Todd Billings at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan wants to remind mega-cool pastors like Mark Driscoll of a few things with regard to Calvinism, and there is a lot of good take away from his suggestions. It is true that the so-called New Calvinists, in their quest to make Johnny C. everybody’s five-point homeboy, miss more nuanced traits that make for a better simmered Reformed witness. For those of us who trek out of a broad evangelicalism steeped in world-flight piety, and perhaps even more especially for those of us who also previously inhabited a secular life where the world was nothing to be feared, one of those vital traits is the affirmation of the created order as indeed “very good.” And from such a theology comes the subsequent doctrine of vocation.

But statements like these seem to keep matters a little confusing:

It is always a heartening thing when one hears the attempt to chart a course between cultural triumphalism and cultural disengagement. Like the drunken mounter, much of Christendom does seem to fall off Luther’s proverbial horse, rushing either headlong into worldly victory or shrinking back into monastic withdrawal. But while the spirit may be willing the flesh is weak. And spirits go flaccid when the narrow path is that “Christians are to act as agents of cultural transformation.” For one thing, it is not altogether clear how those who traffic in what might be construed as cultural triumphalism are finally any different from those who conceive of themselves as being culturally transformative. It may be true that not all transformationists are triumphalists, but don’t all triumphalists at least begin by being transformationists? After all, not all those who wield worldly power are tyrants, but all tyrants seem to begin with a quest for power.

For another, is there really something so wrong with suggesting that believers are to be cultural participants rather than agents of cultural transformation? It would seem that to speak of participation instead of transformation makes all the difference. One gets the sense that to participate instead of transform is to live something of a less-than-victorious Christian life. Where transformers are bred to expect achievement and dominion, participants are asked to live with loss and be patient in the midst of frustration. Transformers stand out, participants blend in. It’s easy to see how the language and doctrine of transformation appeals to westerners over that of mere participation.  True, to transform one must also participate. But if the Christian life really is marked by the ordinary over against the extraordinary then it would seem that, from beginning to end, participation is the category of choice with a careful intent to resist the siren song of transformation.

There is Reformed chatter of late over the season and its reason, or non-reason, depending on who you ask. The arguments for the latter are well formulated enough. I’m hoping that those inclined to put the kabosh on nativity-ism and advent-i-osity might press their arguments into the contemporary service of re-thinking Reformation Day Calvinpalooza’s. (There is just something painfully ironic about throwing parties for a guy buried in an unmarked grave.) Will the same ones who brag about staying home next Friday morning to sip eggnog also be found bobbing for apples on October 31? Here’s hoping.

Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy my own family reputation for sitting all lumpenleisure-like while my more outgoing father, younger daughter and wife deck the Christmas Tree. My oldest has inherited my contrarian inclination. Our refusal has less to do with any principled protest against Christmas goings on (I love Christmas-time) and more with just not liking forced cheer and fun. This year we were told if we didn’t participate we’d get no cookies. I have a brutal sweet tooth, so I hoisted the youngest as she topped the tree with an angel. I must say, the Tree looks great, and I plug it in every night. And, hopeless midwesterner that I was born and bred to be, I also brave the frigid temperatures to plug and unplug the outdoor lights, which I insisted on stringing this year. And I do lots of other festive-y stuff. Still I am branded the family Grinch, simply because I have some sort of thing about the blessed Tree. But as I read the Bar Jester’s latest entry, and find myself feeling like the protagonist to his antagonists, maybe there’s more to it?

If enough people call you “Scrooge” or “Grinch,” and if they do it enough times, you can almost believe that they’re trying to flatter rather than compliment you. But then if you attend to them a little more closely than you promised yourself you would, you begin to realize that they think they’re actually insulting you. They think your disaffection with Christmas is a bad thing.

Then the pieces begin to fall into place. They keep saying they want “Christ” put back in “Christmas,” whereas you’d settle for putting the “mass” back in “Christmas.”

They want to go to their worship auditoriums and reenact the nativity, complete with hay and oxen and asses; you want to partake the holy birth.

They make a point of saying “Merry Christmas” to all the Secular Humanists who wish them “happy holidays”; you just shrug your shoulders, spike the eggnog, and deviate not a hair’s breadth from making your holy days as happy as propriety allows.

They call Jesus the “Greatest Gift of All” (who came “wrapped in ribbons of love”) and snatch for themselves a metaphysical sanction for the annual Visa-borne glut; you unwrap yet another unrequested coat, which the Greatest Gift of All commands to you to give away, and sigh in affected gratitude as your thoughts drift toward the beneficial uses of arsenic.

