A lot of evangelical and Reformed confessions of faith place the article on the doctrine of Scripture near the start of their documents. For example, the doctrinal basis of the FIEC puts it second, after the doctrine of God; the Westminster Confession puts it first. Presumably the idea here is to be up front about your authority for what is going to follow (although if that is the case, the Westminster arrangement is more logical), and perhaps there is an implicit recognition that the confession can be revised in the light of Scripture - something which is made explicit in, for example, the Scots Confession of 1560 when the authors ask "that if any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugning to God’s holy word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity’s sake, to admonish us of the same in writ; and We of our honour and fidelity do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth of God (that is, from his holy Scriptures), or else reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss." (But note where the full article on Holy Scripture is placed in this confession: right down at 19, after the doctrine of the church!)
A couple of conversations recently have got me thinking again about what difference this makes, and where it would be best to place the article on Scripture.
I do think that the place this article holds in your confession is likely to both reflect and shape your doctrine more generally. Clearly this could be the case if the article were relegated to an unimportant position; that may well mean that the recognition of the authority of Holy Scripture within the church is on the wane. But I think putting it first (or worse, second) also has effects.
If you put the doctrine of Scripture first, I think there is a danger of an almost Quran-like doctrine: this book was revealed from heaven, and in it we see a timeless revelation of God. This tends to be wedded, in contemporary evangelicalism, with the desire to answer one of the big questions of modern thought: where can we find a foundation for thought? Scripture here is asserted as the foundation, behind which nothing can be found. I worry about this on two counts. Firstly, I don't think it does justice to what Scripture says about itself, or its function as a witness to Christ and not merely a compendium of true facts about God and the world. Second, I think marrying your doctrine of Scripture to this sort of modernist foundationalism produces a brittle faith, which doesn't stand up well to questioning. And third, I think it risks leaving us philosophically adrift, expressing our doctrine in a philosophical mode which has been largely left behind by the world at large (and not without reason).
If you put the doctrine of Scripture second, after the doctrine of God, I think the big danger is that Scripture becomes the functional mediator between God and man - something which Scripture itself does not claim to be. The effect is to minimise the ongoing work of Christ and the Spirit.
I think you need to put the doctrine of Scripture after the article on the incarnation: to make clear that in fact the reason we believe in the authority of Scripture is not primarily because it is a book from heaven but because the living Word of God has stepped down into our history in the person of Jesus Christ. Scripture derives its authority from the historicity of the gospel, and not vice versa. This is true even though, from our perspective, we may only come to know the historicity of the gospel from Holy Scripture. We believe that God speaks to us because he has spoken to us in his Son. It is Jesus, not Scripture, which is the fundamental communication of God to man.
Then again, it's probably best to delay further, and place the doctrine of Scripture after the article on the Holy Spirit. That way we make it clear that the Scriptural witness to Christ is itself breathed out by God, that its authority is his authority. A strong filioque (that is to say, an understanding of the relationship between Word and Spirit which binds them closely together) will underline the fact that through Scripture God speaks by his Spirit, and the word he speaks is the Word he spoke, namely Christ Jesus.
Anyway, just a thought for anyone writing future confessions of faith. If only there were such people out there.
Friday, August 30, 2019
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Reasonable, because real
On Sunday I preached from the opening part of Acts 17, and amongst other things noted that Luke reports that the apostle Paul "reasoned", "explained", and "proved" the content of the Christian message in the synagogue. A noble response to the message, according to Luke, was not so much to just take Paul's word for it, but to "examine the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so". Because he was in the synagogue, Paul was able to make use of the Scriptures as an acknowledged authority, in a way that we mostly won't be able to do in our context, but the broader point I was making was this: the gospel is the sort of thing that can be discussed, argued over, reasoned.
