise one basic Reformed tradition. Even in 1645, when 13

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Jeffrey Alan Miller, “The Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible: Samuel Ward’s Draft of 1 Esdras and Wisdom 3–4,” in Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Erudition and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 187–265; Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2005).

2. M. M. Knappen, ed., Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries (Chicago: American Society of Church History, 1933), 103–123.

3. See the splendid critique of this caricature in Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” Journal of British Studies 31 (July 1992): 236–64.

1.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), 49, 74.

5. Knappen, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, 113.

6. For English translations of these, see Lyle D. Bierma, An Introduction to the Heidelberg Catechism: Sources, History, and Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 137–223.

7. Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers Relating to English Affairs Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simanacas (London: Longman, 1862–1954), 1:312.

8. Zacharias Ursinus, The Summe of Christian Religion . . . (Oxford, 1595); Jeremias Bastingius, An Exposition or Commentarie upon the Catechisme of Christian Religion . . . , 5th ed. (Cambridge, 1614).

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the Westminster Assembly worked on its own catechism, a new expanded edition of Ursinus’s commentary, the Summe of Christian Religion . . . More Enlarged, appeared in English translation from a notable London printer. As a point of comparison, Ursinus’s work went through more English editions between 1587 and 1643 than did the English translation of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, despite the fact that “Ursinus” was still a big book, running to over one thousand pages in its quarto editions. “Calvin’s Institutes are often talked of as constituting the pre-eminent work of Continental Reformed divinity circulating in Elizabethan and early-Stewart England, but from the late 1580s onwards this [honor] seems to belong to Ursinus’s Summe of Christian Religion.” So much history depends on what takes place elsewhere, and so Heidelberg takes its place as one of the important sites for the development of English Protestantism.

In 1610, Ward became master of Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge, which had been only recently founded. Among his resolutions, he listed the maintenance of true religion along with learning in the college and the encouragement of Sabbath observance and prayers for the advancement of true preaching.

Ursinus and the Heidelberg Catechism thus found yet another Anglophone home. Perhaps Ward also recommended that students consume coffee, not plums, while they read.

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Zachary Purvis (DPhil, University of Oxford; MAHT, Westminster Seminary California) teaches

church history and theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary.

A Catechisme, or Short Kind of Instruction . . . (Oxford, 1588), sig. a5r–v; English spelling modernized here and throughout this essay.

10. A Catechisme, or Short Kind of Instruction, sig. A4v, 4–5.

11. John Mayer, The English Catechisme Explained (London, 1622), sig. 3v.

12. C. M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 81, 87–93, 186–87.

13. British Library, Add Ms 23146, cited in Anthony Milton, “A Missing Dimension of European Influence on English Protestantism: The Heidelberg Catechism and the Church of England, 1563–1663,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 20 (2018): 241.

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14. Thomas Goodwin, The Works of Thomas Goodwin, D.D., 5 vols.

(London, 1681–1704), 5:v, x.

15. G. D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 62, 245n1, 256n17.

16. A Catechism of Christian Religion . . . (Edinburgh, 1591); English modernized.

17. The CL Psalmes of David . . . (Edinburgh, 1615).

18. Zacharias Ursinus, The Summe of Christian Religion . . . More Enlarged (London, 1645).

19. Milton, “A Missing Dimension,” 241–42.

20. Margo Todd, “‘An Act of Discretion’: Evangelical Conformity and the Puritan Dons,” Albion 18 (1986): 581–99.

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T H E

R U L E

O F

FAITH I L L U M I N E S

THE BIBLE B Y

T H E

Bible’s Own Light

by T O D D R .

H A I N S

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F

RO M T H E S M A L L E S T I N S E C T to the

greatest monster of the deep, from the weakest child to the mightiest of men, no creature can exist without God’s word, and without God’s word there is no life and salvation. God’s word does what it says, “for he spoke and it was done; he commanded and it stood fast” (Ps. 33:9). His word brings forth and sustains heaven and earth and all that dwells therein. God’s word makes moons and stars—as well as daughters and sons—out of nothing.

And the Lord our God has given us his word as a precious gift. But that doesn’t mean God’s word ultimately belongs to us. The word of God belongs to God. It does what God sends it to do.

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For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isa. 55:10–11) We’re fools to think we can manipulate God’s word or use it for our own selfish means—let alone make it do what we want apart from God’s purposes for it! Yet there’s a long history of humans trying to master God’s word rather than receive it in faith. ***

God’s Word Doesn’t Allow Us to Possess It or to Protect It The Bible documents this constant struggle between God’s mastery over his word and human attempts to wrest it from him—from the deceiver Jacob to the sorcerer Simon Magus. No doubt you can supply examples from your own experience as well.

Martin Luther associated this temptation to master God’s word with the Ten Commandments’ famous warning against misusing God’s name: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God” (Exod. 20:7 NIV). Luther calls the manipulation of God’s word “practicing magic.” That sounds rather dramatic, but Luther doesn’t have witchcraft and demons in mind (not primarily anyway!).

Luther’s targeting something more subtle and sinister.

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Using words, objects, or people apart from God’s own purposes for them is practicing magic.

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Practicing magic means using words, objects, or people only to get a result.

Once they’ve gotten us what we want, the word, object, or person can be cast away like old packaging. You might first think of someone casting a spell on a lover or an enemy, or someone using a charm like a rabbit’s foot for good luck.

Luther narrows this meaning of practicing magic to using words, objects, or people apart from God’s own purposes for them. It means trying to take something out of God’s control and to place it under our own control. That’s when faithful, legitimate use becomes unbelieving, illegitimate manipulation, abuse, or neglect. All that matters is our desired result, not what word or object or person achieves it.

Sometimes this magical approach to controlling God’s word takes the form of treating it like a possession. Think of someone wearing a cross necklace as protection when committing a crime or someone using the Bible to cultivate personal power, influence, and wealth. While the use of the cross and Bible may happen to accompany success in those ventures, another charm might do the trick just as well.

Our possessiveness can be well intentioned. The Israelites really wanted to worship the God who led them out of Egypt—a good and fitting desire! But they expressed this good intention not with the tradition of God’s command but the tradition of human religion: they cast a golden calf and worshiped it as if they were worshiping the Lord (Exod. 32). They became idolaters, not because they attempted to worship the God who led them out of slavery, but because they didn’t submit to God’s word about how he desired to be worshiped.

Attempting to control the Bible as my possession can be more subtle than casting golden calves. Some people distort Jeremiah 29:11—“I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope”—into a guarantee of a successful career and materialistic blessings. Politicians (on the right and the left) might use certain verses to acquire divine support for their agendas. Either way, God’s word is reduced to a charm to protect me or a tool to accomplish my desires.

Treating God’s word as an object for our possession, however, can motivate an equal but opposite reaction: controlling God’s word by treating it as if it needs our protection. If God’s word is so easily abused for self-serving agendas, how can it be safeguarded, and those agendas corrected? This well-intentioned anxiety leads to the misbelief that the Bible is my responsibility, or that I must guard it.

For example, in response to personal misuses of Jeremiah 29:11, biblical scholars might use history and grammar to restrict the applicability or relevance of God’s word to an ancient audience (for which the scholars alone are the interpretive gatekeepers). Or in response to cultural and political trends, church authorities might align God’s word with narrow doctrinal interpretations which they alone can adjudicate. Either way, God’s word is reduced to a history to be explained or a code to be deciphered, which Bible readers can’t access for themselves.

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God’s Word Possesses and Protects Us God’s word isn’t a charm, a tool, a history, or a code. It isn’t something we can control and wield. God’s word wields us. It’s living and active: it protects, accomplishes, explains, and commands. It brings light. “Your word is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path” (Ps. 119:105). “For with you is the well of life; in your light shall we see light” (Ps. 36:9). “You also shall light my lamp; the Lord my God shall turn my darkness into light” (Ps. 18:28).

The Bible is the light that illumines itself. And reading light by light, according to the ancient tradition of the church, is to read the Bible by the rule of faith. Many think of the rule of faith as an abstract, “I’ll know it when I see it” summary of the Bible; some think of it as God’s word potently distilled in the words of the creeds. And for Luther, the rule of faith comprises three texts: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. “Whatever all of Scripture holds,” Luther preached, “it is simply expressed in these three.”

Notice that these three texts are themselves biblical.

The Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer are directly biblical, of course—Exodus 20:1–17 and Matthew 6:9–13, respectively. And the Apostles’ Creed is no less so; it is a beautiful wreath of Bible verses. Or as Luther liked to put it, the creed is honey made from the many flowers of the Bible: 2

We did not create or invent [the Apostles’ Creed]—nor did the church fathers. Instead, just as a bee makes honey by gathering together many lovely, delightful, dear flowers, so this creed is gathered from the books of the dear Prophets and Apostles. That is, it is finely and succinctly distilled from the entirety of Holy Scripture for children and ordinary Christians.

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The creed isn’t something the church added to the Bible to impose an official interpretation; the creed is the Bible’s own interpretation given to us in the Bible itself.

Together these texts proclaim the faith, hope, and love of the Bible. The Ten Commandments declare the love of the Bible: the Lord who made heaven and earth is your God and he commands that you honor him and your neighbor in thought, word, and deed. The Apostles’ Creed announces the faith of the Bible: the God who created heaven and earth died for you and rose again for you—for your forgiveness, salvation, and life. And the Lord’s Prayer gives words to the hope of the Bible: you can speak with the creator of heaven and earth the way a small child speaks with her dear father.

The Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, therefore, cast light on every passage of the Bible, no matter how dark it may seem 4

“The Israelites Worshiping the Golden Calf” (1758)

by Lorenzo de Caro.

The Israelites became idolaters, not because they attempted to worship the God who led them out of slavery, but because they didn’t submit to God’s word about how he desired to be worshiped.

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The Bible is the light that illumines itself. And reading light by light, according to the ancient tradition of the church, is to read the Bible by the rule of faith.

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to us. To call a Bible passage dark is like talking of the sunset. The sun doesn’t actually set; instead, the earth rotates. In the same way, the rays of the Bible are constant; it’s we who are dark and don’t understand. “If then the light in you is darkness,” Jesus says, “how great is the darkness!” (Matt. 6:23). Humans bring darkness. We need a light from outside, which is the word God has spoken. But God’s word doesn’t need light from outside; God’s word illumines by its own light. And in his light, we see light.

Receiving the Bible according to its own light transfigures our relationship to God’s word. The rule of faith cannot be squirreled away under my own control— whether my possession or my responsibility. The rule of faith welcomes all comers, unlike the readings that try to cordon off the Bible as something to possess and protect, placing a bushel over the lamp rather than placing it on a stand for all to see (Matt. 5:15–16). The rule of faith is a gift to all God’s children, and like any gift from God, we receive it but do not own it.

This gift of the rule of faith not only strengthens us as those who belong to God, but it protects us from all the ways we or others are tempted to misuse God’s word. Armed with the rule of faith, even untrained people and children can oppose any dark or abused reading of the Bible—no matter the master or authority over that reading.

You, through your commandment, have made me wiser than my enemies, for it is always with me.

I have more understanding than my teachers, for your testimonies are my study.

I am wiser than the agéd, because I keep your commandments. (Ps. 119:98–100) God’s word proclaims the truth. And the truth does not submit to us—no matter how learned or powerful or experienced we might be! The truth belongs to God

All psalm verses are quoted from the New Coverdale translation; see the Book of Common Prayer 2019. Unless otherwise noted, all other Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version.

