why-does-matter-matter-may-june-1998

Why Does Matter Matter?

Why Does Matter Matter?

FEATURES 5 Why Sacred Space Matters Michael S. Horton God meets his covenantal people every Sabbath in an actual place. In that place, there is no room for either materialism or spiritualism.

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13 The Word Made Flesh: The Liturgy of Word and Sacrament Ronald Feuerhahn “The Word became flesh and ‘pitched his tent’ among us.” Do we understand how God continues to “tabernacle” among us today?

18 Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield on Science, the Bible, Evolution, and Darwinism Mark Noll While coming to different conclusions about evolution, these leading Princeton intellectuals shared the commitment that the Bible will not contradict scientific developments.

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23 Jars of Clay or Chips of Silicon?

Douglas Groothuis Gnostic groups have always sought the disembodied state. Might cyberspace present some similar dangers?

28 Justified by the Resurrection: A Reformation Insight for Today Paul F. M. Zahl Paul proclaims that Jesus was “raised for our justification”—a justification which relates to not only the past, but also the present and future.

32 Theologians and Utilitarians: Historical Context for the “Distance Learning” Debate

DEPARTMENTS 2 In This Issue…

3 Letters 16 Quotes

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31 In Print 45 Endnotes 48 On My Mind

Benjamin Sasse Many today argue as if learning is great, but “going to school” is not. But isn’t the distance from the world which enables reflection on the content studied part of what “schooling” is?

39 History & Faith J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) “Without history, there can be no Gospel.”

EFORMATION

IN THIS ISSUE…

By Michael Horton

Production Editor Irene H. Hetherington

“Thank God for hard stones; thank God for hard facts; thank God for thorns and rocks and deserts and long years. At least I know now that I am not the best or strongest thing in the world. At least I know now that I have not dreamed everything.” — G. K. Chesterton1 hat on earth (literally!) could privilege thorns, rocks, deserts, and long years? After all, we live in a time and place that ranks such qualia of slight importance (perhaps even something of a threat) in the face of other values. One such value is convenience. Rose bushes without thorns? Plastics technology has made the dream possible. The appearance of rock or stone construction without the expense, weight, and labor of the real thing? Hollow resemblances may be ordered for practically any structure within a week. And as for deserts, I live in the part of California that recent writers have called a “Cadillac desert.” Though semi-arid desert, the southern half of my state remains quite unwilling to accept the verdict of Mother Nature. Fed by enormous reservoirs and labyrinthine aqueducts descending from the more naturally fruitful upper half of the state, there is very little left of the indigenous horticulture.

So, as you might expect, Chesterton’s line is particularly striking to those of us who are heirs of the suburban squalor that passes for prosperity in modern, industrialized (and computerized) nations. Prefabricated extravagance: Pink stucco grandeur aping a strange confluence of styles, massive colored plastic or glass imitating stained glass windows, spurting fountains which assure us that there is, after all, something natural underneath all of the concrete, even if it is piped in from the kitchen plumbing.

Perhaps I may be taking all of this a bit too seriously. (It wouldn’t be the first time, of course.) But the culture of convenience certainly prejudices us in a “Gnostic” direction. Obviously, I am using Gnosticism here in the most general terms, referring to its basic anti-matter bias. In a culture of convenience, things must be light, soft, and dispensable. So the “real” usually has to go.

As we have considered in past issues of modernREFORMATION, ancient Gnosticism (which emerged in the first few centuries and threatened the very existence of the early church) was characterized by a number of beliefs.2 Despite the varieties, it was essentially committed to the following dualisms, favoring the first in each pair: spirit vs. matter, eternity vs. time, secret revelation vs. public faith, the individualistic vs. the corporate and institutional. That which the New Testament proclaimed as salvation, Gnostics generally regarded as bondage. For most Gnostic sects, history is divided between the dominance of the “Bad God” who created the world and “threw” human spirits into NEXT ISSUE: bodily prisons, and the dominance of the “Good God” who teaches us how to retur n to our Revivalism preincarnate, eternal, divine estate.

Gnostics had no use for such doctrines as:

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Editor-in-Chief Dr. Michael S. Horton Assistant Editor Benjamin E. Sasse

Why Matter Matters

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A publication of Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Copy Editors Ann Henderson Hart Deborah Barackman Layout and Design Lori A. Cook Proofreader Alyson S. Platt Production Assistant Kathryn Spicer Alliance Council Dr. John H. Armstrong The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael S. Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen Dr. J. A. O. Preus Dr. R. C. Sproul Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Contributing Scholars Dr. D. A. Carson Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb Dr. Tremper Longman III The Rev. Donald Matzat Dr. John W. Montgomery Mr. John Muether Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Roger Nicole Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Dr. David P. Scaer Ms. Rachel S. Stahle Dr. David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals © 1998 All rights reserved.

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life.

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LETTERS MONTGOMERY RESPONDS TO NEFF David Neff, Vice President and Executive Editor of Christianity Today, in his defense of his magazine (Letters to the Editor, modernREFORMATION, January/February) makes the point of my article (MR, September/October 1997), to which he was responding, very eloquently: Today’s CT and its current editors prefer journalistic cleverness to substantive truth, theological or otherwise.

Neff says that I got the time of Carl Henry’s departure from CT wrong. Even if that is the case, what does that have to do with the real issue—that “Henry left in disgust” over the cheapening and loss of vision CT was undergoing?

That is a fact, and it was the point being made.

Secondly, I am criticized for commenting on a three year old masthead. But CT did in fact use that “CT Institute” masthead for a significant time and clearly did so to give a scholarly veneer to what had become a nonscholarly journalistic production.

Why doesn’t CT reply to the issues instead of hiding behind the trivia? But isn’t that precisely David Wells’ central critique of today’s CT: It sacrifices theology and truth for cheap, populist victories? It is true that I haven’t seen the CT masthead recently. (My MR article clearly noted that it was a revised version of an article which had earlier appeared in the New Oxford Review. Some of the data in the article goes back three years.) To comment on the current masthead, I would have to read CT regularly. But, with many serious evangelicals, I find today’s CT entirely dispensable. Instead of arguing about trivia, CT should be asking itself why it is dispensable today, when twenty years ago it was our staple diet and a journal of which I was personally proud to be a very active Contributing Editor and Editor-at-Large.

— Prof. John Warwick Montgomery London Having read some of MR’s Letters to the Editor recently, I would like to lay my opinion before your readers with respect to the “fog index” that some folks find in some articles. I have been to no college or university, and am a warehouse worker by trade; therefore, I should be the one to have a “fog problem.” I don’t mean to demean those who have expressed such concerns, but to encourage them to reconsider. We all need to be challenged to stretch our vocabularies

especially in this culture of McEverything: quick and short and simple. For example, reading Puritan literature for the first time seems “foggy” and overly complex, until the vocabulary and ways of expression become more familiar. I suggest that perhaps this might be the case here. I applaud the efforts that go into these articles; I could never write them, and I appreciate being challenged by reading them. They are “roast beef ” for the mind, perhaps? Sign me: “Vulgar Christian.”

— Charlie Wilson Via Internet Far from railing against the diction, syntax, or depth of your magazine’s articles, I rejoice in them. I enjoy learning new words and encountering terminology unfamiliar to me. Correct me if I’m wrong, but becoming familiar with the unfamiliar is commonly called “education,” is it not?

— Mark B. Carson Via Internet Frequently one reads letters in MR from disgruntled readers who are disturbed by what they perceive as a highbrow intellectualism. Although not articulated, perhaps they are leveling the charge that MR is arrogant and “puffed up” in knowledge. Their beef is that your words are too big or long, your material too hard for the average layman to understand, your theology too divisive.

Beware when all men speak well of you; when your magazine reads with the ease of the daily newspaper; when your content is dumbed down to accommodate an imprecise and broad, egalitarian mediocrity; when your theology becomes insipid like tasteless salt.

When pondering such letters, remember that many of us left Christianity Today for a magazine of substance, which challenges us to love God with our minds.

— Jurey Howard Via Fax Let us hear from you! modernREFORMATION: Letters to the Editor 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Fax: (215) 735-5133 ModernRef@aol.com www.remembrancer.com/ace MAY/JUNE 1998

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continued from page 2 creation (considered positive in the biblical account), original sin (since evil was attributable to the material, temporal, and corporate-social-institutional structure of the world), the incarnation (God becoming flesh? That was tantamount to saying that the Good became Evil), the atonement (human blood is salvific?), resurrection (the soul’s escape from the body, not its everlasting “incarceration,” was Gnostic salvation), or the restoration of the material cosmos at the end of time. They certainly didn’t like the church. After all, there was an obsession with public preaching (instead of private revelations), and the physical elements of water, bread, and wine were actually regarded, when consecrated by the Word and prayer, as means of grace. Free spirits, the Gnostics of all ages have chaffed at the notion of corporately binding

creeds, sacraments, and discipline. In brief, they exhibit what theologian Ernst Troeltsch identified as “sectconsciousness” rather than “church-consciousness.”

Christianity rejects Gnosticism, and echoes God’s affirmation of matter: “Behold, it is good.” From the dust of the ground to the confines of time, our God is the Creator. From the Resurrection to the Word and the Sacraments, our God the Redeemer is pleased to use matter to accomplish his purposes. As humans, we seek to understand matter (science) and to build with it (architecture). Matter matters.

In this issue, as we explore some of the benefits and challenges of our material world, we will consider the implications of the biblical orientation in our age—an age which Francis Schaeffer so perceptively dubbed the era of “super-spirituality.”

SAVING FAITH HOW DOES ROME DEFINE IT? William Webster The ECT Accord (Evangelicals and Catholics Together) of 1994 called for the setting aside of doctrinal differences between the Roman Catholic and Evangelical churches, appealing for unity in the fight against the rapid secularization and moral decline engulfing our culture. The appeal was made by writers who believe we all share a common faith and Gospel. But to what extent do Evangelicals and Roman Catholics share a common faith? In fact, do we share a common understanding of the Gospel message?

Recently, the ECT Accord was reformulated. In November 1997, it was represented to both Protestant and Roman Catholic communions under the title, The Gift of Salvation, popularly coined ECT II. Again, the appeal is for unity based on a shared faith and a common gospel message. The problem, however, is one of definition and interpretation. Do we really have a biblical unity on which to base such an appeal? When Rome states that an individual is saved by faith, what does she mean? In this book, Mr. Webster, a former Roman Catholic, documents the official teaching of saving faith from the authoritative Roman Catholic sources.

B-WEB-7 Paperback, $7.50 To order call (800) 956-2644.

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Why Sacred Space Matters MICHAEL S. HORTON As C. S. Lewis’ oft-repeated line has it, “God likes matter. He invented it.” Christianity has always affir med God’s own verdict concerning the work of his hands.

Human work (vocation) was established before the Fall as an expression of the image-bearing status of the Great King’s royal servant.

The principle of flourishing, which God had encoded into the natural world, was also given to humanity: “Be fr uitful and multiply, subduing the earth.” It was not a matter of using, raping, and pillaging the earth, but of taming its lushness and “living off of the land.”

It was not the earth that was Mother, but God who was Father, and he placed it under human supervision.

But, as we know from Genesis 3, human rebellion—the mutiny against the Great King—brought the curse upon the imagebearing race, spilling over into the whole natural order. The lushness of Eden would soon be a wasteland. When God forms a people from Abraham’s aged loins and Sarah’s barren womb, liberating them from Egypt and bringing them through the wilderness into the Promised Land, he again made his dwelling on earth. Once more, his heavenly kingdom was reproduced in miniature in an earthly Paradise, with the temple of God’s presence in the midst of his people. This whole arrangement was a type or shadow of the everlasting kingdom. In that day, there will be no boundaries, as the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. It will be a new creation.

If anything, the Jew would have been tempted (and was, in fact) to miss the heavenly purpose of God in the earthly shadows, but our tendency often lies at the opposite extreme, for our Western thought-forms are more Greek than biblical. Creation “in the beginning” is often a sort of preface to the fall and redemption. And the consummation “on the last day” is often an afterword. Even in the middle, MAY/JUNE 1998

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we often either “spiritualize” the reality of a “heaven on earth” or insist upon ushering in the everlasting kingdom of righteousness ourselves. How often is sinfulness identified with the body in Christian circles? And yet, it is the body as much as the soul which God created and redeemed, which participates in worship and sanctification, and which will be raised forever on the last day.

Obviously, if one emphasizes the way of salvation as the ascent of the spirit, transcending the bodily, historical, institutional, and social dimensions of existence, the best route is to escape as much as possible from the world. Monastic spirituality, though rarely as crudely antimaterial as the Gnostics, represents an antithesis to the spirituality which pronounced the creation “good,” commissioned secular vocations, and issued the command to be fr uitful and to multiply. As Paul complained of the proto-Gnostics of his day, the forbidding of mar riage is a sharp contrast to the “earthy” piety of the Bible.

But there are more insidious challenges to the biblical doctrine of creation. Often, for instance, Christians believe that they must justify not only secular callings by a “spiritual” cash-value; they must also “Christianize” culture. The assumption here is that the creation is not good. But, in fact, it is not the creation which is bad, but we who have rebelled against the Creator, subjecting the creation to frustration (Rom. 8).

The Christian inherits two commissions. In the first birth, the believer becomes an heir of the “cultural mandate,” the creation-commission to subdue the earth, settle the pioneers of God’s earthly city, and protect the garden-city from the entrance of the evil one. But since God’s kingdom is no longer identified with Eden, and ever since Cain began building his city “east of Eden,” human civilization has emerged as a secular enterprise under God’s common grace. Thus, the cultural mandate which all human beings inherit as God’s image-bearers pertains to the command to be fruitful and to multiply.

This includes secular callings, as well as the institutions of the home, neighborhood, society, and civilization. In

the second birth, the believer becomes an heir of a second commission: the Great Commission. In this Commission, “subduing the ear th” per tains to redemption rather than to secular callings or institutions of creation. It is not by instituting Christian legislation or electing Christian officials that we fulfill this commission, but by going into all nations teaching, baptizing, and leading the reconciled into citizenship in the City of God. So here we are, “east of Eden” according to our secular citizenship, and yet flourishing in the Paradise of God according to our heavenly birth. When one becomes a believer, it is neither necessary nor possible to diminish one’s creation-identity or one’s obligations to this world. Fleeing from the world’s lusts is required, but such sinful affections take up residence in our own hearts, as Jesus said, and not in the mere existence of secular institutions, occupations, and opportunities for bodily refreshment and human society. In one sense, all people are brothers and sisters. There is one origin, one Creator, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” says Paul, going so far as to cite one of the pagan poets: “‘For we are all his offspring.’” (Acts 17:28). We do not have to swallow creation up in redemption in order to affirm the significance of the former. Nor should we confuse the two. We do not have to say that “all of life is sacred” in order to justify the sphere of creation and common grace, which is quite definitively not sacred.

God has set apart for himself a people, a Holy Land of Sabbath Rest which is already here in the presence of Word and Sacrament and will descend finally and forever on the last day.

In that day, the serpent will be driven finally from Paradise. The Second Adam will serve the Creator and protect the City from the invasion of evil, suffering, and sin. But this is not salvation from the world, bodily existence, culture, and the like. In contrast to many of the popular portraits of disembodied spirits rising helium-like to the clouds, where they will strum on

There is no place for either

materialism or spiritualism.

It is neither matter over mind, nor mind over matter — the former a “high church” tendency, while the latter reflects the often rationalistic “low church” bent, which reduces worship to information, education and exhortation.

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harps of gold for eternity, the biblical vision is decidedly earthy. The prophets clearly have in view a restored heavens and earth, and this is carried forward carefully by the New Testament writers. For instance, Paul reminds us, For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body (Rom. 8:20-23).

We may affirm, with the Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come,” but much of our discourse tends toward the more Gnostic theory of salvation. In this scenario, death is a good thing because it frees the soul from the body and this world. Salvation is more a matter of learning the “spiritual principles” that will lead us back to our heavenly home than of the historical Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of the Son of Man. An individual affair, such a “liberation” hardly requires a mediator—much less, the mediation of such earthly elements as water, bread, and wine, or the preaching of ordinary human words. The visible church is deemed so unimportant that membership is either downplayed or perhaps not even offered. It is only the invisible church which counts, like the disembodied spirit. And it is the naked self ’s encounter with the naked Divine Spirit which is central, rather than the incarnate God and his human ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Do we really affirm the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come? Is Paul’s hope, affirmed in Romans 8, our own? Perhaps we are put off by the disparity between the state of the world as it now exists and the picture of the prophets, Jesus, and Paul.

And yet, we should find exactly the same disparity between our slight sanctification and the glorification which awaits us. If such a disparity does not keep us from pursuing the mark of our high calling here and now, then surely the restoration of all things at the end of the age should inspire us to pursue our calling in the secular city with justice, righteousness, and peace in view. After all, this future reality (which is already the reality for God in his heavenly Paradise) is already breaking in on us here and now, as we have already “tasted of the powers of the Word of God and the age to come” (Heb. 6:5).

So How Does This Affect Our Approach to “Matter”?

Theology is practical, and there is no better testing ground than in the so-called “worship wars.” But, with few exceptions, such debates rarely address one of the most important questions: If matter matters, why don’t our church buildings?

“It’s just a building,” we say of the church—and so it is. “The church is the people, not the brick and mortar.” Right again. According to Scripture, worship is no longer bound to the ceremonies of Mosaic covenant, types and shadows of the reality to come; namely, Christ. He is, after all, the true Sanctuary and Temple of God’s dwelling among his people, and we worship “neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, for the time is coming and now is when people will worship in Spirit and in tr uth” (John 4:21-24). God commanded the old covenant worship, with its elaborate regulations governing liturgical, ceremonial, and sacrificial rites, but when the “temple greater than Solomon’s” (Matt. 12:42) arrived and, after being reduced to rubble was rebuilt after three days (John 2:19-21), the Holy of Holies could not be located in any particular earthly structure. Instead, as Jesus promised the Samaritan woman, new covenant worship is eschatological—that is, it takes place in the heavenly sanctuary in which believers are already “seated with Christ” (Eph. 2:6).

Calvin’s impatience with liturgical extravagance and novelty focused on just this concern. Like the covenant people gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai around the golden calf, we are all inveterate idolaters. We want to worship “our way,” and our minds are “idol factories,” so “our way” always ends up at odds with God sooner or later. The greatest tragedy in all of this is that, in our impatience with God’s redemptive time-table (like Israel at Mount Sinai), we create our own “image of the invisible God” instead of waiting for the advent of the only legitimate incarnation of God (Col. 1:15).

At the heart of Reformed approaches to the space and elements of worship are three chief concerns: (1) The fear of idolatry, which is to say, the fear of undermining the authority of God’s Word by the human propensity for innovation; (2) The centrality and finality of Christ as the mediator between heaven and earth; (3) The eschatological transition from promise (in types) to fulfillment (the reality). Within these parameters, there is a great deal of freedom. On the other hand, the Refor med tradition has always underscored the importance of reverence and the distinctiveness of God’s covenantal meeting with his people. Governed by the dialogical principle (“God Speaks”/“We Respond”), Reformed worship has historically emphasized God’s present action in this assembly which he has called each week. Accordingly, the accent falls not on what we are MAY/JUNE 1998

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doing (even if it is more godly than pure “entertainment”), but on what God is doing. When we meet, it is not to hear the preacher lecture, entertain, cajole, or inspire us, but to hear God address us through his minister. We come not to enjoy the special music, but to receive God’s saving promise and the benefits of Christ’s work through the Supper and to respond in grateful thanksgiving. As Westminster Seminary Professor D. G. Hart observes concerning Calvin’s approach, “Music for entertainment (at home or in the pub) could be light and frivolous. But music for worship, he believed, should be majestic and dignified. … According to Charles Garside Jr., ‘The antithesis [in Calvin’s theology] between the secular and the sacred could scarcely be more pointed.’”1 Nothing could be further from much of current Reformed practice.

