“But your dad will not
know about that,”
Said the cat.
“He will never find out,”
Laughed the Cat in the Hat.

A popular argument among theistic evolutionists and hyperpreterists (and theistic evolutionary hyperpreterists) is that Adam wasn’t the first actual man, just the first man “in Covenant” with God. [1]

This is a means of keeping Genesis 1 as some sort of history (not a physical Creation, but a Delegation of “Temple purpose” to the physical Creation already in existence) and also maintaining the long ages asserted by modern naturalists. However, what this boils down to is simply a game of “kick the can.” The problem isn’t resolved. Rather, like the ring around the bath in The Cat-in-the-Hat Comes Back, it simply moves the problem elsewhere. In fact, it spreads its mess through the rest of the Bible.

Oh, the things that they did!
And they did them so hard,
It was all one big spot now
All over the yard.

For the separation of Adam from other “now-evolved” humans to occur, it had to be Covenantal. Most theistic evolutionists are too compromised to believe anything before Genesis 12, so they see no Covenants before Abraham (I mean, the actual word Covenant isn’t mentioned until Genesis 6, so the fact that all the preceding history has the same shape at many levels can’t possibly be significant in any way!) At least the hyperpreterists see Genesis 1 as Covenantal, but this poses a few conundrums for their theory.

Firstly, if an “Adamite” Adam (a genealogy divided by Covenant before Abram) was the first man in Covenant, then salvation is only of the Adamites. All the other people supposedly living at the time were not considered “human” by God. They were just part of a Creation that had known suffering and death for millions of years already, and God could somehow call this process “good.” [2] That’s an old Creationist argument, but there is also a Covenantal aspect to it. These non-Adamites died without hope under the Sanctions of a Covenant they were never given.

This assertion doesn’t follow the processes in the Bible at all. God chose Israel and then whittled Israel down to Christ. Each “new Covenant” in the Old Testament was founded within the previous one (Noah within Adam, Abram within Noah, etc.) God cut into Adam until He got to the foundation for the Bride. [3] At each point there was a division, a disinheriting of the unfaithful from the faithful.

For there to have been a Covenantal “disinheriting” of the non-Adamites at the beginning of the Adamic Covenant, then the previous race must have been under some sort of Covenant from their physical Creation that has not been recorded for us. Unless this first era was nothing like any later era, why were they disinherited? Were they “not-quite-human-enough”? If this were the case, they would have been physically close enough to Adam (in evolutionary terms), yet we are not told anything about them. We don’t need to invent non-Adamites to have an intermarriage between Covenant people and people outside the Covenant. The “daughters of men” in Genesis 6 were descendants of Cain, [1] who was cursed, but shown mercy, because he was unfaithful under Covenant.

This is a chicken-and-egg dilemma for the compromisers. An actual, physical, historical “Construction of Creation” Covenant can’t be escaped, any more than the special creation of the first chicken, so they might as well settle for Adam being the first actual man. Any other view violates the universal Covenant process, which originates in the Trinity.

And it removes the need for such highbrow primeval fiction. All of this discussion is merely an accommodation to people who do not respect the actual text of the Bible. Genesis 1 is certainly “Temple-structured,” but it’s not merely an inauguration service, and Adam is not chosen from among his brothers. The text says he was created from the dust in a Creation unmarred by sin. There’s not a non-Adamite to be seen anywhere. We are all Adamites. They ride roughshod over the text to accommodate the biggest flaw in modern science.

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man,
and death through sin,
and so death spread to all men because all sinned…” (Romans 5:12)

“For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Cor 15:22)

___________________________
[1] See BioLogos’ Jenga Bible.
[2] See Hugh Ross and a Shotgun.
[3] See my diagram in The Covenant Key, p. 236.

Doing my first Bible Matrix presentation this Sunday morning (with Powerpoint) at a church in Sydney. Also have a question time at the church dinner on Saturday night. Please pray for me as I prepare. I can handle public high school kids okay, but this is a different kettle altogether!