They think “Silent Night” is a great song; you think it’s sentimental schlock.

They want to go on and on about “the true meaning of Christmas”; you’ve been meditating it your whole life and still couldn’t say for sure what it is.

They express the mystery of the Incarnation in “Happy Birthday, Jesus”; you consider reading St. Athanasius again but think better of it and reach instead for all the pills in the medicine cabinet and a bottle of Absolut.

This is important because it is customary for some theologians to give the erroneous impression that God wanted Adam to Eve to relate to him in terms of meritorious works rather than childlike faith…I am hesitant to call Jesus’ obedience in life and death the fulfillment of a ‘covenant of works’ . . . works implies a relationship with God that is more like an employer receiving earned wages that like a Son trusting a Father’s generosity…Keeping the covenant of God did not mean living perfectly. It meant a life of habitual devotion and trust to the Lord, that turned from evil and followed him in his ways.

Mary as a model of faith always sounds good and pious, but this essential message is really quite far from the point of historical Christianity. Are we really to come away with yet another moral or spiritual lesson designed to merely help us get through our days, weeks and lives? In these scenarios one of the theses in Reformed theology once again is made true: the Gospel is not our natural inclination. It is very hard “to do” the Gospel because it is not natural to us. It is easier and more natural to cull out naturalistic messages from the Bible, or the “timeless principles” such as the Application-Bridge model implores us to do. This is because timeless principles, naturalistic messages or moralistic and spiritualistic truisms all fall under our natural inclination, namely that category of Law. We get Law. We understand “do this and you shall live.” We were programmed for such things. We were hard wired to fulfill the covenant of works. That natural programming has never been extinguished. The problem is that our ability was. Thus, to hear “sit back and watch God do it on your behalf,” is aggravating, frustrating, and angering. So it is not natural to read Mary’s Magnificat as the otherworldly announcer of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, the justification of the wicked and the conduit for the age to come. That message is too foreign to the flesh, which furls its brow and asks, “What’s that got to do with me? That’s all too impractical, too lofty and transcendent to be of any earthly good. Please, just tell me what to do, how to live. Give me principles and tools and guidelines. I have a lot to figure out in my particular life, so just write it all down and let me get on with it.”

But instead of pulling God down into our own narratives and making God “relevant and practical” to our lives as we demand He be, the Redemptive-Historical approach seeks to show how we are caught up in the biblical narrative of God’s redemption as He has declared it. Coming away from Advent messages that tell us that the whole point is to pull God down into our individual narratives is weak, to say the very least. Biblical figures point us (and even them) away from our narratives to Christ the Messiah which is God’s narrative.

The biblical narrative is like a rainbow that arches above us, a thing that surpasses our particular experiences as individuals and goes on “above our heads,” so to speak. This is because, like a rainbow, it is God’s work. It then reaches down and sweeps us out of our particularities and sets us all on equal ground together. The truth narrative of Christ’s work for us becomes ours; we are grafted into it together. Gone are the individual experiences amongst us that serve only to divide us. Gone are John’s particular pains and my this-worldly pleasures. The themes that unite us are those otherworldly themes of sin and grace. Gone are any impulses to examine what is going on in our lives these days and how God fits into it, and they are replaced with what God has done and how we fit into that.

Mary’s Magnificat beckons us to enjoin with Mary and “magnify the LORD” that He is about to fulfill what He declared through the prophets: the fulfillment of the promises to justify His chosen people, His race of faith, His elect. He is about to clothe Himself in flesh and blood, come down and actually dwell amongst His people. The Light is about to flicker and remind us all that He is ready to make the way of salvation and to do His work as promised, to usher in the next age. Ours is a dual task: we celebrate His first coming and what it accomplished in order that we might look ahead to His second.

The movie was less than classic, and I’m a little embarrassed to refer to it. But in Father of the Bride Martin Short told Steve Martin that “every party has a pooper, and that’s you, George Banks.”  Poor George, he was just trying to bring sanity to a family going berzerko. Likewise, amongst other concerns, Darryl Hart wonders aloud if the latest bout of declarative statements has more to do with thanking the Most High for not being born a Gentile than beating one’s chest and begging for mercy:

I do not mean to question the motives of anyone who signed, but isn’t it possible that a measure of moral grandstanding goes into these statements, along with very little policy or legislative reform, because these statements are so far removed from the legislatures, courts, and chambers of elected officials? Meanwhile, such statements do function to throw down yet another gauntlet in the culture wars, thus inviting as much opposition as support and cementing the stalemate that already exists between the parties of morality and license.