2. Martin Luther, Sermon on May 18, 1528, D. Martin Luthers 1.

Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe); WA 30, 1:2.20–21.

3. Luther, Sermon on Trinity Sunday (1535), WA 41:275.29–34.

4. See further, “A Life Discipled by the Catechism: An Introduction,” in The Collected Christian Essentials: A Guide to

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alone. God’s word, the word of truth, scatters my darkness as well as the darkened uses of the Bible. It transfigures the charmed, weaponized, historicized, and codified readings of the Bible, scattering darkness and falsehoods while brightening whatever is true in those readings.

Nothing can darken the light of the word of truth, for “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Even our darkness can’t darken God’s word.

That would be like trying to stop the rays of the sun. Wherever God’s word is proclaimed and believed, the light of the word gives growth.

The church can make no secret about our relationship to God or his word. In a real sense, what you see is what you get: a heap of sinners in need of forgiveness and salvation. “I know my faults, and my sin is ever before me” (Ps. 51:3). And what you hear is what you need: “This is my comfort in my trouble, for your word has given me life” (Ps. 119:50). We cry out in distress, and God sends his word and heals us (Ps. 107:20). Will we trust the word he sends to accomplish its purpose?

When your word goes forth it gives light and understanding to the simple. (Ps. 119:130) Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, kindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Todd R. Hains (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is associate publisher for Lexham Press where

he edits the Christian Essentials series, Lexham Ministry Guides, and FatCat Books. He is author of The King of Easter (Lexham, 2023), The King of Christmas (Lexham, 2022), and Martin Luther and the Rule of Faith (IVP Academic, 2022); he is the general editor of The Collected Christian Essentials: A Guide to the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer (Lexham, 2023).

the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023), xi–xiv; Todd R. Hains, Martin Luther and the Rule of Faith: Reading God’s Word for God’s People (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022), 164–65; Joseph Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith

and the Sources of Faith,” in Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 32–33.

Armed with the rule of faith, even untrained people and children can oppose any dark or abused reading of the Bible—no matter the master or authority over that reading.

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I N T E RV I EW

Doing Theology with the Global Church: An Interview with Adam Smith and Michael Horton

by Brannon Ellis

In the following interview, I’m chatting with Adam Smith, chief operating officer and leader of international initiatives for Sola Media (the parent organization of Modern Reformation) and Dr. Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, cohost of the White Horse Inn, and editor-in-chief of MR. Our theme for this issue, “The Rule of Faith,” represents the shared Christian convictions of the universal church across time and place. That worldwide identity is why I’ve been so excited to talk to Mike and Adam about Theo Global, an initiative that reminds us that the church’s unity in the faith isn’t abstract. It’s as real as the relationships Adam and Mike have been forming with brothers and sisters around the globe. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To listen to an extended audio version exclusively for subscribers, visit www.modernreformation.org/theoglobal.)

Michael Horton

In a nutshell, what is Theo Global?

AS: Theo Global is an initiative focused on doing theology with Bible and theology scholars from around the world, especially the Majority World outside the cultural West. We began in 2015 with our first conference in India, and since then, we’ve continued to hold annual conferences in India and Africa. Just this past month, we added our first in the Middle East and in North Africa. We also provide other resources and opportunities for global scholars to do theology together. We’re currently working on a book project with Zondervan Academic, and we have a website with a library of resources that scholars and professors from all over the world can access for personal learning and for curricula.

Adam, your background prepared you quite well for this role. Can you tell us a little about that?

AS: For an American kid from Iowa, I have a pretty international background. Immediately after college, I moved overseas to live in the Philippines for a short time and then for about six years worked with a large organization developing biblical and evangelistic training for churches, traveling a hundred-plus days a year all over the world.

Adam Smith

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Mike, how did you get roped into this?

MH: I’ve always received more than I gave when I visited the Global South.

But now with Theo Global, I feel like I’m a part of a targeted, goal-oriented, and organized effort. They’ve had to endure from us a lot of the (frankly) garbage we’ve pumped out to the rest of the world—the prosperity gospel being the worst of it. These are people committed to the gospel, to the inerrancy and authority of Scripture, even if from different theological confessions. We have some people who don’t think of themselves as part of a confession, but they have missionary hearts, a high view of Scripture, and love studying theology.

Mike, you mention all these exotic locales. But many of us know the story that this whole organization started thirty-something years ago in your dorm room at Biola University in Southern California.

MH: That was already a kind of foreign place.

So what’s distinctive about what we at Sola Media focus on or how we approach things that leads us to see a distinctive opportunity for Theo Global?

AS: Back in 2014 and 2015, we started doing research, including numerous conversations with institutions and professors, particularly in India and in East Africa. We were trying to listen to what they and their churches needed to help them take the next steps toward faithfulness and fruitfulness. We kept hearing from these institutions that there was very little opportunity for their Bible and theology professors to actually do theology or discuss it. Now, they’re teaching it— but how much opportunity do they have to dialogue about it or to enjoy an academic space (in publications or conversations) that enables continued learning and refining after their graduate work? There was a hunger to engage in theological and biblical conversation, which is their first love. But a lot of the time they’re stuck in administration. As we talked and prayed through the question “Who are we to engage or to try to meet a need like this?” it struck us that facilitating theological conversations is what Mike and the White Horse Inn have been doing all these years. We just had to figure out how to take that ethos of unity in diversity, theological conversation and respectful dialogue, and doxology—and translate it all from a podcast and a magazine into a forum for scholarly conversation.

MH: This is what we’re laser focused on: Get the gospel right and get the gospel out. We know that if we can plant seeds in the Majority World, then they’ll grow. Although we’ve seen weeds grow like there’s no tomorrow, healthy wheat also grows. If we can get more good theology into the soil there, that’s going to help not only them but us, especially as the West seems to be in decline. We’re learning from them already; hopefully they’re also learning from us. But mostly what’s exciting is that we’re all learning from the conversation together.

AS: I can remember several years ago sitting in Mike’s backyard, asking ourselves the question, “Who would we say are the top theologians from the Majority World?” Not Western—not American, not Australian, not European. We both felt this heavy burden because we’ve met some folks that could be in that

“ We know that if we can plant seeds in the Majority World, then they’ll grow. Although we’ve seen weeds grow like there’s no tomorrow, healthy wheat also grows.”

—Michael Horton

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category. Folks who could be a gift to the global church if only we could have an opportunity to listen to them. Imagine if my pastor or your pastor could name three theologians from the Majority World. Not only name them but also reflect on the goodness and wisdom of the insights they bring, or maybe challenge some of our cultural assumptions, or sing beautifully of the gospel with descriptions and perspectives outside the way we typically think about and approach it.

MH: The difference now is that Adam and I can name them. In fact, we have quite a few names. These are people with whom we study and pray and eat— people I’ll know the rest of my life. And it’s not that they or we are saying, “Oh, great, the Westerners have come riding in on their white horses.” It’s nothing like that. The Lord has certainly given us in the West greater material wealth—and greater opportunities, therefore, to create initiative like this. But the only way it works is because the people who participate in it are creating it. We’re not arriving with something prepackaged “Coming to a theater near you!” This is actually a movie being made by the local crew.

In Ephesians 4, Paul writes that there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”

That oneness doesn’t feel so abstract anymore, does it? These are real people in real places that we’re one with. That also means oneness isn’t whatever we assumed it was; it’s something Jesus is doing.

MH: A good example of that is when we were sitting around a table in Istanbul with scholars from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Brazil. We were having real fun together. There were some tense moments, especially when we got into the Lutheran and Reformed debates over Christology. But it’s just like the White Horse Inn and all the fun we’ve had for thirty-odd years. Let’s all talk about the things we already agree on. But let’s also talk about lots of other important things we don’t agree on.

Imagine if my pastor or your pastor could name three theologians from the Majority World.

Not only name them but also reflect on the goodness and wisdom of the insights they bring.

What are some of the other places you’ve visited for Theo Global, and what insights did you gain about the churches there?

AS: As we’ve worked with churches and institutions and engaged with leaders in various places, we’ve learned and heard so much about the challenges the church faces in trying to be biblically and theologically faithful. There’s a remnant striving in all kinds of different places and situations to hold fast, to teach well, and to combat those challenges they face.

MH: In India, I’d say I’ve seen what a suffering church looks like—not a whining church, but a suffering church. But they aren’t sitting around rubbing their hands. They’re working every day to get the gospel out to people who haven’t heard it. Professors at the seminaries are out in the villages sharing the gospel with people, even though it’s entirely possible that if the authorities find them, they’ll suffer great loss, perhaps even their lives. They’re not asking for sympathy.

They’re asking for prayer. We also just held our first conference in Egypt, which was amazing. The Anglican primate of Alexandria and bishop of Egypt is really excited about what we’re doing. Their Alexandrian School of Theology is one of

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the brightest spots in the Middle East for Reformed theology being consistently taught across all the disciplines. And I have to mention again the opportunities we’ve had in East Africa, making friends we’re going to have for life. These are all priceless experiences that help us realize that the church is a lot bigger than we thought it was.

AS: If I could just say one thing about the majesty and mystery of the Lord: in surprising ways, wherever we go, we learn about churches that are seriously seeking biblical Christianity, whether or not they came through Reformation history. Some of them predate the Reformation. Some of them weren’t influenced by a couple centuries of reformational teaching and just started to acquire it over the past fifty or hundred years. But there were and are churches in these places that, to varying degrees and in various ways, have been seeking to be biblical Christians. We’ve been amazed to hear some of those stories, reflecting on them together in the back of an Uber in Egypt, or brought nearly to tears as we debrief about a conversation we had or a book we picked up at a Coptic monastery. Just seeing the Lord at work—in surprising places that go beyond our expectations, certainly, but that go beyond some of our categories and definitions.

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In surprising ways, wherever we go, we learn about churches that are seriously seeking biblical Christianity, whether or not they came through Reformation history.

We’ve been talking for so long about seeking a “modern reformation” that sometimes it’s easy to miss the little (or big) ways the Lord has been doing this in other parts of the world all along.

MH: In future issues of Modern Reformation, we’ll be discovering some of the church history we’ve missed here in the West. It’s part of our story, not just theirs.

It’s not a balanced family reunion if you’re only talking about your side of the family. Although reformation and renewal have happened in other places and other times, we haven’t heard all these stories. We’ll be hearing a lot more of them so we can have more interesting family reunions.

I’ve heard from some longtime MR readers that when a new issue arrives in their mailbox, it reminds them they’re not alone. A lot of these folks may be the only person “into” theology in their home church. Maybe now they’ll realize that there are all these people around the globe who are passionate about the Lord just like us. Even with so many fewer resources, they have the same spirit.

AS: That’s part of the great joy of Theo Global events. It brings everyone together into a room—people facing similar challenges with similar interests and the same calling to teach the Scriptures and train the next generation of pastors and church leaders. One Kenyan woman, who’s a New Testament scholar, told me how incredibly important the conferences were to her, especially since through them she had received the unexpected gift of a wonderful new friendship with another woman who’s likewise a New Testament scholar. That’s the kind of thing that happens organically as the Lord puts his people together in fellowship.

MH: We can become discouraged sometimes about how precipitous the decline seems to be in the Western church, so it helps to hear these stories, to be

It’s not a balanced family reunion if you’re only talking about your side of the family.

