Mother Church

'Extra ecclesiam salus non est.' Cyprian

'Outside of the Christian Church there is no truth, no Christ, no salvation.' Martin Luther

'Those to whom he is a Father, the Church must also be a mother.' John Calvin

'We esteem fellowship with the true  Church of God so highly that we deny that those can live before God who do not stand in fellowship with the true Church of God.' Henry Bullinger

‘None are subjects of church government unless they be within her communion.' John Brown 

‘membership of the visible church consists of all who are enrolled as church members.’ R.B. Kuiper

Body Language

When a woman visitor heard that the church needed assistance for its crèche, she offered her services and was turned down. The elder to whom her offer was referred said ‘we don’t use non-members for work in the church’ - not the kind of response we might expect. Some would take the view that it was an opportunity missed. The woman could have been drawn into the church and opened up to the gospel. As it happens, when she was thanked for her interest, she received the rejection without question, understanding, it seems, a relationship between entitlement and formal membership. Some churches do not see this and operate (at best) on the basis of a credible profession of faith – not as a precondition of membership but as a qualification for service and privilege. In such fellowships we might find non-members participating in the Lord’s Supper, contributing to aspects of worship, covenant children in their later teens standing outside formal membership assuming responsibility for aspects of ministry and elders effectively ignoring accountability and collective responsibility in order to do their own thing.

It is true that over the years churches have appeared without formal memberships. One evangelical church I know has a duly constituted eldership but by deliberate decision no membership. The Calvary Chapel fellowships have no members, the only formal position being that of pastors accredited through their affiliate programme. The pastors are not accountable to local elders, only to God and an independent board of elders.  This, it is said, makes them resistant to advice and correction.  It is probably true to say that views about formal membership are less uniform and more relaxed than a couple of generations ago.  At the time of the Evangelical Awakening in Wales, the founders of what became the Presbyterian Church of Wales placed great store by examining candidates for membership of the religious societies and exercised zeal in expelling those estimated to be unworthy of the privilege. Times have certainly changed!

A former colleague in a seminary where I used to teach told me that in his opinion formal church membership has no basis in scripture and was only to be preserved as an expedient. Even in churches where formal membership lives on, the importance attached to it can be variable and inconsistent. Sometimes candidates are rushed into membership without due preparation, non-members rise to positions of prominence and official members are made to feel that they are unimportant or taken for granted. Individualism has become institutionalised and is perhaps most damagingly apparent in the activities of leaders whose commitment to collective leadership and responsibility is minimal and whose children, though professors of the faith, are not encouraged to join the church. It seems that ‘co-habitation’ as opposed to ‘marriage with vows’ is becoming the norm.  Of course much of this is justified by reference to the doctrine of the invisible church membership of which the visible church is not competent to judge (Bannerman).  In reality it is little more than a form of  institutional individualism that devalues the membership of those who made the commitment and took the trouble to 'tie the knot'.

Home Is Where your Heart Is - reflections on 1 Peter 1:1-2

Home is where your heart is and to be away from home is to be a stranger. Being a stranger means not belonging but not losing one’s identity. Some years ago my wife and I visited our great cultural festival, the National Eisteddfod. After about an hour of recognising only one word in around every four hundred, I wanted to go home; I felt that I was a stranger. The Welsh word for this is hiraeth, which everyone says is untranslatable. It means something like a longing for one's home tinged with sadness for the people and place from whom one is separated.

Christian experience is like this. The apostle Peter, from the very beginning of his First Letter, reminds us that as Christians we are strangers or exiles journeying to our real home.  We have an identity and a citizenship but not here. Not that the here and now is unreal or unimportant but it is transient and on the whole uncongenial. We have to pass this way in order to get to where we are going and to do this successfully we must fix our hope firmly on Christ. Only then will we keep our identity, persevere along the way and finally receive our inheritance. John Calvin writes ‘… if heaven is our homeland, what else is the earth but our place of exile? If departure from the world is entry into life, what else is the world but a sepulchre?[1]

The environment in which we live is hostile, the terrain difficult and we fool ourselves if we think otherwise. Humanly speaking journey’s end is achieved against all the odds. In her poem inspired by Samuel Rutherford’s dying words, Ann Cousins wrote, ‘I’ve wrestled on towards heaven, against storm and wind and tide, Now, like a weary traveller that leaneth on his guide. Amid the shades of evening, while sinks life’s lingering sand, I hail the glory dawning from Immanuel’s land.’ Christian reflection tends to individualize experience but for Peter we make our journey as part of the great pilgrim band. He points us towards our inheritance as encouragement to persevere against storm and wind and tide. But we are strangers together; ‘you’ and ‘your’ are almost invariable plural, not singular. We are strangers of ‘the dispersion’ – the people of God scattered throughout the world. There is safety in numbers.