While unbelievers in the New Testament were confused by the strangeness of Christian worship, the trend in our day is to make the service as familiar as possible. Not only does this manifest itself in the dissolution of the line between secular and sacred music and communication; it is apparent also in the architecture.

Issues of space are rarely raised in the “worship wars,” and perhaps this itself reflects the triumph of a cer tain type of rationalistic (mind over matter) mentality that has always lurked beneath the surface of certain (especially Zwinglian-leaning) sections of the tradition. But does the Reformed emphasis on the fulfillment of the Mosaic system and the amazing rupture between the two covenants in the new world which dawned that first Easter render the question of ecclesiastical space irrelevant? Not at all. This is evident in the seriousness with which our forebears struggled with inherited forms and put forward reforms.

While Gnostics would rank a building next to the body in the scale of being, as we have already seen, God sanctified time and space, consecrating the Sabbath day and the Sabbath land as the earthly copy of the heavenly reality. It is not time versus eternity, matter versus spirit, earth versus heaven, but the harmonization of the two, 8

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that was involved in creation. It was the Fall—human pride and rebellion—that divided what God had joined together, separating the City of God from the City of Man. Only in Canaan would God restore such a union between the two cities, cult (i.e., worship) and culture, the sacred and the secular. A future kingdom was anticipated by the prophets in which these realms would be joined forever because of the perfect sacrifice of the perfect High Priest. After his ascension, Jesus was worshipped as God incarnate by the growing church, and the Sabbath gave way to the Lord’s Day. Circumcision and Passover gave way to Baptism and Eucharist, respectively, as promise gave way to the reality.

So while there is no Holy Land on earth, no city or temple of God’s presence, the whole community of faith is regarded as living stones being incorporated into Christ’s body, which is the everexpanding temple and city of God (1 Pet. 2:5).

Although it is commonly misinterpreted to justify a presumed insignificance of space, time, or specific elements in worship, our Lord’s promise, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20) refers to the ministry of Word and Sacrament. This is clear from the context, in which “the power of the keys” is explained. The ascended Savior is the Glory in the midst of Jerusalem, his church. He is the Holy of Holies, the place of access to God, and even the small, persecuted, and scattered believers who come together in clandestine meetings may be assured of God’s presence in Christ among his people. God has still set apar t ear thly time, an ear thly people (Jewish/Gentile believers and their children), and earthly space (“where two or more are gathered”), as well as earthly elements (water, bread, wine) and earthly speech (preaching). The most common of everyday things are set apart for special use. Thus, it is not the case that everything is sacred (so why not use any building or any style of music?). Just as congregational singing is part of the ministry of the Word (Eph. 5:19), the architecture and furniture of the church building are as well. In both cases, something significant is proclaimed, MODERN REFORMATION

the former orally, the latter visually. And in neither case is style neutral.

After the Fall, humanity lives “east of Eden.” There is nothing inherently wrong with this location: culture is God’s creation and is upheld by his common grace. But Christian worship takes place in the New Eden. Does our worship lead us to fix our eyes on “this present evil age” which is passing away, or to fix our eyes on Christ (cf. Col. 3:1-3)? There is nothing inherently ungodly about music halls, stadiums, movie theaters, shopping centers, business parks or malls. They may be ugly and unconducive to enduring and flourishing cultural forms, but there is no divine layout for the mall. However, they are certainly not neutral. And a church which, in its attempt to reduce the discrepancies between the secular and the sacred, imitates one of these forms already preaches volumes concerning its view of God, humanity, sin, salvation, the church, worship, and discipleship.

It’s true: the church as the body of Christ is what is holy, not the building itself. Nevertheless, just as the soul is united with and expresses itself through bodily action, the Holy Land, which is the baptized people of God, gathers in ordinary, non-consecrated space in order to participate in extraordinary, consecrated events of divine condescension. It seems to me that this is the theological balance that must be struck: our architecture must neither rivet our attention to earthly templeworship (leading us again from Christ to Moses), nor distract us from heavenly worship by an austerity or an outright ugliness that results from denying the role of material environments. There is no place for either materialism or spiritualism. It is neither matter over mind, nor mind over matter—the former a “high church” tendency, while the latter reflects the often rationalistic “low church” bent, which reduces worship to information, education, and exhortation.

While studies of Refor med theolog y and architecture are all too rare, there are a few worth noting.

In their 1965 work, Christ and Architecture (Eerdmans), Donald J. Bruggink and Carl H. Droppers provided the most thorough study to date. “Architecture for churches is a matter of gospel,” they insist.

A church that is interested in proclaiming the gospel must also be interested in architecture, for year after year the architecture of the church proclaims a message that either augments the preached Word or conflicts with it… . The par ticular insights of these [Refor med] churches—the indispensability of God’s Word, the importance of the Sacraments, justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers, the kingship of Christ as the only Lord and head of his Church, the Presbyterian form of church

government—are an understanding of God’s Word that needs to be shared with the2 rest of the Church and proclaimed to the world.

The Reformers were not motivated by “aesthetic inclinations on the part of the Reformed clergy,” they write. Changes were made, whether liturgical or architectural, “because the gospel was so important that the Reformers could not allow the churches to remain as they were. The Reformers were acutely conscious of the power of architecture and the constant message that it held for the people.”3 A theater-style already announces a church’s view of God and how one relates to this God, as does a cathedral in which the congregation is separated from the liturgical action of the priest and choir up front. “Church architecture is therefore first and foremost a matter of theology rather than a matter of style.” 4 According to these authors, Reformed churches tended to lose their confessional distinctiveness first by adopting the eclectic architectural styles of American churches. “Architecture, however, must also be a liturgy in working out the theology of a church in its physical structure. Just as liturgy is theology in action, so architecture is theology in material structure.”5 So some Reformed churches today imitate Pentecostal and nondenominational groups, while others imitate Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox liturgical and architectural styles. Our confusion in these areas, our pick-and-choose approach to styles, reflects an underlying fragmentation and disorientation in our theology. For instance, the priority of the Word is often displaced architecturally even before the service begins, either by a stage and choir or by an altar and candles.

But Reformed believers do not believe that the Word is the only means of g race. “How does Christ communicate with his people? The [Reformed] answer … is that Christ communicates himself to his Church through Word and Sacrament! This was the message Luther and Calvin found in God’s Word; this remains the position of those churches which are reformed according to his Word. God communicates himself through Word and Sacrament.” Thus, they insist, the sacraments must share the spotlight together.6 A central pulpit with a table that is not equally prominent speaks volumes about one’s theology, especially if the table bears the inscription, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” as if this statement from our Lord’s institution were the only aspect of the sacrament. Although Zwingli’s rationalistic tendencies were repudiated by Calvin and by the Reformed confessions and dogmatics, it lives on in the “mind over matter” presuppositions of many today.

The old Reformed pulpits were exalted works of superb craftsmanship. Why so many steps? Why so high? Why so prominent and unmoveable? Because, MAY/JUNE 1998

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theologian Karl Barth answered, preaching used to be God’s Word to his Church. But now it has become the preacher’s wit and inspiration for the consumers. This preacher may be like us, but God is different; he is “other.” Barth explains why Reformed churches have high pulpits and related expressions of God’s “aboveness” and “otherness”: Preaching takes place from the pulpit (a place which by its awesome but obviously intentional height differs from a podium), and on the pulpit, as a final warning to those who ascend it, there is a big Bible. Preachers also wear a robe—I am not embarrassed even to say this— and they should do so, for it is a salutary reminder that from those who wear this special garment the people expect a special word. A formidable and even demonic instrument, the organ, is also active, and in order that the town and country alike should be aware of the preaching, bells are rung. And if none of these things help, will not the crosses in the churchyard which quietly look in through the windows tell you unambiguously what is relevant here and what is not?7 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will never pass away”: Such promises should move us to make it impossible to turn the chancel into a stage. It should be inconvenient to move the pulpit, font, and table.

It is, after all, these which make us a Christian people, not the praise band, not the drama team, not the special effects. Bruggink and Droppers hint at these points, as they emphasize the Christian conviction that the Word became flesh: The question may well be asked how it can be that the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ can possibly come to us as Word of God through the instrumentality of some minister in the pulpit. At the same time it must be noted that this is precisely the same question as to how the Word of God made flesh can come to us in water, bread and wine through the instrumentality of some minister at font or table. The two problems are no different, and for both Scripture has an identical answer: whether Christ comes to us from pulpit, font, or table, he does so through the operation of the Holy Spirit.8 Thus, worship “in Spirit and in truth” is not “spirit” as a general category (i.e., “spiritual” as opposed to “material”). Rather, it refers to the Holy Spirit, and he 10

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works through ordained means. The architecture must avoid sacerdotalism (i.e., a magical view of the “priest’s” activities) and a rationalism which requires little more than a hall for a public lecture. Worship that is reformed according to the Word of God will concentrate on the vertical rather than the horizontal, so shouldn’t the space lend itself to that orientation? In other words, isn’t a vaulted ceiling with high walls more likely to draw our attention upward than an indoor amphitheater? Is the font something we bring out of the sacristy for baptisms, or is it front-and-center, as a permanent fixture as a testimony to God’s covenantal promise in Christ and our duty to “struggle against the world, the flesh and the devil”? “Baptism involves continuing participation in the atoning work of Christ; therefore the font should stand emphatically before the congregation as a continuing reminder of this redemptive relationship to Christ.”9 How did we ever start putting the American flag up front, where symbolism is most important, despite the fact that the people of God gathered for worship belong to the communion of saints in all places and times? And the “Christian” flag? It’s actually an invention of a Methodist Sunday school society at the turn of the century. Do we not find God’s ordained symbols (pulpit, table, font) sufficient for proclaiming Christian unity?

But the questions continue. Why is the choir up front, instead of in the back, as it is in the older Reformed and Presbyterian churches? Bruggink and Droppers go so far as to charge the “theater-plan” with a “choirolatry” every bit as dangerous as that of the medieval choirs.

Where did this innovation begin, and what allowed it to take such tenacious hold in American church life? How the choir attained this position of eminence, where visibly more mighty than pulpit, font, or table it reigns throughout the service, is a story too recent to have been thoroughly chronicled by the historians.10 Ironically, the origins are in the Romantic appropriation of the medieval split-chancel: In low-church Protestantism, the pulpit may be central, but the parishioner, like his high-church counterpart, goes to church with the expectancy of the drama of the service, except that his drama is not one of ecclesiastical awe and mystery but of a performance by choir and minister in which the personalities involved are given the opportunity to play a larger part in relation to their function in the service.

Through almost nineteen centuries Christian choirs had been content to sing praise to God MODERN REFORMATION

In the late nineteenth century, evangelical revivalism’s adaptations of secular entertainment began to shape Reformed architecture (and eventually made its liturgical mark). The chancel, which only had room for a large pulpit, font, and table, was dismantled and replaced with a stage: With this emphasis upon the “performance” and the “performers” the visual place of Word and Sacraments was decreased until the pulpit became but a small reading desk on a platform, while the table and font were delegated to the floor in front of the pews. Is there a relationship between the loyalty of so many Protestant congregations to a particular preacher (allowing people to move from church to church in search of a minister) and this nineteenth-century attitude which put personalities to the forefront?12 It is important to remind ourselves that we do not have a choice between architectural expression and nonexpression. Some readers may find the questions raised here pedantic, concluding that we have given too much weight to the material environment. But it isn’t a choice between making an architectural point or not making one. Every church building expresses a particular theological orientation. If, as Reformed theology teaches, Christ mediates his threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King, through his church, do our buildings

devoted to that purpose conform to such teaching? The great danger in allowing the culture to provide models of architecture and worship style is that the precious jewel of the gospel is loosed from its setting and is then easily lost in all the activity. Matter matters.

In 1983, Professor Bruggink authored an analysis of architecture specifically in the Christian Refor med Church (CRCNA).13 In recent years, this denomination too has adopted utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to architecture, revealing deeper shifts. Recently, Arie C. Leder, Old Testament professor at Calvin Theological Seminary, has offered a seminal contribution to this question. As we have seen, Gnosticism defies authority, tradition, institutions, sacraments, discipline, and order. But Leder describes megachurch functionalism in much the same way: Functionalism fits Protestant iconoclastic tendencies because of a shared protest against forms, traditions, language, and hierarchies. The denig ration of traditional symbols is accompanied by a symbolization of such important cultural symbols as the mall, the marketplace, the theater, or the celebrity. Upon entering such a building, one is overwhelmed as when entering the Mall of America in Minneapolis: an enormous space and a platform to allow for free expression. No restrictive spaces; no playing with dark and light; no symbolic hint of the eternal impinging upon the temporal. With one act following another, the traditional vertical aspect of ecclesiastical design has been replaced by an almost vaudevillian horizontalism.14 PhotoDisc

unobserved by the congregation, while ministers had preached the gospel from ambos or pulpits which generally took visual precedence over the minister.11

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Industrialist Andrew Carnegie said it first: “The business of America is business.” But evangelical marketing guru George Barna has reiterated the point: “Think of your church not as a religious meeting place, but as a service agency—an entity that exists to satisfy people’s needs.”15 Functionalism wins hands-down if the church is a voluntary society, like the Elk’s Club, says Professor Leder. “But the church is not a voluntary organization, nor is the consecrated space and time of Christian worship the product of a worship committee’s will. Just as the nature of the family shapes the design of a house, so the nature of the church is foundational for the design of its meeting place and worship.”16 A human-centered theology will regard worship as our activity, for God, each other, or ourselves.

Consequently, it will demand architecture that borrows from the entertainment or business world. Instead of calling us out of the world to “sing a new song,” it will perpetuate our old identity which was buried in baptism.

While God does not prescribe the size, style, or color of buildings devoted to new covenant worship, he has clearly defined the new covenant theology that must govern our use of space. To deny the importance of our material space, our architectural design, and the symbolism of the furniture, is implicitly Gnostic. It may perhaps be compared to a specific version of that heresy which threatened the early church: docetism. From

the Greek verb, “to appear,” this heresy taught that the Word seemed to become flesh. In truth, the Savior was a pure spirit, undefiled by “corrupt” materiality. By suggesting that the liturgical, architectural, aesthetic, and other ineluctable aspects of every church are inconsequential to the “spiritual” worship of God, one wanders far from the earthiness of the biblical outlook.

The goal of this article (as of the sources I’ve cited) is hardly the advocacy of an aesthetic elitism. I know that new churches often get off of the ground by leasing space in an industrial or business park and that it is difficult to raise sufficient funds to convert the space, especially in cases of shared use. Nor have I argued for architectural uniformity. In fact, that would be to sacrifice the particularity and diversity of creation, which God preserves and accentuates in redemption, to a homogeneity that would be theologically disastrous. However, my hope has been to get us to be more theologically deliberate and constructive as we seek to worship God with our bodies as well as our minds. Let all that is in me—and around me— bless his holy Name! MR Dr. Michael Horton, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), is a research fellow at Yale Divinity School and co-pastor of Christ Reformed Church (CRC) in Placentia, California.

RENEWING YOUR MIND R. C. Sproul “When a person embraces Christian faith and says with assurance, ‘I believe…,’ then that person has truly embarked upon life,” writes R.C. Sproul. “This book is about living that life to the fullest, about renewing your mind so that your thinking conforms to the mind of Christ.”

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The Word Made Flesh: THE LITURGY OF WORD AND SACRAMENT RONALD FEUERHAHN

But God does deal with us daily in a physical way.

As we pray the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “give us this day our daily bread,” (and confess in the first article of the Apostles Creed), God does provide our daily needs through all sor ts of physical instruments. God answers our prayer by a host of people who are working to provide for us. God is not only Creator, He is also Provider and Protector, through

an ar ray of very physical instr uments.

In a similar way God provides for the forgiveness of sins. Some imagine this as a leap from the material to the spiritual; but “spiritual” is not necessarily “non-material.”

In the language of St. Paul, our resurrected body will still be physical, but now imperishable, without corruption, and adaptable to live with God forever, a body similar to Christ’s resurrected, glorified physical body (cf. 1 Cor. 15:44-49; Phil. 3:21; Luke 24:36-43).

It doesn’t seem to help much when Luther speaks of the “hiddenness” of God (the Deus absconditus). Of course, he did not mean by that that God was not present. Luther distinguished between the omnipresence of God and God’s presence-for-us.2 That special, unique presence is his presence in the incarnate Christ, in the church, and in the divine service of worship. Though present everywhere, God remains invisible or hidden to sinful man. Nowhere except in Christ can he be found or seen. Seeking God anywhere else, one finds not him, but the devil. The difference is spoken of in Scripture in various ways. We learn of the “mysteries” of the faith (Col. 1:26-27) or the “secrets of the kingdom” (Matt. 13:11). The Gospel, Paul warns, is foolishness to Gentiles and a scandal to Jews (1 Cor. 1:23). Jesus spoke in parables which some heard yet did not hear, some saw without seeing (Matt. 13:13). “He who has ears, let him hear” (Matt. 13:9).

This hiddenness of God—especially his love and mercy, his for-us-ness—is made visible only through the Corey Wilkinson, scratchboard

It seems that humankind has always lived in a tension about the presence of God, especially the physical presence. We have continually “sought signs and wonders” (John 4:48), physical evidence, as it were, of God’s activity and presence. On the other hand, we also suspect that such a thing as the actual presence of God is impossible. There is after all the dictum, “the finite cannot bear the infinite” (finitum non est capax infiniti)! But Christians have confessed that God is present everywhere; we even have a word for it, “omnipresent.” Yet, if God is so “omnipresent,” why are we not able to “see” Him? In his critique of evangelicals, Mark Noll chides their weakness of “immediatism,”1 the wish that God would deal with his people in a less mediated way, less through instruments and in a rather more physical way.

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means of grace, the Gospel and the Sacraments. And these means of grace are nowhere more prominent, more available, than in the divine service. “God can be found only where he adds the Word to his work.”3 When Luther talks about the “spiritual” presence of God, he does not mean “immaterial,” for God chooses very material things as the means of his presence. These are “material things” which are “comprehended4 in God’s command and connected with God’s Word.” In this way, “the most ordinary and earthly things of this world become spiritual realities when by faith they have been linked with the Word of God.”5 In this way, God makes what is earthly, “profane,” into something heavenly, “holy.”

In the divine service we are, as it were, suspended between the two.

Christians have also believed that in Jesus, God truly took flesh, assumed a very physical presence. They have confessed that he “came down from heaven and was incar nate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary and was made man.” Nevertheless, the history of the church chronicles one group after another which has sought to “spiritualize” God, unable as they were to confess any manner of God’s revelation of himself except in a nebulous, non-physical manner.

About this Luther told a story:

stick or a stone. You hear that God did not become an angel but a man like you, and you just stand there like a stick of wood!” Whether this story is true or not, it is nevertheless in accordance with the faith (Rom. 12:6).6 In the early centuries of the New Testament church, the nature of God’s presence among humans became a matter of fierce debate. Many were influenced by Greek philosophical notions that matter, including flesh, was itself evil. Several early heresies featured this emphasis, among them Gnosticism and Marcionism.

The Docetists held that Jesus could not have taken a real physical human form but only “seemed” to do so. At the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451 these questions were addressed: How are divinity and humanity joined in Jesus Christ?