To put it another way, the gospel is reasonable, because it is real. Contemporary Western culture wants to put a hard border around a world of 'facts' which can be debated, and to put religious claims outside that border, in the world of 'opinions' and 'beliefs'. Some people think they're doing religion a favour here - putting it outside the grubby world of argument and within a transcendent realm where you can hold your beliefs in a mystical way without being bothered. Others think, more accurately, that they're defending the secular order against dangerous religion - it neuters religious opinion by making it the sort of thing which one can't really discuss. Either way, the point is that religion may be a nice interpretive story that people tell themselves to find meaning in the world, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with truth (not, at least, the everyday sort of truth which concerns the way things are), and therefore can't be argued over, except in ways unrelated to truth: we can argue, for example, about whether religion is helpful or harmful, but not about whether it is real.
The whole Bible stands against this point of view. Everything in the Christian faith stands or falls with the reality of Christ's resurrection, in history, at a particular place, in reality. If Christ didn't rise, Christians are pitiable fools. The book of Acts stresses again and again that the message proclaimed by the apostles has to do with public, accessible events: these things were not done in a corner.
If this is true, it is possible to argue, to reasonably engage in a demonstration of the truth of Christianity. (I don't mean here the sort of Enlightenment reasoning, as if a person sat down with nothing but their intellect and the world around them ought to be able to arrive at Christian conclusions; I mean that given God's revelation in Christ in history, it is in principle possible to discuss the reality or otherwise of the Christian faith).
I argued on Sunday that there is one thing in particular that it is incumbent on Christians to know about: why do they believe that Jesus rose from the dead? There are some good resources out there on this question. N.T. Wright's big book on The Resurrection of the Son of God is the very best, in my opinion, setting the question in its historical context and showing that there really is no other plausible explanation. Some of the arguments are summarised in the first part of his more popular level Surprised by Hope, which might be more manageable. It doesn't seem to have got the attention it deserves, but Daniel Clark's little book Dead or Alive? is a helpful introductory presentation of the evidence for the resurrection set in the context of a gospel presentation, and would be a good one to have on hand to give away. And of course there is still the classic Who Moved the Stone.
On the broader question of the rationality of faith, a good introductory run through many of the questions that people ask about Christianity can be found in But is it Real? and Why Trust the Bible? by Amy Orr-Ewing. I continue to find the argument of C.S. Lewis in Miracles to be deeply convincing, though I'm aware it has its detractors. The Reason for God by Tim Keller is excellent. I would warn against many more philosophical works, for example those by William Lane Craig, not because there is nothing useful in them but because in my view they ultimately depend too little on God's revelation in Christ.
Have others found particular books (or other media; I'm aware that I don't really engage much with audio or video presentations, just because I like books better...) helpful in thinking through the rationality of faith?
To put it another way, the gospel is reasonable, because it is real. Contemporary Western culture wants to put a hard border around a world of 'facts' which can be debated, and to put religious claims outside that border, in the world of 'opinions' and 'beliefs'. Some people think they're doing religion a favour here - putting it outside the grubby world of argument and within a transcendent realm where you can hold your beliefs in a mystical way without being bothered. Others think, more accurately, that they're defending the secular order against dangerous religion - it neuters religious opinion by making it the sort of thing which one can't really discuss. Either way, the point is that religion may be a nice interpretive story that people tell themselves to find meaning in the world, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with truth (not, at least, the everyday sort of truth which concerns the way things are), and therefore can't be argued over, except in ways unrelated to truth: we can argue, for example, about whether religion is helpful or harmful, but not about whether it is real.
The whole Bible stands against this point of view. Everything in the Christian faith stands or falls with the reality of Christ's resurrection, in history, at a particular place, in reality. If Christ didn't rise, Christians are pitiable fools. The book of Acts stresses again and again that the message proclaimed by the apostles has to do with public, accessible events: these things were not done in a corner.
If this is true, it is possible to argue, to reasonably engage in a demonstration of the truth of Christianity. (I don't mean here the sort of Enlightenment reasoning, as if a person sat down with nothing but their intellect and the world around them ought to be able to arrive at Christian conclusions; I mean that given God's revelation in Christ in history, it is in principle possible to discuss the reality or otherwise of the Christian faith).