There might be something in the movement to reclaim and transform culture but for the Christians of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bythinia in the first century, culture was the killer - literally. Whether or not the persecutions of Nero’s reign form the actual background does not matter, God's people lived with slander, discrimination, deprivation, suffering and the threat of the ‘fiery trial’ on a daily basis. Such conditions test the commitment of the strongest, which is why Peter insists that they should live as people determined to obtain the inheritance reserved in heaven for them. Carl Truman asks the question “Have you noticed … [how] ‘heavenly mindedness’ has come to be seen by some as the real problem in the church, rather than worldliness and the aping of secular culture? It is a strange church culture indeed where such things are now commonplace.”[2]

If First Peter reminds us of anything, it is that we are strangers together, members of that great spiritual entity known as the Dispersion, travelling the same road, fighting the same fight and heading for the same destination as the pilgrims to whom Peter wrote so long ago. 

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[1] Institutes 3.IX.4 (McNeill, ed. )

[2] http://www.reformation21.org/articles/a-question-of-priorities.php

Reformed Exegesis and Christian Discourse

A Confessional Hermeneutic 1

Let's begin by admitting that we cannot do detailed exegetical work in sermons or on every page of a popular book; it would kill the enterprise. But neither can we avoid it because Scripture is our only authority for saying anything. Quality-work done in the study under-girds the work of the pulpit and literature as the only way of validating our conclusions. It goes without saying that filling a sermon or book with textual references while ignoring exegetical rigour and reformed theological parameters does little more than create an illusion of faithfulness. A sound hermeneutic for this writer is the Confessional hermeneutic of Westminster.

William Evans reminds us that confessions are the product of their age and are normative for the communities that produce and interpret them. Exegeting the Confession might be thought to be less exacting than exegeting Scripture. Not so, he tells us, for the problems are the same. For instance, we cannot get back to the original authors' intent and therefore must make of it what we can. We have to 'contextualize' the Confession. This has implications for how we understand subscription and the taking of exceptions.

If the Confession really is the product of the believing community, we might reasonably anticipate that exceptions will be few, not many, minor not major and public not private. If we cannot proceed in the confidence that the men of Westminster said what they meant and meant what they said, we can proceed nowhere at all. Acknowledging the essential difference between inspired an uninspired writings, we must yet affirm that no doctrine of the Confession is of any private interpretation. In the words of Charles Hodge, 'It is no less plain that the candidate has no right to put his own sense upon the words propounded to him. He has no right to select from all possible meanings which the words may bear, that particular sense which suits his purpose.'2 As for revision, unless we (the church) have compelling scriptural reasons for for change, the confession should remain intact as the public statement of faith and practice to which we are bound to subscribe.

In it application to Christian discourse the confession sets the hermeneutical parameters. The interpretive method is set down in the Confession. If subscription is at all meaningful, we should not fear theological parameters but be thankful for them. Nor should we feel the need to break the mould or kick over the traces, whether in the interests of semper reformandum or as a reaction to the anachronistic charge that the Assembly failed to address today's issues. The Confession is 'dated', we know that, but not essentially, otherwise it could have little relevance. What is might be 'guilty' of is by omission not commission, which leaves little need for revision. As a comprehensive and systematic summary of biblical doctrine it sets forth 'supracultural’ truth with great clarity, laying down timeless principles especially relevant to the interpretation of scripture, which is what this article is really about. So while revision is always possible3 the truth summarised and set forth represents both the irreducible deposit and the safe environment in which to carry out exegetical exploration.

A confessional hermeneutic for our purpose therefore, is not primarily about interpreting the confession but about interpreting scripture. It has to do with how we get out of scripture what is in it. The hermeneutic of 'reformed' preaching and literature must necessarily resemble the hermeneutic of the standards in its employment of the principle of scripture being its own interpreter. At a time when it is de rigeur to come at the biblical text from a point on the outside, the proposition that 'The infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself...' draws us back to what is fundamental and essential. Whatever the possible insights of Literary Theory, Social Anthropology, Second Temple Judaism, Discourse Analysis and other disciplines, none constitutes the key to getting out of scripture what is in it.