From about that time, I began to have a new kind of apprehensions and ideas of Christ. and the work of redemption, and the glorious way of salvation by him. An inward, sweet sense of these things, at times, came into my heart; and my soul was led away in pleasant views and contemplations of them. And my mind was greatly engaged to spend my time in reading and meditating on Christ, on the beauty and excellency of his person, and the lovely way of salvation by free grace in him. I found no books so delightful to me, as those that treated of these subjects. Those words Cant. 2:1, used to be abundantly with me, I am the Rose of Sharon, and the Lilly of the valleys. The words seemed to me, sweetly to represent the loveliness and beauty of Jesus Christ. The whole book of Canticles used to be pleasant to me, and I used to be much in reading it, about that time; and found, from time to time, an inward sweetness, that would carry me away, in my contemplations. This I know not how to express otherwise, than by a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the concerns of this world; and sometimes a kind of vision, or fixed ideas and imaginations, of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and wrapt and swallowed up in God. The sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden kindle up, as it were, a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of soul, that I know not how to express.

Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave an account to my father of some things that had passed in my mind. I was pretty much affected by the discourse we had together; and when the discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father’s pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; it was a sweet, and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness.

After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of every thing was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every thing. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for continuance; and in the day, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the mean time, singing forth, with a low voice my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer. And scarce any thing, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly, nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunder storm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunder storm; and used to take the opportunity, at such times, to fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder, which oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. While thus engaged, it always seemed natural to me to sing, or chant for my mediations; or, to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice.

I felt then great satisfaction, as to my good state; but that did not content me. I had vehement longings of soul after God and Christ, and after more holiness, wherewith my heart seemed to be full, and ready to break; which often brought to my mind the words of the Psalmist, Psal. 119:28. My soul breaketh for the longing it hath. I often felt a mourning and lamenting in my heart, that I had not turned to God sooner, that I might have had more time to grow in grace. My mind was greatly fixed on divine things; almost perpetually in the contemplation of them. I spent most of my time in thinking of divine things, year after year; often walking alone in the woods, and solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy, and prayer, and converse with God; and it was always my manner, at such times, to sing forth my contemplations. I was almost constantly in ejaculatory prayer, wherever I was. Prayer seemed to be natural to me, as the breath by which the inward burnings of my heart had vent. The delights which I now felt in the things of religion, were of an exceeding different kind from those before mentioned, that I had when a boy; and what I then had no more notion of, than one born blind has of pleasant and beautiful colors. They were of a more inward, pure, soul animating and refreshing nature. Those former delights never reached the heart; and did not arise from any sight of the divine excellency of the things of God; or any taste of the soul satisfying and life; giving good there is in them.

–Jonathon Edwards

I drove over to Aunt Flo’s to look for them and got caught in Sunday morning rush hour. It was Confirmation Sunday at Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church. Thirteen young people had their faith confirmed and were admitted to the circle of believers, thirteen dressed-up boys and girls at the altar rail in front of a crowd of every available relative. Pastor Ingqvist asked them all the deepest questions about the faith (questions that have troubled theologians for years), which these young people answered readily from memory before partaking of their first Communion. Later they lounged around on the front steps and asked each other, “Were you scared?” and said, “No, I really wasn’t, not as much as I thought I’d be,” and went home to eat chuck roast, and some of them had their first real cup of coffee. They found it to be a bitter, oily drink that makes you dizzy and sick to your stomach, but they were Lutherans now and that’s what Lutherans drink.

 –Garrison Keillor, Life among the Lutherans

It’s the same game of “singling out men as spiritual creatures, with a side helping of masculinity,” but this time it’s to capture men by way of women (and Messianic Jews).

Speaking of ecclesiology and mission lately, it’s fun when secular media gets the foibles of evangelicalism:

But Promise Keepers also offered something different from a church: an unmediated relationship with God. The stadium rallies produce an intimate, almost frenzied relationship with God that create a high—which even an alcohol-abstaining Christian man might seek out. But for how long? The P.K. experience that might have created an ecclesiastical euphoria the first time might not bring the same high the next time. Bartkowski thinks that to continue to bring men back, to sustain the high, P.K. needs to present something new—always. This year, at least, that something new comes in the form of women and Messianic Jews.

The last couple of posts on confessional formulation and subscription have generated some interesting discussion (at least to me).

It has been suggested that one way to deal with doubt about what is confessed is to change what is confessed. That makes sense. After all, if we take the pains to put into writing what it is we believe—and by extension what we reject—it should go without saying that what is put down is actually believed. If we come to seriously doubt what we wrote then it should be changed. But until such time it makes little sense to take exception, all the while maintaining that those outside the parameters of confessional Reformed orthodoxy (e.g. Catholics or evangelicals) are outside the pale. In other words, why can we object but they can’t?