Here’s my outline (subject to approval!). I’ve got 40 minutes:

In his post You Will Never Guess Who Is Really Responsible For The Softening of Males In The Church, Mark Sayers shifts the blame for the current “sea of passivity” in modern males from feminism to men like John Newton.

To rescue masculinity in the West we must remember that we stand on the shoulders of giants. One such giant was John Newton, a man whose debauched life as a slave trader ensured that he had inhabited the old world of male violence. Yet Newton was thoroughly transformed by his encounter with the truth of the gospel. Newton operated as a template for the new evangelical mode of masculinity. He chose to champion others rather than simply build his own empire. A committed calvinist, he collaborated with and encouraged other believers who thought differently to him, maintaining a warm friendship and working relationship with John Wesley.Newton was not a prim and proper Georgian dandy, often he was described as uncouth. Newton was passionate and dedicated, his communication of the gospel was uncomprimising. Yet what entranced his contemporaries was that his gospel communication was described as having an almost ‘womanly tenderness’.  Newton was pointing the way forward to a new mode of being male, one shaped by the Gospel not the code of honour and violence. Newton would act as a father figure to a whole generation of evangelical leaders who would not just transform culture’s idea of masculinity but culture itself.

So what are we to do with our current crisis of masculinity? What advice should be given to young men who find themselves looking for male role models, who wonder what it is to be a Christian man in today’s culture of passivity and indecision. I think that if you want to be a man, stop trying so hard. Instead look to Newton’s advice, understand that you are a wretch who has been transformed by a grace that is amazing. Allow yourself to daily mediate upon and live out of that reality and one day you will get up to shave and the face in the mirror looking back at you will be the face of a man.

Great advice. But Newton and those of his time understood that men need a mission, something to construct and some to conquer. With the rejection of Christianity by our culture, that mission was replaced first with the empty quest for wealth, but now has been lost altogether. People, men in particular, are rebels without a cause. With everything else now shown to offer false hopes, the only real cause left is the New Covenant. [1]

Two Women for Every Man

In his post Old style evangelical gender politics, Steve Holmes tries to shore up the gender imbalance with some history of great evangelical women who followed this “transformation of masculinity.”

This evangelical generation changed the world, or major parts of it at least: they broke the international economic system of the day because it was unjust; they reformed prisons, factories, poor laws, and anything else they could think of; they saw major revivals, and huge numbers of conversions; when it came to gender politics, they taught men to be gentle, and women to be active in ministry.

Besides the few radicals he mentions, a lot of good was most certainly done, but how did that lead to the situation we are now in, where many men wouldn’t be found dead in a mainline Western church. Or, in reality, they might only be found in such a church if they were actually dead. Here’s a clue:

Methodist and holiness movements provided a particular intensification of this theme, as a woman who could lay claim to the experience of entire sanctification was in a demonstrable position of spiritual superiority to men who could not, a situation creating a significant pressure to reverse cultural-normative gender roles. Phoebe Palmer’s astonishing evangelistic ministry is the most obvious example of this, but there are many others (Hannah Whitall Smith’s entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals notes that, at the Brighton Convention for the Promotion of Christian Holiness in 1875, ‘[t]he most popular sessions … were those in which Hannah preached her practical secrets of the happy Christian life to audiences of 5000 or more, mostly clergymen who were theologically opposed to the preaching ministry of women’).

There was a deep-seated structural problem in this “transformation.” We might say that well-meaning evangelicals fell off the other side of the horse.

The Stigmatization of Male Traits

My friend Alastair Roberts’ comments after this post are the reason why I am posting this at all. He’s very familiar with the “liturgical” roles for men and women laid down in Genesis. [2] Modern evangelicals either don’t believe Genesis, or don’t know how to apply the Bible’s types, and so are left bumping around in the dark regarding gender roles in the Church, and in the interpretation of their history. Roberts makes a lot of sense, so I’ll post it in full. He writes:

It seems to me that the picture is rather one-sided. More probably needs to be said about the manner in which disempowered women and disempowered clergy joined forces to bring about the reformation of men’s morals, epitomized by such things as the temperance movements of the 19th century. This alliance between women and the clergy was coupled with a sentimentalization and feminization of religion, as in many quarters religion became conformed to dominant forms of cultural sentimental femininity, operating on the assumption that women had a greater affinity with religion and according to the narrative of the woman who reforms wayward men by making them see things more like them.