It goes without saying that this does not remove the necessity of appropriate principles and methods. Where there is a question about the true and full sense of scripture, we employ as our basic tool the analogy of faith so that what is 'not alike clear' 'may be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.' This is simple but emphatically not simplistic. Comparing texts requires discernment of their doctrinal content and didactic import, which is why we call it the analogy of faith. It is more than a simple comparison of texts. Rather we have to exegete texts in order to know that they are truly comparable as opposed to being superficially similar.

Additionally, when texts do not speak directly to a point, we apply the principle of necessary and justifiable inference: 'The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.' The Westminster Assembly took great care to safeguard the method so as to avoid superficial exegesis based on false comparisons and eisegesis issuing from the use of strange and unbiblical hermeneutical grids.

Yet in all this there is room for exegetical disagreement. The Assembly, which was not a hermeneutical monolith, admitted that all places in scripture are not alike plain. Variations of understanding may occur but reassuringly, always within the boundaries of the system of doctrine agreed by the church and set forth in the confession. A confessional hermeneutic provides a necessary, if not infallible, safeguard against exegetical, hermeneutical and doctrinal aberration and provides a safe environment for exploration and discussion about the meaning of texts.

Successful exegesis is not a matter of intuition. Students learning to exegete are often unaware of their hermeneutical baggage and fail to recognise the difference between themselves and the text. Consequently they read their own experience or that of others into it. Distanciation helps us come to grips with our personal hermeneutical predispositions. Eisegesis or reading meaning into the text goes hand in hand with failure to recognise personal interpretive baggage and a predilection for superficial comparison. The idea that because texts are similar-looking or sounding they necessarily speak to the same point is simplistic. These weaknesses, which are neither truly exegetical nor reformed, may combine to create an illusion of understanding but in reality are the consequence of distracting influences and presuppositions. A certain facility and ease of movement in the handling texts can be mistaken for spiritual illumination. Yet the idea that not having to work hard with the text equals inspired insight probably has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit and everything to do with an ability to elevate the incidental to a position of first importance – the genesis of heresy!

In the words of the Westminster Directory For the Public Worship of God, what matters is that we 'insist upon those doctrines which are principally intended.' In order to do this we must get out of the text what it says (author's intention) in a way consistent with the nature, character, content and context of scripture itself. This was the conviction of the reformers and their successors. According to The Second Helvetic Confession 'we hold that interpretation of the Scripture to be orthodox and genuine which is gleaned from the Scriptures themselves (from the nature of the language in which they were written, likewise according to the circumstances in which they were set down, and expounded in the light of like and unlike passages and of many and clearer passages) which agrees with the rule of faith and life, and contributes much to the glory of and man's salvation.' (Ch. 20.5.010)

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1 The following are reflections drawn from a paper entitled Discoursing Like Paul, presented at the annual officers’ conference of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in England and Wales’, September 2011.  As such they are little more than introductory.
2 http://www.reformation21.org/blog/william-b-evans/owards a Confessional Hermeneutic: Some Suggestions

3 (The minister’s Vows and the Confession of Faith: http://continuing.wordpress.com/tag/charles-hodge/)

4 For example the adjustments to Articles 23  et al in American editions.

The Escondido Theology by John Frame

Just started reading it. What a pity about the personal stuff. Knowing an author's motives is not always a help, just another barrier to get past in trying to appreciate the arguments.

A weighty service

According to The Directory for the Public Worship of God, the spoken ministry is a ‘weighty service’. In the words of the Lager Catechism it is to be undertaken painfully, plainly, faithfully, wisely, gravely, with loving affection and as taught of God; never in a spirit of self-confidence.[1] Dabney, in his lectures on sacred rhetoric, states that ‘rhetorical discourse should deal not only with the intellect (to produce mental conviction) but also with the affections to direct the motives’,[2] which is to say that ministerial discourse is a ‘hearts and mind’ enterprise demanding clear proclamation and persuasive application. This adds up not only to a weighty task but also to a demand that we appraise our office and function as preachers appropriately. I suppose none of us escapes ‘the morning after the night before’ experience when it comes to reflecting on how well are badly we fared in the pulpit on the Lord’s Day. At the very least, as I’m sure we will agree, our written report from the school of Christ will invariably include 'could do better’.