How can the immutable, eternal God be joined to a mutable, historical man? The answer was articulated, among others, by Gregory of Nazianzus: “For that which he has not taken up he has not saved.” To our ears this is a curiously compact way of speaking. It was a way of confessing what had been taught in the scriptures, that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14), “being in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7). Thus Chalcedon asserted that the virgin Mary actually bore God. It became part of the orthodox faith to refer to her as “Theotokos,” literally, the “one who gave birth to God.” “Even Arius and Athanasius were agreed that ‘God was in Christ’ and that ‘in Him the whole fullness of Godhead dwells bodily.’”7 The language of John 1 is instructive; it directs our attention, for instance, to the Old Testament, to “the beginning.” From the beginning God’s “physicality” has been part of the record of sacred Scripture: “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8). Yes, we call this an anthropomorphism: that ascribes to God, who is after all a Spirit, characteristics of humans. But there is more to it than that. Throughout his dealings with his creatures, the Creator God has

In Christ, God’s power and

glory are hidden under the lowliness and shame of the cross, his wrath under love.

Even after his ascension, God’s grace was made present for us through the physical realities of his Word and through water and bread and wine.

The following tale is told about a coarse and brutal lout. While the words “And was made man” were being sung in church, he remained standing, neither genuflecting nor removing his hat. He showed no reverence, but stood there like a clod. All the others dropped to their knees when the Nicene Creed was prayed and chanted devoutly. Then the devil stepped up to him and hit him so hard it made his head spin. He cursed him gruesomely and said: “May hell consume you, you boorish ass! If God had become an angel like me and the congregation sang: ‘God was made an angel,’ I would bend not only my knees but my whole body to the ground! Yes, I would crawl ten ells down into the ground. And you vile human creature, you stand there like a 14

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shown himself to be merciful and gracious in that he has made accommodations; he has used material things as gifts of his presence among his people.

Our “problem” about the presence of God, that tension of which we spoke at the beginning, is not new among the people of God. Even Jacob—he of “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”— had the problem. At Bethel (“House of God”) he found the presence of God perplexing: “‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven’” (Gen. 28:16-17). Jacob’s admission, “I was not aware of it,” might be a common refrain today. Bethel, the place where God chose to be present for Jacob, was holy ground, like the place where the Angel of the Lord was present for Moses at the Burning Bush at the mountain of God (Exodus 3:2).

Holy ground, holy place, is a place “set apart.”

John 1 based its message in the Old Testament also in the words, “made his dwelling among us.” Literally the word used by John is that God “tabernacled” among us (1:14). That makes reference to the gracious way that God announced his presence for his people Israel; he was present for them in the Tabernacle. The book of Leviticus teaches us that “God is preeminently present in worship,” that it takes place “before the Lord.”8 God’s presence was especially in the tent of meeting, the place of Israel’s worship. Here is where God “dwelt”; thus, he caused his name to dwell here (Deut. 12:5, et passim.).

The association of God’s name with his presence is a promise richly given in the Old Testament. Already in the time of Adam and Eve, after the birth of Seth, it is reported that “at that time men began to call on the name of the Lord” (Gen. 4:26). 9 In his journeys, Abram/Abraham built altars and there “called on the name of the Lord” (Gen. 12:8; 13:3f; 21:33); likewise his son, Isaac (Gen. 26:25). And, of course, so did Isaac’s son, Jacob at Bethel. In his dramatic encounter with the prophets of Baal, Elijah on Mt. Carmel offered the challenge: “Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the Lord” (1 Kings 18:24). First Kings also records the building of the first temple: Solomon announced his intention “to build a temple for the Name of the Lord my God, as the Lord told my father David, when he said, ‘Your son whom I will put on the throne in your place will build the temple for my Name’” (1 Kings 5:5). At the dedication Solomon prayed: “The Lord has kept the promise he made: I have succeeded David my father and now I sit on the throne of Israel, just as the Lord promised, and I have built the temple for the Name of the Lord, the God of Israel” (1 Kings 8:20). In response the Lord renewed His promise: “‘I have heard the prayer and plea you have made before me: I have consecrated this

temple, which you have built, by putting my Name there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there” (1 Kings 9:3, cf. 2 Chr. 7:16).

In the New Testament then, the declarations of the early church about Jesus are all the more interesting. In the Lord’s vision to Ananias, the disciple reports to Jesus about Saul: “And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your [Jesus’] name” (Acts 9:14). That very same Saul, now Paul, would later declare: “To the church of God in Corinth to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours” (1 Cor. 1:2).

In the Old Testament tabernacle and temple, God’s presence was “located” specifically in the Most Holy Place, on the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant (Ex. 25:22). Access was limited.10 But in the New Testament, access to God is freely ours through Christ.

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place11 by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.

(Heb. 10:19-22).

When God in Christ took human form, he set aside his glory and power and exposed himself to all that could be inflicted on the body, even crucifixion (Phil. 2:8). In Christ, God’s power and glory are hidden under the lowliness and shame of the cross, his wrath under love.

Even after his ascension, God’s grace was made present for us through the physical realities of his Word and through water and bread and wine. God, who causes his name to dwell among us in the divine service of worship, gives himself through the everyday things of life. As Christ, the Logos, became incarnate in flesh, so God’s Holy Word continues to be “incarnate” in the written, material word.

His word gives his presence in water, in bread and wine.

There is fresh meaning to those familiar liturgical words: “In the NAME of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” They announce to us each time the promise that “where two or three come together in MY NAME, there am I with them” (Matt. 18:20, emphasis added).

Matter does matter to God! After all, he redeems even our bodies! MR Dr. Feuerhahn, professor at Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, is co-editor of a new translation of Hermann Sasse’s Church and Lord’s Supper.

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QUOTES “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”

— Genesis 1:31 Despite the inadequacies of this conception, I do not believe that we should wholeheartedly adopt the modern disparagement of ancient other-worldliness and see in it only an evasion of the value of this life. It is not so in every respect. Orientation to a divinely promised future sets human life in context, and is by no means a disincentive to appropriate use of this world. (We should remember Luther’s remark that if he knew that the end of the world was coming tomorrow, his response would be to plant a tree.)

— Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, 92.

We “dressed up” on the Lord’s Day, dressed up for the Lord’s Day, and entered church well in advance of the beginning of the service to collect ourselves in silence, silence so intense it could be touched. The interior was devoid of decoration: plaster painted white, ceiling pitched to follow the roof, peak high but not too high.

The only “richness” was in the wooden furnishings.

These were varnished, not painted; as a child I dwelt on the patterns in their unconcealed woodiness—perhaps because, coming from several generations of woodworkers, I was from infancy taught reverence for wood. We faced forward, looking at the Communion table front center, and behind that the raised pulpit.

Before I understood a word of what was said, I was inducted by its architecture into the tradition.

— Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Grace That Shaped My Life,” in Kelly Monroe, Finding God at Harvard, 150-51.

With good cause, therefore, does the true religion recognize and proclaim that the same God who created the universal cosmos, created also all the animals, souls as well as bodies. Among the terrestrial animals man was made by Him in His own image, and, for the reason I have given, was made one individual, though he was not left solitary. For there is nothing so social by nature, so unsocial by its corruption, as this race. And human nature has nothing more appropriate, either for the prevention of discord, or for the healing of it, where it exists, than the remembrance of that first parent of us all, whom God was pleased to create alone, that all men might be derived from one, and that they might thus be admonished to preserve unity among their whole multitude.

— St. Augustine, The City of God, 12.27.

Islam denies the Incarnation. It will not allow that God has descended into flesh … It stands for all religions that are afraid of matter and afraid of mystery.

— C. S. Lewis, “Williams and the Arthuriad,” in Taliessin Through Logres,...Arthurian Torso, 308-9.

Shall we say that they are insane who developed medicine, devoting their labor to our benefit? What shall we say of all the mathematical sciences? Shall we consider them the ravings of madmen? No, we … marvel at them because we are compelled to recognize how preeminent they are.

— Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.15.

“Somewhere is better than anywhere.” — Flannery O’Connor

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If the aesthetic of this liturgy [of my youth] was simplicity, sobriety, and measure, what was its religious genius? The only word I have now to capture how it felt then is sacramental; it felt profoundly sacramental. One went to church to meet God; and in the meeting, God acted, especially spoke. The language of “presence” will not do. God was more than present; God spoke, and in the sacrament, “nourished and refreshed us,” here and now sealing his promise to unite us with Christ.

In word and tone the liturgy I experienced was a liturgy of God’s action; it was “Calvinistic.” During the liturgy as a whole, but especially in the sermon and most of all during the Lord’s Supper, I was confronted by the speech and actions of an awesome, majestic God. Of course, liturgy was our action as well, not just God’s. We gave voice, always in song, never in speech, to praise and thanksgiving and penitence. The religious genius of the liturgy was interaction between us and God. — Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Grace That Shaped My Life,” in Kelly Monroe, Finding God at Harvard, 151.

If we think of ourselves as lofty souls trapped temporarily in lowly bodies in a dispirited, desperate, unlovable world that we must despise for Heaven’s sake, then what have we done for this question of significance? If we divide reality into two parts, spiritual and material, and hold (as the Bible does not hold) that only the spiritual is good or desirable, then our relation to the material Creation becomes arbitrary, having only the quantitative or mercenary value that we have... assigned to it. Thus, we become the judges and

inevitably the destroyers of a world we did not make and that we are bidden to understand as a divine gift. It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.

If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God’s dust and God’s breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves ... then all our acts have a supreme significance.

If it is true that we are living souls ... then all of us are artists.

— Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 109-10.

The [New England] Puritans knew and applied a principle ... that an intelligent and socialized community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit and keep up its common institutions.

Beyond that point growth must cease, or the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing.

— Lewis Mumford, on the physical layout of the colonial New England village, in Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization, 16.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.

— Genesis 2:7-8.

“Thank God for hard stones; thank God for hard facts; thank God for thorns and rocks and deserts and long years. At least I know now that I am not the best or strongest thing in the world. At least I know now that I have not dreamed everything.”

— G. K. Chesterton, cited in Stephen R. L. Clark, “Orwell and the Anti-Realists,” Philosophy 67 (1992), 149.

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Charles Hodge and B.B.Warfield on Science,the Bible,Evolution, and Darwinism MARK NOLL

Two of the g reat theologians in American Christian history sought a better way. Charles Hodge (1797-1878) and Benjamin Warfield (1851-1921) were the most influential theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary during the first century of that institution’s existence. During their tenure, Princeton was widely regarded as the nation’s center of Presbyterian intellectual life, and Presbyterians were properly regarded as among the country’s leading intellectuals.2 Both of these Reformed stalwarts wrote learnedly about the most vexing theological issues raised by theories of evolution in their day. The specific assertions that Hodge and Warfield made about science are still worthy of serious consideration today. Even more, however, the way in which they wrote about such issues—with patient analysis and unhesitating confidence in both science and Scripture—offers modern believers a better approach than extremist, antiintellectual, or paranoid combat against the scientific establishment. At the same time, they also offer scientific despisers of traditional biblical faith consequential examples of a responsible respect for science that arises directly out of Christian belief.

Hodge, Warfield, and most of their colleagues at 18

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Controversies over evolution excite every bit as much passion in the late twentieth century as they have ever done. Christian believers who seek humbly to understand the means by which God directs the natural world as well as honest scientists who seek to deal responsibly with what their researches reveal are regularly shouted aside by culture warriors heavily invested in the supposed struggle between science and religion. Truth is usually the loser; populist politicking too often drives out patient, responsible science.1

Princeton shared a common attitude toward science in relation to theology. Their steady goal was to preserve the harmony of truth. Hodge and Warfield refused to countenance any permanent antagonism between the two realms of knowledge: what humans, by God’s grace, could discover about the natural world (which owed its origin to God), and what they could learn, again by grace, about the character and acts of God from special revelation in the Bible.

Their common mentality was that of scholars.

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Hodge and Warfield were alike committed to thorough reasoning. They thought it was a Christian duty to use their minds fully to understand the world. They did not set reasoning about the physical world and interpretations of divine revelation in opposition, but rather held that properly qualified deliverances of the human intellect and properly understood conclusions from Scripture were complementary. As a consequence, they were patient in unpacking detailed arguments in theology as well as in philosophy, and they abhorred merely rhetorical responses to complicated intellectual problems.

Hodge and Warfield also held common intellectual convictions. Theologically, they were Calvinists who maintained traditional Reformed convictions about most subjects, including nature. Specifically, they held that the world owed both its origin and its ongoing operation to the direct activity of God. They believed that God was responsible for the orderliness of natural processes; that the human ability to discern this order in nature was a gift from God; and that investigations of nature testified to the work of a purposeful designer.

They also felt that Scripture provided reliable general information about the physical world.

Philosophically, the Princeton theologians were committed to the principles of common-sense reasoning as these principles had been imported to North American in the eighteenth century by Scotsmen like John Witherspoon (president of Princeton College from 1768 to 1794) and then developed by a host of American commentators. Their common-sense philosophy featured trust in ordinary human intuitions against the skeptical speculations of philosophers like David Hume. Proponents of this philosophy drew on sophisticated arguments by Scots like Thomas Reid and popularizations of those views in works like the Encyclopedia Britannica as edited by Reid’s follower, Dugald Stewart. With such support, Americans easily turned aside doubts about the reality of the self and the reality of normal cause and effect connections. As testified to by the opening discussion of method in Hodge’s Systematic Theology, the Princeton theologians shared at least some of the American enthusiasm for Sir Isaac Newton, as the doyen of modern science, and Sir Francis Bacon, as the most famous early promoter of an epistemolog y of induction. The Princetonians’ Calvinistic convictions about the debilitating character of sinfulness did not always fit smoothly with their common-sense philosophy. Yet that philosophy was common intellectual coinage in nineteenth-century America, and they were among the American intellectuals who put it most skillfully to use.

In many ways, the Princetonians’ theology of nature and their philosophy of common sense were typical of most American Christians during the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. But unlike at least some other conservatives, they also held that Scripture did not need to be interpreted literally when it referred to nature.

Perhaps even more untypically, they held that the findings of science should be enlisted to help discover proper interpretations of Scripture.

The Princeton theologians were interested in science for several inter-related reasons. First was confessional. As Calvinists, they believed the physical world was an arena in which God manifested his power and glory. Scientific research, therefore, was a way of finding out more about the world God had made, but also about the God who had made the world. Second was apologetic. The Princeton theologians knew that in the wake of Newton and the Mechanical Philosophy, science was being increasingly used to attack traditional Christian faith. If others used science to discredit Christianity, it was the responsibility of mature believers to show the error of such abuse. Third was social and ideological. They thought that Christian appropriation of science was critical for the health of civilization in America. If science (or any other false source of ultimate value) undercut faith in God, evil would inevitably proliferate, public virtue would retreat, and civilization would be imperiled.

Finally, such views about relationships among science, theology, and civil society also implied much about the Princeton theologians’ own role. Hodge, Warfield, and their colleagues were remarkably pious people; personal testimonies abound to their unusual humility. At the same time, they also possessed an extraordinarily lofty conception of their vocation. They were guardians not just of theology, and not only of relationships between science and theology, but of Truth and of Civilization. Part of their concern for the spread of sub- or anti-Christian uses of science was, thus, concern about themselves. If scientists with no concern for the theological traditions they defended succeeded in becoming public arbiters of the culture’s most influential questions, it was obvious that the theologians would also be displaced from their positions of cultural authority.

Science in general, therefore, was important to Hodge and Warfield both because of what they believed and because of who they were. Especially as the pace of scientific discovery quickened in the nineteenth century, and as alternatives to Christian appropriations of scientific knowledge grew more forceful, their concern deepened.

Alike as they were on many matters, Hodge and Warfield did differ—or at least appeared to differ—on whether evolution was acceptable to Christianity.

Hodge, who is best known for his short book, What Is Darwinism? (1874), but who also wrote much else on science, did not think Darwinism was compatible with the faith. For his part, Warfield over a thirty-year period published at least thirty-nine articles and reviews, some MAY/JUNE 1998

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of them substantial, on questions related to evolution.

Throughout most of his career, he held that evolution might be compatible with the Christian faith. Despite this apparent difference, however, to understand the way each theologian approached his work is to see the substantial continuity of their convictions.

Charles Hodge Charles Hodge came to write about Darwin after a lifetime of serious attention to scientific issues. That interest was partly a familial legacy. Both his father and his brother were Philadelphia physicians, and Hodge himself attended medical lectures during several periods of his life, including the trip he took to Europe as a young theological professor in 1826-1828.

Hodge’s interests in scientific matters led to a longtime friendship with Joseph Henry, a professor of science at Princeton College who later was the inaugural director of the Smithsonian Institution. (Henry also served several years as a trustee of Princeton Seminary and was a serious Presbyterian layman.) Hodge recruited Henry to write for the Princeton Review,3 he included Henry in the informal meetings where the editorial business of the Review was carried out, he worked hard to keep Henry at Princeton when other institutions tried to lure him away, and he took special delight when Henry was introduced to the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1843 as a man who4 carried out scientific duties with a due sense of piety. During the period when Hodge’s “rheumatic” leg gave him the most difficulty, he even applied electricity to the afflicted limb from a machine that Henry had invented. Henry was not altogether pleased with this experiment, and, in the event, it did not relieve Hodge’s condition, but it does indicate something of the relationship the two enjoyed.5 For modern purposes, the Hodge-Henry friendship is significant for its ability to transcend differences of scientific opinion. Henry, after initially doubting the compatibility between any form of evolution and traditional Christianity, eventually came reluctantly to accept a Christianized form of evolution.6 But even though Hodge could not agree, he remained on very cordial terms with his scientific friend.

In addition to his avocational scientific interests, Hodge, at least from the late 1840s, regularly lectured and wrote on issues concerning the relationship of science and Scripture.7 A letter to the New York Observer in March 1863 showed clearly how Hodge felt science 20

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and theology should interact.

He first affirmed that the Bible could “teach no error” on anything that it touched. But then he hastened to say that the Princeton theologians had always held, “in common with the whole Church, that this infallible Bible must be interpreted by science.” True to form, Hodge took pains to spell out what he meant by “science”: “ascertained truths concerning the facts and laws of nature.” Yet once having made a careful definition, Hodge forcefully affirmed the hermeneutical value of scientific knowledge: “The proposition that the Bible must be interpreted by science is all but selfevident. Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible, and we only interpret the Word of God by the Word of God when we interpret the Bible by science.”

Hodge then provided an example of what he meant: “For five thousand years the Church understood the Bible to teach that the earth stood still in space, and that the sun and stars revolved around it. Science has demonstrated that this is not true. Shall we go on to interpret the Bible so as to make it teach the falsehood that the sun moves round the earth, or shall we interpret it by science and make the two harmonize?” Hodge closed with a word in the other direction: just as legitimate science must be used to interpret Scripture, so must Scripture be allowed to shape the interpretation of science. In his words, Hodge wanted to avoid both sides of “a two-fold evil.” One evil was the overwillingness “to adopt the opinions and theories of scientific men, and to adopt forced and unnatural interpretations of the Bible, to bring it to accord with those opinions.” The opposite evil was to “not only refuse to admit the opinions of men, but science itself, to have any voice in 8 the interpretation of Scripture.”

The strategy Hodge outlined in 1863 was the strategy he followed eleven years later in What Is Darwinism? In the pages of this book Hodge took great pains to define the meaning of “Darwinism” and to distinguish what might possibly be real science from invalid speculation. As he saw it, “Darwinism” entailed three assertions: (1) that species undergo evolutionary development over time; (2) that natural selection (defined as variety, overproduction, and survival of the fittest), explains important aspects of those changes; and (3) that these changes are ateleological, or entirely the result of random occurrences.