This wasn’t the only thing that was going on at the time, of course. There was also the ‘muscular Christianity’ of such as Kingsley, with its commitment to an imperial model of masculinity, and the refined and aesthetic masculinity of the Oxford movement. However, this ‘feminization’ and ‘sentimentalization’ trend has had a significant effect upon the worship, piety, theology, image, and demographics of the Church in many quarters.

It led to a stigmatization of many stereotypically male traits, along with a celebration of many stereotypically female traits. Within such a context, Christian spirituality was increasingly colonized by the sort of sentiments that are usually reserved for cheap romantic paperbacks. The agonistic and martial language of much biblical piety was increasingly abandoned in favour of a rather sickly emotionalism.

The problem is that, in the process evangelical spirituality drifted further away from the sort of biblical patterns of spirituality that one finds in the psalms, which do not exalt sentiment and sentimentality to the position of dominance that it often possesses. Churches also lost contact with men, as churches increasingly ordered themselves around disempowered women and children and their forms of piety (in a related movement, Christian piety started to disconnect from the wider world of society, life, and work to focus ever more narrowly on the individual soul and its private spirituality). The expectation that men conform themselves to a culturally feminine sentimental model of spirituality (rather than the expectation that both men and women conform themselves to a biblical model of spirituality) encouraged men to view the Church as emasculating and irrelevant to their lives, or as an unwelcome imposition upon them to be borne grudgingly and passively.

If the full story of the evangelical transformation of masculinity is to be told, we need to take this part of the picture into account. The evangelical church has often tended to neuter its men in order to empower its women. Its celebration and empowerment of women within its walls has gone hand in hand with its cultural marginalization and disempowerment. It has also fallen prey to a gross distortion of biblical piety in the form of sentimental piety, which still prevails in many quarters. This sentimentalized evangelical church has proved more effective at producing milquetoasts, who are culturally ineffective, than it has at producing men and women of firm character who make a powerful impact in the wider society.

The ‘masculinization’ of the church championed by Driscoll and others is obviously not the answer, but the Church is generally ‘feminized’ in a profoundly unhealthy manner, and something needs to be done to address this. What we have at the moment is a culturally marginal or irrelevant institution where there are almost twice as many women as men, where men are more inclined to be passive, and where piety is overly fixated on sentiment and emotion. I hardly think that this this qualifies as a success in terms of the transformation of gender norms and the shape of society…

[I will] explain in more detail what I mean by the ‘feminization’ of the Church here. Gender identities are indeed largely socially constructed (which perhaps should not surprise us if our most fundamental identity as human persons is a symbolic one, rather than one of biological essence, as we are created images of God). The problem comes when a particular social construction of one gender, which has little to do with Scripture and is at odds with it at various points, becomes a norm that is increasingly imposed upon all within the Church. For instance, I think that it is fair to say that Mark Driscoll is attempting a ‘masculinization’ of the Church, without suggesting that the gender norms that he is working in terms of are anything but ones contingent upon the surrounding culture.

I believe that the last couple of centuries witnessed just such a conforming of the evangelical church to norms of a particular cultural gender identity, in the form of sentimental femininity. I don’t see this particular development in piety as having much to do with an attempt to conform to biblical patterns of piety. Rather, it seems to me to arise primarily out of particular set of historical circumstances in which the interests of clergy and women aligned against a dysfunctional masculinity, and men were increasingly expected to conform and submit themselves to a cultural form of femininity, rather than to Scripture.