It is no bad thing to feel that weight. Properly estimated, ministers have no intrinsic value. What distinguishes them from other church members are the gift and call of God and the growth in grace and knowledge requisite in those who preach. But at the end of the day, we are but clay pots in which God has deposited his gospel treasure that the excellence of the power might be of him, not us. Calvin writes ‘Those that intrude themselves confidently [into the ministry], and in a spirit much elated, or who discharge the ministry of the word with an easy mind, as though they were equal to the task, are ignorant at once of themselves and of the task.’[3]The Directory recognizes that ‘the minister of Christ is in some good measure gifted’, which is what sets him apart from his fellows but never so much that there is no room for improvement. In fact, it recommends that a minister ‘improve [his gift] in his private preparations before he deliver in public what he hath provided’, which accords with the aim of this paper. Improvement is always desirable, even necessary but always within the bounds of what Scripture means by preaching. We are not showmen, just preachers, not authority figures, just ministers, not out to serve ourselves but to be the church’s servants for Christ’s sake. 

A humble and grave approach is what Paul advocated. In 2 Cor. 4:1 he writes ‘men ought to regard us Christ’s servants’ and in 4:5, he adds ‘we are your servants for Christ’s sake. It is a ‘servant ministry’, though today, even that expression has been high-jacked by men with a much wider agenda. Actually, throughout its history, the church has been plagued by men and women more committed to making a name for themselves than lifting up Christ.  Paul’s warning to the Ephesian elders has always been timely,[4] not least in our own time when we are assailed by self-appointed preachers & teachers, many without training and accountable to no one. Some even, who went through a training and appointment process, manage to turn the ministry to their own advantage, which brings me back to weightiness of the ministry and the need to improve.

Paul, it is clear, had not the remotest interest in ‘performance’ despite his reported discourses being delivered ‘off the cuff’ so to speak and his being ‘ready’. Although he never attended seminary and never learned homiletics, he was well trained. He met the risen Christ, from whom he received certain truths which he passed on, he made early contact other disciples and the apostles, spent time in Arabia and was part of the ‘ministry team’ of the church at Syrian Antioch.  My point is that, even as an inspired preacher, one taught by the Spirit, he had ‘studied’ the disciplines, gained a thorough acquaintance with the Scriptures, learned how to divide them correctly and apply them passionately. In the forms in which we have them, Paul’s discourses are coherent, spiritual insightful, existentially sensitive, penetratingly logical and passionately persuasive. If anyone can help us, he can!

[1] Larger Catechism Q. 159

[2] Eloquence 233

[3] Commentary 1Cor.99

[4] Acts 20:28-29

A soldier goes to heaven

When we returned to Northern California in October 2011 I quickly became involved with a marine who had terminal cancer. It started as acute back-ache but turned out to be incurable. While on a six month tour in Iraq his life fell apart, his marriage ended and he cut loose. In one of those strange and rather wonderful providences God brought Carlos into his life. Carlos is a believer who finds it hard to believe and is  plagued by demons of the mind.  But he is a believer and he brought Daniel to church, where Daniel, a very lapsed Catholic professed faith in Christ. He ran well for a while but the demands of his paramedic course and the lure of the world eventually drew him away, but not completely. Every so often he would contact one of his former friends with a question about the Bible.

Then came the cancer and with it a return to the Lord. 'I''ve re-found my faith' he said on or first meeting. From the time he knew he had cancer, discipleship became a serious matter.  Visits were always the same; lying on the sofa, he would get his Bible, Strong's Concordance and laptop from the glass coffee table and away we would go. It was a quest for good texts, ones he could use in witnessing to his friends;  'Where does it say about God 's law being in our conscience?' Another time, I visited him in the hospital but he was too ill to talk. I made ready to leave when two of his pals turned up. 'Pastor, will you please pray?' The pals had to listen, then I left. He witnessed very clearly to his mother and one of the elders of the church testified that she prayed like a Protestant. I hope she believes like one too. He was not afraid to die.  He told the social worker from the hospice that he was going to a better place. A week ago we held the memorial. I preached on Simeon's readiness to die after seeing God's salvation in the face of Jesus Christ.  It was a good service.  The marines did their thing - very dignified. Then the veterans did theirs, five old men, one played 'taps' and the four others, who looked barely able to lift their rifles, fired three volleys, picked up the shells and gave them to Daniel's mother.. It was all over. For Daniel it all began on December twenty-sixth - the day he died.