Theses on preaching: remember the kids

Some free-associating this afternoon called to mind a candidate for ministry who was to fill our pulpit some years ago. He was interested in employing certain theological categories and asked whether he could simply refer to them by name, or would have to explain them. From my experience, he wasn't alone: any number of pastors, particularly in their home congregations, can get into fairly technical weeds, the understanding of which would require some advance study. It may be that these men have particularly well-trained members, but I wonder.

It seems to me that in any congregation, at least any congregation with hope of surviving many years, there will always be the ignorant and unlearned. I speak, of course, of children. The presence of children, if nothing else, should compel preachers to use as simple and vivid language as possible, and to explain theological terms and ideas even if they are extraordinarily common. How else will all those erudite and learned pastors get well-trained members who they can lead through the theological weeds?

My doctor is trying to kill me

I have been diagnosed with "cochlear hydrops," which means there's a wee bit of fluid in my inner ear  which leads to a persistent sense of "ear fullness" (i.e., how your ears feel when you ascend in altitude just before they pop) and of very mild dizziness. Since I enjoy neither of these symptoms, I am on the only known treatment (which is 40% effective, yay!), which aims to reduce said fluid by the use of diuretics, a low-sodium diet, and avoiding caffeine; this last because caffeine can reduce  the vascular flow which might enable the fluid to pass out of my inner ear.

The eyebrows of my otologist (ear doctor; I didn't know that word, either) raised noticeably when I told him I typically drink four or more cups of coffee per day; he told me to cut way down, preferrably to none. However, "the nation's top nutrition panel" "said that consuming as many as five cups of coffee each day (400 mg) is tied to several health benefits," according to the Washington Post.  Turns out that "moderate" coffee consumption is 3-5 cups, which means I am, at my most excessive, moderate. (Full disclosure: to get through presbytery meetings, I often double my consumption; however, it's church coffee, which we all know hardly even counts.)

For once, your tax dollars are spent on a good cause: vindicating my dubious lifestyle choices. Thanks, federal government!

Puritan Sacramentalism (Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: p. 1319, vol. 2)

Many defectors from Protestantism, particularly of the reformed and presbyterian variety, to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy cite a desire for a more serious and ceremonial liturgy. In "Puritan Sacramentalism," Peter Leithart argues that a simpler liturgy, stripped of unnecessary ceremony, takes the Spirit's work in and through the sacraments more seriously.

ADDENDUM: John Calvin echoes this sentiment, with just a wee bit more polemicism, in 4.15.19 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. A couple choice lines:

By these experiences let us learn that there is nothing holier or better or safer than to be content with the authority of Christ alone.

How much better it would be to omit from baptism all theatrical pomp, which dazzles the eyes of the simple and deadens their minds...

Let Us Consider: a homily from Hebrews 10:23-25

(This homily was delivered at the opening of the April 3, 2012 stated meeting of the Presbytery of the Dakotas [OPC].)

Given the age in which we live, whether you’ve ever preached our text, you’ve almost certainly turned to it as you’ve exhorted a Church member to more faithful attendance at Sunday services. And well you should! Particularly when we understand the connection between the eschatological Day of Hebrews 10:25 and the Sabbath day of Hebrews 4, this text calls us to see the Church’s Lord’s Day services as the primary place to discharge our Christian duties of mutual edification and encouragement. Nonetheless, because the Apostle directs us to love and good deeds, a category broader than liturgical action, we are also called to dedicate ourselves to assembling together for encouragement, on the basis of our shared hope, on other occasions as well. If all our people understood and lived out these few verses, our congregations could all be more vital and uplifting places. A great many of our congregations’ problems would disappear if all our members considered how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds.

In most sermons there comes what I like to think of as the “Nathan moment,” when the preacher turns the sermon back on the congregation and announces, as the prophet Nathan did to King David, “you are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7).

Brothers, you are the man.

We have neglected to stimulate one another to love and good deeds and have forsaken mutual encouragement. While we all get along quite nicely when forced together by our bylaws and Form of Government twice a year, only a crazy man would suggest the other 359 days of the year are filled with edification and comfort. Indeed, we are often blithely unaware of the most momentous events in one another’s lives and congregations until the spiritual reports are delivered on Tuesday morning. [Stated meetings of the Presbytery of the Dakotas are preceded by reports on the spiritual progress of the congregations, with prayer for each.] We sit together in council, but we are not as faithful as our Lord in our brotherly duties to one another. We worship together twice a year, but do not seek out other occasions to assemble together.