____________________________________
[1] If you don’t understand Covenant-as-cause, please read my book, Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key.
[2] See Liturgical Man, Liturgical Woman.

by Albert Garlando

Charles Stone introduces his book, ‘Five Ministry Killers and How to Kill Them‘ with an account of how a Church fired their Pastor. As I started the first paragraph, I thought it was a fictional parable used to kick off the main topic of the book. Wrong!

I read a little further and started to feel a little uncomfortable with the issues being mentioned. Then comes the surprise (for me anyway). The pastor in question is a real person and he is talking about real struggles that defeat many men and women who are in Christian Ministry.

The pastor in question, faced difficulties with power struggles, salary controversies, questions about his leadership style. His visitation policy was considered questionable and he was accused of “not loving the people.” Why? Because he made a decision to concentrate on the strengths and gifts of his ministry and prioritize his time on preaching and teaching instead of following a routine visiting program.

After some time, one particular man lead a factional revolt that would eventually see the pastor fired from his job. The pastor, unhindered by this, then made a decision to introduce changes in the Church policy regarding the expectations of the character of those that wanted to become Church members. He was called to question for this stance and the other matters. He was threatened with losing his job. He stood his ground and they fired him.

Stone closes off this account of the pastor, called “Jonathan”, as follows:

Ten years later, because Jonathan had so graciously responded to his critics and his dismissal, one of his main detractors admitted that pride, self-sufficiency, ambition, and vanity had caused the contention. The pastor’s handling of his ministry crisis left such and impression that eventually the church publicly repented of their actions, exactly 150 years after they sent him packing.

Who was Jonathan? Jonathan Edwards, arguably America’s greatest theologian.

Dear Pastor friend, if it happened to Edwards, chances are you will face similar challenges. Are you ready to meet them with a godly, gospel oriented approach?

Dear Church Member friend, if you have a Pastor that has different ideas about leadership style and ministry emphasis are you able to model gospel-oriented flexibility and serve alongside him for God’s glory?

“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,
whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free;
and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.” 1 Cor. 12:13

On the BH forum, Michael Jones observed:

“If you look up the words for “drinking into” lexically (Strong’s), you come up with the idea of plants being irrigated and soaking up water through the roots. Is this somewhat valid? Are we like a bunch of trees around an oasis in the desert?” [1]

I believe that very often, the word choices of the biblical writers are hints to the literary structure — especially when their word choices are a little unexpected or ambiguous. This one isn’t unexpected, but perhaps that’s because we are so familiar with this passage. It really is an odd turn of phrase. Could the Bible Matrix shed any light on it?

The “Covenant key” structure is bolded, and the “Matrix” structure is italicized.

Transcendence
For BY ONE SPIRIT (Creation - Genesis)

…..Hierarchy
…..are we all baptized into one body, (Division - Exodus)

……….Ethics
……….whether we be Jews or Gentiles, (Ascension - Leviticus)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - (Testing - Numbers)

……….whether we be bond or free; (Maturity - Deuteronomy)

…..Sanctions - Oath
…..and have been all made to drink (Conquest - Joshua)

Succession
INTO ONE SPIRIT. (Glorification - Judges)

The first water is external (delegation - Exodus) — the saints are in the Laver; the second is internal (vindication) — the Laver is in the saints. God washes us that we may be instrumental in washing others. So, when the Firmament/Veil is installed the nations are divided (Division); when the Firmament/Veil is torn the nations are united (Conquest).

The central correpondence seems to be sacrificial. It was the Old Covenant which set up a wall between Jew and Gentile. Under the New Covenant, the division is between the bondwoman and the free (Genesis 21; Galatians 4). Israel was bound on the Altar under the Law so that the nations could be free from worldwide (Creational) judgment. The Jew-Gentile division is Adamic. It brings us to the centre of history, to Pentecost. The bondwoman-freewoman distinction is Evian. It follows Pentecost. It is not a “genealogical” division but a legislative one. This is reflected in the change from Old Covenant circumcision (national division) to New Covenant baptism (voluntary allegiance).