As it happens, Hodge himself had doubts about the compatibility of the first two assertions with biblical Christianity, but he also acknowledged that other MODERN REFORMATION

orthodox Christians did not. As an example of a scientist who did not, Hodge mentioned several times in his essay Asa Gray, an orthodox Congregationalist who taught at Harvard and who was the most important promoter of Darwin’s writings in America. Almost certainly, Hodge also had in mind the president of Princeton College, James McCosh who was also a reconciler of Christianity and evolution.

It was, however, the third assertion that meant the most to Hodge: “by far the most important and only distinctive element of his theory, that this natural selection is without design, being conducted by unintelligent physical causes.” In pursuit of clarity, Hodge repeated that, “It is … neither evolution nor natural selection which gives Darwinism its peculiar character and importance. It is that Darwin rejects all teleology or the doctrine of final causes.” This definition led to Hodge’s famous condemnation at the end of the book: “We have thus arrived at the answer to our question, What is Darwinism? It is Atheism. This does not mean, as before said, that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic, that the exclusion of design from nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to atheism.”9

reviews, some of them mini-essays in their own right (among the most important of these concerned books

by James McCosh in 1888, by J. W. Dawson in 1891, by Otto Pfleiderer in 1901, by James Orr in 1906, and by Vernon Kellogg in 1908).

In these writings, Warfield repeatedly insisted on the distinction between Darwin as a person, Darwinism as a cosmological theory, and evolution as a series of explanations about natural development. Of key importance for Warfield was his willingness throughout a long career to accept the possibility (or even the probability) of evolution, yet while also denying Darwinism.

Warfield’s strongest assertion of evolution was theological and came in a lengthy paper on Calvin’s view of creation.

Warfield ascribed to Calvin what was doubtless his own view as well: “[A]ll that has come into being since [the original creation of the world stuff]—except the souls of men alone—has arisen as a modification of this original worldstuff by means of the interaction of its intrinsic forces… .

[These modifications] find their account proximately in ‘secondary causes’; and this is not only evolutionism but pure evolutionism.”10 To grasp the underlying harmony between this statement and Hodge’s earlier equation of Darwinism with atheism, it is necessary to pay strict attention to the distinctions that Hodge cautiously advanced in his 1874 book and that Warfield developed much more boldly in most of his writings on the subject.

As a way of positioning Warfield properly on these subjects it is vital to stress a conjunction of his convictions that has been much less common since his day. Warfield, in short, was both the ablest modern defender of the theologically conservative belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and an evolutionist.

During the late nineteenth century when critical views of Scripture came to prevail in American universities, Warfield was more responsible than any other American for refurbishing the conviction that the Bible communicates revelation from God entirely without error. Warfield’s formulation of biblical inerrancy, in fact, has even been a theological mainstay

The commitment of

Warfield and Hodge to solid empirical science and to the concursus of divine and natural action gave them extraordinary balance in sifting the difficult questions of science and faith that beset their era.

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield Hodge’s careful distinctions about what he denounced as the atheism of Darwinism paves the way for understanding why B. B. Warfield’s more accommodating attitude to evolution was, in fact, largely compatible with that of his revered teacher and predecessor. Warfield’s publications on evolution and related subjects included several kinds of writing: major essays devoted to Darwin’s biography (“Charles Darwin’s Religious Life” in 1888 and “Darwin’s Arguments Against Christianity” the next year); several substantial articles directly on evolution or related scientific issues (“The Present Day Conception of Evolution” in 1895, “Creation Versus Evolution” in 1901, “On the Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race” in 1911, and “Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation” in 1915); and many

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for recent “creationist” convictions about the origin of the ear th. 11 Yet Warfield was also a cautious, discriminating, but entirely candid proponent of the possibility that evolution might offer the best way to understand the natural history of the earth and of humankind. On this score his views place him with more recent thinkers who maintain ancient trust in the Bible while affirming the modern scientific enterprise.12 Warfield did not simply asser t these two views randomly, but he sustained them learnedly, as coordinate arguments. Accordingly, Warfield’s convictions on theology and evolution are as interesting a commentary on our own era’s intellectual warfare as they are illuminating for historical conjunctions in his age.

In the course of his career, both Warfield’s positions and his vocabulary shifted on the question of evolution.

But they shifted only within the constraints of a fairly nar row range. What remained constant was his adherence to a broad Calvinistic conception of the natural world—of a world that, even in its most physical aspects, reflected the wisdom and glory of God—and his commitment to the goal of har monizing a sophisticated conservative theology and the most securely verified conclusions of modern science.

Another way of describing the constancy of his position is to say that while Warfield consistently rejected materialist or ateleological explanations for natural phenomena (explanations that he usually associated with “Darwinism”), Warfield just as consistently entertained the possibility that other kinds of evolutionary explanations, which avoided Darwin’s rejection of design, could satisfactorily explain the physical world.

In several of his writings, Warfield worked carefully to distinguish three ways in which God worked in and through the physical world. The most important thing about these three ways is that Warfield felt each of them was compatible with the theology he found in an inerrant Bible, if each was applied properly to natural history and to the history of salvation. “Evolution” meant developments arising out of forces that God had placed inside matter at the original creation of the world stuff, but that God also directed to predetermined ends by his providential superintendence of the world. At least in writings toward the end of his life, Warfield held that evolution in this sense was fully compatible with biblical understandings of the production of the human body. “Mediate creation” meant the action of God upon matter to bring something new into existence that could not have been produced by forces or energy latent in matter itself. He does not apply the notion of “mediate creation” directly in his last, most mature writings on evolution, but it may be that he expounded the concept as much to deal with miracles or other

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biblical events than for developments in the natural world.13 The last means of God’s action was “creation ex nihilo,” which Warfield consistently maintained was the way that God made the original stuff of the world. It also seems that, in his 1915 article on Calvin, when he considered the soul of every human, Warfield held that God created each soul directly ex nihilo.

Throughout Warfield’s career, the concept of concursus was especially important for both theology and science. Just as the authors of Scripture were completely human in writing the Bible, even as they enjoyed the full inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so too could all living creatures develop fully (with the exception of the original creation and the human soul) through “natural” means.

The key for Warfield was a doctrine of Providence that saw God working in and with, instead of as a replacement for, the processes of nature. Late in his career, this stance also grounded Warfield’s opposition to “faith healing.” In his eyes, physical healing through medicine and the agency of physicians was as much a result of God’s action (if through secondary causes) as the cures claimed as a direct result of divine intervention.14 For his views on evolution, concursus was as important, and as fruitful, as it was for his theology as a whole. It was a principle he felt the Scriptures offered to enable humans both to approach the world fearlessly and to do so for the greater glory of God. Warfield’s writings on evolution, the last of which appeared in the year of his death, 1921, cannot, of course, pronounce definitively on theological-scientific questions at the end of the twentieth century. They can, however, show that sophisticated theology, nuanced argument, and careful sifting of scientific research are able to produce a much more satisfactory working relationship between science and theology than the heated strife which has dominated public debate on this subject since the time of Warfield’s passing.

The commitment of Warfield and Hodge to solid empirical science and to the concursus of divine and natural action gave them extraordinary balance in sifting the difficult questions of science and faith that beset their era. One of the reasons that many in subsequent decades have failed to retain their equipoise on this subject may be that they have abandoned one or both of these commitments. MR Dr. Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.

His most recent book is Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997).

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Jars of Clay or Chips of Silicon?

DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS

The Case Against Matter A host of non-Christian religions and philosophies claim that the source of human misery is not sin against a holy and personal God, but materiality itself. The

Morna Kint, charcoal

God’s revealed truth can be attacked outright by those who deny cardinal biblical doctrines on the basis of supposedly new revelations or through spurious skeptical arguments against the supernatural. The most insidious challenges to Christian orthodoxy, however, often insinuate themselves into the fabric of culture so that their presence subtly under mines crucial Christian perspectives on the things that matter most—God, creation, human nature, salvation, and ethics. The biblical doctrine of creation is being vitiated today not only by assor ted NeoGnostics who deny the very reality or goodness of matter, but also by certain emerging technologies that create implicit habits of thought and perception which corrode the Christian understanding of matter. Before exploring these recent developments, we will critique the fundamental philosophical error that sparks their appeal. problem is not that we sin in our bodies, but that we have bodies in the first place; not that the fall affects the material world but that the material world is the effect of the fall. The physical universe conspires against our noble souls, which find themselves incarcerated in the

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cruel cages of corporeality. Spiritual liberation, according to various modern-day Gnostics, Hindus, Neoplatonists, occultists, New Agers, and others, comes not through the reconciliation of the creature to the Creator through Christ, but by transcending the body itself. They echo the beliefs of ancient Gnosticism, a heresy of the early Christian centuries, that creation itself was the fall—the fall of spirit into matter.

Nevertheless, spirit still resides as the kernel in the hard shell of matter, however hidden. Through the attainment of gnosis (the esoteric wisdom of one’s essential nature divined through direct experience), the soul can be set free by ascertaining its own deity. 1 Disembodiment is the highest form of liberation. Once free from the bondage to the body, matter matters not.

The Gnostic error flourishes in our times. Wellknown literary critic Harold Bloom has recently written a defense of a kind of Gnosticism called Omens of Millennium, which he concludes with a “Gnostic Sermon.”2 For Bloom, and all Gnostics, what afflicts humans is not sin, but ignorance of our innate, but hidden deity. The suicide of thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult sadly illustrates the Gnostic error in extremis. Under the direction of Marshall Applewhite, the cultists believed that they could leave their human “containers” by ending their earthly lives and ascend to a space craft hiding behind the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. Despite the UFO element, the group was essentially Gnostic. This explains their ascetic behavior and the castration of several of the members. They believed that the body must be renounced and overcome—not disciplined by God’s grace or finally resurrected at the end of history. Rather, it must be left behind as refuse.

The Biblical Case for Matter When put this blatantly, the Gnostic temptation is easily identified and confronted by core aspects of Christian theology, such as the concept of divine, fiat creation. God, the perfect and personal Creator, brought the universe into existence by his will ex nihilo, according to his wisdom, and for his pleasure. Since creation is rooted in the will of an all-good and omnipotent being, it is intrinsically good (Gen. 1:21; 1 Tim 4:1-4) and fitted for human flourishing (Is. 45:18).

The fact that creation is (by definition) less than divine—since it is physical, finite, temporal, and contingent—does not render it unworthy of respect or ill-suited for God’s image-bearers to inhabit or cultivate (Gen. 1:26-28).

The Christian reality of redemption is equally implanted in matter. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

As the early church fathers put it, what isn’t assumed 24

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cannot be redeemed. God, in Christ, took on a human nature in order to redeem human beings in their totality: body and soul. Hebrews cites Christ as affirming, “a body you prepared for me” (Heb. 10:5). In his great Christological hymn Paul proclaims that Christ Jesus, though “in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped” but took “the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” for the sake of our redemption (Phil. 2:6-7). Although Christ humbled himself to assume a human nature, he did not pollute himself by the sheer fact of Incarnation.

The idea of Incar nation and cr ucifixion was “foolishness to the Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23), who deemed the divine as being too exalted to associate with matter.

But God in Christ did not reckon it so. Paul again emphasizes God’s investment in matter when he says that believers are reconciled “by Christ’s physical body through his death” to present them “holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation” (Col. 1:22).

The final liberation of the redeemed and of the cosmos itself is a material matter. The death-defeating resurrection of Jesus Christ is not the release of a disembodied spirit to a higher level while his body is discarded. The resurrected Jesus told his startled disciples, “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself!

Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Luke 24:38-39). Christ’s resurrected body was physical; the tomb was empty. It was a body unlike any other, because it was the first fruits of the general resurrection to come, but it was—and is—a genuine, material entity (1 Cor. 15). Christ ascended bodily to the Father, and he will return in like manner (Acts 1:11).

The final state of every human being will involve the body as well. The prophet Daniel foretells the resurrection of the just and the unjust (Dan. 12:2).

Jesus promised his disciples that they would rise with him at the end of history (John 5:24-29). Paul teaches that the entire cosmos groans for redemption as it “waits eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23).

Those redeemed from sin through the incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and ascended Christ are also called to follow his way of life, to glorify God in their bodies by presenting themselves a living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1). Christian ethics pertains to the soul, but not at the expense of the body. Paul counsels husbands to love their wives “as their own bodies” (Eph. 5:28). His argument against immorality assumes the worth of the human body: “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body … Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!” (1 Cor. 6:13, MODERN REFORMATION

Cyberspace Temptations: Techno-Gnosticism However, other challenges to the Christian view of the physical world are more indirect and subtle. The world of cyberspace technologies presents some strange new hi-tech versions of ancient errors. The term cyberspace has been bandied about in the last few years, and it has a range of meanings.

Essentially the term comes from two words. Cyber is an abbreviation of cybernetics, the study of information systems, typically computers. Cyber-space, then, is the space or place where humans interact with computers. I am writing this article on a word processor, one of the less exotic realms of cyberspace. The words I type appear and disappear on a computer screen, not on a piece of paper (as they would if I were using a typewriter). The information is in cyberspace, an electronic or “wired” environment.

More interestingly, cyberspace also refers to the informational exchanges of the Internet, a system where millions of computers are linked by phone lines. The

Internet, made more accessible through the World Wide Web (a way of simplifying Internet access), is a huge, ever-changing depository of information—involving everything from Christian apologetics web pages to hard core pornography. Through the various modalities of cyberspace, people may do research on a particular cult, use electronic mail, engage in chat rooms (where several people in different places post shor t messages that appear one after the other on a scrolling screen), engage in bizarre on-line fantasy role playing games (called MUUs and MUDs), or any number of activities.

Cyberspace allows those who can master the technology and afford to be wired (which excludes many, both here and abroad) to be connected in a variety of ways not possible before. Huge amounts of information can be exchanged across vast distances very quickly, providing a host of beneficial possibilities for up-to-date prayer concerns, personal cor respondence, medical research, and so on.

However, this manner of electronic connectedness increases information flow often at the expense of the personal presence. The digital world is disembodied in the sense that information is detached from encounters with other persons. Previous technologies produced this effect as well. Both the telephone and the radio detach the human voice from physical presence. Television gives us images of humans without their actual presence. There are real, live people sitting somewhere in front of their computers, but the information they send, receive, and synthesize can never replace the person-to-person, life-onlife dimension so central to the Christian ethos and ethic.

Some cyberspace-utopians (digitopians), such as Bill Gates in his book, The Road Ahead, have hailed the Internet as a zone of unlimited freedom and positive possibility. One television commercial revels that on the Internet there is no gender or race or age, so it is a place of equality and tolerance—as if shearing ourselves and others of these God-given physical particularities were an unmitigated good. The Gnostic temptation rears a digital head as digitopians seek disembodiment as The Transfiguration, Raphael. Planet Art

15). We cannot serve God in the spirit while disobeying him in the body, or vice versa. Our thoughts affect our actions and our actions affect our thoughts, and both are laid bare before the omniscience of God (Heb. 4:12).

Given this rich theology of matter, Christians should be on guard against any direct or indirect attack on the reality and wor th of the physical dimension in relation to divine creation, fall, redemption, and ethics.

We should fortify ourselves against the direct attacks of assorted Gnostics and other anti-matter proponents by a sound understanding of both theology and apologetics.

For instance, the New Age best-seller The Celestine Prophesy, by James Redfield, speaks of humans becoming so spiritual that they dematerialize and ascend into heaven. This has nothing to do with the redemptive work of Christ, who was resurrected and ascended in a physical body. Redfield’s scenario is a counterfeit, a false promise with no logical or evidential support, unlike the Christian hope.3

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ultimate liberation. Yet as media critic Clay Shirky notes, “An area that bases its idea of tolerance on simply hiding characteristics the majority are intolerant of is at best a digital closet.”4 The lack of physical proximity among persons and the absence of responsibility often engenders rude and thoughtless exchanges.5 Nevertheless, some cyberpunk science fiction, such as the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, fancies a world where humans can shed their bodies and as fully digitized beings directly “jack in” to cyberspace. Outside the realm of literary fiction, Hans Morovec, a robot scientist, argues in his book, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, that human consciousness can one day be translated into digital information and enjoy immor tal freedoms unconstrained by biology. These speculations evince a kind of Techno-Gnosticism in which the flesh becomes the technological equivalent of spirit by computer transformations. It is a false hope of digital resurrection apart from the power of a supernatural God. Idols, whether made of silicon or stone, cannot save.

to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith” (Rom. 1:1011). Paul’s letter to the Romans has been an unparalleled spiritual gift to the world for two thousand years; yet Paul still yearned to have an “incarnational” presence in the life of the Roman believers. Even a teleconference linked through the Internet would not have quenched his thirst. Put another way, embodied fellowship is an irreducible and incomparable quality which cannot be adequately translated into any other form of communication, cyberspace or otherwise.

This exclusive quality of fellowship is also evident in the Apostle John’s comment that “I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink.

Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12; see also 3 John 13-14). For John, the fullness of joy sprang from physical encounters, despite the fact that he was an instrument of the Holy Spirit in the writing of inerrant Scripture.

Incarnational Matters Jesus Christ’s incarnation is God’s supernatural means of redeeming erring mortals, but it also spells out a pattern of relationships and communication for Christian discipleship that resists both overt Gnosticism and the disembodying effects of cyberspace technologies. Authentic Christian life and ministry is “incarnational” in that the Body of Christ should relish embodied fellowship and personal involvement with other believers and the nonbelieving world as well. In this way, the reality of Christ can, in a sense, be “made flesh” through our physical presence. In Jesus’ high priestly prayer to the Father, he expounds this dynamic: “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world” (John 18:18). Just as Christ “made the Father known” (John 1:18) by his life among the living, so we should make God known by our personal presence in God’s world for the sake of his creatures.

The incar national model of communication considers personal, face-to-face engagement superior to other ways of communication, yet it does not reject other means entirely. Paul’s written epistles are foundational to biblical theology, but he nevertheless confessed his desire for personal contact with his Christian friends: “I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you. I long

Human Otherness in Jeopardy The centrality of embodied fellowship is sometimes threatened by cyberspace technologies that obscure the reality of genuine human otherness. Technology critic Gregory Rawlins raises this pertinent issue: “Perhaps our deepest distinction is that between our own bodies and our environment—the self and other—and that distinction crumbles when we can jack ourselves into any device in our environment. In such a world, the environment becomes us and we become the environment.”6 In other words, the human presence of others may melt into the software. Rawlins doesn’t develop a comprehensive ethical analysis, but Christians have urgent theological reasons to do so. The incarnational model of ministry presupposes the sanctity of the human person as an individual and embodied soul, a unique bearer of transcendent value conferred by a holy God. By virtue of their essential personhood, such beings must be addressed as truly other. They should not be dissolved into impersonal digital environments. When the flesh becomes data it fails to dwell among us.7 When we busy ourselves with manipulating data in a digital world where human otherness does not intrude, relationships can be stripped of all the vicissitudes of enfleshed encounters. A kind of technological autism

When the flesh becomes data it fails to dwell among us.

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may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all law, all politics.9

can result, in which the human origin of information recedes beyond the digital horizon. To use the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s terms, the “I-Thou” relationship, which is “characterized by openness, reciprocity, and a deep sense of personal involvement,”8 may be eclipsed by an “I-it” relationship that lacks the personal dimension, despite the technological wizardry involved. The more often social interactions occur in cyberspace instead of in the world of real space and material objects, the g reater the threat of depersonalization becomes.

