Shout out to my friend Nathan, whose advice from the last post was "don't be Doug Wilson". I regretfully informed him that much of my style, word choice, views, etc. were shared with him before I knew who he was, but it was good advice. It would be uncharitable to liberals for there to be two of him, thereby causing their heads to explode. That being said, we press on.
I have several disparate categories of thought swirling around at the moment, and I'm going to try to connect them even if it only makes sense to me. Lots of stuff has been in the news lately, and somehow my feebly sparking synapses have been unable to relinquish the notion of a connection between the recent decision of the General Conference of the Seventh-Day Adventist church to (fairly narrowly) reject women's ordination, and gospel preaching in the post-Obergefell kerfuffle. In fact, I'm actually going to link both of them with why I disagree with NCT's view of the law. So I guess you could call this "the month of Notes from the Shore in review". If this blog were popular enough to have themed nicknames for trends of posts, that is.
Years ago, in my ignorance (well, greater ignorance), when I doubt I was saved at all, and my systematic theology, such as it was, constituted a fear of hell coupled with semi-biblical deism, I would have described myself as "an Old Testament Christian". I had back then a loathing of intellectual laziness and shallow morality systems that makes modern James look tame (it's possible, trust me), and untethered from rigorous commitment to two central Bible concepts (those being grace that is free, but never cheap, and Biblical support for robust Trinitarianism), I fell off a number of internal cliffs of thought.
The one most easily spotted as error by just about any regenerate heart was my acceptance of a standard hermeneutic of the "Christian left", at least some of whom are humanists playing religious dress-up. (In Obergeville, you'd better believe that's going to get more obvious. Quickly.) This principle is the juxtaposition of the God of the Old Testament, who is about icky, uncomfortable things like wrath, judgment, personal holiness, and law, with the God of the New, who is represented by the icons of Jesus the robed European Soccer player who can't continue styling his hair, only because he's too busy holding the adorable lamb and softly glowing in gold-pink hues. This God, say our friends the ideological transvestites, is sweetness and light, acceptance and "love", knows all 271 verses to "Just as I Am" (and some he wrote himself), and is knocking meekly at the door of human hearts to offer mankind the lollipop of forgiveness for things we couldn't help much anyway. This God, say grown men who should know better, is a gentleman (or perhaps vampire), who will not cross that threshold to our precious feelings-bosom unless invited in. And I, the little-Deist who couldn't, accepted the existence of these two deities. I merely reversed the normal preference.
The truth, of course, is that neither of these "Gods" exist. The God of the Old Covenant, the God who thundered on Sinai, loves mankind, and offered grace that men may turn and live. The God of the New Testament (who is the same being) reigns in a blood-stained robe with a rod of iron in His hands, and will (and is, and has) crush the nations in the wine-press of His fury. And I am grateful (and hope to remain so eternally) that God, in resurrecting me from the dead, did not do the gentlemanly thing and wait around to ask permission from my corpse. However, in believing an error in this arena, I developed a consequent, yet more subtle one, even after I had formally rejected the first.
Justification by faith became a doctrine for sluggards and intellectual freeloaders in my mind, even after coming to terms with the Holy Trinity and at least assenting intellectually to the inter-testamental unity of purpose in the Godhead. I had come to see enough antinomians and those who pervert the grace of the gospel into licentiousness (Jude 4), or even enough just-plain mutton-heads, to believe that only a God who demanded self-justification by law was capable of being Holy and Righteous, and that only a God who stood over the shoulders of the redeemed with a clipboard was worthy of being worshiped, when in reality the gospel in all it's world-foolishness is the exact opposite. And this brings me to my overall point: the risk of Law/Grace imbalance.
Balance between Law/Grace is vital to the Reformed faith, and to the apostolic faith, because one can fall off the horse on either side; and men often do. If a man believes that the prayer he prayed when he was four allows him to prolong his relationship with his live-in girlfriend, he commits the error of Jude. If a woman believes that God has given her firstborn the chicken-pox because she missed her devotional on Thursday, and will make up for it with three tomorrow (which she will later commend herself heartily on for two weeks), she has committed the error of Galatians. A God who delivers His Son, and thereby His very Self, to agony on behalf of spiritual worms is too Good to deny gratitude; and too Holy to mock by attempting to add to His work. But if I could hazard a guess without being either telepathic or a perfect judge of character, I would bet that all of us do so, and most of us tend to one more than the other. To apply the "split-God" hermeneutic much more accurately to our foibles than to God Himself, this creates "Old Testament Christians" and "New Testament Christians", and both types are imperfect by virtue of their category.