The gap in the centre is for the Law of Christ in the Spirit, Who united Jew and Gentile, bond and free. The only other place I’ve seen this central (Day 4) line missing is in the second stanza of Genesis 1, Day 2. [2] As Robert Alter observes, one of the powerful tools in the use of established patterns in literature is deliberately leaving out something that was expected. Here, a “literary gap” is left between the divided waters, a space for the governing lights of Pentecost.

We can we make an application of this typology to our daily lives. As the saints fill up the sufferings of Christ, the “Veil of flesh” is continually opened, and the world is united by the Spirit of Christ.

Besides the idea of the “cup of testing” Numbers 5) appearing at “Sanctions,” which is common, applying the seven feasts (Lev. 23) to this structure gives us a clue as to why Paul might have used an “oasis” allusion here.

At Atonement, Israel “tasted death” for every man (Day 6). This turns out to be the “firstfruits” of Booths, where every man drank to God, including the seventy Gentile nations (Genesis 10). So the idea of an oasis of palms (branches/booths) certainly fits - at least to my mind!

According to James Jordan, we see the same imagery of Israel and the Gentiles in Exodus 15:

“Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve wells of water [Israel - Laver, Day 6] and seventy palm trees [the Nations, Day 7]; so they camped there by the waters.” (Exodus 15:27)

____________________________________________
[1] This is a private forum. Quoted with permission.
[2] See Firmament of Flesh.

The Lord’s name might not be mentioned explicitly in the book of Esther (though some scholars see it hidden in the text), but as literature it is riddled with riffs on the patterns found in the Law and the Prophets. We don’t see it because we don’t interpret “musically,” that is, looking for recurring themes. [1]

Not only is the book structured according the Covenant pattern (at various levels), James Jordan notices that, as in Israel’s annual calendar, there are seven feasts in the book of Esther:

There are seven feasts in Esther. The Great King is almost presented as living in a kind of perpetual feast. This is the Great Feast of History. At the beginning of Esther, everyone is included, but then because of Esther’s and Mordecai’s sins, the Hews are excluded from the Great Feast and go into mournful fasting.

The word translated as feast or banquet, mishteh, comes from shatah, meaning “to drink.” A mishteh is always a meal with wine. The word occurs twenty times in Esther. The word “wine” occurs six times.

At each of the seven feasts that appear in the book, we see two things: the king drinking wine, and the king issuing a decree. These are the two characteristics of the Feast of Booths in the Law. Deuteronomy 14:26 speaks of spending your tithe money on “whatever your soul desires: for oxen or sheep or wine or beer or whatever your soul desires,” and in Esther 1:8 we find that the Great Kind had decreed that each person should drink as much as little of whatever he wanted. In Deuteronomy 31:10-13 Moses commanded that his sermons in Deuteronomy were to be read at the Feast of Booths every seven years.

At a practical level it may appear contradictory for a king to issue decrees at a feast of wine: Proverbs 31:4-5 counsels that a king should not make decisions when drunk. We must remember though that Esther is recording history with a theological eye. It is not apparent that the Great King is suffused with “much wine” when making decrees, and in fact usually the decree comes before the wine.

The seven feasts in Esther fit with the seven eunuchs and seven nobles of Esther 1 and the seven assistant maidens of Esther 2. Given the symbolism of the book, it is also possible that the seven feasts relate to the sequence of feasts of the Levitical year in Leviticus 23. We shall explore this as we go…

Excerpt from James B. Jordan, The Bedazzling Adventures of Myrtle Morningstar: The Great Feast of History, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 224, December 2011. Subscribe at www.biblicalhorizons.com

___________________________________
[1] See Jordan’s Musical Hermeneutics.

Pic: Cordell Jackson, by karenkuehn.com

Author Marilynne Robinson writes about the Bible in the New York Times:

The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.