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encouraged by brothers and sisters who may be under tremendous stress from Caesar but are flourishing under Christ’s blessings in his kingdom.

Adam shared with me earlier a quote from a Theo Global participant from Burundi. He has a lot of high praise for Mike, so I won’t ask Mike to share it.

It might be embarrassing. Adam, will you share it and embarrass Mike on everyone’s behalf ?

AS: I’m happy to do that. We were at the venue for this event when three or four young men from one of the local seminaries came up to Mike because they heard he was in town. He talked with them for a bit, and afterward we received this note from someone who was a friend of this small group: My friends have been raving about meeting you and, of course, subversively trying to make me jealous. They know how much of an admirer I have become of your work. Indeed, I think I might be one of the few Burundians who religiously listens to the White Horse Inn podcast and whose sole subscription is to Modern Reformation magazine. It has been good to my soul and ministry, always keeping my modest theological engine a little greased up. So I wanted to express my thankfulness for your work, whether books, podcast, magazine, or just coming down to these East African woods. May God encourage you and provide for your needs; oftentimes we don’t know how far God will use these tools to minister to those far and near.

MH: What a dear brother. It’s exciting to see that the main demographic interested in Theo Global is younger people. It bodes well for the future.

Brannon Ellis is the executive editor of Modern Reformation.

Theo Global participants at Hagia Irene in Istanbul, where the ecumenical Council of Constantinople met to ratify the Nicene Creed in 381.

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POEM

Snowstorm at midnight

by Joseph E. Keysor

In the stillness of the night, when the fire is burning low, and its bright and orange light dwindles to an ashen glow, out of doors the blowing snow shrouds the wintry world with white, swirling through the streetlight’s glow and disappearing into night.

Are we like the blowing snow, sparkling briefly in the light, then carried off by winds that blow and disappearing into night?

Within myself I have faith’s light, A higher truth that answers “No.” There is more to life than night, Than silent cold, I feel, I know.

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YO U

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W H AT

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Defines O U R I N

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TO GOD,

Ourselves, A N D

O T H E R S

by J O S H U A PA U L I N G

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NCIENT CHRISTIAN CONFESSIONS

like the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed define the boundaries and content of the Christian faith in accordance with Scripture. But they also function as essential identity formation. These creeds are much more than checklists of personal beliefs. Their propositional and narrative content together offer a unified account of reality in relation to God, ourselves, and one another. In reality, these creeds are one credo, one “I believe”—so in this essay I’ll refer to them in the singular.

The creed describes not only who God is but also who we are. In these ways, the creed is both a no and a yes. “The Nicene Creed was written to say no, in the strongest possible terms,” Phillip Cary explains, to heresy. But the creed “said no by saying yes to who God really is, and who Jesus is . . . and sometimes it says who God is by saying what he has done to make us who we are: God’s creatures who he raises from death to everlasting life in Christ.”

The question of identity is perennial. And in the modern West, the question seems to generate even more existential angst than in the past, as we became unmoored from traditional identity anchors of faith, family, place, and even from biology itself. Numerous identity alternatives have been proposed as solutions, and many thoughtful Christians have responded to this question with powerful calls to find our identity in Christ. It’s a vital case to make—but one that frequently remains abstract and intangible. What does it really mean to encourage people to find their identity in Christ? How am I anchored beyond myself, my thoughts, and my feelings? Is Christianity just another identity choice among many?

The creed helps us move beyond the abstract into the realm of the concrete, revealing that Christianity is a deeply rooted identity-gift of ultimate and eternal significance, anchored in the God who is. This is the God who speaks the world into existence by the word of his power, the God who is the Word made flesh, the God who gives gifts to his people through words that mean something and sacraments that do something. The creed recounts and revels in this Triune God’s work of creation, redemption, and sanctification revealed in his word; and as we believe, it also shapes our identity. In confessing the creed, we’re led further up and further in (as C. S. Lewis might say) to this deepest reality of knowing God and ourselves. We are what we believe—because what we believe, as given in the creed, is reality.

The creed defines who we are in three fundamental ways: In relationship to God, to self, and to others, which I’d like to explore together in connection with the creed’s three articles. But first, we should consider how competing stories— cultural creeds—also shape us as we believe them.

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***

Confounded by Creating Ourselves: How Stories Form or Malform Us For anyone who takes life just the least bit seriously, self-creation easily morphs into an anxiety-inducing burden bigger than our shoulders were designed to bear.

Humans are storytelling creatures. And our stories shape our identity. Countless competing narratives attempt to tell us who we are. Consider the Darwinian creed, which tells us we are just material stuff, here by accident. Or the consumerist creed, which presents humanity as customers who find meaning in their possessions. So too, the creed of expressive individualism, which tells us that our internal desires are who we are, manifest in everything from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—which George Barna flatly calls “fake Christianity”—to the LGBTQ+ identities exploding even among professing Gen Z Christians.

No matter what story or cultural creed tempts us, the common thread linking them together is a vision of the human person as self-defined and self-creating.

The various cultural creeds might be summed up best with this simple statement of faith: I believe in myself.

At first, self-creation seems freeing: We get to throw off stodgy external structures and limiting moral codes—no more cramping my style! But for anyone who takes life just the least bit seriously, self-creation easily morphs into an anxiety-inducing burden bigger than our shoulders were designed to bear.

Alan Noble calls this “the fundamental lie of modernity: that we are our own.”

He suggests that “until we see this lie for what it is, until we work to uproot it from our culture and replant a conception of human persons as belonging to God and ourselves, most of our efforts at improving the world will be glorified BandAids.” The self-help Band-Aids aren’t stopping the bleeding and are actually making things worse, considering rising anxiety, depression, and suicide. While “no single cause can explain the presence of such social ills,” Noble suggests that they all “share important characteristics: they are systemic in nature, they are inhuman, and they all rely on a particular set of assumptions about what it means to be human.” A cultural creedal identity untethers humans from God and from external structures of meaning and morality. Ironically, this creates a boomerang effect in which all those responsibilities are sent reeling back toward us, leaving us on our own to find, formulate, or even fabricate meaning for our lives.

How do we avoid getting crushed under the weight of having to invent ourselves—to be our own creators and sustainers and redeemers? Noble points to a way out by remembering that we are not our own. This is a profoundly countercultural move: “An anthropology defined by our belonging to God is diametrically opposed to the contemporary belief that we are autonomous, free, atomistic individuals who find our greatest fulfillment in breaking free from all external norms.” The creed concretizes this “no” toward cultural self-identity with clear doctrinal claims and a compelling narrative structure for our life in Christ, uniting the worlds of fact and story, the objective truth outside us, and the subjective truth about us. As Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, put it more than eighteen hundred 2

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years ago, “Faith is established upon things truly real, that we may believe what really is, as it is.”

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I Believe: Formed and Re-formed by the Creed Each time we recite and reflect on the creed, we are brought further into its story and its story is brought further into us. We’re doing more than stating bare facts or reinforcing social bonds in the local congregation. We’re responding to what God has said and done by saying “this faith is mine; this is my story.” But not just mine. It’s the same faith confessed by Irenaeus and Athanasius, by Anselm and Aquinas, by Luther and Calvin, by peasants and kings, by mothers and fathers, by sisters and brothers, by friends and enemies, by rich and poor. When you recite the creed, you join millions of living Christians in thousands of languages in hundreds of countries—with untold numbers of faithful saints who have gone before—echoing together the true story and meaning of the cosmos. Talk about an identity-making event that many of us experience every Sunday!

The creed, however, shouldn’t then be set aside until the following Sunday.

It can form our daily life in Christ. Peter Bender explains, It is intended to be used daily in the life of the Christian and the Christian family for the purpose of faithful meditation upon the Word of God. The Creed anchors meditation in what is true, not for the self alone, but for every Christian for all time . . . [and] stands as a grid or framework through which the text of the Scriptures is to be properly understood.

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Historically, we Christians receive the creed as an apostolic deposit given to us in our baptism, that provides us with the language and grammar to think and speak about God, ourselves, and one another. Already in the second century, Irenaeus referred to the long-established rule of faith, or “rule of truth,” that is “received by means of baptism” and that this “truth proclaimed by the Church is immovable.” Irenaeus then described the rule within the trinitarian structure and language familiar to anyone who knows the creeds:

First clause of Apostles’ Creed in Bulgarian, Korean, and Arabic:

The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [It believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, who made the heaven and the earth and the seas and all the things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who made known through the prophets the plan of salvation, and the coming, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily ascension into heaven of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and his [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father “to gather all things in one,” and to raise anew all flesh of the whole human race, in order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God,

전능하신 천주 성부 천 지의 창조주를 저는 믿 나이다.

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Аз вярвам във Всемогъщият Бог Отец, който е направил земята и небето.

‫دحاو هلإب نمؤن ةقيقحلاب‬، ‫بآلا هللا‬، ‫لكلا طباض‬، ‫ضرألاو ءامسلا قلاخ‬، ‫ىَرُي ام‬ ‫ىري ال امو‬.

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and Saviour, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father, “every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth and that every tongue should confess” to Him, and that He should execute just judgment towards all.

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Because we confess God as Creator, we confess that we receive our identity from another because we receive our very existence from another.

The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it. . . . For although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same.

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We have all received the weight and wisdom of this shared sacred tradition.

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God, the Father, uncreated, uncontainable, invisible; one God, the creator of all: this is the first article of our faith.

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The creed’s first article begins by expressing our faith in the work of God the Father as Creator, which simultaneously tells us something about ourselves: We are creatures. God alone is uncreated; we as humans can’t help being creatures.

So where do we ultimately find our identity? In the forces of nature or nurture?

Society or self ? Because we confess God as Creator, we confess that we receive our identity from another because we receive our very existence from another.

As Irenaeus put it, “God indeed makes, but man is made.”

We may not think of creatureliness as good news. Being a creature can be rather disgusting at times. Smelly. Messy. Unsexy. Richard John Neuhaus notes that “the word ‘creature’ is hardly ever used today except negatively. Horror movies have creatures from the deep, and we speak of bothersome insects as creatures, but most people would not call their pet dog a creature, never mind their best friend.” Neuhaus sees this as “a triumph of Gnosticism in our popular culture,” a rejection of the gift of bodily life, and “the desire to be like God on our own terms.”

Neuhaus encourages us to remember “the most elementary fact about what and who we are—creatures. We are not the Creator; we are not God.” The creed’s first article frees us from trying to be God. We are embodied, contingent beings with in-built limits—and this is indeed good news. We have a Creator who, as Luther says, “has made me and all creatures; . . . he has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them. . . . All this he does only out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me.”

“If we belong to ourselves,” Noble explains, “then we set our own limits— which means we have no limits except our own will. If we belong to God, then knowing and abiding by His limits enables us to live as we were created to live, as the humans He designed us to be.” The creed’s first article reveals a Creator whose actions are driven by love—nay, who is love. We are defined in relation to 13

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this fatherly Creator as creatures who are loved with an eternal and unending love, a love that takes on flesh. The God who made us as bodily beings and pronounced it as all “very good” enters history bodily. This further defines our identity.

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And the second article: The Word of God, the Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was revealed by the prophets according to the character of their prophecy and according to the nature of the economies of the Father, by whom all things were made, and who, in the last times, to recapitulate all things, became a man amongst men, visible and palpable, in order to abolish death, to demonstrate life, and to effect communion between God and man.