This being so, what are the works fitting to our corporate repentance?

While institutional reforms might do us some good, and I intend to make several suggestions along those lines, we must first acknowledge no reform will do us any good unless we first make a heart commitment to recognize one another as brethren to whom we not only are accountable, but to whom we each need to be accountable. A number of years ago this body considered charging its Sessional Oversight Committee to regularly visit the congregations of our Regional Church. During those debates, a brother confided to me that he feared such visitations not only would not be a help, but would become a hindrance due to unwise committee members. To this day, I rather suspect his sentiment is shared by others.

That, of course, is why we must commit ourselves to considering how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds. We would be fools to think ourselves immune to the American diseases of individualism, congregationalism, and confident exceptionalism. We will each, I am sure, continue to believe that we are right and, on certain occasions, the body wrong; precisely because we believe that, we must begin seeking out each other’s counsel and offering prayer for one another. We must act as though we need mutual edification if we are ever to learn the true depths of that need.

To begin, then, ask not how the Presbytery of the Dakotas can encourage you, but how you can encourage the presbyters of the Regional Church of the Dakotas. What can you do to build relationships with the men in the congregations geographically closest to yours? How can you come to know the sister Churches throughout our region well enough to pray for them intelligently when the last presbytery meeting was five months ago? What can you do to bring together the members of our various congregations throughout the year?

Secondly, honesty should characterize our meetings: without any institutional changes at all, honesty and transparency would enable us to minister to one another, and care for the Churches under our supervision, much more effectively. An anecdote: a number of years ago, I e-mailed another pastor asking how our congregation could pray for his. This was one of those providentially orchestrated moments when he needed someone to talk to: as e-mails led to phone calls, I learned of divisions within the congregation and session, and serious questions as to his future in that call. At the next presbytery meeting, I listened with interest and surprise to the spiritual report from that congregation. Not only was there no mention of trouble, one got the impression of an active and Spiritually vital place. Of course, he wasn’t lying: even the most troubled Church is still a Church, and one can usually find enough good things to bring to presbytery that none need suspect some bad news is being omitted. Ever since, I’ve taken our Tuesday morning reports with a grain of salt.

This congregation’s problems could not be kept under wraps indefinitely, and eventually the pastor left and the presbytery got involved. By that point, it was too late for us to offer much help, and this Church went into a period of severe decline. Here we come to the really depressing part of my story: those of you who’ve been in the Regional Church of the Dakotas for the past 12 years, as I have, will have some trouble figuring out which congregation I’m talking about. Depending on how one judges these things, we’ve had about a half-dozen de facto Church splits or sudden pastoral resignations during my tenure here, and a large portion of those have come to a head shortly after a stated meeting of presbytery at which no mention was made of the brewing crisis. We cannot help sessions, congregations, or pastors who refuse to give an honest accounting of their congregational lives. Brothers, give us the opportunity to encourage you and counsel you toward more perfect love and a greater plenitude of good deeds. You owe it to this presbytery and to your congregations by virtue of your ordination vows, not to mention by virtue of our duty to Jesus Christ, the Lord and head of his Church.

Thirdly, let us consider our institutional life. Our bylaws were not delivered atop Pike’s Peak on tablets of stone, and could be much improved. Other presbyteries have found ways to address some of the problems which chronically plague our Regional Church, and we would do well to learn from the brethren. 

Less formal mechanisms are also open to us. I have used my time as moderator to promote gatherings before our stated meetings convene which create opportunity for discussion of issues of interest to our Regional Church and to the broader Church as well. (Such gatherings are held regularly by the Presbytery of Northern California and Nevada.) By design, we debate rather than discuss during presbytery meetings. Since this is how presbyteries are supposed to function, that is a good thing. However, those debates would be much improved if we had other occasions to engage in dialogue: the nuances of a man’s position can rarely be fully communicated in a floor speech. Thankfully, we are presbyterians, and when such a thing has been done three times, it has become an inviolate tradition.

Some further suggestions: perhaps our ministers and elders could gather together in geographically convenient groups for prayer and discussion every couple months. Perhaps similarly grouped meetings of deacons could gather to coordinate on local needs. Perhaps the  stated clerk could distribute communications a month before the presbytery convenes so those documents could be studied and men could meet to gain a better understanding of the issues we will be called upon to judge when we sit in formal assembly.