For example, a Christian professor may write his Email address on a class syllabus, and then, instead of meeting with students in his office, simply trade E-mail messages with them. Information is exchanged, and much of it may be helpful, yet there is no authentic meeting of eyes, minds, hearts, and souls. There is no person-toperson mentoring; iron fails to sharpen iron because silicon has absorbed the interpersonal impact of a face-toface encounter. Similarly, a pastor may deceive himself into thinking that by reaching more people through Email and the church’s jazzy web page, he can justify fewer hospital and home visits. But no electronic message can take the place of human touch and physical proximity.

Biblical practices such as the laying on of hands (Acts 28:8; 2 Tim. 1:6), the right hand of fellowship (Gal. 2:9), Communion (1 Cor. 11:17-34), and Baptism (Matt.

28:19) can have no digital counterparts because they require the literal presence of others.

Although C. S. Lewis wrote before the age of cyberspace, his eschatological reflections on the dimension of otherness serve as a tonic for us today.

And, we must add, all our interaction in cyberspace must be understood in this eternal context as well.

The “incarnational” ideal for communication certainly does not eliminate cyberspace or other electronic media of communication for Christians.

Technological innovation is implied in God’s command for his image bearers to “have dominion over the earth” (Gen. 1:28). With respect to evangelism, the Apostle Paul said that he had become all things to all people so that he might win as many as possible to Christ (1 Cor. 9:22). Analogously, we should use whatever media are appropriate in particular contexts. Nevertheless, unless we subject all means of communication to a solid theological analysis, we may mismatch the message with the medium and fail to hallow God in our stewardship of the resources at our disposal. How we estimate and handle matter matters to our Maker and matters eternally. Those who attempt to forever free us from matter or use it in ways that undermine its goodness and value find themselves at odds with the Creator and Redeemer of heaven and earth.10 MR

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to

Dr. Groothuis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at Denver Seminary and the author of The Soul in Cyberspace (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1997).

It should not be surprising that the leaders of a civil society love its glory and happiness; but, unfortunately for the tranquility of men, that those who consider themselves as the magistrates, or rather as the masters, of a more holy and more sublime homeland manifest some love for the earthly homeland which nourishes them. How sweet it is for me to be able to make such a rare exception in [Geneva’s] favor, and to place in the rank of our best citizens those zealous trustees of the sacred dogmas authorized by the laws, those venerable pastors of souls, whose lively and sweet eloquence the better instills the maxims of the Gospel into people’s hearts as they themselves always begin by practicing them. Everyone knows the success with which the art of preaching is cultivated in Geneva. But since people are too accustomed to seeing things said in one way and done in another, few of them know the extent to which … severity to oneself and gentleness to others reign in the body of our ministers. Perhaps it behooves only the city of Geneva to provide the edifying example of such a perfect union between a society of theologians and of men of letters. It is in large part upon their wisdom and their acknowledged moderation and upon their zeal for the prosperity of the state that I base my hopes for [Geneva’s] eternal tranquility.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on his surprise that Geneva’s theologians love earth in addition to loving heaven, in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men, dedicatory letter to the Republic of Geneva.

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Justified by the Resurrection A REFORMATION INSIGHT FORTODAY PAUL F. M. ZAHL It is a striking fact that one particular sentence from St. Paul occurs in three foundational documents of the Reformation.

And it is not Romans 1:17! Moreover, each document uses this sentence to highlight some aspect of the doctrine of justification.1 The sentence is from Romans 4:25. Martin Luther places it at the head of Part Two of the Schmalkaldic Articles (1527): “Here is the first and chief article: (1) That Jesus Christ our God and Lord, ‘was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification’ (Rom. 4:25).” The Augsburg Confession, the first official Protestant Confession of Faith, quotes the verse generally in the 1530 version and cites it specifically in the 1540 revision. 2 And Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549 organized his Fifteenth Collect for the First Sunday of Easter entirely around the Pauline text: “Almighty Father, who hast given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve Thee in pureness of living and truth; Through 28

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the merits of the same Thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.” Significantly, St. Augustine in his Enchiridion, chapter 52, had long before used St. Paul’s words to link the present justification of man through word and faith to the Resurrection of Christ: “in illo vera resurrectio, ita in nobis vera justificatio,” (“in his true resurrection is our true justification”).

The classic sentence itself, in its original form, was composed by Paul in the mid- to late-50s A.D. It occurs as a sort of climax to the argument that childless Abraham’s justifying faith (Gen. 15:6), according to which he believed God’s Word that he would have

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countless descendants, resulted in a proleptic (anticipatory as if already accomplished) “resurrection of the body,” by which he and Sarah were able to conceive a son. In the same way that Abraham’s faith was connected with God’s motion that took his body from death to life, so is our faith connected with God’s motion that takes us from death to life in ultimate eternal terms. Paul then follows with the associated truth that Jesus’ Resurrection results in the believer’s justification before God. No distrust made [Abraham] waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

That is why his faith was “reckoned to him as righteousness.” But the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Rom. 4:20-25).

As happens so often in the teachings of St. Paul, a biblical story suggests parallels that prove fruitful for theology, in this case extremely fruitful!

Paul emphasizes that our justification before God, our being restored from a position before God based on guilt and estrangement to a relationship based on acceptance and positive regard, is accomplished by means of the Resurrection. This Resurrection emphasis is different from another common emphasis within the cluster of ideas concerning the doctrine of justification by faith. The other emphasis, which has been ascendant in the Protestant tradition of thinking about justification, occasionally so focuses on Good Friday (atonement) that the link between justification and the Resurrection is downplayed.

Certainly we are justified because we have been forgiven on account of the atonement of Christ on the cross: our justification hinges on the forgiveness of our sin. Within this emphasis, Good Friday becomes the central moment in the history of justification. It is more a question of emphasis than fundamental teaching—no one ever denied Paul’s linking justification to Easter. But the focus has shifted from Easter to Good Friday, from Resurrection to atonement, even from present vitality to mere remembrance of the past.

We can observe that Paul’s lightning-rod connection of new resurrected life with the justification of sinners represents an aspect of justification that has been subordinated to the atonement emphasis, and in some ways neglected in our Reformation tradition. Justification, the mark of a living Church, moves quite rapidly in the later decades of the

sixteenth century from an electric word for the here and now to an assertion based primarily on memory.

Justification anchored principally to Calvary threatens to become a talisman tied up to the past without being pivoted to the future. The point is that the doctrine of justification in the “mature” period of Reformation thought began to lose its dynamism and Lebendigkeit, or vitality, when only one strand of truth was emphasized.

It is important to discover, or re-discover, the connection in theology (let alone in the real living of Christianity), between the Resurrection of Jesus then and our status as forgiven sinners now. Forgiveness is the fulcrum for a new life. This is as true in everyday life as the fact that the sun shines. When you confess your sin and are truly forgiven and know it, then there is a potent awakening of hope in the human spirit. Such confession meshes the reality-principle (i.e., repentance) and the God-reality (i.e., grace and absolution) to create this conviction. I could stop here and give dozens of examples of this from personal pastoral experience. I could witness from my own life. I could even point to parables from the arts, such as John Ford’s 1953 masterpiece, The Sun Shines Bright (or from any number of other movies, plays, or books, among which Les Miserables of Victor Hugo would have to top the list). In The Sun Shines Bright, there is one central act of forgiveness in a small Kentucky town that is riven with divisions stemming from the Civil War. This act of forgiveness brings together all the factions in the town in such a way that no one is left out in the provision for future good.

With the Apostle Paul, we link our future to the Resurrection. The atonement, or forgiveness of sin once and for all achieved on the cross, weighs in, and heavily.

But the atonement is confirmed, ratified, sealed, and made enduringly good by virtue of Christ’s rising from death. Our justification hinges on a risen life, present in us now because Christ is present with us now.

Note the actuality of this. Jesus in his bodily substance rose from death. It was the molecules (according to John Updike, in his poem “Seven Stanzas for Easter”)! The New Testament is at pains to underline the corporeality of this. Thomas touched Jesus’ side and his hands (John 20:27). Paul stressed the appearances of Jesus, their number and the specific disciples who saw him (I Cor. 15:1-11). The Gospels are all rich in their accounts of the risen Jesus, who ate with and even cooked for his disciples (e.g., Luke 24).

John’s account of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus in the garden is among the most riveting and plausible reports because of its very strangeness (John 20:11-18). Her touch and his recoil (Noli me tangere) are vividly remembered.

For Paul, the Resurrection of Jesus is also the ultimate case of creatio ex nihilo, the creation of something MAY/JUNE 1998

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(life) from nothing (death). The Old Testament case of this par excellence (not to mention God’s creation of the world) was the physical enabling of Abraham and Sarah to conceive a child. The New Testament case of this par excellence, following from the virgin birth of Jesus, is the raising of Jesus from death. These are not cases of amelioration. They are cases of the quantum leap!

Thus the individual person today, and in all periods, is able to derive hope for the future based on God’s forgiveness of past trespasses (Rom. 4:25a) and established for all time in God’s Resurrection of Christ (4:25b). Justification is present truth because Christ is not dead but alive. And it is the molecules. Justification carried forward into the present and future by the Resurrection is Easter truth.

We owe it to ourselves and our fellow sufferers (i.e., our fellow human beings) to give due weight to the insight of Romans 4:25. Luther saw it and passed it on, although the insight faded somewhat over time.

Cranmer picked it up and prayed it. The Reformation was born through it. We can close with the words of W. H. Griffith-Thomas, that bright light of Edwardian Protestant Anglicanism, who wrote in 1904: Justification is much more than pardon.

Forgiveness is only part of Justification, and to identify them is to cause spiritual trouble and loss… . Forgiveness is only negative, the removal of the condemnation. Justification is also positive, the removal of guilt (ital., sic), and the bestowal of a perfect standing before God. Forgiveness is an act, and a succession of isolated acts from time to time. Justification is an act which results in a permanent relation or position in the sight of God. Forgiveness is repeated throughout our life. Justification is complete and never repeated … it covers the whole of our life, past, present, and future (ital., PZ).

Christ the Lord is ris’n today! Alleluia!

MR

Dr. Paul F. M. Zahl, Dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent (Episcopal) in Birmingham, Alabama, has studied at Chapel Hill, Harvard, St. John’s College (Nottingham), the University of Nottingham, Trinity College (Bristol), Wycliffe Hall (Oxford), and the University of Tubingen.

Dean Zahl’s most recent book is The Protestant Face of Anglicanism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

Seven Stanzas at Easter

by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

— From TELEPHONE POLES AND OTHER POEMS by John Updike Copyright ©1961 by John Updike Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

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IN PRINT The Soul in Cyberspace Doug Groothuis (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997) The Soul in Cyberspace investigates how the technologies of cyberspace impinge on our modern culture, how they shape our souls, and whether they should be received, rejected or refined. Groothuis specifically addresses the postmodern view of the self and its relation to personal identity in cyberspace; the relationship of the book and the screen to the nurturance of the soul; the status of objective truth in the digital world; and the advisability of putting Christianity online.

B-GRTH-1 Paberback, $10.00 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology Neil Postman (New York: Random House 1992) In this provocative work, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation from a society that uses technology to one that is shaped by it, as he traces its effects upon what we mean by politics, intellect, religion, history—even privacy and truth. But if Technopoly is disturbing, it is also a passionate rallying cry filled with a humane rationalism as it asserts the manifold means by which technology, placed within the context of our larger human goals and social values, is an invaluable instrument for furthering the most worthy human endeavors.

B-POST-2 Paperback, $12.00 In the Face of God The Dangers & Delights of Spiritual Intimacy Michael Horton (Dallas: Word, 1996) Against pop culture’s assumption that a feel-good faith brings one into a chummy relationship with God, Michael Horton raises this war ning about the dangers of

spiritual intimacy. In short, getting close to God without carefully defining who he is, without knowing whether he can be approached at all, and without understanding how to approach him is an immense risk which causes us to miss out on his transcendence.

B-HO-10 Paperback, $13.00 Lament for a Son Nicholas Wolterstorff (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1987) After the death of his own twentyfive year old son, Wolterstorff hoped that this chronicle of his grief would give voice to those who, “sit beside us on the mourning bench for children.”

What he found was that his book spoke to many who have suffered loss in other forms as well. Lament for a Son provides hope and comfort to those who know the pain of loss in its many shapes and forms.

B-WOLT-1 Paperback, $10.00 The City After the Automobile Moishe Safdie (New York: Basic Books, 1997) Available at your local library or bookstore.

OUT OF PRINT: (available at your local library) Charles Hodge’s What is Darwinism and Other Writings on Science and Religion Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994) Christ and Architecture Donald J. Bruggink and Carl H. Droppers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965)

All books (except out of print) are available from MR by calling (800) 956-2644. Phones are answered from 8:30 am through 4:30 pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. For further book recommendations and an on-line resources catalogue, please visit our website at www.remembrancer.com/ace.

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Theologians and Utilitarians: HISTORICAL CONTEXT FORTHE “DISTANCE LEARNING”DEBATE BENJAMIN SASSE

O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility [sic] of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories....1 Postman’s point in commenting on this tale—and 32

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indeed the basic point of most of Postman’s instructive work—is that technology is always a mixed bag: “[The King] gives arguments for and against each of Theuth’s inventions.

For it is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and Steven Burch

Neil Postman begins his Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology with a retelling of Socrates’ tale of Thamus and Theuth. Thamus is the king to whom the inventor Theuth comes to show all of the latest, cuttingedge technology.

Among his many creations is writing, andTheuth proudly proclaims that he has thereby improved memor y.

But the wise King points out the error of the inventor’s exuberance:

technology taketh away.”2 We should begin a discussion of “distance learning” with the reminder that almost every technological innovation has both costs and benefits, simply because this reality is so often forgotten. Proponents of a new tool quickly become “technophiles,” while opponents of the tool often sound like Luddites.3 Let’s begin then with the acknowledgement by all parties in this debate that there are two extremes to be avoided: It is possible to have either too much or too little technology in education.

In spite of all the benefits of an oral culture, the book is surely an invention that even the most technologically skeptical among us doesn’t regret. As MODERN REFORMATION

anyone who has ever played the party-game “Telephone” knows, it is unlikely that the theology of Romans 5 would have been accurately transmitted by word of mouth. On the other hand, technology worshippers sometimes think that technology is itself the savior, able to redeem us from all ills—including the “ill” that we have bodies which are limited to one place at a time.

Once we’ve admitted that there are two possible errors, we can begin a less zealous and more thoughtful discussion.

Our Changing Times?

We hear that these are changing times so frequently that we forget to distinguish between things that are and things that are not actually changing. Advertisements, especially, shout this nonsense: “The new Dodge—it’s about change.” Clearly our age has engineers who stand on the shoulders of last generation’s engineers, who stand..., etc. When we are talking about vaccinations or other medical technology, few of us lament the changes that time has brought (even though some evidence suggests that certain diseases mutate in response to medical innovation). Similarly, most of us are pleased that the survival rates from accidents improve as cars are built more soundly (even though the work in increasingly efficient factories is often more dehumanizing). Finally, most of us appreciate the improvements in early nineteenth century saw-mills which created the two-by-four, and thus enabled the modern “balloon frame” house. This innovation made it possible for more than merely the rich to enjoy warm and dry shelter (even though there is an aesthetic cost to the mass production of homes which has displaced regional materials and diversity).4 In our globalizing age, the main change about change is that it seems to come more rapidly than ever before. We need to distinguish, though, between heavenly things and all of the earthly things just mentioned. Technology’s domain is the earthly. It is even an implication of God’s direction to his creatures in the cultural mandate of Genesis, and much technological change is, on net, beneficial. But in spite of all this change, at least two things do not change: human sinfulness, and the consequent need for the Church’s proclamation of the work of Christ. Our tools for subduing nature may change, but our human nature does not. No matter what the marketers may tell us, there is no salvific technology. Perhaps surprisingly, this assertion must be restated when talking about “Christian” inventions just as much as when talking about run-of-the-mill creature comforts.

There are now predictions by a Texas mega-church that their pastor will soon be preaching in multiple locations at once on Sunday mornings by means of hologram technology. As outrageous as this may sound,

hasn’t it been common practice since the radio’s invention for people to “forsake the assembling” (Heb. 10:25) of the local congregation because they think they can get all the sermon’s benefits from home? While more of us may have an intuitive skepticism about technologically aided preaching, we are less likely to question the costs of adding more technology to our education. Now we need to ask whether the technologies which enable “distance learning” really give as much as they take away.

What Is Distance Learning?

When institutions—and for the purposes of this article, seminaries in particular—talk about “distance learning,” they generally mean one of three things: 1) Classes for credit taken by means of a computer; 2) The establishment of an “extension campus” which is typically staffed by teachers who drive or fly to the remote site from the home campus; or 3) A class schedule which enables students who live far away from the campus to come to the school for compressed classes, usually for one week, three times per year.

What all three of these variants share in common is that the student does not have to leave his or her home and move to the campus where the faculty and the rest of the student body are physically located. Because of either transportation technology (which enables faculty or students to move to and from classes rapidly) or communications technology (which enables faculty and students to communicate without being in the same place), the student does not have to withdraw from the world to go to school.

Technology has made this possible, but technology cannot tell us if this is actually a desirable thing.

Unfortunately, many evangelical seminaries seem to be merely assuming that possibility equals desirability.

Consider the following statements by seminary presidents discussing the future of theological education in a recent issue of Christianity Today: 5 • A lot of people want a theological education, but they can’t uproot themselves and their families and come live here. We’ve taken some things we’ve learned through our doctor of ministry program and developed what we call a summer/winter program… .

It worked so well that we developed an external studies, or distance-learning, program that can be done at the convenience of the individual. People receive an edited lecture and the complete notes and textbooks. And they can always call and talk to the professor.

• We have five extension campuses: [in cities A, MAY/JUNE 1998

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B, C, D, and E]. They make theological education available to people who can’t uproot and come to us.

[Y] offers a modular program, Master of Arts in Ministry, and a resident program, Master of Arts in Biblical Studies.

• We used to see people seek formal education, then take up vocational ministry. Today, it’s more common to take up ministry and then seek formal preparation. Subsequently, we have developed several degree programs designed for practitioners. We have what we call an inministry M.Div....They come to campus for three weeks, twice a year. The rest of their instruction is done with interactive computing, with telephone conferencing, with E-mail, video—a whole variety of media tools.

These statements and ads raise many questions that space prohibits considering fully, such as: How could students possibly have time to study if they don’t have time to attend a class, “day or evening”? Should institutions of theological education really be finding ways to accommodate the more common practice of people going into “ministry” without having had any training, thereby legitimizing the practice? What exactly are “ministry skills”? What is the “spiritual” knowledge that is to be contrasted with “book knowledge”?

As important as these questions are, this article focuses instead on the aspects of the presidents’ statements which seem to imply that it is unfortunate that our bodies are limited to one place at a time: If only we could be both at home and at school at once; if only I could be working at my job and reading in the library; if only one could be at church and watching the football game. The implication is that learning is great, but going to school is not. I suggest, on the other hand, that the benefits of formal education include not merely receiving the data or content that is studied, but also the critical distance from the world, from the cares of the moment, which enable meaningful reflection on the content.

• [T]echnology has destroyed geography. This is exciting, because it opens up new oppor tunities to engage persons in both theological education and evangelism.

• We’re going to fit our schedule to meet student needs as much as possible—not try to get the student to fit our schedule. That was a big shift.

Seminary advertisements which appeared in the same special section of Christianity Today exclaimed:6 • You want to strengthen your ministry skills.

You’d like to earn a master’s degree. But your schedule is packed. There’s no time for classes, day or evening.

Not to worry. The modular Master of Arts Program at [X] School is tailor-made for people like you. This innovative program allows busy professionals to earn a graduate degree in Christian Ministry or Missiolog y while continuing their full-time positions.