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The creed’s second article about the Son’s work of redemption helps to define the self. Now, confessing our beliefs in relation to ourselves may sound dubious after all my earlier warnings about the dangers of self-creation and navel gazing. But it’s in the second article that we see how Christ remakes and redefines human identity around himself. For believers, self-identity is now Christ-identity. Saint Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Christ in me. Jonathan Linebaugh describes the identity-forming power of Paul’s words here as “the meeting of the christological past and a personal pronoun, a pairing that gives peace to ‘a trembling and troubled heart’ and ‘rest to your bones and mine.’”

The ancient church testifies to this comprehensive understanding of identity in Christ, as evidenced in their frequent confession of Christianus sum (“I am Christian”) in the face of persecution. Christianus, in both its Latin and Greek equivalents, is suggestive of something more than simply a lifestyle choice or an individualistic decision. When someone says “I am a Christian” today, it just doesn’t quite capture the weight and force of the original. When Christians confessed Christianus sum, they weren’t making a claim of personal perspective or wishful thinking; it was primal and real. There were now of Christ, belonging to Christ; Christ was in them, and they were in him. Such an ultimate claim reordered their allegiance under the world’s rightful king, Jesus, to whom they were united. They saw themselves as part of a new humanity constituted around the risen and glorified Christ, made up of people from all tribes, nations, tongues, and peoples. The claims of the creed radically changed Christian self-identity.

No longer did the early Christians primarily identify as citizens of this or that country, or members of this or that family or class. This is not to say that their personal distinctiveness was lost or absorbed. Those things weren’t erased but transformed as they were now in Christ, who took on flesh, lived, died, and rose again proving his divinity and victory over the forces of evil and the empires of this world by the foolishness of his cross. Now that is a self-identity worth 19

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The claims of the creed radically changed Christian self-identity. No longer did the early Christians primarily identify as citizens of this or that country, or members of this or that family or class. . . . Those things weren’t erased but transformed as they were now in Christ.

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reclaiming—and urgently so, considering the scope and breadth of our contemporary identity crises.

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And the third article: The Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied and the patriarchs learnt the things of God, and the righteous were led in the path of righteousness, and who, in the last times, was poured out in a new fashion upon the human race renewing man, throughout the world, to God. 21

The creed’s third article on the Spirit’s role as sanctifier reminds us of our relational nature. The creed tells us that we are not solitary, mechanistic units but created to be in living relation to a people and a history. In the church, not in isolation, the gifts of God are distributed to the people of God: communion, forgiveness, resurrection, and everlasting life.

In his explanation of the Apostles’ Creed, Luther highlights the inseparability of the individual and communal.

Not only has “the Holy Spirit . . . called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith,” but also “in the same way he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith. In this Christian church he daily and richly forgives all my sins and the sins of all believers.” The Spirit makes us new creatures in the image of Christ, our new head, which situates our rich and robust individual Christian identity in his larger body, the church where we all have varying gifts and roles. Confessing “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins” roots us in our relationship to God as redeemed sinners and in community with other sinful saints where we together receive God’s spoken and sacramental gifts. Here, both self and other are properly placed in relation to God. Each individual is valued for their unique identity, but they are also united into one body. Christianity is particularly applied to individuals in each locale and community but is also universal in scope and application. All of this provides us with a firm place within the larger ordering of the cosmos—a position from which to live with assurance and purpose.

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Detail of “Pentecost” (c. 1509– 1510) by Albrecht Dürer.

***

Being Formed by the True Story of the World This creedal identity frames my relation to God, myself, and others. How can this not have significant influence in my daily life? The creed calls us to a life properly ordered toward the world’s master key, its deepest reality and unifying principle: Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and the one in whom all things

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hold together (John 14:6; Col. 1:17). Here are a few starting points for further meditation on how a creedal rather than a cultural identity transforms everything about who we are and how we live.

C R E E DA L I D E N T I T Y I S S U BV E R S I V E

Confessing the creed is a countercultural act that places us in a new community, in a new body, with a new king, and his name is neither Self nor Caesar. In the church’s confession, all our stereotypes and assumptions are turned upside down.

Societal outcasts and social butterflies, truck drivers and doctors, those who clean toilets and those who design them are equally humbled and honored. All are united with our king and with one another in God’s paradoxical kingdom as we confess where our ultimate allegiances lie.

This dislocates us by reminding us that we’re pilgrims in a world that confesses different creeds. But it also locates us, anchoring us to a place and a people in a way that heals worldly divisions. From the church’s earliest days, this reality came through as our baptismal creed established a new community—a chosen race and royal priesthood that is a foretaste of the New Jerusalem, elevating the status of those who were considered lower, and breaking down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile (Eph. 2:14).

C R E E D A L I D E N T I T Y I S A N C H O R E D T O T H E B O DY

Being a creature means that our bodies are gifts to be received and embraced, not rejected or deconstructed. Life in the body has limits, and it is from such a place of finitude and contingency that wisdom, virtue, and day-by-day faithfulness can grow. Consider the extreme inefficiency of caring for a young toddler or an elderly parent, or the long agonizing hours of conversation and presence required to walk together with someone through despair, grief, or depression. These are highly inconvenient but deeply human and deeply beautiful expressions of belonging to Christ and his body. Today, the body frequently seems not only too limited but also expendable, a waste product to be disposed of as neatly and quickly as possible. There is little thought of the body’s inherent value, its creation by God, or its ultimate resurrection. Our bodies have inherent value, however, and should be treated with respect and care, both during life and in our final Christian act: what we do with our bodies upon death.

C R E E DA L I D E N T I T Y I S A G I F T

Quite distinct from self-constructed and self-made forms of identity, the creed grants us an identity-gift, reminding us that God plants us in webs of mutual interdependence and support. At our birth, our name is given, our place is given, our family is given, our community is given. And if we take our cues from the church fathers, the rule of faith is gifted to us as well. The apostolic deposit is

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exactly that—a deposit we receive and inherit. The language of creedal and baptismal inheritance is common throughout the early church. Irenaeus notes how the faith has been “handed down to us . . . [which] exhorts us to remember that we have received baptism for the remission of sins . . . [as] the seal of eternal life and rebirth unto God, that we may no longer be sons of mortal men, but of the eternal and everlasting God.” In a culture that sees only self-chosen commitments and identities as authentic, we see in the creed a vision not of an identity we choose but one we receive by grace.

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The creed frames the passage of time and seasons as structured by the church and marked by the milestones of God’s work in word and sacrament. It places us on a path rich with meaning, with accompanying rites to mark life’s journey: baptism, the Eucharist, Christian death and burial—all of which are explicitly referenced in the creed in the life of Christ and thus anticipated in the life of believers. These milestones are enacted and re-enacted in the church’s weekly rhythm of Lord’s Day rest. Kelly Kapic suggests that the concept of Sabbath is “one of the most countercultural and radical ideas in the Bible.” We cannot keep running the modern rat-race endlessly—we will perform ourselves to death. Structuring our lives around, and resting in, the rhythms of God’s gift of rest and word frees us to step off the tyrannical treadmill and into the Sabbath of God. These milestones and rhythms also ensure that our beliefs are embodied in our practices and that there is wholeness between our hearts and our heads, our bodies and our brains.

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Phillip Cary, The Nicene Creed: An Introduction (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2022), 2.

2. George Barna, “American Worldview Inventory 2021, Release #02: Introducing America’s Most Popular Worldview— Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” Cultural Research Center, April 27, 2021; Paul Bond, “Nearly 40 Percent of U.S. Gen Zs, 30 Percent of Young Christians Identify as LGBT, Poll Shows,” Newsweek (October 20, 2021).

3. Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2021), 5.

4. “Youth Risk Behavior Survey: Data Summary and Trends Report,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https:// www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data -Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf.

5. Noble, You Are Not Your Own, 17.

1.

Noble, You Are Not Your Own, 6.

Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 41.

8. Peter Bender, “The Creed Defines the Scriptures and Strengthens the Faith,” in We Believe: Essays on the Catechism (Fort Wayne, IN: Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 2000), 44.

9. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.9.4–1.9.5, vol. 1, p. 330, in The AnteNicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (1885–1887; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).

10. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.10.1, 330.

11. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.20.2, 331.

12. Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, 43.

13. To be sure, we understand that the work of creation is the work of all three persons of the Godhead (inseparable 6.

7.

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C R E E DA L I D E N T I T Y H A S A D E S T I N Y

The creed also clearly points us to our journey’s end. The pilgrim church daily confesses our faith in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. The goal of human identity runs much deeper than individual choice or lived experience, personal achievement or social status, race or sexual preference. Your true purpose is found not in your own name, history, or constructed identity, but in the name, history and identity of Christ given in the ancient creed. This is an earth-shaking and life-altering identity that offers hope for this world and the next, knowing that what awaits us in the eschaton is the fullest expression of human identity imaginable: a glorified humanity in full communion with the Trinity and with one another. ***

Conclusion The creed tells me that I am fundamentally a creature, a Christian, and communal. It tells me that you and I are in Christ and thus belong to each other. Despite the false and fleeting alternative identities we try to create for ourselves or adopt from our culture, Irenaeus has been right all along: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Let’s embrace the creed’s call to be defined by what we believe because we belong to the One in whom we believe. Let’s embrace reality.

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Joshua Pauling is a classical educator and furniture maker. Vicar at All Saints Lutheran Church

(LCMS) in Charlotte, North Carolina, he studied at Messiah College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University.

operations). But we also understand that there is a proper work to each Person of the Godhead when considering the economic Trinity, which the creed reflects: Father as Creator, Son as Redeemer, Spirit as Sanctifier.

14. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.11.2, 474.

15. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 120–21.

16. Martin Luther, Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 2017), 16.

17. Noble, You Are Not Your Own, 118.

18. Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, 43–44.

19. Jonathan Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 72.

20. For an excellent short treatment of martyrdom and Christian

identity in the early church, see William Weinrich, “Christian Martyrdom: Some Reflections,” Journal of Lutheran Mission, vol. 2, no. 2 (September 2014): 9–15.

21. Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, 44.

22. Luther, Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation, 17–18.

23. Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, 42.

24. Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022), 219.

25. This is a frequently used paraphrase that is faithful to the more wooden translation: “For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.” Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.20.7, 490.

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Vol. 32, No. 6

IV.

Engage Connecting with our time and place

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T H E

Communion O F

SAINTS I N

T H E

DIGITA L AGE

by J A R E D L .

J O N E S

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O

UR WORLD TODAY is marked by

something so obvious we miss just how peculiar it is: the existence of another world that is both “in and not of ” our physical world. Not because the other world is purely spiritual; I’m speaking about the existence of the digital realm.

Of course, it’s not actually a separate “realm” at all. It is a world of algorithms and processors, networks and codes, and servers and cables that all belong to our actual world just like everything else. It is part of the created order, yet we experience it as being somewhere else.

The concrete realities of the predigital age were pews, town squares, pubs, malls, and classrooms—human-scale spaces where real people were introduced, learned, had conversations, fought, prayed, and fell in love. The hardware of the digital world comprises giant warehouses filled to the brim with wires, buzzing fans, steel-framed cabinets, and blinking lights—instruments that “pour forth speech” to one another and in so doing create a world. In that world, you’ll find a lot of the same things, though never in the same ways.