Granted, changing confessional formulation is hard, as it should be. Another, easier way to deal with doubt is to go the way of a certain CRC task force. Because office bearers sometimes misunderstand what signing the form means, Synod 2005 called for a revision of the form’s language to clarify its meaning. However, the task force assigned to this project exceeded their mandate by proposing a document that appears to be a replacement of the traditional form, rather than a clarified or simplified form. They came up with something called the “Covenant of Ordination.” Departing from the historic language of the Form of Subscription, it goes like this:

We the undersigned office bearers of the CRCNA heartily accept the authority of the Word of God as received in the inspired Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, which reveal the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ, namely the reconciliation of all things in him.

We accept the historic confessions: the Belgic Confessions, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort, as well as Our World Belongs to God: A Contemporary Testimony, as faithful expressions of the church’s understanding of the gospel for its time and place, which define our tradition and continue to guide us today.

We promise with thankfulness for these expressions of faith to be shaped by them in our various callings: preaching, teaching, writing, and serving. We further promise to continually review them in the light of our understanding of Scriptures. Should we any time become convinced that our understanding of the gospel as revealed in the Scriptures has become irreconcilable to the witness of the church as expressed in the above documents, we will communicate our views to the church according to the prescribed procedures and promise to submit to its judgment.

We do this so that the church will remain faithful to, grow in understanding of, and be diligent in living out this witness in all of life to the glory of God.

From my experience in broad evangelicalism, my guess would be that most evangelicals would read this as a much better formulation than the older Form of Subscription, that relic of an entrenched past.  Many evangelicals like much of what the forms have to say, but this business of being bound to them irritates modern sensibilities. That is, they have a high opinion of the forms but not a high view.

It has been my opinion that efforts like the Covenant of Ordination reflect an ongoing trajectory toward a broad evangelical posture in relation to confessional formulation and subscription—guiding helps instead of binding authorities. I don’t think I’ve been completely alone in this regard. Whatever else is involved here, one of the interesting things in all of this is how the older forms are much more tolerant of the doubt that always resides in the human heart. That may seem counter-intuitive, given the stout nature of the language in the older forms. But that is the very nature of true Christian faith itself, namely to have an infallible assurance in the midst of doubt. Indeed, doubt is a necessary aspect of true faith as it is set over against sight. Whereas lower views, such as those reflected in the Covenant of Ordination, seem to suggest being ill-at-ease with doubt. So much so that the counter-intutive posture of an infallible assurance in older forms needs to be scaled back in order to make room for what is more comfortable and intuitive, namely sight.

With Part One as the backdrop, let’s return to Mary. During Advent it is Mary’s turn to be held up as the model. And, according to the Application-Bridge model, we once again must find a moral lesson to learn instead of joining her in anticipation.

“Mary is a model of faith. We ought to submit ourselves, like she did, to the will of God for our lives and to trust God in our daily lives.” In keeping with an Application-Bridge model, this is usually the bottom line message we can anticipate. It is the one we are intended to internalize in our contemporary day.

I have always felt weird when any Bible character is displayed for me to follow. Using Mary to buttress my own sense of general vocation or plodding out the Christian life in the here and now is no less weird. What follows is an attempt to explain why can’t I easily link up that message with Mary’s Magnificat.

First, the mode of the Magnificat. How does Mary receive the message? It’s via an audible and visual display by the angel of the LORD. Though we all might wish we could have this sort of direction when trying to make daily decisions, most of us do not have the angel of the LORD reveal to us what our daily duties and responsibilities shall be. Here is the first disconnect I have with Mary. To Mary it was pretty much unmistakable just what God had in store for her. I have never once had any sort of revelation in this life (and, much as it might be useful, I really hope I never do). Most of us have to figure out our lives the old-fashioned and painfully ordinary way. Some may claim God has shown them this or that, guided them hither and yon. But upon such reports I get that same weird feeling. Images of a sanctified Ouji board come to mind. But for Mary it was extraordinary. It had been some 400 years since God had spoken in such a way. This fact is not lost on Mary, since her response is one of fear. God must not have ordinarily come to Mary in this way. People today who like to claim they have discerned the “will of God for their lives” talk about it as if it is a common occurrence. It seems that even the mother of God herself does not take such guidance so lightly. Perhaps more contemplation of DT 29:29 might be in order: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”