All this will take time and energy, commodities precious to each one of us. But brethren, what choice do we have? We have been called into the service of the Great High Priest, who offered himself as the once and for all sacrifice for our sins. Let us draw near to him with sincere hearts. Let us confess our hope by discharging our presbyterial office according to the cruciform standard of his own work on our behalf. Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, and all the more as we see the day drawing near. He is faithful; let us be found, by his grace and the power of his Spirit, faithful to our calling as well.

Jupiter Ascending, Downton Abbey, & Leviticus

The reviews of Jupiter Ascending have not been kind, and I suppose I can see why. I am second to none in gape-jawed amazement at The Matrix, with which the Wachowskis exploded onto the film scene, not only revolutionizing the way action sequences ever after would be filmed, but creating one of the most potent allegories of Christ’s redemptive work in recent memory. Though vast in interstellar scope, Jupiter Ascending shares none of The Matrix’s metaphysical or genre-shaping ambitions. Instead, it puts me in mind most of The Fifth Element, and if that silly science-fiction romp is the standard, then Jupiter Ascending is good (and notably clean) fun.

Royalty is a major theme in Jupiter Ascending: it turns out that the earthling Jupiter, the titular character, by pure accident is a genetic duplicate of a now-deceased intergalactic matriarch and vicious capitalist empire-builder. As such, she is by nature “Entitled,” i.e., royal. There’s a rather lovely scene (although, admittedly, somewhat preposterous) in which bees engage in a bit of synchronized swarming in recognition of her majestic status. (It appears bees have something of a sense for this sort of thing.) While this scene has been widely mocked on the interwebs, I thought it hit on what most people, around the world today and throughout time, have intuitively accepted as true: there are some people who are, to borrow from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, more equal than others. Take, for example, the popularity of Downton Abbey: hordes and hordes of Americans, reared on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, adore a story built on the odd conceit that some people are born to rule, and others to serve them. 

In God’s providence, I saw Jupiter Ascending the day before I preached Mark 1:40-45, in which Jesus heals the unclean leper. The leper’s problem was not so much that he was diseased, but that he was ceremonially unclean, and thus unable to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 13-14) and prone to being shunned by those who wished to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 5:3). Under the Old Covenant system of worship, cleanliness and uncleanliness were a symptom of man’s alienation from God: all you had to do was interact with a person with a skin disease, and your inherent sinfulness would, as it were, bubble to the surface and make you unfit to enter the presence of the LORD God to offer up a sacrifice in worship.

It seems to me that (what seems to be) the native human instinct for respecting persons of royal birth is, in some way, a reflection of the Old Testament laws of purity and cleanliness. There are some people who are more holy, more clean, closer to God than others, and such persons must be respected: even if their personal character is not respectable, their status demands our reverence and awe. 

In light of this, Mark 1:41 is shocking: “Moved with pity, [Jesus] stretched out his hand and touched him….” Leviticus 5:3, if not the rest of the Old Testament Law, is extraordinarily clear: to simply touch the unclean is to become unclean oneself. To push the double negative past the breaking point, Jesus not only is unafraid of becoming unclean, but bears a holiness so intrinsic and so powerful that he obliterates the category of uncleanness: he makes all things clean. He cannot be made unclean; instead, the power of sin is so conquered by his person that the unclean has no option but to become clean. “And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:42). Herein lies the immensity of Christ’s work on the Cross: because in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, even the ways in which human societies have intuitively ordered themselves since time immemorial are shown to be mere shadows and types, overturned and abolished in the person and work of our Savior.

(Here, then, lies the peculiarly Christocentric genius of the American experiment in republican self-government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” No royalist, enmeshed as she or he must be in the Old Covenant perspective on the world, could say such a thing.)

We respect royalty because we respect God: that is how we were made. Nonetheless, Christ’s work on the Cross destroys the royal conceit: there is no more clean or unclean, but in Christ all things have become new. “[T]hat is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19)

So many heroes, so little heroism

In an admirably caustic post at the First Things website, Owen Strachan calls out "evangelical" pastors who congratulate themselves on their "brave" choice to ignore the Bible and affirm homosexual desire, practice, and marriage. His conclusion says it all:

This is the endgame of the affirming movement. It is a project that removes the scandal of the faith. Once you’ve whitewashed your house’s doorposts of their bloody stain, you find that your neighbors stop looking at you funny, and your house looks just like every other abode in Egypt.