When meeting a couple for the first time and asking where they met, it’s not uncommon today to hear, “We met online.” To these couples, where they met is a real place with a meaningful story—whether that place be Facebook, eHarmony, Bumble, or Tinder. But the fact remains that if any of us actually showed up in person to the physical places where our Facebook feeds live or our Zoom calls are hosted, we’d be very much alone. In this way, digital spaces both do and do not actually exist.

This digital realm is where many of us work now. It’s the main place where large swaths of our social interaction take shape. While it might not be where we live and move, it’s arguably where we have our being. We’ve placed into its virtual hands untold influence over our meaning and identity. What, then, does it do to us in return, as those who spend so much time in a “there” that may not be there at all? ***

Digitally Living In this essay, I want to explore the peculiar nature of what it’s like to live in a digital reality. I want to reflect on what it means to be human beings (especially Christians) spending so much of our lives existing within a realm that both does and does not exist. Let’s focus on three important ramifications.

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BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

We are constantly in two (or more) places at once.

We’re located wherever our bodies happen to be, and we’re also connected to someplace else.

First, we have become bifurcated beings. We are constantly in two (or more) places at once. We’re located wherever our bodies happen to be, and we’re also connected to someplace else. Formerly, and in a simpler time—maybe just ten years ago!—there was a generally acknowledged concern that video games like Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Second Life posed a societal threat of the digital bleeding into the real. What would happen, we wondered, when gamers wanted to invest all their time, relationships, and energy into these digital worlds to the neglect of their nondigital lives? The satirical cartoon South Park created an episode at the time panning World of Warcraft. Its storyline followed several young boys attempting to play the game while being hopelessly outmatched by a middle-aged, overweight man living in a filthy basement who does nothing else.

As the entire world (of Warcraft) is mercilessly brought under the dominion of this basement-dweller, the characters keep asking one another the comically epic question, “How does one kill that which has no life?” How indeed.

At the time, this felt like a niche problem for overly zealous gamers. Perhaps video-game addiction would become a struggle for young boys, but that’s a small demographic. Almost twenty years after World of Warcraft came out, it now seems as though our collective fears weren’t exaggerated. If anything, we may not have been fearful enough.

Gaming isn’t the only way we spend bifurcated lives in the digital realm.

What’s the practical difference between a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (or MMORPG, like World of Warcraft) and social media? Both present an alternative world for us to get caught up in—a world that tracks our engagement in it through quests, notifications, likes, and upgrades; a world in which we form complex and sometimes close relationships and communities.

Perhaps most importantly, both online gaming and social media entice us to begin to filter our experience of the real world through the lens of the digital.

Our children become less objects of our enjoyment and more opportunities for comment-worthy pictures to post on social media. Conversations and dinner dates are no longer private but captured with selfies to give everyone the chance to eavesdrop or engage. Our daily life and decisions are now graded on pass/fail standards, wherein failure could mean an excruciating death in a fantasy dungeon or (much worse) no “likes” on our latest post. The digital world has become a new place for us to invest and get involved, to pursue meaning and competency, to matter, and even a place for us to be hurt and fail—but not in the same ways, or with the same stakes, as in the real world.

A WORLD UNDER OUR CONTROL

One reason so many of us are attracted to life in the digital realm despite its bifurcation (and this is the second ramification) is that it offers the allure of a completely curated experience. During the pandemic, I was working as a school chap-

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lain. As in most schools, when we came out of lockdown, our students had the option to attend in person or online. The online students were functionally a part of the class: their video feed would be broadcast to the classroom, they could ask questions, take tests, and talk to friends. The staff and students did as much as we could to make it feel normal (even though it felt far from normal). As time went on, however, I noticed that many students were starting to prefer attending online. This surprised me. I was sure they would want to be at school in person with friends rather than stuck at home with everything mediated through a screen. I asked one student why they liked it and if they missed seeing their friends. “Oh, I still see my friends. I just don’t have to see the other people.”

I then realized the draw—and the danger—of a completely online experience.

It offers the potential for a completely curated experience wherein we interact only with people we choose (which are almost always people we like or who are like us). The digital realm allowed these students to circumvent all the social awkwardness and complexity in school, brushing shoulders with people they don’t like or who don’t like them. The digital world allows us to ensure that we come into contact (if you can call it contact) only with those with whom we prefer to interact.

Another way to think of the appeal of curation is to call it by another name: control. The digital realm promises us almost complete control, a control we are altogether aware of lacking in the real world. There are no blocks or mute buttons in Walmart. We can stop talking to individual people of course; in real life, however, most of our relationships are not formed abstractly or by pure preference but are part of broader, messier social networks of relationships in our churches, schools, or sports leagues. In real social networks, while we might stop seeking out a relationship with someone, we still usually have to figure out how to live with them or work around their very real presence.

B E I N G K N O W N — O R B E I N G S TA L K E D ?

Our third and final ramification of living in the digital realm is that we have become used to being constantly catered to. Through expensive and sophisticated marketing systems and predictive algorithms, we enjoy the thrill and affirmation of being known. Companies in Silicon Valley have processes and datasets that can pretty accurately sum up our desires and fears. We’ve all experienced the eerie feeling of having a conversation with friends about a product or service and then getting an ad for it on our phone sometime the next day. Princeton sociology professor Janet Vertesi described the incredible lengths she had to go to keep her pregnancy out of the digital world. She used encrypted web browsers, paid only in cash or with Amazon gift cards (which she had shipped to an Amazon locker so that the company wouldn’t know her home address). She even had to delete and unfriend her uncle who privately messaged her on Facebook congratulating her about the pregnancy. All of this led Vertesi to remark, “Those kinds of activities, when you take them in the aggregate . . . are exactly the kinds of things that tag

The digital realm promises us almost complete control, a control we are altogether aware of lacking in the real world.

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you as likely engaging in criminal activity, as opposed to just having a baby.” She had to operate like a money launderer to keep her personal life off the internet.

And that was way back in 2014. Good luck avoiding the algorithms now.

Beyond the creepy Big Brother factor, what does this kind of hyper-personalized catering do to us? It begins to reshape the world to be focused on me. The digital world is my world, directly accommodating and gratifying me. I can tell the algorithm what I want to see or what I don’t. Even when it shows me something I didn’t ask for, it often knows me better than I know myself. The momentum of the digital world is centripetal—its goal is to drive us forever deeper, with ourselves at its dark center.

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The momentum of the digital world is centripetal—its goal is to drive us forever deeper, with ourselves at its dark center.

***

Digital Church On June 13, 2023, St. Paul’s Church in Fürth, Germany, hosted a special worship service complete with psalms, prayers, and a sermon. More than three hundred attendees quietly laughed at the jokes in the sermon, mumbled along with the Lord’s Prayer, and smiled uneasily at the people on the screen smiling back at them. In many ways, it looked like a normal, digitally enhanced church service in the twenty-first century. The only difference was that the entire service was planned, produced, and performed almost completely by AI. AI-generated avatars selected the psalms, crafted and delivered the sermon, and read the prayers.

The only real thing about the service was the real human beings obeying the computer when it told them what to pray.

Everyone knew the service was fake, of course, but what should be fascinating and disconcerting to us is how simple it all was to accomplish. The creator of the spectacle, Jonas Simmerlein, said that all he did was tell the chatbot to create a service with a particular theme following certain guidelines and voilà! Indeed, most of the media for such a wholly digitized worship service have been in place for some time—to the point that much of the service wouldn’t feel strange at all to many contemporary Christian worshipers. Watching a pastor and reciting lyrics and prayers from a screen has become par for the course in today’s church.

Churches have almost completely, nearly 100 percent, invested in the digital world. Go on to a church website, any church website (it proves my point simply that I can safely assume that almost every church has a website), and you’ll be surprised if you can’t find a livestream of worship. During the COVID-19 lockdown, almost all of us invested in live-streaming abilities, for justifiable and even noble reasons. But how many of us turned the stream off after the last protocols were lifted? If not, why not? Your reason is probably the same as everyone else’s: because we didn’t want to miss out on being in the digital realm. We had engagement there, or at least the hope of future engagement.

I’m not here to argue against churches streaming our services. Some congregations have found that their elderly or housebound members are now able to participate in the service whereas before they were completely left out. My point 2

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is simply that now the church is trying to occupy another world as well, and that world has its own strange ways. By moving church to an online consumable, we have in some ways abstracted it. “Attending church” now in the digital realm exists on the same continuum as watching Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon Prime.

Whatever the “it” that church offers people is a product of the same type being produced in Hollywood. You and I may recoil at this suggestion: we hate the idea of the church as a product. So, I ask again, why do we participate? Because to stop streaming would feel as though something ceased to exist somewhere.

When churches moved online, we became online beings, and going offline feels as though we would be losing something of ourselves or abandoning our place—no matter how tenuously that place exists.

This digital localization has led to actual de-localization, a loss of real place within churches. Most of us are a long way from being village or neighborhood parishes made up of local believers who, upon hearing our bells toll on Sunday morning, answer the summons by walking to our local house of worship. Instead, we’ve gone to the other extreme. It’s quite normal for us to drive past half a dozen churches (sometimes even churches within our own denominations!) to get to the community church with the mass-produced programming, preaching, and services that appeal the most to us. I don’t mean to say that smaller is inherently better or that faithfully using God-given resources to benefit a broad audience is inappropriate. I’m simply pointing out that these things can easily tempt us to treat the church like one product among the rest.

To put church online isn’t only to say something about the digital realm; it’s to say something about church. When this occurs, we compromise our ability to offer something truly distinct—or any respite or solace from the digital age.

But what if the doctrine of the communion of saints offers something unique and much needed in such a time as this? What if rather than being an abstract doctrine out there, one more thing among the multitudes of things out there, the communion of saints offers a local, analog, concrete expression of the gospel? A place right here, a place to belong and rest. ***

The Communion of Saints One of the first things that stands out to me about the creed’s confession of “one holy catholic and apostolic church” is that I’ve never seen one. Besides, how would you find one? One cannot walk into the narthex of First Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and hurriedly smile at the ushers as you take your seat. It doesn’t exist in its fullness in brick and mortar but somewhere else: as an article of faith.

This is something far more than digital, however—more than an artificial construct. The church catholic is a real thing, perfectly realized in heaven and in the age to come. It exists as a theological reality in the proclamation of the gospel, a worded reality. But it’s increasingly easy to think in a digital world, with the investments the church has made into streaming, that you can have the article

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itself without the concrete instantiation of the article. A way of grasping at the Form without having the Particular. Reaching over and around your beloved to grab hold of Beauty itself.

But the church, as actually experienced, is never taken directly as the one holy catholic church. It defies digitalization. It’s experienced in concrete, particular churches—real places with architectures and histories, traditions and cultures.

Our local expressions of the church are not denigrated by this doctrine, as if they’re a problem to be solved, but rather upheld and dignified. My local neighborhood parish is part of the “one holy catholic and apostolic church,” wherein exists the communion of saints.

Church, the real church, does not exist in server farms and lines of code.

Think of the most digitally resourced church you know. If the streams go down, that church still exists and functions in a real place. Perhaps it’s important in our day and age to let the titles of Paul’s letters have their input on our ecclesiology. St. Paul wrote to the church “in Ephesus” and “in Rome” and “in Corinth.”

St. John wrote the circular letter of Revelation with individual, local congregations in mind—congregations he knew and could encourage, rebuke, and pray for. And it’s just this local, rooted, physical expression of the communion of saints that might offer a salve for people in the digital age.