This principle can be expanded easily to the macro-level, as churches, denominations and societies are little more or less than groups of men, humanistic theories to the contrary notwithstanding. Just as there can be Christians who love the best seat at theological conferences and pray loudly to thank God that they are not like that man over there, who doesn't know the definition of "supralapsarian" (self-righteousness can be theological, too), there are churches who will put 18 year-olds in front of ecclesiastical courts for being alone with a person of the opposite sex. And just like there can be Christians who think that Jesus' payment on the cross was sufficient to cover their offices' stapler (and three other things) too, there can be denominations that wink at sin, because after all, grace will abound. Here's mud in your eye, Episcopalians.*
I was forcefully reminded of all this by the recent news of attempted shenanigans in favor of women's ordination at the upper echelons of Adventism. While there will be further repercussions as a result of what may amount to de facto rebellion on the issue in large swath of the North American branch of that denomination, it must be said that, as a church for whom cheap grace has seldom been a problem, SDA held the course in our "progressive" age where other organizations would have sold out. That does not take Adventism off the hook on the other end of the stick, though. This is not an Adventist-bashing post. Were I to write a church-bash post (perish the thought), I would have a teeming horde of more profitable targets. But an organization that maintains the centrality of original Sabbatarian commands and holds a belief that, at least in more conservative SDA circles, amounts to a covenant republication of portions of the ceremonial dietary law has reasons for low risk of antinomianism, not all of them the most healthy.
With that convenient ripped-from-the-headlines example in mind, I would apply the same principle to societies as a whole, and I would take the idea of balance, which we have already looked at in men and churches, and say that it is key to gospel proclamation in a societal context. With all apologies to NT Wright, who is much smarter than I, Second Temple Judaism was a decidedly law-emphasis society. Although, in fairness, it was probably much easier to have an "Old Testament God" mindset so close in history to the Old Testament. The intellectual descendents of that mindset got Paul's most blistering graphe in the form of Galatians. However, if I could rock a few boats for a second, legalism is (dare I say it?) not the predominant theological crisis in 21st century America.
Calculated underexaggeration aside, in fact, the number of pastors who preach on Deuteronomy or Leviticus, the number of men who can quote or understand them at all, and the number of twenty-somethings who've read any of them after they were shaving or driving is, um, low. The number of theologians who believe them to be inspired, or even relevant, is likewise less than stellar. One can only speculate as to the number of 30-year old laypeople. And this is why I believe that many Christians, even, perhaps especially Reformed Christians, are going about evangelizing this society the wrong way. Permit me to speak boldly.
I have already commented on the fact that the particularly egregious forms of synergistic preaching are calculated to attract sinners without changing anything about them ("what a coincidence! I love me and have a wonderful plan for my life, too!"). However, in our zeal for the gospel, Reformed Christians can tend to put the cart before the horse in more subtle ways. "Jesus died for sinners", we say, "and you can be forgiven. You can have a relationship with your creator". All true, Amen and Amen, I got so excited I temporarily became a Baptist. However, what do we do with a person, what do we do with a society, who responds to that message with "sinners do not exist because sin does not, and therefore I am not one"? To them, I fear our response, if we are to awaken people, is to do what the classic "awaken-ers" like Jonathan Edwards did, e.g., bring the hammer. We must be willing to say, if it costs us (and it will), if it gets us called hypocrites (and in once sense it will make us hypocrites, as we ourselves are sinners), if we see no fruit but derision for years, "you are a sinner, and this is why. Activity x displeases God and without holiness, no one will see the Lord". In saying this, I have been met with well-meaning responses of "no one will listen to that!". People listened to Edwards. And that's because, outside of the loosest of senses, Edwards was not speaking. The Holy Spirit was. On this front, the average American could stand a refresher on Calvinism 101. The Spirit blows where It wills, and God does what He pleases.
It is for these reasons, first and foremost, that I fear the ramifications of the NCT hermeneutic (and others like it) regarding the law and Americans. While the NCT men who exist right now are Calvinists, and gospel men, and lovers of the New Testament witness to morality, the one thing I feel Americans do not need more of is greater covenant disunity, that is to say, more reasons to disregard the text of the OT, and specifically the law. I do not say that the NCT scholars disregard the OT themselves, merely that read in one light, the idea of such concepts as abrogation of the decalogue continues to kick up silt in the already hopelessly muddied pond of American ethics. And while I know that this does not attribute guilt specifically to the nuanced and conservative positions held by these men of God, I can just hear the application of "love God and love neighbor" as NCT ethics chair passage to the rallying cry of the previously discussed Christian left. "Love thy neighbor shall be the whole of the law", cry the camouflaged secularists, while promoting their neighbors' lifestyle choice of moral filth, and in response we must be willing to say that the buck stopped long before that, when tablets carved without hands were brought from Sinai to a people who I suspect we would leave in the dust in terms of riotous living.
I have commented before that now is an age, and this is a nation, that is desperately in need of a proclamatory people. I do not blame fellow Christians, including Reformed men, for a love of the gospel, for a genuine desire to bless their unbelieving neighbor, or for a natural human preference to bring good news before bad. But we must follow the apostolic example. Lumps struck on the anvil of the gospel are made into tools for the Creator's hand, but they are struck by the hammer of the law. But because this is offensive to men, does not make it impotent. One Spirit gave us life. One Spirit gave the Apostles their victories. That same Spirit can bring hope and change to us and to our fallen neighbor in the most unlikely message. Men who God has known in eternity past will trip over the stumbling stone of the law and in doing so, see Golgotha in the distance. We have marching orders and a conquering King for a general. "Son of man, can these bones live?"
In Christ,
~JS
*I fully realize there are saved, and even Reformed men and women in general American Episcopalian circles. To you I say: "come out from among them and touch no unclean thing, and I will be your God and you, my people."
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