Here’s how it works: you spend three oneweek sessions a year on [X’s] campus for a period of three years. You gain practical knowledge. And after each one-week session, you apply your knowledge on the job… .

So if you think you’re too busy to take a graduate program, give us a call.

• Preparation for a total ministry takes total person training. This is why at [Y] Graduate School, we integrate a Total Person Training philosophy into our programs. We don’t just give you book knowledge, we give you the personal, spiritual and practical knowledge you need to be prepared for ministry in the nineties.

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From New England College to American University To think more intelligently about the relationship between the protected community of learning and the broader community (that is, the world), it is helpful to consider the changes that occurred in American higher education between 1865 and 1910. One of the best books on the subject is historian Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University. Simply put, there was an institution which existed in 1865, the typical New England college, which was not that different from the Harvard established by the Puritans in 1636. These colleges were initially founded to train men for the ministry. The Calvinistic theology was watered-down over time, but the ministers who ran the colleges generally continued to believe that rigorous study of the classics was the best means to the interrelated ends of mental discipline, moral stability, and religious orthodoxy. But they also believed that fulfilling their mission required much more than just what occurred in the classroom. With paternalistic control that might make us nervous, they governed their campuses as enclaves from the world. A college was not just another place with a different kind of business; it was a different kind of place. (By contrast, the discussion of seminary presidents highlighted earlier talks about the “delivery of theological education”—as if it is a “product.”)7 MODERN REFORMATION

At the other end of Veysey’s study (1910), there exists a different institution, the modern American university, which is surprisingly similar to the universities we know today. He explains that there are two basic differences between the old college and the new university: purpose and governance. For reasons too numerous to explore here (ranging from post-Civil War nor ther n economic organization, and the democratization of American culture, to American conceptions of both German romanticism and German particularistic research),8 there was great pressure both inside and outside the academy for the college to evolve as the other cultural institutions around it were evolving.

While not every actor fits neatly into the categorization, Veysey finds four basic views among academics about the purpose of higher education. First, the conservatives in the reform debate primarily defended the old college. Though they were not opposed to all change (especially if their descending social status could be stabilized or elevated in the process), their conception of a “university” was little more than a college with a larger library.

Their willingness to change was generally limited to the methodological (the recitation was regarded as tedious)— though they were also aware that some innovation might be required to respond effectively to thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.9 The three remaining schools were all comprised of reformers, though their aims diverged widely. One must not underestimate, though, the value of the “idea” of reform, and the inspiration derived from the word “university,” even where ideas and words were not clearly defined. In debate with the conservatives, advocates of change of every stripe often looked—even to each other—like allies. Veysey names these three schools practical service, pure research, and liberal culture.

(Though this typology could be pushed too far, it is also possible to view these schools as expressions of the typical minds of the social scientist, the natural scientist, and the [theologically liberal] humanist respectively.)

Understanding the ways in which the world shaped

the visions of these various reformers gives us a better sense of their objectives. The tentacles of the general culture entwining the utilitarian (practical service) and liberal cultural schools are easy to identify, while cultural influence upon the advocates of pure research is harder to isolate. Successful businessmen provided the metaphors for the utilitarians. 10 Liberal culture’s advocates were often motivated partly by the fear that Darwin’s triumphs would lead the naturalistic study of everything, including humanity, to displace entirely the humanistic study of humanity; the “lower” would thereby undermine the “higher.” (When conservatives liberalized—both theologically and in ter ms of academic reform, as the two frequently coincided—they usually joined the broad learning/liberal culture school.)11 The proponents of pure research, though harder to understand, were still partly shaped by culture—just not American popular or high culture as evidenced in the other two groups of refor mers.

While engaging in some psychological analysis, Veysey argues that the years that most of these researchers spent in Ger many completing doctoral work (at a time of a very low cost of living) were a source of nostalgic inspiration.

Recalling the intimacy of time spent in seminars with “master” teachers, these idealists (in the popular rather than the philosophical sense) were often willing to forgo marriage and meals for their research, and they spoke of research as both “the very highest vocation of man” and “a kind of scientific missionary work” even when they were not referring to technological or utilitarian application.12 Ultimately, the vocational (practical service) and research proponents defeated the conservatives and the defenders of the liberal arts. Put another way, the applied and pure scientists won the day over all humanists, old and new. The peculiarities of this victorious coalition translated into challenges for governing significantly more complex than the managing of either vision taken individually. Directing this new institution was no longer a matter of prudently selecting the best means to an end, but rather one of managing

But affirming matter—that is,

affirming God’s good creation— is to affirm the limits of nature.

And our bodies are limited to one place, and our minds are generally limited to thinking seriously about one thing at a time.

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both competing factions inside the institution and perceptions of these debates outside. Consequently, the scrupulous early nineteenth century theologian/moral philosopher serving as president, who viewed the executive role as an important one but rarely as a comprehensive calling, was generally ill-suited to the demands of a new office with greater affinity to the populist politician and the industrialist marketer than to the colonial preacher.13 The new president was less a teacher and more a businessman. The introduction of the typewriter (technology is always a mixed bag) and the presidential staff (to send more letters than one man could write) signaled the increasing importance of fund-raising— hence, of crafting what is happening inside the institution with an eye to how it will look outside the institution. The presidents’ “rooms” and the professors’ “studies” were transfor med into “offices.”14 The school became less a haven, and more a business. Students (customers?) were increasingly credited with knowing what they needed, so the curriculum grew looser, affording more student choice (and allowing professors to differentiate themselves by means of narrower research). So rose the elective system and the proliferation of departments we know today.15 The faculty committee system, which one might think was a means of ensuring that the faculty retained some power in the tension with a more powerful and distant “administration,” actually often had the opposite effect. Even if unintentionally, the administration’s organization of an entire web of faculty committees often made the teachers look like a bureaucratic mess, and thus made the solitary executive look all the more competent. “The administrator tried also, from time to time, to present bold schemes ... that cast the administrator [himself] as a genuine ‘leader’ at the same time he ‘consulted’ with others.” He would “gamble” by expanding his institution before he had the money to pay for it, and then see “whether benefactors could be goaded into alleviating the consequent plight by responding to the ‘emergency.’”16 As the administrator’s “natural role” became “politician,” one scholar complained: “The men who control Harvard today are very little else than business men, running a large department store which dispenses education to the million. Their endeavor is to make it the largest establishment of the kind in America.”17 Even if this was a bit overstated, it was clear that the presidents became more responsive to public opinion generally and to business models particularly. The university was “his” university, and the “faculty member had become a hired 36

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man” rather than a part of what defined the school.18 Theologians and Utilitarians How does this history relate to the current debate in the seminary community about distance learning? First, higher theological education has not been insulated from the changes that have occurred in broader higher education. I am not suggesting that there were or are definitive answers to the questions of purpose and organizational structure at either general or theological educational institutions.

Nonetheless, as Americans generally, and as evangelicals particularly, we need to be especially aware of the insidious ways in which efficiency-concer ns—or utilitarian thought processes—come to dominate all other concerns and all other ways of thinking. The successful businessperson or entrepreneur easily becomes the model for all other callings—administrator, professor, pastor, etc.

Let’s be clear, though, about what is not being said. I am not making the theologian king and the businessperson servant. (I am all in favor of having a businessperson run the faculty meetings!)

Instead, I argue that every Christian should give theological thinking priority over every other sort of thinking—business and technological and utilitarian thinking included. It is not that those who are professional theologians should r ule, but that theological categories (including a theological anthropology which reflects on the nature of the whole person, body and soul) should frame our thinking about all other spheres of life.

The heirs of the Reformation have an excellent trackrecord for not allowing grace to eradicate nature. All legitimate callings are affirmed. Ours is not a desperate God, helplessly lamenting all of the lost going to hell because some doctor is faithfully loving her neighbor by comforting the body instead of doing the “higher” work of foreign missions. Affirming all callings, though, does not preclude the doctor (the one using the tool) from telling the medical technician (the one providing the tool) which scalpel she needs for the incision at hand.

Similarly, doesn’t it make sense that we ought to employ theological categories to determine if given tools or technologies will aid the task of theological education?

The proper sort of thinking should be superior in each sphere. The problem is not that businesspeople think pragmatically about a given business issue. Rather, the problem is that evangelicals (be they businesspeople or theologians) often think about theological questions with utility concerns foremost in our minds. Not all MODERN REFORMATION

questions are about management or science.

Nonetheless, Christian managers and scientists, just like professional theologians, are called to think theologically about theological matters. Elders, for example, are not all professional theologians, but they are surely all to govern the church with theological thinking.

We need to determine if we first approach the question of which tools theological education needs with our theological hat on or our technological (utilitarian) hat on. Ours is a culture that worships tools. We’re so intrigued with computer graphics that we’ll gladly make a movie without a plot just to show them off. There is little harm in that (after all, it is entertainment), but great harm in altering our sense of what education is just because we have new tools.

Propositional and Experiential Knowledge Another frequently overlooked distinction in this debate is the one between experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge. Communications technology can certainly transmit propositional knowledge. We can and do learn from books on tape and from magazines like this one. And we have already affirmed the value of books. In no way should this article be construed as an attack on any of these forms of media.

But there is also experiential knowledge. The theme of this issue of MR is “matter,” and thus, it makes sense that we recognize the material forms of knowledge.

Sexual knowledge is of course one of these forms. Christians are not Platonists; no amount of “book-learning” or cognitive knowledge can replace the experience of sex.

It is an act, not an idea.

Many things combine propositional and experiential knowledge. For instance, a night at a concert cannot be reduced to a cognitive understanding of what is happening in the musical score.

Nor is the evening merely the sound. It is the sights and the sounds, the theory and the unfolding of the events (the “liturgy”) of the entire evening, from getting ready, to going, to returning home. The same might be said of a dinner party. A school is like these things. It is not simply about the transfer of data from a source to a recipient. People are not computers, or mere minds. We are minds in bodies. “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” The voice of my teacher is not an irrelevant, accidental property; it is the instrument—the human instrument, not simply the constructed tool—by which he explains the fallacy of my argument to me as we meet on his porch.

The school is not higher than the world, but it is

different than the world. The school is not an end in itself, but it is a protected place to which one withdraws to gain the critical distance which enables preparation for a meaningful return to the world. The school has a culture, and the experience of this culture is a part of the knowledge that one gains in an education. Our word for school comes from the Latin word for “leisure.” We draw back from the demands of the moment, in leisure, at a school, to prepare. “Alma Mater” was a title for Roman goddesses meaning “fostering mother.” It was only later transferred to schools. It is surely more than coincidental that both the school and the Church are referred to with these feminine/motherly terms. These institutions nur ture us; they are havens. Recall Augustine’s assertion that God is our Father because the Church is our mother. And the Church is an assembly; it is not merely cognitive content. Similarly, the school is not merely what is learned, but also the assembly of the faculty and student body, living and growing together in a community of learning.

But, the critic might argue, haven’t I simply hijacked a general discussion about learning and made it particularly about schools? Yes and no. If you want to talk about the benefits of this magazine or of cassette tapes of lectures or of books, I’m happy to agree that these are benefits of technology, and that they do promote “learning” at a “distance” from the place where the teaching is occurring.

For these benefits, I am grateful.

But our discussion here is really about formal education—that is, education working toward a degree. Our discussion is about what the model of education should be. The model should be embodied, fully human education, where there is personal contact between teacher and student. Distance learning is solitary learning. Proponents of computers and planes can talk about students phoning teachers all that they want; the reality is that teachers and students who are in the same place can eat together, walk together, and talk together. This is the ideal context for truly human education, and it should be our model. This is what today’s seminaries, at their best, are. And they shouldn’t cease to be what they are to become something less than what they are. They are schools (which combine propositional and experiential knowledge in a physical community), and they shouldn’t become merely an institution which “delivers” cognitive data.19 To reiterate, I am not underestimating the value of other sources of teaching such as this magazine (I work for it after all!). However, the type of learning that one MAY/JUNE 1998

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derives from this education is necessarily supplementary.

It is insufficient by itself. One should not get a degree from a magazine, or from a set of cassette tapes—even if there are prepackaged tests that come with it. The professor needs to know the student, and to hear the student struggle to connect one locus of theology to another. (Additionally, why isn’t more of this fully embodied teaching taking place in the local church?

Maybe if the seminaries focused less on “practical theology,” and more on actual theology, pastors would be better able to undertake this teaching themselves.)

Certainly arguments can be made in favor of the locational freedom enabled by bringing the education to the student. I am aware that many students work their way through school. But the fact remains that a future minister/theologian needs the best education possible for such a high calling. If the one who wants to serve actually wants to serve, then the education he needs is the education that will be best for his congregants in the long-run, not what most easily secures him a degree.

Mine is not an elitist argument; it is an argument that says that the future minister needs the best education possible—for others’ good, more than his own. And the best education is the embodied education. I want my future minister to have known his teachers, face-to-face.

Though it may surprise the technology enthusiasts in the debate, most of the defenders of the school do indeed think that education is more than merely “book learning.”

However insufficient these facets of the argument may be, they are yet superior to the arguments which start with a possible technology and construct a use, rather than starting with a genuine need and finding a tool or remedy. And this is the case with many distance lear ning advocates. (Other, more frightening, alternatives are that the seminaries are starting with different needs—money and/or power—and working backward to possible solutions to these needs. As Gordon-Conwell Professor David Wells has argued, though there are of course exceptions to the rule, it is difficult to believe that the Doctor of Ministry degree, one of the older distance learning programs, was really initiated to facilitate the love of learning. It makes seminaries lots of money, and it buys many clergy more professional standing. 20 Similarly, the cynic might wonder if the desire to have extension campuses in half a dozen cities isn’t just a desire for the big and the powerful, even if we baptize it by calling it a desire for “influence.”21) Ours is a culture obsessed with time. We worship the present and ignore the past. Most importantly, we don’t want to waste any time. Every minute must be “productive,” and “multi-tasking” is a means to this end.

Yet, though obsessed with time, we disdain space. We 38

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want to “destroy geography.” But affirming matter— that is, affirming God’s good creation—is to affirm the limits of nature. And our bodies are limited to one place, and our minds are generally limited to thinking seriously about one thing at a time.

Our future pastors need to withdraw from the world to prepare to serve the Church and world, precisely because they can’t think about theology and utility simultaneously. They need to learn theology exclusively for a time. “It has often been observed that higher education, technically advanced education, is able to make a nuclear bomb or some other weapon of mass destruction, but that only a liberal education provides the means to decide whether to use such weapons.”22 Socrates expressed a similar sentiment when he had King Thamus tell Theuth that “the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility [sic] of his own inventions.” Let evangelicals similarly say that our theological ways of thinking ought to prevail over our utilitarian ways of thinking as we evaluate the distance learning technologies. MR

Benjamin Sasse, a graduate of Harvard and St. John’s (Annapolis), is assistant editor of modernREFORMATION.

EPHESIANS

A N E X P O S I T I O NA L C O M M E N TA RY James Montgomery Boice This series speaks directly to our materialistic, secular, pagan, sex-oriented culture. This is the same world the Christians at Ephesus faced. That’s why Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has so much meaning today. Order this series as a whole or by chapter-long studies.

Working his way through the important themes elaborated by Paul in this epistle, Dr. Boice provides the reader with a compelling and thoughtful presentation of the central doctrines from a Reformed perspective. Hardback $25.00.

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MODERN REFORMATION

History & Faith J. GRESHAM MACHEN (1881–1937)

PhotoDisc

The student of the New Testament should be primarily an historian. The center and core of all the Bible is history. Everything else that the Bible contains is fitted into an historical framework and leads up to an historical climax.

The Bible is primarily a record of events.

That assertion will not pass unchallenged. The modern Church is impatient of history. History, we are told, is a dead thing. Let us forget the Amalekites, and fight the enemies that are at our doors. The true essence of the Bible is to be found in eternal ideas; history is merely the form in which those ideas are expressed. It makes no difference whether the history is real or fictitious; in either case, the ideas are the same. It makes no difference whether Abraham was an historical personage or a myth; in either case his life is an inspiring example of faith. It makes no difference whether Moses was really a mediator between God and Israel; in any case the record of Sinai embodies the idea of a covenant between God and his people. It makes no difference whether Jesus really lived and died and rose again as he is declared to have done in the Gospels; in any case the Gospel picture, be it ideal or be it history, is an encouragement to filial piety. In this way, religion has been made independent, as is thought, of the uncertainties of historical research. The separation of Christianity from history has been a great concern of modern theology. It has been an inspiring attempt. But it has been a failure.

Give up history, and you can retain some things. You can retain a belief in God. But philosophical theism has never been a powerful force in the world. You can retain a lofty ethical ideal. But be perfectly clear about one point—you can never retain a gospel. For gospel means “good news,” tidings, information about something that has happened. In other words, it means history. A gospel independent of history is simply a contradiction in terms.

We are shut up in this world as in a beleaguered camp. Dismayed by the stern facts of life, we are urged by the modern preacher to have courage. Let us treat God as our Father; let us continue bravely in the battle of life. But alas, the facts are too plain—those facts MAY/JUNE 1998

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which are always with us. The fact of suffering! How do you know that God is all love and kindness? Nature is full of horrors. Human suffering may be unpleasant, but it is real, and God must have something to do with it. The fact of death! No matter how satisfying the joys of earth, it cannot be denied at least that they will soon depart, and of what use are joys that last but for a day?

A span of life—and then, for all of us, blank, unfathomed mystery! The fact of guilt! What if the condemnation of conscience should be but the foretaste of judgment? What if contact with the infinite should be contact with a dreadful infinity of holiness? What if the inscrutable cause of all things should turn out to be a righteous God? The fact of sin! The thraldom of habit! This strange subjection to a mysterious power of evil that is leading resistlessly into some unknown abyss!

To these facts the modern preacher responds with exhortation. Make the best of the situation, he says, look on the bright side of life. Very eloquent, my friend! But alas, you cannot change the facts. The modern preacher offers reflection. The Bible offers more. The Bible offers news—not reflection on the old, but tidings of something new; not something that can be deduced or something that can be discovered, but something that has happened; not philosophy, but history; not exhortation, but a gospel.

The Bible contains a record of something that has happened, something that puts a new face upon life.

What that something is, is told us in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The authority of the Bible should be tested here at the central point. Is the Bible right about Jesus?

The Bible account of Jesus contains mysteries, but the essence of it can be put almost in a word. Jesus of Nazareth was not a product of the world, but a Saviour come from outside the world. His birth was a mystery.

His life was a life of perfect purity, of awful righteousness, and of gracious, sovereign power. His death was no mere holy martyrdom, but a sacrifice for the sins of the world. His resurrection was not an aspiration in the hearts of his disciples, but a mighty act of God. He is alive, and present at this hour to help us if we will turn to him. He is more than one of the sons of men; he is in mysterious union with the eternal God. That is the Bible account of Jesus. It is opposed today by another account. That account appears in many forms, but the essence of it is simple. Jesus of Nazareth, it maintains, was the fairest flower of humanity. He lived a life of remarkable purity and unselfishness. So deep was his filial piety, so profound his consciousness of a mission, that he came to regard himself, not merely as a prophet, but as the Messiah. By opposing the hypocrisy of the Jews, or by imprudent obtrusion of his lofty claims, he suffered martyrdom.

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He died on the cross. After his death, his followers were discouraged. But his cause was not lost; the memory of him was too strong; the disciples simply could not believe that he had perished.

Predisposed psychologically in this way, they had visionary experiences; they thought they saw him. These visions were hallucinations. But they were the means by which the personality of Jesus retained its power; they were the foundation of the Christian Church.