There’s no bifurcation in the church. We are whole people and whole sinners at that. In my church, we begin every service with the Collect for Purity: Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Church, the real church, does not exist in server farms and lines of code. . . .

And it’s just this local, rooted, physical expression of the communion of saints that might offer a salve for people in the digital age.

The church consists of human beings who are fully and completely known and laid bare before God. He doesn’t care about our image or social clout. We stand together before the cross without our reputation or supposed virtue meaning much of anything. Rich lawyers serve as ushers alongside middle-school teachers, retired judges sing in the choir with stay-at-home parents, and ministers kneel and confess their sin along with everyone else. We are wholly known, just as we are; and through this knowledge, we come to know others just as they are.

We also can’t cultivate the church to be exactly what we want. We often try, though. We bounce from church to church, we get on to sessions, elder boards, and vestries, with the hope that we can shape the church into the image we want of it. But churches always have a knack for resisting this kind of alteration. Try as we might, we just can’t quite get rid of everything we don’t want. That one car in the parking lot with the political bumper sticker we despise is still there every Sunday morning. That minister, who you swore would be better than the previous one you ran out of town, is now perpetrating the frustrating crime of telling you what he really thinks, again. They continue to sing that hymn or praise song you despise that’s borderline heretical.

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Whatever it might be, and for all its faults and flaws, the local church is a place where you bump up against a truly uncomfortable fact: you are not God. You are a creature among many creatures, called into loving relationships with those different from you. Much more, you are called to the table to eat with them, to share the Lord’s Supper at the same communion rail together. The communion of saints is not a doctrine that exists in the abstract; it’s altogether real, held closely by faith along all kinds of polarities and differences that attempt to pull us apart.

It’s the community of faithful sinners who have been called out of darkness by a merciful and compassionate God. A God who did not remain in the abstract, “digital” world where we might be able to craft him however we want, cultivate him to be exactly what we think he should be, love the people we love and hate the people we hate. We are called into relationship with a God who became flesh and blood, who walked the earth gathering followers from those broken by demands of the law, who healed the bodies of the sick and lame, and who spoke tenderly to the deaf and the dead. Jesus formed his church not to be another product in the marketplace, but a present community of faith, rooted and localized in almost every street corner in the world, where children are baptized with water, prayers are offered in native languages, bread and wine are received, real sinners are prayed over and forgiven, and the dead are buried in hope of the resurrection.

All these are physical manifestations of the spiritual reality of the communion of saints around the throne room of God—the very real place in heaven where the dead are welcomed, prayers are heard, and sinners are invited to truly “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

In other words, the future of the church must be a return to seeing people not first and foremost as attenders, consumers, or demographic projections, but as neighbors. This leads us to ask, like the scribes thousands of years ago, “Who is my neighbor?” To which Jesus still responds as he did in the parable of the good Samaritan: our neighbors are the people right in front of us; our neighbors exist in our neighborhood.

Our calling as Christians is to minister in specific, local contexts, not primarily “out there” in the digital world. Insofar as the digital world helps us to connect better to the actual world, then it’s a good and useful tool. But the goal should always be to connect people to their local community or neighborhood church, to bring back the parish in our parishioners. Because it’s in the church that we find rest from the exhaustion of living in a digital age.

Jared L. Jones (MDiv, Reformed Theological Seminary) is an Episcopal minister currently serving as

associate rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Winter Park, Florida.

1.

“How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy from Big Data,” Mashable (April 20, 2014), https://mashable.com/archive/ big-data-pregnancy.

2.

“AI-powered Church Service in Germany Draws a Large Crowd,” arsTechnica (June 12, 2023), https://arstechnica .com/information-technology/2023/06/chatgpt-takes-the -pulpit-ai-leads-experimental-church-service-in-germany/.

The future of the church must be a return to seeing people not first and foremost as attenders, consumers, or demographic projections, but as neighbors.

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B I B L E ST U DY

Something Beautiful: More Than Conquerors

by J. D.“Skip” Dusenbury

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Rom. 8:35–39) “LORD, DON’T YOU CARE?!” The Gospels record two occasions when some of Jesus’ closest disciples posed that question to him (Mark 4:38; Luke 10:40).

In the book of Job and in the Psalms, others pose the same question to the Lord many times and in different ways. How about you? Have you ever cried out to Jesus, wondering if he cares? Perhaps you turned to him in the midst of your own terrible storm when help seemed nowhere to be found. Some of you might be there right now. In the midst of trials, especially long-lasting ones, we can begin to feel that God is ignoring us—or worse still, has simply stopped caring about us and our suffering at all.

In this essay, I want to meditate together on God’s good news for all suffering believers, good news the whole church confesses at the very heart of our creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ . . . who suffered.”

***

Suffering Looms Large in Human Experience In June, we saw in the news that the submersible Titan imploded, killing all on board, hundreds of largely Afghani and Pakistani asylum seekers drowned when their overloaded fishing boat sank en route from Libya to Italy, and several American towns were devastated by tornadoes. One of the Titan’s passengers was a billionaire (the tour cost $250,000 per person), while the asylum seekers were doubtless at the other end of the economic spectrum, and the tornado victims were likely somewhere in between. Notwithstanding their varied nationalities, economic status, and personal differences, all

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these people shared in the reality of human suffering, as did their friends and loved ones.

Their stories were prominent in the media at the time, but the same subjection to suffering takes place to a less acute degree for everyone, everywhere.

We live in a world where beauty, goodness, and joy abound. Yet despite our best efforts (and sometimes by means of our worst efforts), ugliness and pain are part of life in this fallen world. Suffering’s nature, extent, and intensity vary greatly, and people respond to it differently; but sooner or later, suffering looms large in every human life. ***

Suffering’s Centrality to the Christian Faith and Its Gospel Message Given suffering’s presence and prominence in human life as a universal problem, it may come as a surprise to find it prominent in the Christian faith as God’s universal solution. This is reflected in both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds where the word suffered appears centrally in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion “under Pontius Pilate.” That one word contains a glorious fact: by virtue of the two natures united in Christ’s Person, the impassible God submitted to unfathomable suffering and overcame it so that he might free us, suffering’s deserving subjects, from an eternity of suffering. In the gospel, God doesn’t ignore or run away from the reality of suffering. He solves our problem by taking it upon himself.

The various Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican confessions and catechisms echo and expand on this creedal confession of Jesus’ suffering. For example, in his Shorter Catechism, Luther explains this article in the creed this way: I believe that Jesus Christ . . . has redeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil; not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death, that I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, just as He is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.

1

The Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 37) focuses on the word suffered: What do you understand by the word “suffered”?

That . . . Christ sustained in body and soul the anger of God against the sin of the whole human race. This He did in order that, by his suffering as the only atoning sacrifice, he might set us free, body and soul from eternal condemnation, and gain for us God’s grace, righteousness, and eternal life.

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In the gospel, God doesn’t ignore or run away from the reality of suffering. He solves our problem by taking it upon himself.

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The Anglican catechism contained in the Book of Common Prayer (first edition) is briefer on this point, but it still underscores the personal and cosmic significance of the redemptive purpose of Christ’s suffering: What dost thou chiefly learn in these Articles of thy Belief? . . .

[I believe] in God the Son, who hath redeemed me, and all mankind.

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***

Suffering Is an Inevitable Part of the Life of Faith That suffering is part of the life of faith should not surprise or discourage us because of who we are called to believe in and follow as disciples, the One who “was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief ” (Isa. 53:3). Indeed, Paul made the intimate connection between following Christ and suffering clear earlier in Romans 8, and in so doing simply reflected the plain teaching of Christ and the rest of the New Testament: The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. (Rom. 8:16–17) “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matt. 16:24) For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. . . . Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. (1 Pet. 2:21; 4:12–13)

Suffering is not an anomaly or evidence of God’s indifference or hostility toward believers, but an ordinary and even necessary part of the life of faith. . . .

God is accomplishing his purposes of grace and glory for us in Christ.

In Romans 8:35, Paul lists a wide range of severe sufferings believers might face, as he himself had done: “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword.” In verse 36, he quotes Psalm 44:22 to show that such sufferings are nothing new for God’s people, “As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’” The psalmist was not suffering because of some sin on his part, but because of his faithfulness to Yahweh: “for your sake.” Think of the “heroes of the faith” in Hebrews 11 who “were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated . . . wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”

Our suffering might be evidence of fatherly discipline—and even that is an expression of love (Heb. 12)—but it might not be. It might, instead, be “the fel-

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lowship of His sufferings”; that is, evidence of our identity with Christ whom the world and its evil ruler hate (John 15:16, 18–19). In either case, the Bible’s point is that suffering is not an anomaly or evidence of God’s indifference or hostility toward believers, but an ordinary and even necessary part of the life of faith.

Through that suffering, God is accomplishing his purposes of grace and glory for us in Christ. ***

Believers Overwhelmingly Conquer in and through Our Sufferings Romans 8:37 is even shorter in Greek than in English, but for all its terseness, it’s altogether glorious: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” The Greek for “more than conquerors” is one word: literally, “hyper-victors” or as F. F. Bruce translates it, “super-conquerors.” Notice, too, that there are no exceptions to the rule. “In all these things”—even in the worst of our struggles, we’re completely victorious. This victory is not achieved or obtained in or by our own strength but “through Him who loved us.” Paul mentions the Spirit twenty times in this chapter’s thirty-nine verses, where God’s many names and descriptions underscore the richness of his ministry to us and our unbreakable union with Christ through him.

By means of our union with Christ and the ministry of his Spirit, believers overwhelmingly conquer in and through our sufferings in at least three wonderful ways highlighted by Romans 8. First, we’re wonderfully sustained in the midst of our sufferings. For instance, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness” (v. 26). While this verse mentions the Spirit’s ministry to us in prayer, many other testimonies make clear the breadth and richness of the Spirit’s work in upholding us in our suffering (Isa. 40:31; 41:10; Rom. 5:3–5; 2 Cor. 12:9–10, just to cite a few).

Second, we’re not only sustained in and through our sufferings, but we’re also surprisingly blessed by means of them. That’s the point of the justly famous verse 28: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” This verse is unfortunately too often divorced from the next that describes the specific “purpose” and the “good” toward which God is working: his glory in the Son’s exaltation among a vast host of redeemed sons and daughters who reflect his lovely image. Our conformity to that image is the great purpose and good to which the Lord is orchestrating even our worst sufferings.

And third, we hyper-triumph in our sufferings in that we’ll eventually be completely delivered from them and all their sources will be utterly vanquished and destroyed while we are exalted and blessed forever: 4

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set

Our conformity to that image is the great purpose and good to which the Lord is orchestrating even our worst sufferings.

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free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Rom. 8:18–21)

No matter what we’re going through, we can confess with the universal church that “Jesus Christ suffered.” Our calling is to remember and believe it, rejoice in it, and claim its reality for ourselves, even when it’s hard—especially when it’s hard!

All these promises are contained in the creeds’ wonderful confession that Jesus Christ “suffered.” Because he was forsaken for a time (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!”) yet not abandoned in the grave, neither shall we ever be. And not only did Jesus take upon himself the suffering that we deserved, but by his grace, we partake of the blessing that he deserves. So, any forsakenness or abandonment we experience is only apparent and temporary. Because he suffered, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).