I argued on Sunday that there is one thing in particular that it is incumbent on Christians to know about: why do they believe that Jesus rose from the dead? There are some good resources out there on this question. N.T. Wright's big book on The Resurrection of the Son of God is the very best, in my opinion, setting the question in its historical context and showing that there really is no other plausible explanation. Some of the arguments are summarised in the first part of his more popular level Surprised by Hope, which might be more manageable. It doesn't seem to have got the attention it deserves, but Daniel Clark's little book Dead or Alive? is a helpful introductory presentation of the evidence for the resurrection set in the context of a gospel presentation, and would be a good one to have on hand to give away. And of course there is still the classic Who Moved the Stone.
On the broader question of the rationality of faith, a good introductory run through many of the questions that people ask about Christianity can be found in But is it Real? and Why Trust the Bible? by Amy Orr-Ewing. I continue to find the argument of C.S. Lewis in Miracles to be deeply convincing, though I'm aware it has its detractors. The Reason for God by Tim Keller is excellent. I would warn against many more philosophical works, for example those by William Lane Craig, not because there is nothing useful in them but because in my view they ultimately depend too little on God's revelation in Christ.
Have others found particular books (or other media; I'm aware that I don't really engage much with audio or video presentations, just because I like books better...) helpful in thinking through the rationality of faith?
Monday, August 05, 2019
On running the church, then and now
One of the interesting things about reading John Owen on the question of church is picking up some of the similarities and differences between his situation and ours. When it comes to the role of elders, Owen has three main things to argue: firstly, that churches should have elders(!); second, that elders should not be put over people without their consent; and third, that elders have real authority to rule and manage the church. I think it would be fair to say that his stress falls on the first two points, without neglecting the third.
The backdrop, presumably, to this arrangement is a prevalent clericalism and authoritarianism in religious matters. The semi-reformed state of the Church of England before the Civil War - and in many ways the worse situation after the Restoration - meant that the most familiar form of running the church would have been episcopalianism. The break with the Roman understanding of the clergy/laity divide had not been made with anything like the decisiveness or clarity required. So one of Owen's main targets is the parish church, to which a person is legally assumed to belong purely by virtue of their habitation within the boundaries of the parish. This brings a person of necessity under the rule of a pastor (vicar, priest, whatever) who derives his authority from a bishop - and moreover it does so without the person's consent.
Owen regards this as a form of spiritual tyranny. Both the singular nature of the pastor - Owen devotes a great deal of space to the importance of having 'ruling elders' alongside him - and the lack of consent make the arrangement entirely illegitimate.
On the other hand, against those on the radical wing - remember that Owen had significant and very negative encounters with Quakers during his time as VC at Oxford - Owen has to assert that elders really do rule (1 Tim 5:17) and have a responsibility for managing the church (1 Tim 3:4-5). They do this as ministers and not as absolute rulers - they can appeal to people's consciences, but they have no coercive power - and nothing they do is legitimate if it isn't ultimately designed to display Christ's authority and not their own. Owen maintains that there is no ultimate authority in the church save that of Christ, and elders can only act under him. Their authority is not inherent in them, but is simply the ministerial exercise of Christ's authority. (Neither is their authority delegated to them by the congregation; rather, the church, in endorsing elders, recognises Christ's gifting of them and his appointment of them to office). The limits of their authority are made most obvious for Owen by the fact that anyone can freely withdraw from a local congregation if they judge the elders not to be ruling in Christ's name for the good of his people. Still, the (delegated, limited) authority of the eldership is maintained. It is established as a sign of the authority of Christ himself.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The clericalism of the past is largely dissipated, and the parish structure has long been bereft of legal force and is now in complete breakdown - the most lively Anglican churches are functionally 'gathered churches' rather than parish churches. The radicals of Owen's day have largely wandered over the centuries further and further away from orthodoxy, and their heirs barely claim to be Christian anymore. But the threats to a biblical form of church government haven't gone away: on the one hand, an authoritarianism (usually, let's face it, promoted - perhaps unconsciously - by ministers, but more often that not with the connivance and cooperation of congregations) which exalts the 'man of God' over the congregation, neutering whatever 'lay elders' there may be and leaving all the reins in one pair of hands; on the other hand, a democratisation, which (often by an appeal to the Holy Spirit - cf. the old Quakers) denies the form and order of the church as it is prescribed in Scripture in favour of a kind of free-for-all.
