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| Missouri Presbytery Federal Vision Study Report | | Date Created: Jan 18, 2006, 02:04 PM |
| Quick to Hear, Slow to Speak | | Date Created: Jan 13, 2006, 06:49 AM |
Intellectual honesty does not come naturally when we are critiquing our "enemies." After all, it's hard work, requiring some humility on our part. This is especially difficult for "confessional Reformed" Christians, it seems to me. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's something I myself have had to repent of on many occasions and so I can usually detect it in others. Perhaps we feel so superior to other Christians that we need not try to understand things from their point of view? I don't know. What is more likely is that we see all other theological and/or ecclesiastical options as dangerous and are constantly afraid that people under our care will be seduced and "switch sides." But just because someone may think that the Emergent Church movement or N.T. Wright, for example, are not "on our side" that does not give them the license to "trump up" their charges against them in their effort to "warn people."
Joel's post is spot on. |
| All of Life is Worship - Again | | Date Created: Jan 03, 2006, 12:26 PM |
Just a little bit more on on this topic. It's important to remember that we often use the word "worship" in a way that it is not normally used in the Bible. As I tried to make clear in my posts and in my book the word "worship" in our English Bibles typically translates Hebrew or Greek words that denote a physical act of prostrating oneself, kneeling, or bowing down. Understood in this way, all of life is most definitely not "bowing down" or "kneeling." I tried to make this point in my discussion of John chapter 4 in The Lord's Service, pp. 290-294. Perhaps a little more clarification is needed.
Throughout the week we are walking, sitting, grasping, turning, pulling, typing, speaking, etc. Occasionally, maybe even regularly, we drop to our knees or bow our heads in prayer, or even lift our hands in praise. These ritual acts are done at specific times and places. If anything, they punctuate our daily work. By periodicaly performing these acts of worship, we define and consecrate the work of service we do in our individual callings.
Most importantly, these acts of worship are done with the assembly of God's people on the Lord's Day. When we are called togther as the church it is so that we can all receive and do things as the body of Christ. This "receiving" and "doing" is what we call liturgical worship. These acts - hearing, speaking, sitting, standing, kneeling, raising hands, singing, bowing heads, eating, drinking, etc. - are all acts of worship. Even common acts become special in the assembly. We may hear and speak, eat and drink, during the week, but they are not typically liturgical acts of worship. What we do on the Lord's day together as the body of Christ is different that what we do in "all of life."
We run the risk of gnosticizing "worship" with our overly mental/attitudinal view of what constitutes true worship. As I said in my recent posts: it is true that "all of life is worship" in a metaphorical sense. That doesn't make it any less real, but it does remind us that the worship we engage in on the Lord's Day in assembly with God's people - bowing, kneeling, singing praises, raising our hands, eating and drinking, etc. - is sui generis. We don't normally do these things as acts of worship during the week, at least not in the same way that we do on Sunday.
All of life is worship comes to fruition every Lord's Day when we physically offer our tribute, the token of the work of our hands during the week, to the Lord at the offertory. This ritual act makes what we have done during the week an act of worship. By doing this on the Lord's Day we offer everything we have done during the week to the Lord for his evaluation and pleasure. That act, then, affects our frame of mind, our mental attitude, as we go back into the world to work for God's glory during the week.
My problem is that people are using the phrase "all of life is worship" as a club to flatten out time so that the Lord's Day is no different than, no more important than any other day of the week. What people are saying to me is that all your talk about how the Sunday service should be ordered and how important what is done in the assembly is, well, this is all wrong because "all of life is worship." Or I say that the Lord's Day assembly is central and that what happens in "formal worship" orients one's entire life, and the naysayer then says, "No, all of life is worship." I say that the Sunday service is special and the critic responds, "That's wrong because all of life is worship!"
Now, if these objections sound rather illogical, I believe they are. I'm not even sure I can connect the dots when someone presents this objection to a liturgical service. Apparently, however, for some the fact that "all of life is worship" seems to imply that performing liturgical acts of worship on Sunday is either inappropriate or insignificant, mabye even both. Why all the fuss about Sunday worship if all of life is worship?
You don't know how many times I've heard this phrase used as a way to relativize, even neutralize the significance of the Sunday assembly. This highlights a dangerous tendency these days towards individualizing and mentalizing "worship." If a person can "worship" God in everything he does, then worship has been reduced to something that happens inside an individual's head rather than what they do - hearing, speaking, singing, kneeling, standing, eating, drinking, etc. - with the body of Christ in the assembly. |
| Advent | | Date Created: Nov 28, 2005, 01:26 PM |
 It is disappointing to see churches observe Advent but have no clue about its meaning or proper observation in the liturgy of the church. The Advent season seems to function simply as a countdown to Christmas Day or a silly exercise in let's pretend that we are living in the days before Jesus came.
First, Advent and Christmas should not sentimentalized. The celebration of Christmas for Christians in the church must have nothing to do with sentimental reflections on the cuteness or innocence of infancy. What the church sees in the Nativity is not the sentimental picture which is accessible to unbelievers. In the descent of God to man, the church celebrates a reality which can be perceived by faith alone: the beginning of the divine action that would bring man back to God. The beginning, not the end.