Many people these days are simply not satisfied with the revealed will of God as given in Scripture. It just isn’t exciting enough. Many want His secret will, that which He has declared simply unknown to man and only for Him to know. Paul Simon seemed to get it better than many Christians do: “God only knows when God makes His plan; the information’s not available to the mortal man.” Contemporary and upwardly mobile concerns such as what house to buy, what person to marry, what to major in, what job to take, what to say to someone, how to spend our money, what pastor to call or any other host of daily and ordinary decisions are for us to make without direct access to the mind of God. Praying honestly for wisdom and guidance in these situations is far different than doing so and concluding that God directly revealed this or that. As painfully unspiritual as that may sound, God has declared it so. But many are still eerily at ease with declaring what God has not. John Calvin himself wrote that the secret will of God is “a labyrinth from which there is no return.” How one jumps from Mary’s clear visitation from the LORD with regard to her task to how we need to discern God’s will for our lives always leaves me quite stumped. I imagine Mary trying to make sense of such a message. While God is indeed sovereign over all things, I truly wonder if she would say the point was to “trust God with our daily lives.”

Second, the content. Mary was given the task of giving birth to and rearing the Son of God. Here is more disconnect for me. And as important to God as I consider my life and those around me, they seem quite ordinary when compared to Mary’s task. I should be clear. Ordinary does not mean “less important.” It simply means that a task like Mary’s is quite distinct from yours or mine—it is extraordinary. This fact also was not lost on Mary, for she declares, “As the LORD has spoken, may it be!” God has not declared something ordinary to her, like where to send Jesus to school. It’s important for Mary and Joseph to decide where Jesus will be educated, but it is doubtful they will exclaim, “As the LORD has spoken, may it be!” when landing on a decision. Mary is just like you and me. She had an equal number of ordinary minutes in her life, except for however many it took to receive this message. The only thing distinguishing Mary from us is the mode and content of her Magnificat experience. She, like us, must take her extraordinary experience into her own ordinary experience. But, again, is the point that she herself should “trust God in her daily life”? Think of this: Mary will enjoy no more extraordinary messages from God. True enough, her task will continue to be extraordinary through to the day she sees Jesus crucified. But mainly she will have a very ordinary life. As with us, God does not break in at every milestone of Mary’s with an angel of the LORD to spell it all out. And if ever there was someone who may be prone to thinking she had some sort of access to the mind of God for the secret things, we never see Mary pretending that she has. So if Mary doesn’t get any special revelation about her ordinary life, why should we expect any?

When it comes to Mary’s Magnificat, I find that I cannot take away the messages often proffered. Both the mode and content of her revelation will never be afforded me in any sense whatsoever. God will never speak directly to me, and I will never be mother to the Son of God. Trying to sort of mimic Mary’s experience in order to be relevant or to connect with her just doesn’t cut it. How can I relate to her if I can’t connect with having the angel of the LORD tell me I will bear and rear the Son of God? Perhaps if I don some otherworldly lenses it will make more sense.

In Part Three, I will take up Mary’s Magnificat from a Redemptive Historical model.

What seems missing to me from the Dordt oath that Z has cited (and from historical Reformed praxis), is something of the form:

“We promise that, if in the future we discover that that any articles or points of doctrine set forth in the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, or the Canons of Dort in any way disagree with the Word of God, WE WILL CHANGE THEM!”

Practically speaking, the Achilles’ heel of reformed confessions may be that, as originally written, Westminster and the 3 Forms are so close to perfect, that nobody is willing to change them! This could be one driving force behind why the common understanding of subscription has weakened. It’s just easier to subscribe less, than to fix the confessional artifacts so that full subscription is enforceable.

In my Presbyterian (OPC/PCA) tradition, I know of only the one change since the original Westminster, namely the 1789 American revision that scrubbed Theonomy. And has there ever been a change to any of the three forms? How many CRC/URC pastors actually believe that Paul is the author of Hebrews, and are willing to apply the third mark of the church to those who do not?

You may say I am a nitpicker, putting such weight on something so trivial, but isn’t that the point? Do we want full subscription, or do we want subscription to the parts of the confessions that we (individually and subjectively) determine to be nontrivial?

In 1689 the Particular Baptist Association of London adopted the London Baptist Confession of Faith. It was the doctrinal standard of the Particular Baptist Churches of England and Wales and is the doctrinal standard of Reformed Baptist churches today. Of it, C.H. Spurgeon wrote,

This little volume is not issued as an authoritative rule, or code of faith, whereby you are to be fettered, but as an assistance to you in controversy, a confirmation in faith, and a means of edification in righteousness. Here the younger members of our church will have a body of divinity in small compass, and by means of Scriptural proofs, will be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them.