Slouching toward abominable neologisms

I was appalled to see the so-called word "ganjapreneur" in an above-the-fold headline in yesterday's Denver Post, the paper of record of the Gateway to the Great Plains. However, the Urban Dictionary has found a usage from The Atlantic Monthly in 2009, which means it's not quite as new as yesterday morning, but still abominable.

I foretold much doom and gloom when marijuana was legalized in the great state of Colorado, but the death of English has caught me by surprise.

Scripture speaks to politics: a response to Cale Horne

I think I like Cale Horne. I certainly like what I take to be his point in “How Scripture Speaks to Politics” in the May 2014 edition of Ordained Servant: namely, that Christians must beware a tendency, found on both the right and left, to read justifications for public policy positions into the Bible. Unfortunately, the exegetical argument he uses to buttress this wise advice demonstrates both poor logic and (perhaps unwitting?) ignorance of our confessional standards.

That exegetical argument has to do with the proper interpretation of the Eighth  and Tenth Commandments, but Horne falls into the logical fallacy of the excluded middle earlier when he writes, “If we accept that the Bible in its entirety is an unfolding of the story of redemption, we are unlikely… to go looking in the Bible for policy prescriptions that simply are not there” (emphasis added). He does not explore, and hence by implication excludes, the possibility that we who accept that the Bible in its entirety is an unfolding of the story of redemption may  go looking in said Bible for policy prescriptions and may even, on occasion, find them.

This brings us to his argument that the Eighth and Tenth Commandments do not presuppose the God-ordained existence of private property and a consequent duty of the civil magistrate to protect individuals’ right to hold it. Remarkably, he does not demonstrate that the conclusion with which he disagrees is founded on bad exegesis, but argues it is ruled out because of the previous exclusion of the middle: “Based on our assumptions – that the Bible in all its parts is revealing to us God’s plan of salvation for his people, and that this revelation is organic and unfolding – we must conclude that these uses of Exodus 20… are wide of the mark.” Instead, he posits that Adam in his innocence was called to steward all things as possessions of God, and so “[t]he Eighth and Tenth Commandments are required because, by the entrance of sin, we no longer regard property entrusted to us as articles of our stewardship that are not his own.”

Frankly, I find this, especially in the context of Horne’s exegesis of Acts 4, a helpful redemptive-historical insight. However, said insight fails to rule out the exegetical conclusion that the Eighth and Tenth Commandments presuppose a right to private property. Without further demonstration to that effect, this assertion on Horne’s part is another example of the fallacy of the excluded middle: here, the assumption that one application necessarily excludes all other applications. In this case, both applications could be true.

Further, our Larger Catechism speaks in support only of the application which Horne believes excluded, that the Eighth Commandment (at least) requires a right to private property. Larger Catechism 142 speaks of “what belongs to” our neighbor, and it and 143 assume a civil legal apparatus to enforce property rights (“justice in contracts and commerce…; restitution of goods unlawfully detained from the right owners thereof; … avoiding unnecessary lawsuits…; and an endeavor, by all just and lawful means, to procure, preserve, and further the wealth and outward estate of others, as well as our own”). Horne appears not to have thought through the implications of his argument for our confessional standards.

I respond at this late date (at the time of this writing, in mid-October to an essay which appeared in May) not because I want to employ the Bible to promote a right- or left-wing political agenda (which I consider in poor taste, not to mention a subversion of the Gospel). Rather, I write because Horne falls into errors which are increasingly common in the OPC, including (and perhaps especially) among her ecclesiastical officers. The fallacy of the excluded middle can be found in some of our theological controversies, such as pitting a redemptive-historical hermeneutic against grammatical-historical exegesis or Genesis 1-2 as covenant against chronological history. Some of our other theological controversies, it seems to me, could be forestalled by reflection upon what we have already purported to believe in our doctrinal standards. (I have in mind, for example, a failed overture to the General Assembly some years ago to form a study committee on hermeneutics. The OPC’s hermeneutic is stated plainly in WCF 1.9: “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture [which is not manifold, but one], it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.”)

As I said earlier, I like Cale Horne, and with him I look askance at efforts on the political right and left to claim the Scriptures support their predetermined positions; still, that does not change the fact our Catechisms teach us that the moral and civil law have implications for public policy. In other words, Scripture speaks to politics, and our duty as Church officers is to think reasonably and confessionally about what the Bible says.