There is no spiritual power for us in thinking about the baby Jesus. Important as it was that the Second Person of the Godhead take on humanity and be born as a man, just thinking about baby Jesus and how sweet and nice he might have been has no spiritual power for us. It does not transform our lives. All the sappy poems that are read and all the cute little Christmas movies that kids watch have little or nothing to do with the church's celebration of Advent and Christmas. There’s nothing necessarily evil or dangerous about them. They are simply not enough.
Christmas is not Jesus' birthday party. We have greatly impoverished Advent and Christmas when all we have left is some vague sentimentalized commemoration of the baby Jesus. Pagans do this all the time. Nativity scenes here and there. Syrupy Christmas music everywhere. This is the only thing left in American popular culture. Sentimental feelings about a baby. Christmas has been Disneyfied. The climax of the Disney idea of Christmas, remember, is those cute little animals huddled together around an indistinct warm glow. There is nothing left but that indistinct war glow, the mere feeling of niceness. There is more to the Christian faith than that. Again, there is no spiritual power in this stuff.
The word “Advent” is derived from the Latin word adventus which means “coming" or "arrival.” Advent is the time of year when we reflect upon the coming of Jesus Christ. Advent begins 40 days before Christmas day. Remember, a period of forty days or forty years in the Scriptures symbolizes a time of testing and preparation (wilderness wanderings, the Ninevites had 40 days of Jonah’s preaching, Jesus tempted for 40 days and nights, etc.).
Advent, then, is a time of preparation for the coming of Jesus. But it is just here that so many churches are confused. We are not preparing for his first coming. That has already happened. The Son of God became man, suffered, died, rose again, and has ascended into heaven as Lord. Whatever Advent means for the church, it simply cannot be a time when we pray for his first coming. And there is no spiritual power in make-believe prayers about his first coming. Acting as if he hasn't come, as if we were the generation waiting for his birth is not what Advent is all about. Let that sink in.
The Church of Jesus Christ has always insisted that it is not the birth of Christ by itself that we are to focus our attention on at Advent and Christmas. Instead, it is the birth of Jesus that causes us to mediate on the faithfulness of God in the past, present, and future. More than that, we are encouraged to prepare and pray for the coming of the Lord now.
The life and worship of the church is prayer. "My house shall be a house of prayer," Jesus said. How do we pray for his first coming? How can we pray for what has already happened? We can't. He’s already come. So when we sing "O Come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel" we are not playing a game, acting like we are Israelites living before the birth of Jesus. This hymn is a corporate prayer. We are the new Israel. And we are asking Jesus to come again and again to deliver us from sin and the curse. We use the language and imagry of his first coming, but the prayer addressed to our faithful God in reference to our mourning in lowly exile. All good Advent hymns are prayers.
It is especially imperative that we who live at the end of the 20th century, who are so comfortable, so well installed in this world, not lose the fervor of the hope for the world to come. The purpose of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany is ceaselessly to reanimate that hope, that expectation, to move us again to pray for the coming of Jesus in our time. The church should resist the sentimentalization of Christmas in America's sappy civil religion.
The theme of Advent is the coming of the kingdom, and the coming of Jesus Christ. We pray for him to come again in time and history as well as at the Last Day. And that’s why the readings in Advent focus not only on his first coming, but also on the second coming, and on all the various ways that Christ comes to us in history. He comes to deliver us from sin and the curse in many ways.
The traditional Advent lessons remind us that Christ's first coming is a pledge of his second coming. More than that, it's a pledge that he will come in many ways to deliver us even before his final bodily coming at the end of the world. We don’t yet see all things put under his feet. We don’t yet experience the fullness of the kingdom so we look for the age to come. Therefore, we not only want Jesus to come at the end of history and wrap things up, but we also want Jesus to come in history and deliver us from oppression, from hardship, deliver us from sin, deliver us from fools, from foolish or oppressive governments, and more. We want Jesus to come and give us blessing and put down our enemies. We want him to come and give us the Lord Supper and be specially present with us in the assembly of believers. These are all comings of Christ. And on Advent our attention is focused on the fact that our God is a God who comes in answer to prayers of his people.
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| Mercersburg Lectures | | Date Created: Nov 17, 2005, 11:10 AM |
I mentioned in my last post that I spent some significant time in the late 80's and early 90's researching Nevin, Schaff, and Mercersburg theology. That work culminated in a few lectures I did in August 1992 at the Biblical Horizon's Bible Conference.
There are many men in our circles who know little or nothing about Mercersburg. I think that's a shame. Hart's biography should help. But I thought I'd contribute a bit myself with these older lectures.
Here is my first lecture, in two parts.
The Mercersburg Movement, Part 1
The Mercersburg Movement, Part 2
Download the lecture outline here.
The first few sentences of this lecture were cut off. It begins with my comments about how little we study and know 19th-century history and theology. Most of our studies in seminary focus on the first 17 centuries of church history. Modern church history is largely neglected, expect perhaps as a foil to do apologetics against liberal and neoorthodox theology.
As I said above, these lectures were originally given in August 1992 at the Biblical Horizons Conference in Niceville, Florida. The topic for that conference was Worship & Sacrifice. The entire set can be purchased from Jim Jordan at
Biblical Horizons
P.O. Box 1096
Niceville, Florida 32588
850-897-5299 |
| Articles in Theology (Total Entries: 64) | | | | - Advent
Date Created: Nov 28, 2005, 01:26 PM
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Uh oh!
Date Created: Jun 27, 2005, 09:48 PM
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Kneelers?
Date Created: Jun 26, 2003, 02:51 PM
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