Literatures are self-referential by nature, and even when references to Scripture in contemporary fiction and poetry are no more than ornamental or rhetorical — indeed, even when they are unintentional — they are still a natural consequence of the persistence of a powerful literary tradition. Biblical allusions can suggest a degree of seriousness or significance their context in a modern fiction does not always support. This is no cause for alarm. Every fiction is a leap in the dark, and a failed grasp at seriousness is to be respected for what it attempts. In any case, these references demonstrate that in the culture there is a well of special meaning to be drawn upon that can make an obscure death a martyrdom and a gesture of forgiveness an act of grace. Whatever the state of belief of a writer or reader, such resonances have meaning that is more than ornamental, since they acknowledge complexity of experience of a kind that is the substance of fiction.

Old Jonathan Edwards wrote, “It has all along been God’s manner to open new scenes, and to bring forth to view things new and wonderful.” These scenes are the narrative method of the Bible, which assumes a steady march of history, the continuous unfolding of significant event, from the primordial quarrel of two brothers in a field to supper with a stranger at Emmaus. There is a cosmic irony in the veil of insignificance that obscures the new and wonderful. Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too.

A number of the great works of Western literature address themselves very directly to questions that arise within Christianity. They answer to the same impulse to put flesh on Scripture and doctrine, to test them by means of dramatic imagination, that is visible in the old paintings of the Annunciation or the road to Damascus. How is the violence and corruption of a beloved city to be understood as part of an eternal cosmic order? What would be the consequences for the story of the expulsion from Eden, if the fall were understood as divine providence? What if Job’s challenge to God’s justice had not been overawed and silenced by the wild glory of creation? How would a society within (always) notional Christendom respond to the presence of a truly innocent and guileless man?

Continue reading at New York Times…

The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible

“Rivers of water run down from my eyes,
because men do not keep Your law.” Psalm 119:136

I might bag out [1] the Biblical Horizons crowd for their views on baptism, but otherwise they are giants. They have a hold on Scripture and history that enables them to understand the times.

Rich Blesdsoe recently made the observation that the unbelief which constantly confronts us Western Christians is quite a different animal to the demonism found in other cultures. We don’t suffer the full-scale “possessions” seen in pagan cultures. The rebellion is just as self-destructive, as crazed and zealous, and just as much a “nothing” as the idols of the pagans, but it is a different kind of nothing. What’s going on in our culture?

Eastern demonism and western unbelief are essentially the same thing—nothing, futility, vanity. Which would mean that, once you cut through the crap, the solution is the same—the gospel. When the deceptive veneer is pulled back (or the vanity bubble is burst), the nihilism of Europe (and to a slightly lesser degree, America) is the demonism of India. Yet these are “nothings” coated in very different lies.

Apostasy as Defense

Old Covenant history was a sequence of “lunges and parries” with God on the defensive for a helpless Israel among idolatrous pagan cultures. Under the New Covenant this has been reversed. Western apostasy is thus not a lunge but a parry, a human(istic) exorcism of a constantly invading gospel. The “just so” stories of the atheists in lab coats are an opiate for a culture haunted by the Law of Moses and the Love of Christ. Christ is the One seeking to possess, and it is now the nations who are helpless, despite appearances. When He is cast out, in the words of Peter Hitchens (regarding the Soviet Union), there is left “a howling void.”

Yes, there is a sense in which a Christian culture without Christ is an entirely new species, but it probably has similarities to first century Judaism, the first truly godly culture to suffer the onslaught of the Spirit-filling gospel of Christ. The Temple might contain no images but the Temple itself has become the image. For the Herods, the desolate house was a Temple built for God but vacated by the Spirit. The first century Ichabod began at Pentecost. The Roman Ichabod began with the early Reformers. In our own culture, the vacated Temple is the institution of the state.

But a spiritual vacuum cannot remain so forever. When Christ is cast into the wilderness, He returns with greater power.

Death of the Multi-Culti

I’m making my way through Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It. Published in 2006, it’s a little behind in its history, but prophetic in its observations. Steyn speaks of the “death of the multi-culti.” Demographically, the West has exercised its democratic right to extinction:

“The modern western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect, except its ability to reproduce.”