At the Synod of Dort (1618-19) the Form of Subscription was adopted and was to be signed by professors, ministers, evangelists, elders, and deacons when ordained and/or installed in office. Of those confessional formulations, it is understood that

We, the undersigned, by means of our signatures declare truthfully and in good conscience before the Lord that we sincerely believe that all the articles and points of doctrine set forth in the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort fully agree with the Word of God.

We promise therefore

to teach these doctrines diligently,
to defend them faithfully,
and not to contradict them,
publicly or privately,
directly or indirectly,
in our preaching, teaching,
or writing.

We pledge moreover

not only to reject all errors
that conflict with these doctrines,
but also to refute them,
and to do everything we can
to keep the church free from them.

We promise further that if in the future

we come to have any difficulty with
these doctrines
or reach views differing from them,
we will not propose, defend, preach,
or teach such views,
either publicly or privately,
until we have first disclosed them
to the consistory, classis, or synod
for examination. We are prepared moreover
to submit to the judgment
of the consistory, classis, or synod,
realizing that the consequence
of refusal to do so
is suspension from office.

We promise in addition

that if, to maintain unity
and purity in doctrine,
the consistory, classis, or synod
considers it proper at any time
on sufficient grounds of concern
to require a fuller explanation
of our views
concerning any article
in the three confessions
mentioned above,
we are always willing and ready
to comply with such a request,
realizing here also that
the consequence of refusal to do so
is suspension from office.

Should we consider ourselves wronged,

however,
by the judgment of the consistory
or classis, we reserve for ourselves the right of appeal;
but until a decision is made
on such an appeal,
we will acquiesce in the determination
and judgment
already made.

It would seem that having a confession does not necessarily a confessionalist make. Neither do high opinions necesarily make for high views.

But one difference between a confessionalist and an evangelical seems to be how one views confessional formulations. The confessionalist speaks of ecclesiastical statements in terms of them being “binding and authoritative.” The evangelical speaks of them as “an assistance and guidance,” stopping well short of suggesting they have any sort of real, binding authority. It is not as if the confessionalist knows nothing of limitation. But his inclination is less to the evangelical left whereby he is in danger of castrating the forms and more to the Roman right whereby he is in danger of ascribing to them inspired infallibility. Despite the protestations of the evangelical who, not only mistakes mere high opinions for high views but also mistakes high views for infallible ones, the status of infallible is reserved for the Scripture alone.

Here’s a view of Manhattan from north of the border on a Declaration that seems “strangely useless”:

Given the provenance of the document being the American Religious Right, therefore, it will surprise precisely no one that the document declares that such people are (still) prolife, (still) pro-traditional marriage, and (still) desirous that their way of seeing things is put into American law. It’s not evident to me that anyone needed a big declaration that such people still feel this way.

The document gives no clear direction about what anyone is supposed to do once they have read it–besides sign it, I suppose. Is anyone now going to campaign for prolife positions any differently than he or she did before? Is anyone going to change his or her mind about homosexual marriage? Is anyone going to seek new legislation or, if the law swings against conservative Christians, engage in civil disobedience of some unspecified sort? Who knows?

Finally, the document seems philosophically and politically incoherent. It argues for religious liberty for Christians to dissent from views they don’t like (and this point, alas, needs increasing emphasis in America as well as here in Canada). But it also argues that these particular Christian views of abortion, euthanasia, marriage, and more should be enshrined in American law. It says nothing about the liberty of those who would dissent from those views except to assert that because these Christian views are right, they should be the law of the land. What, then, happened to religious liberty on these important matters? The document doesn’t say.

Advent is the time on the Christian calendar for expectancy. We anticipate Christmas during the season of Advent. There are many other consistent expectations. We can expect a lot of innocuous yet enjoyable stuff: multi-colored and flashing lights, a barrage of holiday sales, Santa’s in malls, radio programs going 24/7 with Christmas songs, nostalgia, cold and snowy weather—all stuff I really like myself. We can also expect the not-so-innocuous: the typical squabbling over politically correct phrases like “Merry Christmas or happy holidays,” the desperation of some Christian circles for the wider culture to affirm them by bemoaning the fact that Christmas gets less and less cultural and government sanction every year. We can expect these same pious faultfinders to chastise the culture for not really celebrating the “reason for the season,” even as these same critics themselves get swallowed up in the materialism they mean to diminish, as if the Christian answer to materialism is really glorified immaterialism. And watch out if, like 2005, Christmas falls on a Lord’s Day.