There, in a word, is the issue. Jesus a product of the world, or a heavenly being come from without? A teacher and example, or a Saviour? The issue is sharp—the Bible against the modern preacher. Here is the real test of Bible authority. If the Bible is right here, at the decisive point, probably it is right elsewhere. If it is wrong here, then its authority is gone. The question must be faced. What shall we think about Jesus of Nazareth?

From the middle of the first century, certain interesting documents have been preserved; they are the epistles of Paul. The genuineness of them—the chief of them at any rate is not seriously doubted, and they can be dated with approximate accuracy. They form, therefore, a fixed starting-point in controversy. These epistles were written by a remarkable man. Paul cannot be brushed lightly aside. He was certainly, to say the least, one of the most influential men that ever lived.

His influence was a mighty building; probably it was not erected on the sand.

In his letters, Paul has revealed the very depths of a tremendous religious experience. That experience was founded, not upon a profound philosophy or daring speculation, but upon a Palestinian Jew who had lived but a few years before. That Jew was Jesus of Nazareth.

Paul had a strange view of Jesus; he separated him sharply from man and placed him clearly on the side of God. “Not by man, but by Jesus Christ,” he says at the beginning of Galatians, and he implies the same thing on every page of his letters. Jesus Christ, according to Paul, was man, but he was also more.

That is a very strange fact. Only through familiarity have we ceased to wonder at it. Look at the thing a moment as though for the first time. A Jew lives in Palestine, and is executed like a common criminal.

Almost immediately after his death he is raised to divine dignity by one of his contemporaries—not by a negligible enthusiast either, but by one of the most commanding figures in the history of the world. So the thing presents itself to the modern historian. There is a problem here. However the problem may be solved, it can be ignored by no one.

The man Jesus deified by Paul—that is a very remarkable fact. The late H. J. Holtzmann, who may be regarded as the typical exponent of modern naturalistic criticism of the New Testament, admitted that for the MODERN REFORMATION

rapid apotheosis of Jesus as it appears in the epistles of Paul he was able to cite no parallel in the religious history of the race.1 The raising of Jesus to superhuman dignity was extraordinarily rapid even if it was due to Paul. But it was most emphatically not due to Paul; it can be traced clearly to the original disciples of Jesus. And that too on the basis of the Pauline Epistles alone. The epistles show that with regard to the person of Christ Paul was in agreement with those who had been apostles before him. Even the Judaizers had no dispute with Paul’s conception of Jesus as a heavenly being. About other things there was debate; about this point there is not a trace of a conflict. With regard to the supernatural Christ Paul appears everywhere in perfect harmony with all Palestinian Christians. That is a fact of enormous significance. The heavenly Christ of Paul was also the Christ of those who had walked and talked with Jesus of Nazareth. Think of it! Those men had seen Jesus subject to all the petty limitations of human life. Yet suddenly, almost immediately after his shameful death, they became convinced that he had risen from the tomb and that he was a heavenly being. There is an historical problem here—for modern naturalism, we venture to think, an unsolved problem. A man Jesus regarded as a heavenly being, not by later generations who could be deceived by the nimbus of distance and mystery, but actually by his intimate friends! A strange hallucination indeed! And founded upon that hallucination the whole of the modern world!

So much for Paul. A good deal can be learned from him alone—enough to give us pause. But that is not all that we know about Jesus; it is only a beginning. The Gospels enrich our knowledge; they provide an extended picture.

In their picture of Jesus the Gospels agree with Paul; like Paul, they make of Jesus a supernatural person. Not one of the Gospels, but all of them! The day is past when the divine Christ of John could be confronted with a human Christ of Mark. Historical students of all shades of opinion have now come to see that Mark as well as John (though it is believed in a lesser degree) presents an exalted Christology, Mark as well as John represents Jesus clearly as a supernatural person.

A super natural person, according to moder n historians, never existed. That is the fundamental principle of modern naturalism. The world, it is said, must be explained as an absolutely unbroken development, obeying fixed laws. The supernatural Christ of the Gospels never existed. How then explain the Gospel picture? You might explain it as fiction—the Gospel account of Jesus throughout a myth. That explanation is seriously being proposed today. But it is absurd; it will never convince any body of genuine

historians. The matter is at any rate not so simple as that. The Gospels present a supernatural person, but they also present a real person—a very real, a very concrete, a very inimitable person. That is not denied by modern liberalism. Indeed it cannot possibly be denied.

If the Jesus who spoke the parables, the Jesus who opposed the Pharisees, the Jesus who ate with publicans and sinners, is not a real person, living under real conditions, at a definite point of time, then there is no way of distinguishing history from sham.

On the one hand, then, the Jesus of the Gospels is a supernatural person; on the other hand, he is a real person. But according to moder n naturalism, a supernatural person never existed. He is a supernatural person; he is a real person; and yet a supernatural person is never real. A problem here! What is the solution?

Why, obviously, says the modern historian—obviously, there are two elements in the Gospels. In the first place, there is genuine historical tradition. That has preserved the real Jesus. In the second place, there is myth. That has added the supernatural attributes. The duty of the historian is to separate the two to discover the genuine human traits of the Galilean prophet beneath the gaudy colors which have almost hopelessly defaced his portrait, to disentangle the human Jesus from the tawdry ornamentation which has been hung about him by naive and unintelligent admirers.

Separate the natural and the supernatural in the Gospel account of Jesus—that has been the task of modern liberalism. How shall the work be done? We must admit at least that the myth-making process began very early; it has affected even the very earliest literary sources that we know. But let us not be discouraged.

Whenever the mythical elaboration began, it may now be reversed. Let us simply go through the Gospels and separate the wheat from the tares. Let us separate the natural from the supernatural, the human from the divine, the believable from the unbelievable. When we have thus picked out the workable elements, let us combine them into some sor t of picture of the historical Jesus. Such is the method. The result is what is called “the liberal Jesus.” It has been a splendid effort.

I know scarcely any more brilliant chapter in the history of the human spirit than this “quest of the historical Jesus.” The modern world has put its very life and soul into this task. It has been a splendid effort. But it has also been—a failure.

In the first place, there is the initial difficulty of separating the natural from the supernatural in the Gospel narrative. The two are inextricably intertwined.

Some of the incidents, you say, are evidently historical; they are so full of local color; they could never have been invented. Yes, but unfortunately the miraculous incidents possess exactly the same qualities. You help MAY/JUNE 1998

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yourself, then, by admissions. Jesus, you say, was a faithhealer of remarkable power; many of the cures related in the Gospels are real, though they are not really miraculous. But that does not carry you far. Faithhealing is often a totally inadequate explanation of the cures. And those supposed faith-cures are not a bit more vividly, more concretely, more inimitably related than the most uncompromising of the miracles. The attempt to separate divine and human in the Gospels leads naturally to a radical scepticism. The wheat is rooted up with the tares. If the supernatural is untrue, then the whole must go, for the super natural is inseparable from the rest. This tendency is not merely logical; it is not merely what might naturally be; it is actual.

Liberal scholars are rejecting more and more of the Gospels; others are denying that there is any certainly historical element at all. Such scepticism is absurd. Of it you need have no fear; it will always be corrected by common sense. The Gospel narrative is too inimitably concrete, too absolutely incapable of invention. If elimination of the supernatural leads logically to elimination of the whole, that is simply a refutation of the whole critical process. The supernatural Jesus is the only Jesus that we know.

In the second place, suppose this first task has been accomplished.

It is really impossible, but suppose it has been done.

You have reconstructed the historical Jesus—a teacher of righteousness, an inspired prophet, a pure worshipper of God. You clothe him with all the art of modern research; you throw upon him the warm, deceptive, calcium-light of modern sentimentality. But all to no purpose! The liberal Jesus remains an impossible figure of the stage. There is a contradiction at the very center of his being. That contradiction arises from his Messianic consciousness. This simple prophet of yours, this humble child of God, thought that he was a heavenly being who was to come on the clouds of heaven and be the instrument in judging the earth.

There is a tremendous contradiction here. A few

extremists rid themselves easily of the difficulty; they simply deny that Jesus ever thought he was the Messiah.

An heroic measure, which is generally rejected! The Messianic consciousness is rooted far too deep in the sources ever to be removed by a critical process. That Jesus thought he was the Messiah is nearly as certain as that he lived at all. There is a tremendous problem there. It would be no problem if Jesus were an ordinary fanatic or unbalanced visionary; he might then have deceived himself as well as others. But as a matter of fact he was no ordinary fanatic, no megalomaniac. On the contrary, his calmness and unselfishness and strength have produced an indelible impression. It was such an one who thought that He was the Son of Man to come on the clouds of heaven. A contradiction!

Do not think I am exaggerating.

The difficulty is felt by all.

After all has been done, after the miraculous has carefully been eliminated, there is still, as a recent liberal writer has said, something puzzling, something almost uncanny, about Jesus.2 He refuses to be forced into the mold of a harmless teacher. A few men draw the logical conclusion.

Jesus, they say, was insane. That is consistent. But it is absurd.

Suppose, however, that all these objections have been overcome.

Suppose the critical sifting of the Gospel tradition has been accomplished, suppose the resulting picture of Jesus is comprehensible—even then the work is only half done.

How did this human Jesus come to be regarded as a superhuman Jesus by his intimate friends, and how, upon the foundation of this strange belief was there reared the edifice of the Christian Church?

In the early part of the first century, in one of the petty principalities subject to Rome, there lived an interesting man. Until the age of thirty years he led an obscure life in a Galilean family, then began a course of religious and ethical teaching accompanied by a remarkable ministry of healing. At first his preaching was crowned with a measure of success, but soon the crowds deserted him, and after three or four years, he

The modern preacher offers

reflection. The Bible offers more.

The Bible offers news— not reflection on the old, but tidings of something new; not something that can be deduced or something that can be discovered, but something that has happened; not philosophy, but history; not exhortation, but a gospel.

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fell victim in Jer usalem to the jealousy of his countrymen and the cowardice of the Roman governor.

His few faithful disciples were utterly disheartened; his shameful death was the end of all their high ambitions.

After a few days, however, an astonishing thing happened. It is the most astonishing thing in all history.

Those same disheartened men suddenly displayed a surprising activity. They began preaching, with remarkable success, in Jerusalem, the very scene of their disgrace. In a few years, the religion that they preached burst the bands of Judaism, and planted itself in the great centers of the Graeco-Roman world. At first despised, then persecuted, it overcame all obstacles; in less than three hundred years it became the dominant religion of the Empire; and it has exerted an incalculable influence upon the modern world.

Jesus himself, the Founder, had not succeeded in winning any considerable number of permanent adherents; during his lifetime, the genuine disciples were comparatively few. It is after his death that the origin of Christianity as an influential movement is to be placed. Now it seems exceedingly unnatural that Jesus’ disciples could thus accomplish what he had failed to accomplish. They were evidently far inferior to him in spiritual discernment and in courage; they had not displayed the slightest trace of originality; they had been abjectly dependent upon the Master; they had not even succeeded in understanding him.

Furthermore, what little understanding, what little courage they may have had was dissipated by his death. “Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered.” How could such men succeed where their Master had failed? How could they institute the mightiest religious movement in the history of the world?

Of course, you can amuse yourself by suggesting impossible hypotheses. You might suggest, for instance, that after the death of Jesus his disciples sat quietly down and reflected on his teaching. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” “Love your enemies.” These are pretty good principles; they are of permanent value. Are they not as good now, the disciples might have said, as they were when Jesus was alive? “Our Father which art in heaven.” Is not that a good way of addressing God? May not God be our Father even though Jesus is now dead?

The disciples might conceivably have come to such conclusions. But certainly nothing could be more unlikely. These men had not even understood the teachings of Jesus when he was alive, not even under the immediate impact of that tremendous personality. How much less would they understand after he had died, and died in a way that indicated hopeless failure! What hope could such men have, at such a time, of influencing the world? Furthermore, the hypothesis has not one jot of evidence in its favor. Christianity never was the

continuation of the work of a dead teacher.

It is evident, therefore, that in the short interval between the death of Jesus and the first Christian preaching, something had happened. Something must have happened to explain the transformation of those weak, discouraged men into the spiritual conquerors of the world. Whatever that happening was, it is the greatest event in history. An event is measured by its consequences—and that event has transformed the world.

According to modern naturalism, that event, which caused the founding of the Christian Church, was a vision, an hallucination; according to the New Testament, it was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The former hypothesis has been held in a variety of forms; it has been buttressed by all the learning and all the ingenuity of modern scholarship. But all to no purpose! The visionary hypothesis may be demanded by a naturalistic philosophy; to the historian it must ever remain unsatisfactory. History is relentlessly plain. The foundation of the Church is either inexplicable, or else it is to be explained by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. But if the resurrection be accepted, then the lofty claims of Jesus are substantiated; Jesus was then no mere man, but God and man, God come in the flesh.

We have examined the liberal reconstruction of Jesus. It breaks down, we have seen, at least at three points. It fails, in the first place, in trying to separate divine and human in the Gospel picture. Such separation is impossible; divine and human are too closely interwoven; reject the divine, and you must reject the human too. Today the conclusion is being drawn.

We must reject it all! Jesus never lived! Are you disturbed by such radicalism? I for my part not a bit. It is to me rather the most hopeful sign of the times. The liberal Jesus never existed—that is all it proves. It proves nothing against the divine Saviour. Jesus was divine, or else we have no certain proof that he ever lived. I am glad to accept the alternative.

In the second place, the liberal Jesus, after he has been reconstr ucted, despite his limitations is a monstrosity. The Messianic consciousness introduces a contradiction into the very center of his being; the liberal Jesus is not the sort of man who ever could have thought that He was the Messiah. A humble teacher who thought he was the Judge of all the earth! Such an one would have been insane. Today men are drawing the conclusion; Jesus is being investigated seriously by the alienists. But do not be alarmed at their diagnosis. The Jesus they are investigating is not the Jesus of the Bible.

They are investigating a man who thought he was Messiah and was not Messiah; against one who thought he was Messiah and was Messiah they have obviously nothing to say. Their diagnosis may be accepted; perhaps the liberal Jesus, if he ever existed was insane.

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But that is not the Jesus whom we love.

In the third place, the liberal Jesus is insufficient to account for the Origin of the Christian Church. The mighty edifice of Christendom was not erected upon a pin-point. Radical thinkers are drawing the conclusion.

Christianity, they say, was not founded upon Jesus of Nazareth. It arose in some other way. It was a syncretistic religion; Jesus was the name of a heathen god. Or it was a social movement that arose in Rome about the middle of the first century. These constructions need no refutation; they are absurd.

Hence comes their value. Because they are absurd, they reduce liberalism to an absurdity. A mild mannered rabbi will not account for the origin of the Church.

Liberalism has left a blank at the beginning of Christian history. History abhors a vacuum. These absurd theories are the necessary consequence; they have simply tried to fill the void.

The modern substitute for the Jesus of the Bible has been tried and found wanting. The liberal Jesus—what a world of lofty thinking, what a wealth of noble sentiment was put into his construction! But now there are some indications that he is about to fall. He is beginning to give place to a radical scepticism. Such scepticism is absurd; Jesus lived, if any history is true.

Jesus lived, but what Jesus? Not the Jesus of modern naturalism! But the Jesus of the Bible! In the wonders of the Gospel story, in the character of Jesus, in his mysterious self-consciousness, in the very origin of the Christian Church, we discover a problem, which defies the best efforts of the naturalistic historian, which pushes us relentlessly off the safe ground of the phenomenal world toward the intellectual abyss of supernaturalism, which forces us, despite the resistance of the modern mind, to recognize a very act of God, which substitutes for the silent God of philosophy the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, having spoken at sundry times and in diverse manners unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son. The resurrection of Jesus is a fact of history; it is good news; it is an event that has put a new face upon life. But how can the acceptance of an historical fact satisfy the longing of our souls? Must we stake our salvation upon the intricacies of historical research? Is the trained historian the modern priest without whose gracious intervention no one can see God? Surely some more immediate certitude is required.

The objection would be valid if history stood alone.

But history does not stand alone; it is confirmed by experience. An historical conviction of the resurrection of Jesus is not the end of faith, but only the beginning; if faith stops there, it will probably never stand the fires of criticism. We are told that Jesus rose from the dead; 44

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the message is supported by a singular weight of evidence. But it is not just a message remote from us; it concerns not merely the past. If Jesus rose from the dead, as he is declared to have done in the Gospels, then he is still alive, and if he is still alive, then he may still be found. He is present with us today to help us if we will but turn to him. The historical evidence for the resurrection amounted only to probability; probability is the best that history can do. But the probability was at least sufficient for a trial. We accepted the Easter message enough to make trial of it. And making trial of it we found that it is true. Christian experience cannot do without history, but it adds to history that directness, that immediateness, that intimacy of conviction which delivers us from fear. “Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.”

The Bible, then, is right at the central point; it is right in its account of Jesus; it has validated its principal claim. Here, however, a curious phenomenon comes into view. Some men are strangely ungrateful. Now that we have Jesus, they say, we can be indifferent to the Bible. We have the present Christ; we care nothing about the dead documents of the past. You have Christ?

But how, pray, did you get him? There is but one answer; you got him through the Bible. Without the Bible you would never have known so much as whether there be any Christ. Yet now that you have Christ you give the Bible up; you are ready to abandon it to its enemies; you are not interested in the findings of criticism. Apparently, then, you have used the Bible as a ladder to scale the dizzy height of Christian experience, but now that you are safe on top you kick the ladder down. Very natural! But what of the poor souls who are still battling with the flood beneath?

They need the ladder too. But the figure is misleading. The Bible is not a ladder; it is a foundation.

It is buttressed, indeed, by experience; if you have the present Christ, then you know that the Bible account is true. But if the Bible were false, your faith would go.

You cannot, therefore, be indifferent to Bible criticism.

Let us not deceive ourselves. The Bible is at the foundation of the Church. Undermine that foundation, and the Church will fall. It will fall, and great will be the fall of it.

Two conceptions of Christianity are struggling for the ascendancy today; the question that we have been discussing is part of a still larger problem. The Bible against the modern preacher! Is Christianity a means to an end, or an end in itself, an improvement of the world, or the creation of a new world? Is sin a necessary stage in the development of humanity, or a yawning chasm in the very structure of the universe? Is the world’s good sufficient to overcome the world’s evil, or is this world MODERN REFORMATION

lost in sin? Is communion with God a help toward the betterment of humanity, or itself the one great ultimate goal of human life? Is God identified with the world, or separated from it by the infinite abyss of sin? Modern culture is here in conflict with the Bible. The Church is in perplexity. She is trying to compromise. She is saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. And rapidly she is losing her power. The time has come when she must choose. God grant she may choose aright! God grant she may decide for the Bible! The Bible is despised—to the Jews a stumbling block, to the Greeks foolishness—but the Bible is right. God is not a name for the totality of things, but an awful, mysterious, holy Person, not a “present God,” in the modern sense,

not a God who is with us by necessity, and has nothing to offer us but what we have already, but a God who from the heaven of his awful holiness has of his own free grace had pity on our bondage, and sent his Son to deliver us from the present evil world and receive us into the glorious freedom of communion with himself. MR

ENDNOTES

Kirche und Herrenmahl, eds. Matthew Harrison, Ronald Feuerhahn, & Paul McCain, trans., John R. Stephenson, manuscript, 84.

8 Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus in The New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 16.

9 Luther commented: “Seth, who was born later, as well as his descendants, had a definite promise, definite places, definite ceremonies for the worship of God, whereas, in contrast, Cain was a wanderer.” AE, vol. 1, 301.

10 “The Lord said to Moses: ‘Tell your brother Aaron not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover of the ark, or else he will die, because I appear in the cloud over the atonement cover’” (Leviticus 16:2).