He traces the economic problems of Europe back to demography, low reproduction rates, a loss of the will to survive. The West has become what he refers to as a “soft culture.” Its loss of what Friedman calls “self-definition” has made it vulnerable to the “hard culture” of a very self-defined Islam. [2] A failing demography can be traced back to a failure of faith. Behind culture there is cultus. Christendom, now vacant, is not imploding. Its shell is becoming host to another faith.

The multi-cultural experiment began in Christian nations because true multiculturalism is only possible in an eternally self-defined and culture-defining Christ, where baptism means a deliberate leaving behind of heredity. [3] The secular square was never self-sustaining. It was always the front porch of a tolerant Christian church. Only Christ can gather all men. Only the Spirit of God can unite the nations. A multi-culture can only ever live under the defining shade of the Christian cultus. If Christ is exorcised from the culture, the seat of a central, animating cultus is left vacant, vulnerable to whichever cultus of the cultures allowed in is the most self-defined. And the secular square of the West has no defense against the virus of Islam. Islam is a counterfeit of Christianity. Like Christianity, its agents hide in plain sight, their operations are cell-based and decentralized–franchized–and their cause easily crosses all social and cultural boundaries.

A multi-culture can survive under the cultus of Christ, but a multi-cultus is impossible in the long term. There must be singular animating principle, or “spirit.” In the West, this began under Constantine, whose “conversion” of Rome gave it a longevity sourced in God. [4]

Surely, God will not destroy His own house, the house of Christendom? He has done it before. And based on these past occurrences, recorded in Scripture, He does it for two reasons:

1) The knockdown is for the purpose of building a bigger house; and

2) He builds the bigger house out of the invading hordes, as He did from the time of Daniel to the time of Constantine. Centres of Islamic power are already falling like dominoes. It is always in the nature of Israel to die for the world, to create a “holy place” in which God can work. [5] The Church is constantly called to get out of its comfort zone and expand.

It is most certainly not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it, and in a way Mark Steyn cannot even imagine. We live in exciting times.

____________________________________
[1] Bag out: to criticize (Australian slang)
[2] See Friedman’s Outline.
[3] See An Atheist Gets Baptism.
[4] See Peter J. Leithart’s Defending Constantine.
[5] See Out of the Eater.

– James B. Jordan on Moses and Jethro, Studies in Exodus (lectures). Available from www.wordmp3.com

The word regeneration is often used to describe conversion, but in Scripture it is understood as a process. God calls, cleanses, instructs, clothes, feeds and commissions us. I believe this fact is, however, abused by paedobaptists, who seem to me to be prone to throw the actual “watershed” of conversion out with their baby bath water.

Calvin writes: “We assert that the whole guilt of sin is taken away in baptism, so that the remains of sin still existing are not imputed. That this may be more clear, let my readers call to mind that there is a twofold grace in baptism, for therein both remission of sins and regeneration are offered to us. We teach that full remission is made, but that regeneration is only begun and goes on making progress during the whole of life. Accordingly, sin truly remains in us, and is not instantly in one day extinguished by baptism, but as the guilt is effaced it is null in regard to imputation.”

With this I wholeheartedly agree. Within the process of regeneration there is a continued process of repentance. Yet, as we read through the Old Testament and become familiar with the methods of God, it should become clear that there is always a watershed, a “Day of Atonement” which cuts into history, buries the past and secures the future, all by Covenant.

As I’ve written elsewhere here, the Federal Vision attempts to import all the gravity of biblical baptism into a distorted shadow of the rite. What they are importing is the truth. What they are cramming it into is an errant practice that cannot contain this truth without contradicting the gospel.

I don’t believe any of these theologians misunderstand the gospel. For instance, Doug Wilson was invited to speak at one of John Piper’s events because “He gets the gospel.” I believe Pastor Wilson gets the gospel better than most baptists. So, what is my problem?