But instead of being distracted by the cacophony of irrelevance, I would suggest we might do better to consider Mary’s Magnificat. To many Protestant ears it might sound dangerously close to a Romish fascination with the Madonna. That might explain so many befuddled Protestant looks when the term is brought up and the subsequent race back to the assortment of things in the first paragraph. But it is far from hands-off Romanism. The Magnificat is named from the first word in Jerome’s Latin version, “magnifies,” or “my soul magnifies” in the aorist Greek tense. Upon hearing the news that she will bear the Son of God, Mary is basically bursting with anticipation and says it all with, “As the LORD has spoken, may it be!” Mary is the second to the last Scriptural figure who points us to Christ (John the Baptist being the last). After some 400 years of silence by God, He comes to Mary through the angel of the LORD to make His announcement–by way of paraphrasing the last prophet to speak, Micah–that she is to be the human conduit to bring forth the Light of the world. He would be the long awaited Messiah Who would take away the sin of the world. Fallen creation would be redeemed from its corruption by the Last Adam brought upon it by the sin of the first. He would be the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets and save His people—and Mary will be His mother.

That is quite a grand and soaring set of themes. Anymore though, instead of pointing us to Christ, messages seem designed to point us instead to ourselves. Instead of stirring the pots of Old Testament anticipation of the promised Messiah and how they seem to approach culmination in the person of Mary in a way they cannot in any other person, we may well get another lecture and lesson on how to generally “submit ourselves to God’s will for our lives and trust God just like Mary did”—a sort of Advent-light. Like a bad penny, this is one of the least favored expectancies to me. It takes the wind right out of the Scriptural sails. It wouldn’t bother me so much if this sort of thing were the exception rather than the rule. But I find that is not the case. It could be said that throughout the year we get Bible characters presented to us as models and heroes. Reading the Bible the way we do Aesop’s Fables, we end up with a sort of glorified litany of moral or spiritual imperatives. Thus, we may hardly blink when Mary is yet another figure used to give us some nice advice about trusting God for any array of temporal concerns.

This message flows from what some call the “Application-Bridge” model of modern interpretation, which is contrasted to the more historical and Reformed “Redemptive-Historical” model. The former, despite whatever beliefs of divine and infallible inspiration, sees the Bible as just another text handed down which contains “timeless principles” for this-worldly endeavor. Where the latter is taken up with much more transcendent and otherworldly themes of sin and grace, the former ends up simply telling us things we already know (Law), which is why Aesop’s Fables outdo Holy Writ when it comes to this-worldly advice. Redemptive-Historical tells us things we are not so privy to in our nature (Gospel), which is why Holy Writ surpasses Aesop’s Fables for otherworldly truth. Both texts have differing concerns. While Aesop may help us plod out this world, Scripture gets us into the next. In the Application-Bridge model we curiously get Moses and David held up as mere examples of leadership, and never mind how riddled with superior faults they are. The Redemptive-Historical gives us these figures as types, shadows and pointers to Christ. The difference between these two approaches may be distinguished as the difference between biblical characters as models or as actuals. Able to afford a lack of historicity, Application-Bridge doesn’t really care if Noah or Jesus actually existed, nor how sinful they were or weren’t, because that’s not the point. But the Redemptive-Historical model itself can’t exist if these figures didn’t, and cares deeply about their sinfulness, because that is precisely the point.
In order to understand Mary’s Maginificat a bit better, it may be useful to think more generally about how we experience the Application-Bridge model in and out of season. We will return to Mary, but first, a sidebar about the Application-Bridge model.

In an Application-Bridge model we might hear what I call “Red Sea” or “Storms of Life” messages. The Red Sea or Storm functions like other Bible characters, concerned with this-worldly problems. Red Sea messages replace our collective, common and otherworldly problems (sin and grace) with any host of this-worldly concerns (if you are a human being who gets out of bed every morning, plug in any host of concerns here, great or small). Moving the fulcrum of sin that rests between this world and the next world back into this world, sin gets refashioned into whatever problem we have in this world. And evidently Jesus overcomes those problems for us, which seems at first blush fairly attractive. But as impious as it may sound, the conundrum I have always experienced with this is that Jesus has never solved my this-worldly problems. I still live with fears, doubts, letdowns, regrets, pain, injury, boredom, anxiety and death to greater or lesser degrees. This shifting of the fulcrum from between this world and the next into this world treats our otherworldly problems rather blithely and regards our this-worldly problems with fear and trembling. But shouldn’t it be the other way around? It seems that we anymore think our problem to be our lives rather than how we can stand justly before God, how we move from this world to the next. It’s as if our otherworldly problem has been neatly tucked away in cosmology and perfectly understandable: “Jesus loves us, this we know,” but why in the world did she die so young? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t we be rather un-surprised that we live lives that are characterized by a mixed bag of relative happiness and success, some dilemma and monotony, and painfully difficult experiences? Shouldn’t the surprise be how God has reconciled Himself to us and made way for us into the next age?