11 In the Septuagint the word for “atonement cover” is the same one used of Christ and translated “sacrifice of atonement” in Romans 3:25, “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”

IN THIS ISSUE—Michael Horton 1 C. K. Chesterton, cited in Stephen R. L. Clark, “Orwell and the AntiRealists,” Philosophy 67 (1992), 149.

2 See also my In the Face of God (Dallas: Word, 1996).

WHY SACRED SPACE MATTERS—Michael Horton D. G. Hart, “It May Be Refreshing, But Is It Reformed?” Calvin Theological Journal, November 1997 (Vol. 32, Number 2).

2 Donald J. Bruggink and Carl H. Droppers, Christ and Architecture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 1-2.

3 Ibid., 2.

4 Ibid., 6.

5 Ibid., 23.

6 Ibid., 58.

7 Karl Barth, The Gottingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 31-32.

8 Bruggink and Droppers, op cit., 67.

9 Ibid., 169.

10 Ibid., 395.

11 Ibid., 388.

12 Ibid., 399.

13 Donald J. Bruggink, “Ecclesiastical Architecture in the Christian Reformed Church,” in Perspectives on the Christian Reformed Church, ed. by Peter De Klerk and Richard R. De Ridder (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983).

14 Arie Leder, “Christian Worship in Consecrated Space and Time,” Calvin Theological Journal (November 1977), Vol. 32, Number 2, 268.

15 George Barna, Marketing the Church (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1988), 37, cited by Arie Leder, op. cit., 269.

16 Leder, op. cit., 269.

1

THE WORD MADE FLESH—Ronald Feuerhan 1 Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 119.

2 Vilmos Vajta, Luther on Worship, An Interpretation (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1958), 85.

3 Ibid., 87. E.g., “We can state with certainty that where the Eucharist, baptism, and the Word are, there are Christ, forgiveness of sins, and eternal life.” Luther on Genesis 2:3, in Luther’s Works, American Edition, ed.

Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955), Vol. 1, 79 (hereafter as AE).

4 The Small Catechism, Baptism, Part I. 5 Vajta, op cit., 88.

6 Martin Luther, “Sermon on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 1-4,” in AE, vol. 22, 105 7 Hermann Sasse, Church and Lord’s Supper, soon to be published translation of

J. Gresham Machen was professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary before becoming one of the founders of Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). This lecture, which was first published in The Princeton Theological Review (Vol. 13, 1915, pages 337-351), was delivered on May 3, 1915, on the occasion of Machen’s inauguration as Assistant Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at Princeton.

CHARLES HODGE AND B.B. WARFIELD ON SCIENCE, THE BIBLE, EVOLUTION, AND DARWINISM—Mark Noll 1 The author has adapted and abridged this article from the Introductions to two books edited by himself and David N. Livingstone, Charles Hodge’s What Is Darwinism and Other Writings on Science & Religion (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994), and B. B. Warfield’s Writings on Evolution, Scripture, and Science (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, forthcoming), both of which contain extensive documentation and bibliography. Mark Noll is solely responsible for the content of this article. For wider background on the subject, see David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, and Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987); Mark A. Noll, ed., The Princeton Theology, 1812-1921 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1983); and David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll, eds., Evangelical Encounters with Science (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1998).

2 The best general introduction to the subject of science at the Princeton of Hodge and Warfield is Bradley John Gundlach, “The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1995).

3 For Hodge’s appreciation of Henry, see “Joseph Henry,” in Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review. Index Volume from 1825 to 1868 (Philadelphia: Peter Walker, 1870-1871), 194-200.

4 A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1880), 239; and The Papers of Joseph Henry, ed. Nathan Reingold (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 2:426; 5:42, 159n.4, 264-65, 353.

5 Papers of Joseph Henry, 2:90n, 240-42, 266-67.

6 See Ronald Numbers, The Creationists (New York: Knopf, 1992), 11.

7 For example, the lecture given from Jan. 1849, with the title, “The Mosaic Account of Creation,” Charles Hodge Papers, archives, Speer Library, Princeton Theological Seminary.

8 Hodge to the New York Observer, in Charles Hodge’s What Is Darwinism?, 53-56.

9 Charles Hodge’s What Is Darwinism, 89, 92, 156-57.

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10

Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Creation,” The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol. 5: Calvin and Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 304-05.

11 For the direct use of Warfield on the inerrancy of Scripture, see John C. Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961), xx.

12 For example, Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954); Russell L. Mixter, ed., Evolution and Christian Thought Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959); D. C. Spanner, Creation and Evolution: Some Preliminary Considerations (London: Falcon Books, 1966); Malcolm A. Jeeves, ed., The Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1969); Donald M. MacKay, The Clockwork Image: A Christian Perspective on Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1974); Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Davis A. Young, Christianity and the Age of the Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection: Resolving Conflicts Between Science and the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986); J. C. Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Howard J. Van Till, The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens are Telling Us about the Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); and John Houghton, Does God Play Dice? A Look at the Story of the Universe (Leicester, England: InterVarsity Press, 1988).

13 Warfield deploys a similar vocabulary in a discussion of miracles that he published at about the same time, see “The Question of Miracles,” in The Bible Student (March-June, 1903), as reprinted in The Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol. 2, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1973), 167-204.

14 See Counterfeit Miracles (New York: Scribners, 1918).

JARS OF CLAY OR CHIPS OF SILICON?—Douglas Groothuis For more on Gnostic doctrine and its refutation, see Douglas Groothuis, Jesus in An Age of Controversy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1996), 77-118.

2 Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996).

3 For an argument for the Resurrection of Jesus in relation to New Age views, see Groothuis, 272-284.

4 Clay Shirky, Voices From the Net (Emeryville, CA: Ziff-Davies Press, 1995), 42.

5 Ibid., 42-45.

6 Gregory J. E. Rawlins, Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 40.

7 This turn of phrase is not original with me, but I can only remember that I read it in an E-mail message of unknown origin.

8 Kenneth Seeskin, “Martin Buber,” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed. Robert Audi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 90. See Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1970).

9 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, revised and expanded edition, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 18-19. Lewis is speaking hyperbolically; he did not believe in literal deification.

10 Parts of this article overlap with themes raised in more detail in Douglas Groothuis, The Soul in Cyberspace (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997).

1

Knopf, 1992), 5.

3 “Luddite” is a general term for one who mindlessly reacts against any technological innovation. The term derives its name from an early nineteenth century, northern English mob that destroyed the machines which were making their jobs redundant. The Oxford English Dictionary notes a source which adds: “Ned Lud was a person of weak intellect.”

4 Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Henry Holt, 1969), 89-90.

5 These quotes are taken from the article “Seminary Leaders Speak Out: Theological Education in a Turbulent World,” in a special advertising section of Christianity Today, February 5, 1996, 64-66. The quotes cited here are from Presidents Luder Whitlock (Reformed Theological Seminary), Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary), George Brushaber (Bethel College and Seminary), and Robert Cooley (President Emeritus, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary).

6 The advertisements are for Simpson Graduate School and Moody Graduate School, Christianity Today, February 5, 1996, 51, 48.

7 Italics added. Christianity Today, February 5, 1996, 64.

8 In his analysis of democratization generally and its effects on religion particularly, Veysey anticipates some of Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

9 Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 11, 39, 50.

10 John D. Rockefeller and the University of Chicago is the most straightforward pairing.

11 Princeton under Woodrow Wilson is a good example of a whole institution following this general evolutionary pattern.

12 Veysey, 152, 168, 172.

13 Veysey, 434.

14 Veysey, 306, 352.

15 Veysey, 320-23.

16 Veysey, 308-12.

17 Veysey, 344-46.

18 Veysey, 347.

19 By this, I do not mean to imply that no improvements can be made. Rick Lints, in a Mars Hill interview with Ken Myers, has made the point that more apprenticeship arrangements might be helpful additions to the traditional seminary plan of study. In fact, both Lints and T. David Gordon practice something like this with their students. One must notice, though, that these instructive models attempt to relate theory and experience, not rip them apart. An apprenticeship model might well better serve students than current practical theology instruction.

20 Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 235-36.

21 See Thomas Naylor and William Willimon, Downsizing the USA (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). There are instructive sections on education and on the relationship between ego and giant institutions.

22 George H. Douglas, Education Without Impact: How Our Universities Fail the Young (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992).

HISTORY & FAITH—J. Gresham Machen H. J. Holtzman, in Protestantische Monatshefte, iv (1900), 465 ff., and in Christliche Welt, xxiv (1910), column 153.

2 Heitmuller, Jesus, 1913, 71.

1

JUSTIFIED BY THE RESURRECTION—Paul F. M. Zahl See Article XI of the 39 Articles (1563): “Of the Justification of Man. We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.

Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.”

2 Of Article IV, “Concerning Justification.”

1

THEOLOGIANS AND UTILITARIANS—Benjamin Sasse Plato, Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. by B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1892), Vol. 1, 278.

2 Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: 1

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MODERN REFORMATION

SCANDAL OF THE EVANGELICAL MIND Mark Noll This critical yet constructive book explains the decline of evangelical thought in North America and seeks to find, within Evangelicalism itself, resources for turning the situation around. In this book Noll explains how this situation developed by tracing the history of evangelical thinking in America. Written to encourage reform as well as to inform, this book ends with an outline of some preliminary steps by which evangelicals might yet come to love the Lord more thoroughly with the mind.

B-NOL-1 Paperback, $16.00 To order call (800) 956-2644.

continued from page 48 most current aspirants to leadership of the conservative movement come across as harsh and mean.

“Clinton also rules by the grace of personality. The trick he learned from Reagan is to show no trace of cynicism....

“So what’s new about personality as political commodity today? Simply this: Today, personality can be marketed in and of itself, without any connection to ideas or achievement. People used to become icons because they did things. They won wars. They built empires. They championed great causes. Now it’s who you are as much as what you’ve done. Personality politics is no longer extraordinary. It’s normal.

“Look at the embarrassing coincidence of Mother Teresa’s death the same week as Princess Diana’s. The world was forced to consider, if only briefly, its standards of renown. People the world over admired Mother Teresa for her life of devotion and sacrifice. But they did not identify with her as a personality. She was not a celebrity. Diana was. Women in Europe and America could identify with her conflicts and struggles—with who she was, not what she achieved.”

One of the results of these cultural changes, I would suggest, is that our view of who Christ is is being reshaped. Most American Christians under the age of 50 likely see Jesus Christ as God publicizing himself.

He is viewed as making himself visible, providing the “personal touch” like a new-style CEO or Princess Diana. (He certainly has a perfect informationgathering system!) Increasingly, we see Jesus, in practice, as “a coach, a cheerleader, a motivator and a leader”— and “a supershrink.”

What should we make of this? Is this good or bad?

Yes, God became flesh and dwelt among us. And some of what Jesus did with the apostles could be called coaching, leading, and motivating. But to the public at large he offered mercy, forgiveness, and grace, rather than tolerance and acceptance. And his speeches and sermons seem designed to shrink the church as often as to grow it. His ultimate act of living among us was his death and resurrection—something Princess Diana hardly imitated. I am nervous that if the motivating coach becomes our main image of God, something of his majesty and glory will be lost in an age that does not have much appreciation of majesty and glory of any kind. The church must observe this trend, as it must observe all trends, and be discerning about how it presents the Word and the Gospel.

Howard Ahmanson, who was educated at Occidental College and the University of Southern California, is the chairman of Fieldstead & Company, Irvine, California.

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ON MY MIND

By Howard F. Ahmanson

Bill Gates, Princess Diana, and Jesus n September 3, 1997, there was an article by G. Pascal Zachary in the Wall Street Journal about the fact that chief executive officers have become stars who often seek publicity, believing it will benefit their companies. The story started with Howard Schultz, chief of Starbucks, sleeping in New York and being awakened to be told that three Starbucks employees had been gunned down in Washington, DC. He, that day, made an unscheduled trip there to console relatives and other workers. Later on, he declared, “It’s very important for me—as a CEO—to be visible.”

CEO’s were faceless bureaucrats until the 1970s, Zachary says, when, first, foreign competition really opened up, and second, the younger generation moving into the workplace changed from “the willing worker to the questioning worker.” This pushed the CEO to become “a coach, a cheerleader, a motivator and a leader as opposed to a manager.” And, Zachary adds, “supershrink,” because “companies now depend heavily on employees for the creative insights that only the enthusiastic can offer. CEOs say their top priority is to enhance ‘intellectual capital’ by managing human relationships.” And “cutting-edge information systems enable [CEOs] to get detailed corporate data swiftly, freeing their time for more visible activities… . But there is a downside to their celebrity. Big customers and corporate allies may feel they are getting short shrift if they aren’t dealing directly with the CEO.” What other factors in society have influenced this change? Zachary adds, “The rise of such CEOs partly reflects a broader trend, the personalization of everything. People make sense of the world by attaching names and faces to impersonal forces. ‘Turning CEOs into celebrities is society’s reaction to complexity,’” says one former publicist for major executives. “We want to be intimate because everything is big. As things get even bigger, we try to tur n these huge edifices into personalities that we can relate to.” If I remember correctly, this is the dualism that John Naisbitt called “high tech—high touch.”

Zachary specifically refers to Bill Gates, who “spends a remarkable 10 percent to 15 percent of his

O

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time on media matters,” and has twice in the last two years had groups of media for a “sleep-over” at his family vacation compound. “For some customers, meanwhile, a meeting with Mr. Gates is the equivalent of shaking hands with Michael Jordan.” Three days after Zachary’s article was published, Princess Diana died.

The publicity about her death, and about her life, dwelt on how the British now preferred her openness and accessibility to the reserve of the rest of the royal family.

On September 7, Martin Walker, U.S. bureau chief of the Guardian newspaper of Britain, declared in the Los Angeles Times that Diana “will haunt from her grave the constipated antiquity that is the royal family.”

Furthermore, he observed, “the British public was becoming aware that we were getting two kinds of royal family. There was the old model, of stiff upper lips and the country-squire life of huntin’ and shootin’ and a strangulating, aloof self-control in public—and there was Diana’s promise of something new, a monarchy as modern and exciting and inclusive as Britain felt it was becoming.

“Diana was not just young and beautiful and glad to share her grace with the public. She hugged people, from young children to AIDS victims, she laughed and danced and went to rock concerts and joked about popular TV shows she liked to watch. Her friends were Elton John and Gianni Versace, and she liked to flirt and to woo the camera with coquettish glances. The royals were deliberately frumpy where she was even more determinedly glittering. They were bread, and she was circus. Where the royal family was reserved and exclusive, she was open and welcoming.”

On September 14, William Schneider wrote in the same paper, “The queen admitted there were ‘lessons to be learned’ from Diana’s short life and public career.

Like what? The cheap techniques the princess of Wales used to build a devoted personal following?

“Yes. It’s called image management, and it’s the very essence of modern political life. Today, personality has become a key source of political power. Skillful politicians (and consultants) know how to market personality.

Reagan was a master at it. He projected likability, while continued on page 47 MODERN REFORMATION

WHITE HORSE INN RADIO BROADCAST FEATURING HOSTS MICHAEL HORTON, KIM RIDDLEBARGER, & ROD ROSENBLADT Arizona Phoenix KPXQ 960 AM, Sun. 9 pm California Lake Tahoe KNIS 91.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Los Angeles KKLA 99.5 FM, Sun. 9 pm Mammoth KNIS 89.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Modesto KCIV 99.9 FM, Sun. 9 pm Palmdale KAVC 105.5 FM, Sun. 9 pm Riverside KKLA 1240 AM, Sun. 9 pm Salinas KKMC 800 AM, Sun. 3 pm San Diego KPRZ 1210 AM, Sun. 9 pm San Francisco KFAX 1100 AM, Sun. 3 pm Ventura KDAR 98.3 FM, Sun. 9 pm Colorado Colorado Springs KGFT 100.7 FM, Sun. 10 pm Denver KRKS 94.7 FM, Sun. 10 pm District of Columbia Washington, DC WAVA 105.1 FM, Sun. 9 pm & 12 Mid. Georgia Augusta WFAM 1050 AM, Sun. 8 pm Idaho Boise KBXL 94.1 FM, Sun. 10 pm Illinois Chicago WYLL 106.7 FM, Sun. 11 pm Kansas Wichita KSGL 900 AM, Sun. 8 pm Maryland Baltimore WAVA 1230 AM, Sun. at 9 pm & 12 Mid. Massachusetts Boston WEZE 590 AM, Sun. 2 pm & 12 Mid. Michigan Grand Rapids WFUR 102.9 FM/1570 AM, Sun. 9 pm Missouri St. Louis KFUO 850 AM, Sat. 11:05 am & Sun. 7 pm Montana Billings KCSP 100.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Nebraska McCook KNGN 1360 AM, Sat. 1 & 6 pm Nevada Reno/Carson City KNIS 91.3 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon New York New York WMCA 570 AM, Sun. 12 Mid. & Mon. 11 pm North Carolina Asheville WSKY 1230 AM, Sun. 8 pm Pennsylvania Philadelphia WFIL 560 AM, Sun. 6 pm & 12 Mid. Pittsburgh WORD 101.5 FM, Sun. 6 & 12 Mid. Tennessee Chattanooga WLMR 1450 AM, Sun. 9 pm Texas Austin KIXL 970 AM, Sun. 11 pm Dallas KWRD 94.9 AM, Sun. 11 pm Houston KKHT 106.9 FM, Sun. 11 pm Jacksonville KBJS 90.3 FM, Sun. 11 pm San Antonio KDRY 1100 AM, Sun. 9:30 pm Virginia Norfolk WPMH 1010 AM, Sun. 9 pm Washington Collville KCVL 1240 AM, Sun. 9 pm Seattle KGNW 820 AM, Sun. 9 pm Wyoming Casper KCSP 90.3 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon

The White Horse Inn is a weekly radio program produced by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Each week the hosts talk about important theological topics from both the Lutheran and Reformed perspectives.

Dr. Michael S. Horton is the author/editor of ten books, including Beyond Culture Wars and Putting Amazing Back Into Grace.

Dr. Kim Riddlebarger is co-pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Placentia, California. Dr. Rod Rosenbladt is a Professor of Theology and Christian Apologetics at Concordia University in Irvine, California.

If the program is not listed in your area, tune in on the internet at www.kkla.com, Sundays at 9 pm, Pacific Time.

UPCOMING TOPICS April 26—May 17—Conference Series May 24–31—Does Matter Matter June 7–28—A Critique of Dispensationalism July 5—August 9—Revivalism

RECENT RADIO SERIES NOW AVAILABLE ON TAPE The Greatest Story Ever Told (20 tapes) Why are there so many different Bible stories, and how do they all relate to one another? In this twenty-tape audio series Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger, and Rod Rosenbladt walk us through the highlights of redemptive history, showing how Christ is at the center of all the Scriptures.

C-GST-S 20 tapes, $106.00 Defending the Faith (3 tapes) The Apostle Peter commands us to “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Pet. 3:15). In this three-part series, the White Horse Inn hosts will help us to do just that as they introduce us to the field of apologetics. Included in this series is a roundtable discussion with R. C. Sproul, Robert Godfrey, Rod Rosenbladt, and Michael Horton on the differences between the various apologetic methods.

C-DTF-S 3 tapes, $18.00 The Book of Romans (8 tapes) Paul’s letter to the Romans is arguably the most important book of the Bible. Focusing our attention on the nature and meaning of sin and the need for redemption and grace is at the heart of this epistle, and is exactly what today’s church needs to recover more than anything else. In this eight-tape White Horse Inn series Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger, Ken Jones, and Rod Rosenbladt walk us through all the doctrines of this important book while making contemporary applications along the way.

C-BOR-S 8 tapes, $43.00 To order call 1-800-956-2644