The backdrop, presumably, to this arrangement is a prevalent clericalism and authoritarianism in religious matters. The semi-reformed state of the Church of England before the Civil War - and in many ways the worse situation after the Restoration - meant that the most familiar form of running the church would have been episcopalianism. The break with the Roman understanding of the clergy/laity divide had not been made with anything like the decisiveness or clarity required. So one of Owen's main targets is the parish church, to which a person is legally assumed to belong purely by virtue of their habitation within the boundaries of the parish. This brings a person of necessity under the rule of a pastor (vicar, priest, whatever) who derives his authority from a bishop - and moreover it does so without the person's consent.
Owen regards this as a form of spiritual tyranny. Both the singular nature of the pastor - Owen devotes a great deal of space to the importance of having 'ruling elders' alongside him - and the lack of consent make the arrangement entirely illegitimate.
On the other hand, against those on the radical wing - remember that Owen had significant and very negative encounters with Quakers during his time as VC at Oxford - Owen has to assert that elders really do rule (1 Tim 5:17) and have a responsibility for managing the church (1 Tim 3:4-5). They do this as ministers and not as absolute rulers - they can appeal to people's consciences, but they have no coercive power - and nothing they do is legitimate if it isn't ultimately designed to display Christ's authority and not their own. Owen maintains that there is no ultimate authority in the church save that of Christ, and elders can only act under him. Their authority is not inherent in them, but is simply the ministerial exercise of Christ's authority. (Neither is their authority delegated to them by the congregation; rather, the church, in endorsing elders, recognises Christ's gifting of them and his appointment of them to office). The limits of their authority are made most obvious for Owen by the fact that anyone can freely withdraw from a local congregation if they judge the elders not to be ruling in Christ's name for the good of his people. Still, the (delegated, limited) authority of the eldership is maintained. It is established as a sign of the authority of Christ himself.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The clericalism of the past is largely dissipated, and the parish structure has long been bereft of legal force and is now in complete breakdown - the most lively Anglican churches are functionally 'gathered churches' rather than parish churches. The radicals of Owen's day have largely wandered over the centuries further and further away from orthodoxy, and their heirs barely claim to be Christian anymore. But the threats to a biblical form of church government haven't gone away: on the one hand, an authoritarianism (usually, let's face it, promoted - perhaps unconsciously - by ministers, but more often that not with the connivance and cooperation of congregations) which exalts the 'man of God' over the congregation, neutering whatever 'lay elders' there may be and leaving all the reins in one pair of hands; on the other hand, a democratisation, which (often by an appeal to the Holy Spirit - cf. the old Quakers) denies the form and order of the church as it is prescribed in Scripture in favour of a kind of free-for-all.
I suspect that in today's climate Owen would have found that he had to lay more stress on his third argument. So used have we become to democratic mechanisms - and so thoroughly has democracy come to be equated with goodness in our culture - that it is hard to argue for the authority of elders without sounding like you're arguing for authoritarianism. It's a fine line to tread.
So, in answer to the question 'who runs the local church?' I think I'd want to say something like this:
The Lord Jesus governs his church, being enthroned in heaven and present by the Holy Spirit, and he has established within his church elders, who are to govern as his ministers, with the consent and counsel of the whole congregation.
Plural eldership. Congregational consent - and counsel, active involvement (Owen doesn't have much to say about this; he is also a product of his time, and has not totally shaken off clericalism). All in recognition of the fact that Christ rules, in the present, by his Spirit, and that this is the form which he has directed for the government of his people.
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