Surely, besides being the rock-solid object of our faith and hope, these promises are abundant reasons for wonder, love, and praise as we consider the Son’s love for us and his past and present ministry to us, not to mention the richness of the Spirit’s work as well. There is also an additional challenge for us to constantly trust and rest in the reality of these great facts, especially when we’re in the midst of terrible trials. Our circumstances and feelings don’t dictate or change God’s truth. No matter what we’re going through, we can confess with the universal church that “Jesus Christ suffered.” Our calling is to remember and believe it, rejoice in it, and claim its reality for ourselves, even when it’s hard—especially when it’s hard! His grace can and will sustain us in our trials. We can know God better and become more like him through them. They can equip us to minister to others. And in his perfect timing, we will be delivered from them forever. ***

God’s Love in Our Suffering and Triumphant Savior Is Our Ultimate Hope While he was dying, Hugh Kennedy, an eminent Scottish Christian, called for a Bible. Since his sight was gone, he said to his children gathered around the bed, “Turn me to the eighty of the Romans, and set my finger at these words, I am persuaded that neither death nor life, etc.” Now, said he, “is my finger upon them?”

And, when they told him it was, without speaking any more, he said, “Now, God be with you, my children; I have breakfasted with you, and shall sup with my Lord Jesus Christ this night;” and so departed.

5

The Christian faith and its gospel of a suffering and triumphant Savior are the Creator’s gracious response to suffering’s root cause: sin and its corruption.

While we still groan under the weight of suffering, he promises not only to comfort us in it but to completely eradicate it upon the renewal of his good world, when “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

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Wherever we may be when our time comes, may Hugh Kennedy’s experience be ours as well—if not in our beds with our fingers on these verses of Romans 8, then with them in the forefront of our minds and hearts. And may we not only die that way but also live that way—and suffer as “more than conquerors, through Him who loved us,” rejoicing in the absolute certainty that nothing “in all creation” will ever be able to separate us “from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a retired pastor who continues

serving the Lord and his church through preaching, teaching, and writing.

Martin Luther, “The Creed,” Luther’s Small Catechism, https:// catechism.cph.org/en/creed.html.

2. Ecumenical Creeds and Reformed Confessions (Grand Rapids: Board of Publications of the Christian Reformed Church, 1979), 21.

3. “A Catechism,” The Church of England, https://www .churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts -and-resources/book-common-prayer/catechism.

1.

F. F. Bruce, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 181.

5. “Matthew Henry’s Commentary—Verses 31–39,” BibleGateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/ matthew-henry/Rom.8.31-Rom.8.39.

4.

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The Christian faith and its gospel of a suffering and triumphant Savior are the Creator’s gracious response to suffering’s root cause: sin and its corruption.

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POEM

In Between

by Herbert H. Vann, Sr.

’Til the dawning of the day be night And all God’s glory comes to light ’Til the sun and moon shine no more Before all things are finally restored Sin still shadows the earth as slums The measure of evil meanders unmoored Though the kingdom has come And redemption has been scored Dwelling in the already but not yet On the precipice of two worlds Free, still shackled in flesh and regret Citizens of the new heaven unfurled As sin-possessed, but reborn Broken in death now living in hope Full of thanksgiving and joy, yet mourn Harnessed, balancing over fire on a tightrope Called and placed into an eternal kingdom To worship the Lord with the heavenly hosts Rebels rejecting the sovereign with depraved dictums Still forgiven and saved to the uttermost All things are being restored for Triune glory The cosmos, Word, and history tell the story Eventual paradise realizes the death of sin Between the beginning and the end.

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Book Reviews

The Rule of Faith and the Nomina Sacra: A Brief Bibliography

by Tomas Bokedal

SCHOLARLY RESEARCH on the rule of faith has em-

phasized three essential, closely related functions for the rule in the early church:

• It shaped faithful Bible reading by ensuring the

Christian community understood the Scriptures as a unified whole, with the Old Testament pointing to the New and the New fulfilling the Old. • It summarized the true faith for those baptized and discipled in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

• It grounded the foundation and boundaries of Christian belief in the revealed teachings of Christ passed down through his authorized apostles.

One important takeaway is that the rule of faith and Scripture were seen by the early church fathers (to use German theologian Karlmann Beyschlag’s phrasing) as “two sides of one and the same norm.” The rule of faith isn’t something the church invented to force an orthodox interpretation of the Bible. Rather, the rule is something the Spirit has given the church in the Bible itself so that we may interpret it in an orthodox way. Irenaeus famously compared the words of the Bible to the pieces of a mosaic, where the rule of faith is the key given with the mosaic to show how the pieces fit together to assemble a beautiful picture of our

king. Heretics may assemble the same mosaic pieces, but they put them together in unfaithful ways—ignoring the rule—which results in a poor counterfeit image resembling a dog or a fox (Against Heresies, I, 9.4). Indeed, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria taught that the church’s rule of faith originated directly with Christ himself (Prescription against Heretics 13; 21; 37; Apology 47; Clem. Stromata VII, 16.95).

My own research builds on this foundation, focusing on how we can more deeply appreciate the history and significance of the rule of faith in light of the nomina sacra. The nomina sacra or “sacred names” are contracted forms of key biblical and theological terms that occur in basically all our Greek manuscripts, even the earliest copies— especially the words God, Father, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Son, and Spirit. These nomina sacra visually reveal the connections between the Old and New Testaments, not just in substance but in the very words and storyline they trace. The nomina sacra also draw attention to the core tenets of faith in the Triune God—and they help to demonstrate that this faith isn’t added to apostolic teaching but is given in the very teachings of the apostles themselves as their words have been handed down through the centuries.

There’s much more fruitful research to be done in this area, but the special treatment of these key names and titles (and a few other nomina sacra closely associated with Christ’s work of salvation) argues powerfully for the inseparabil-

Examples of four key nomina sacra, along with the full Greek word and its English translation

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ity of the Christian rule of faith from the biblical, trinitarian, and apostolic character of that faith.

Following is a short list of some of that research.

• Armstrong, Jonathan J. “From the κανὼν

τῆς ἀληθείας to the κανὼν τῶν γραφῶν: γραφῶν The Rule of Faith and the New Testament Canon,” in Tradition & the Rule of Faith in the Early Church: Essays in Honor of Joseph T. Lienhard. S.J. Edited by R. Rombs and A. Hwang. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010.

• Bokedal, Tomas. Christ the Center: How the Rule of Faith, the Nomina Sacra, and Numer-

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ical Patterns Shape the Canon. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2023.

• ———. The Formation and Significance of the Christian Biblical Canon: A Study in Text, Ritual and Interpretation. Pages 83–123.

London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014.

• ———. “Why Is the New Testament Called ‘New Testament’?” Pages 119–48 in Scripture and Theology: Historical and Systematic Perspectives. Edited by T. Bokedal, L. Jansen, and M. Borowski. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.

• Edwards, Mark. Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church. Farnam, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009.

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• Hurtado, Larry W. The Earliest Christian

Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Pages 95–154. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.

• Lawson, John. The Biblical Theology of St. Irenaeus. London: Epworth Press, 1948.

• Lietzmann, Hans. A History of the Early Church. Vol. 1. 1951. Repr., Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1993.

• Wall, Robert. “Reading the Bible from within Our Traditions.” Pages 88–107 in Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology. Edited by J. B. Green and M. Turner.

Grand Rapid: Eerdmans, 2000.

• Young, Frances. “Christian Teaching.”

Pages 91–104 in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature. Edited by F. Young, L. Ayres, and A. Louth. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2004.

Tomas Bokedal (ThD, Lund University) is associate professor

in New Testament and Early Christianity at NLA University College, Norway, and lecturer in New Testament at King’s College, University of Aberdeen, UK. Bokedal’s primary fields of research concern Christian origins and the relation of Scripture and theology.

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The Nicene Creed: An Introduction

by Phillip Cary LEXHAM PRESS | 2023 | 248 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $19.99

THE UPCOMING seventeen-hundredth anniver-

sary of the Council of Nicaea in 2025 gives us an incentive to learn more about that pivotal time in history and the creed that came of it. To this end, one can scarcely find a more accessible source than Phillip Cary’s new book, The Nicene Creed: An Introduction.

It’s a remarkable book in many ways. Before even opening its pages, I was impressed by its beauty. The publisher has not skimped on aesthetics, and a gilded pattern on both front and back covers moves on to fill the inside cover. The book is relatively small (five by eight inches), easy to handle, with comfortable print, inviting even the most timid of readers. The greatest feature of the book, however, is clearly the text. With his previous books and lectures, Cary has justly earned a reputation for clarity. Gathering from his experience in teaching university students, he has learned to address both spoken and unspoken questions, covering challenging theological concepts with simplicity and ease. Some of these questions include “Who created God?” and “Did God create the devil?” (32–33).

In fact, Cary assumes that most of his readers will be ordinary Christians who are “familiar with the Bible but not necessarily with the traditions of Christian theology” (11). This is an audience he brilliantly addressed in his first popular book, Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do. But his aim, Cary clarifies, is not to simply increase his readers’ knowledge and vocabulary. It is, as he says, “Getting our ears more fully tuned to hear these words gets us more deeply immersed in the richness of Christian worship” (11). He ad-

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mits, however, that he will be “very happy if this book serves some readers as a gateway to theological studies” (12).

The book starts with a bang as he writes, “The Nicene Creed originated because ancient Christians were appalled” (1). Some authors have used nuanced approaches to the history of the creed, explaining Arius’s motives and letting the readers draw their own conclusions. But this is not Cary’s aim. He is convinced that the faith articulated at the Council of Nicaea is essential to Christianity.

That opening sentence thrusts the reader into the animated controversies of the fourth century.

“They had a good reason to be appalled,” Cary explains. “To say ‘there was once when [Jesus] was not’ . . . would mean that he is not really God at all, but one of the things God made. To say this would be to say that what Christians have been doing all along, worshiping Jesus as Lord, is the sort of thing pagans do: worshiping something that is not fully, truly, ultimately God” (1–2). After communicating this urgency, Cary takes the reader through a brief history of the creed and then through a careful, line-by-line reading, including semantical explanations in order to give access to the words’ layers of meaning.

Given that there are several translations of the creed in circulation, Cary provides his own, being careful in the attempt “to stay as close as possible to the original Greek” and explaining any contrasting word choices. As a translator and lover of languages, I was particularly intrigued by these explanations. For example, I was surprised to learn that the Greek version of the creed gives credit to Mary’s participation by stating that Jesus “was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and [kai] the Virgin Mary” (or, more precisely, “Mary the Virgin”). Most English translations, I find, follow the Latin, which distinguishes the two interventions by using different prepositions (“by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary”). Curiously, the Italian, Spanish, and French translations go further in their distinction, separating the sentence into two and adding words. (I was also surprised to see

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that the Italian version translates “died” instead of “suffered,” a choice that seems to miss the full richness Cary uncovers in his exposition.)

The book includes a five-page excursus, which Cary defines as “a quick dive into Trinitarian terminology outside of the Creed for those who wish to study further” (93), along with a simpler presentation of the Trinity in the epilogue. The book then concludes with notes and subject and Scripture indexes.

But this is not primarily a history account or a word-by-word commentary. At the start, Cary states a theme he is faithful to keep to the end: “This book is not about a heresy but about the truth: the gospel of Jesus Christ taught by the Creed that grew out of the faith of Nicaea” (3).