Immediate problems with this spiritualized approach aside, one of the most interesting problems to me is how it fractures us as a collective body. It exalts our diverse and particular experiences over our collective and common one. For example, a couple of pews down John may be experiencing some temporal challenges in his life, but I really don’t have any. John may have just lost his job and the doctors still don’t know what is going on with his pregnant wife and do not seem at all hopeful. But my family is healthy, and I honestly can’t think of much that is brooding on my own horizon. I don’t have a proverbial Red Sea. John does. Should I perhaps excuse myself from my pew? Better yet, should I perhaps drum something up so I can at least pretend to participate? Maybe it’s my mid-western values, but that seems awfully condescending in light of John’s circumstances. If we accept the Application-Bridge assumptions, John and I have nothing in common at the moment unless I manufacture a problem in order to fit in. But if we accept the Redemptive-Historical presumptions, we are oddly enough on the very same page. Simply stated, we are both creatures who, regardless of their particular lots, need to move from this world into the next. Sin and grace are our problem and solution despite his pain and my pleasure. John’s situation matters a great deal to say the least; a properly world-affirming and this-worldly piety can say nothing less. But as dire as John’s life is right now, he is not well served by a Red Sea message, and I am not served at all. His mind needs to be on otherworldly concerns. In fact, both our minds should be on such things, no matter how stilted or opposite our particular lives may be. Both of our this-worldly lives, good or bad, should subsume beneath our properly otherworldly concerns.

This leads to another interesting problem. John has enough reason to not be satisfied with this life and to hope for the age to come. What about me, with all my temporal ducks in order? Am I satisfied? I have always found this sort of question quite telling. It’s easy to claim a hope in Christ and in the age to come when life is falling apart. But I often find myself with my temporal ducks more or less in order (I suspect most of us do, given our American demographics that afford such luxuries). Do I have hope in good times, or does that question seem quite nonsensical—hope in the midst of favor? For my part, I can attest that when all is well I am certainly grateful for it. All good things and times come from God; gratitude ought to characterize a well-tutored Reformed faith. We can all do this theology in our sleep. But I always get that twinge that things are still not right. This life, no matter how good, still just doesn’t cut it. This is the tricky nuance of the confessionally Reformed faith and ethic. It is an ethic that captures the life I live. Our world does indeed belong to God and as Reformed Christians we embrace it wholly whether good or bad. Yet, being too tied to the heels of this life is a this-worldly piety gone quite south. In good Reformed theology, I may and ought to authentically lament when things are bad and rejoice when they are good because this life matters. But either way I should also transcend both sorrow and celebration, hoping for the age to come. The Redemptive-Historical model of confessionalism still asks, Do we have hope even in the midst of favor? The escapist, simplistic and two-dimensional Application-Bridge model cannot sustain such a nuanced existence: seek the world to come only when times are bad, and when they are good just enjoy it. I don’t know about you, but I find a complicated life characterized by concentric circles of competing loyalties and intricacies to need a system that can keep up.

In Part Two, I will return to Mary’s Magnificat and explore its problem in an Application-Bridge model.

…to support his kids’ school! And since it’s also my kids’ school, I share that same goal.

Just like last year, The Cambridge School is having a super-raffle. No macrame plant-holders or peanut-butter-coconut cream pies here; this raffle has 50 prizes, ranging from $100 all the way up to a 3-year lease on a BMW 528i. Accordingly, tickets are $25 each. To sweeten the pot, the raffle imposed a cap of 5000 tickets, so each ticket has a 1/100 chance of winning some prize, and if fewer tickets are sold, then the chances of winning are commensurately better.

The early-bird drawing has already occurred (Nov 6), and the grand prize drawing is coming up fast (Dec 5), and coming up even faster is the deadline for purchasing tickets: 4pm (Pacific), Dec 2. It is possible to print out a form, and fax it with a credit card number for instant purchase; or you still have a day or two to mail a check and have it arrive on time.

So please help out a good cause and buy a ticket or four. I wish you good luck providence!

Would that Christians understood their natural relation to non-Christians the way some understand what neighborliness looks like.