My problem is that infant baptism is not consistent with the gospel, and is actually foreign to the process of regeneration. At the shallow end, it sends a “double-minded” message to the world. At the deep end, it rides against the most fundamental structures of the Bible.

I’m a postmillennialist. I believe the New Covenant will succeed, in history, because all God’s people are now prophets and witnesses. We are still being regenerated, even as we take part in regenerating humanity, yet the New Testament puts a watershed at the beginning of this mediatorial ministry for each person.

Old Covenant Israel’s “watershed” wasn’t water, it was blood. They were a distinct people, a genealogy set apart (sanctified) for a special purpose. Though there were prophets and witnesses within Israel, the people itself was not “converted” in a New Covenant way. The Old Covenant became obsolete by design. Israel was meat set apart, lifted up, placed on the Altar and awaiting the fire of the Spirit to cleanse her. The Old Covenant is a history of knives.

The antignostic direction of the Federal Vision is commendable. Before I read these authors I didn’t even understand what gnosticism was. They teach that the Church is the flesh and blood Body of Christ. But their adherence to the practice of paedobaptism causes a severe misunderstanding of this rediscovered truth. Baptism identifies us with Christ, joins us to Christ’s Body, includes us in and puts us under the authority of the Covenant. But the “water” boundary is never the first contact with the outside world as it comes in. The first boundary is always blood.

For the paedobaptist, the “blood” boundary is not a cutting of the heart. The blood boundary is the genealogy of the parent/s. It’s the wrong blood. The first contact with unregenerate flesh is not the water of baptism. The first contact is the knife of the gospel, the Old Covenant history, all Israel, honed into One Single Event, a shattered Jew stretched out on a Gentile frame.

Faith comes by hearing. The Federal Vision’s act of reviving a gutsy, biblical baptism is wonderful, but conferring this “sainthood” upon infants manufactures another gospel, a carnal one that is in conflict with the true gospel they preach. They preach the gospel from the pulpit, but preach another gospel at the font. It’s just not apparent because they don’t carry this baptism to its logical conclusion. But their enemies do.

The Old Covenant was never going to succeed in bringing the nations–the Greater Bride–into the House of God. The house was not yet clean. There was a continual need for blood, and circumcision drew a line, in blood, in the sand. Paedobaptism does exactly the same thing. It draws a line around flesh that is set apart, awaiting the fire of the Spirit. The claim that an infant can be identified with Christ by the Spirit in baptism is a sophistry made up out of whole cloth. It’s an ugly, man-made Frankenstein of a doctrine that has no basis in Scripture.

The move towards a new understanding of the Church as the City of God on earth is just what the Church needs. But paedobaptists, who lead in this area, are hamstrung by this practice. They preach the process, but they misunderstand the process. Yes, the Church throughout history has been and will always be flesh and blood, but it is now Spirit-filled flesh and blood. This is where all the types in the Old Testament butt horns with paedobaptism. The cleansed lepers were obedient lepers.

The New Covenant people is a nation of chosen, qualified, Covenant-administering mediators, of angels. The “Covenant boundary” of this city is not the water of baptism. It is an ear willingly bored by the gospel, a heart cut by the gospel, a head bowed in submission to a Church invested with the gospel, and a converted man, woman or child who is then invested with the gospel in baptism. The “first contact” is the hearing of the gospel, and baptism is not the gospel. [1] The disempowered paedobaptism of most paedobaptists doesn’t claim to be the gospel. But the reimpowered baptism of the Federal Vision is, in practice, another gospel, because it is administered to those who do not qualify.

Paedobaptism and postmillennialism are incompatible. The goal is not a world under the sound of the gospel, marked out by a misapplied baptism. The world is already marked out by the blood of Christ. That is the first contact. The goal is a world converted by the gospel, with the converts marked out by baptism.

I’m not against the Federal Vision theologians. This is my way of cheering them on. The simple fact is that they haven’t gone far enough.

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[1] When it comes to church discipline, is such discipline a call to baptism? No, it’s a call to hear the gospel and repent. The gospel is the first contact.