Cary repeatedly reminds his readers that “the Nicene Creed is a summary of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” It is so because “it is not telling us what to do but telling us what God has done for us and our salvation—all the things we cannot do to save ourselves, transform our lives, and make ourselves good Christians, for they are things that only God can do” (12).

As such, “the Nicene Creed is a blessing and a joy,” a joy Cary communicates with enthusiasm

and that becomes a primary motivation for his writing: “It brings me great joy, and I wanted to make that joy accessible to those who may be unfamiliar with it.” Cary’s passion in exploring this gospel is evident. Mirroring the careful and wise economy of words of the creed, he manages to highlight important features such as a theology of the cross and a balance between the “already” and the “not yet” with admirable fairness, leaving the reader satisfied and yet hungry for more.

Cary’s The Nicene Creed can be read in a day or savored for months—and both approaches have their benefits. The large number of quoted or referenced Scriptures makes this an excellent tool for a Bible study for both new and seasoned Christians. In any case, readers can expect to gain a fresh and richer appreciation of the creed they most likely recite in church and of the gospel the creed expresses.

Simonetta Carr is the author of numerous books, includ-

ing Broken Pieces and the God Who Mends Them: Schizophrenia through a Mother’s Eyes (P&R), and the Christian Biographies for Young Readers series (Reformation Heritage Books).

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The Rule of Faith Isn’t Western

by Michael Horton were barely making inroads among Northern and Western European tribes.

Especially through my interactions with Christians from Asia, Africa, India, and the Middle East through our Theo Global conferences, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the collective memory of Western Christians, like me, is short. I vividly recall gathering for a group picture in Istanbul at the Hagia Irene, where the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed received its finishing touches in 381. It reminded us all that our Christian story, woven around this shared “rule of faith,” is much older and broader than so many of us assume. This is not in any way to diminish the significance of the modern missionary movement; it’s to affirm that being catholic and evangelical today requires an appreciation for the diverse voices that have propagated it from the beginning. Catholic, after all, means universal.

When Asian and African Christians bear witness to this evangelical catholicity, they neither adopt wholesale nor reject Western developments of Christian faith and practice. And as Western Christians, we need to listen to these brothers and sisters committed to a rule of faith that came to the West rather than invented here. The global church has its own stories to bring to the family reunion, both ancient and contemporary, to receive important legacies of Western Christianity and enrich the whole body of Christ in our day—a body most diverse in character but sharing one and the same faith.

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CHRISTIANS IN THE WEST often assume that

missionaries from Britain and the United States were the first to bring the gospel to Asia and Africa. Within this broad assumption, we tend to make either of two false choices: some of us risk throwing out the baby of essential Christian faith and practice with the bathwater of Western prejudice, while others pursue contextualization while slipping into relativism and syncretism. But the actual history of the church points to a third way that’s sensitive to regional diversity as well as to unity, as Jude 1:3 says, in “the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.”

(Jude, let us recall, was Jewish.)

Here’s the real story: Christianity emerged in the Middle East but spread quickly, not only to the Southern fringes of Mediterranean Europe but also to Central Asia, Africa, and India, beginning with the apostles. Mark went to Egypt, for example, and Thomas to India.

Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity officially in 301. About a decade, later the Christian apologist Arnobius could celebrate that the gospel “has subdued the fires of passion, and caused races and peoples and nations most diverse in character to hasten with one accord to accept the same faith . . . in all islands and provinces on which the rising and setting sun shines.” A wide door was opened in China by Emperor Taizong in the seventh century when he embraced Christ through an Assyrian missionary, Alopen, who gave him the Scriptures.

During roughly the same period, missionaries 1

Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, vol. 1, ed. Angelo Di Berardino (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014), 500–01.

2. See John C. Lamoreaux, trans., Theodore Abū Qurrah, The Library of the Christian East (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), vii.

1.

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“BUT THE SAINTS OF THE MOST HIGH SHALL RECEIVE

LEADER’S EDITION

Unt ipsam re maion nati consequae. Italics look like this Nequid molo te parum faccum dipsunt pa seditatibea corro ipsaped maiorerepedi undaes dolorae as rerfererunt, vel in pa et fugit, quo eaquoditate volupta quiatquamet omnim cullo beratum est, vero idunditios dem qui odipiderit eos modit volupta tquaspe liquunt la apellam, corro et volores susdae. Nam, aut que core, que volor atatiur ra aut voles et imiliberro Lori dolorat equist,quis ut et et volorem verovita none pelique que di rem eost, ommodi alicipsum et magnatem hit laceperia vellitempores quo volorem repelendunt pre demporepe volupta spelesc ilist, que nonsequae dendis prorem lam num que simporrovit adi omnimpos a dolendant, ut experumtenima aut renisi dolorio eum rerio G E N Evolore SIS → Leader's Edition ruptatate aboribus doloreped molestore sim erioasexmolorer eum voluptatur autparuptatem ullor sitatae.rem Offic te od qui nonsequam rehenis assum recumquat et,dolum eossus, offici non eos quas pa nos ilitempor simet a nonse quam ipsapis niae pa quaessit autpos velique nus issecatqui sint.

Daniel

On esequi acipsame sus des natiusda am quiberia perum, sed quaeperibus ventin et pa ipsumqui bearita turehent quunt es exeraec estrument.Um ipsapitio. Ut fugia pos maio eos ma cor acit dolore velic totatiorrum iumqui nullest inciet voloria exceat.Itatque re nonetur? Mus apid quodi rem aut ad qui dolut et res sum, vendign imaioru mquasperum dolupiciet maiore vit, cus explita con es amust molum eicatur sincte vellit mi, ea nos ni od ut quam velibea volesciet fuga. Ut ma con none volupti oreseri atibea et etur?

THE KINGDOM AND POSSESS

Need at Least a three line Headline to go Here Daniel 7:18

THE KINGDOM FOREVER, FOREVER, AND EVER.”

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Offic te od qui nonsequam rehenis assum $19.95 offici non pos eos quas pa nos ilitempor simet a nonse quam recumquat ipsapis niaeet, paeossus, dolum quaessit aut velique nus issecatqui sint. vendam, ut omnihitis ut molorestrum everum fugit ut ut ea cus, ut odisqui tem volor On esequi acipsame sus des natiusda am quiberia perum, sed quaeperibus ventin soluptiamet magnimu scimagn imentorum volupid modigenis aut eaquidis placcum et pa ipsumqui bearita turehent quunt es exeraec estrument.Um ipsapitio. Ut sinihicat apid minisqui qui officius eate nis rent ipsae prepe ea quat aut velit qui fugia pos maio eos ma cor acit dolore velic totatiorrum iumqui nullest inciet voloria aliti ipic tem ressim aut ut erunte eaquo in eatur maio is plaborem nobist aspelibus exceat.Itatque re nonetur? Mus apid quodi rem aut ad qui dolut et res sum, vendign eum rehent vent, optat. imaioru mquasperum dolupiciet maiore vit, cus explita con es amust molum eicatur Design and Creative Direction by Metaleap Creative sincte mi, cus ea nos ni od quam velibea volesciet fuga. Ut ma con none volupti Cover Illustration by Peter Voth NAME OF AUTHOR HERE ur sam fugiavellit quo ium ea vid maut doloreped quatem oreseri etipsaped etur? que odit autem dipiet quodio. Ratem simagnate rem sequam, cuscitatibea rem qui quae con perum quiaspe llacepe liquas mo mi, quasper rorest, seces ne dus est, omnis Unt ipsam re maion nati consequae. Italics look like this Nequid molo te parum faccum a dolessint es aut lam illandis ium dolut arunt assitat iorrum ea destiusam andisit re dipsunt pa seditatibea corro ipsaped maiorerepedi undaes dolorae as rerfererunt, vel nullab illicia vel magnim que eatur? in pa et fugit, quo eaquoditate volupta quiatquamet omnim cullo beratum est, vero idunditios dem qui odipiderit eos modit volupta tquaspe liquunt la apellam, corro et volores susdae. Nam, aut que core, que volor atatiur ra aut voles et imiliberro ommodi alicipsum et magnatem hit laceperia vellit quo volorem quis repelendunt adi omnimpos a dolendant, ut experum nima demporepe aut renisi dolorio eum rerio aboribus doloreped molestore sim erio ex eum voluptatur aut ullor sitatae. Offic te pa nos ilitempor simet a nonse quam ipsapis niae pa dolum quaessit aut velique nus vendam, ut omnihitis ut molorestrum everum fugit ut ut ea cus, ut odisqui tem volor soluptiamet magnimu scimagn imentorum volupid modigenis aut eaquidis placcum sinihicat apid minisqui qui officius eate nis rent ipsae prepe ea quat aut velit qui aliti ipic tem ressim aut ut erunte eaquo in eatur maio is plaborem nobist aspelibus eum rehent vent, optat.

LEADER’S EDITION

Genesis

vendam, ut omnihitis ut molorestrum everum fugit ut ut ea cus, ut odisqui tem volor On esequi acipsame sus des natiusda am quiberia perum, sed quaeperibus ventin soluptiamet magnimu scimagn imentorum volupid modigenis aut eaquidis placcum et pa ipsumqui bearita turehent quunt es exeraec estrument.Um ipsapitio. Ut sinihicat apid minisqui qui officius eate nis rent ipsae prepe ea quat aut velit qui fugia pos maio eos ma cor acit dolore velic totatiorrum iumqui nullest inciet voloria aliti ipic tem ressim aut ut erunte eaquo in eatur maio is plaborem nobist aspelibus exceat.Itatque re nonetur? Mus apid quodi rem aut ad qui dolut et res sum, vendign eum rehent vent, optat. imaioru mquasperum dolupiciet maiore vit, cus explita con es amust molum eicatur vellit mi,cus eaea nos oddoloreped ut quam velibea NAME OF AUTHOR HERE ur samsincte fugia quo ium vidnima quatemvolesciet fuga. Ut ma con none volupti oreseri atibea et etur? quodio. Ratem simagnate rem sequam, cuscit rem qui ipsaped que odit autem dipiet quae con perum quiaspe llacepe liquas mo quasper rorest, ne dusItalics est, omnis Untmi, ipsam re maion natiseces consequae. look like this Nequid molo te parum faccum a dolessint es aut lam illandis ium dolutdipsunt arunt assitat iorrum ea destiusam re pa seditatibea corro ipsapedandisit maiorerepedi undaes dolorae as rerfererunt, vel nullab illicia vel magnim que eatur? in pa et fugit, quo eaquoditate volupta quiatquamet omnim cullo beratum est, vero

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The Gospel of Luke HERE. QUOTE GOES HERE

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Genesis ##:##

$19.95

Daniel

Name of Author

Design and Creative Direction by Metaleap Creative Cover Illustration by Peter Voth

NAME OF AUTHOR HERE ur sam fugia quo ium cus ea vid ma doloreped quatem quodio. Ratem simagnate rem sequam, cuscit rem qui ipsaped que odit autem dipiet quae con perum quiaspe llacepe liquas mo mi, quasper rorest, seces ne dus est, omnis a dolessint es aut lam illandis ium dolut arunt assitat iorrum ea destiusam andisit re nullab illicia vel magnim que eatur?

$19.95

Genesis

Author Name Here

Design and Creative Direction by Metaleap Creative Cover Illustration by Peter Voth

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