“That which they sought to save them from the condemnation of the Law of Moses has also innoculated them against the grace and Spirit of Jesus Christ.”

Pope Francis, in a recent homily, has written,

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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“What we have received from Jesus is not a collection of ‘merits,’ but rather His maturity.”

James B. Jordan writes:

The problem with the “covenant of works” notion lies in the fact that it is linked up with merit theology. There is no merit theology in the Bible. Merit theology is a hangover of medieval Roman Catholicism.

The problem with much “active and passive” talk is that it is part of the same erroneous scheme: Jesus’ “active obedience” earned merits that are then given to me, merits that Adam was supposed to earn. Such “merits” are some kind of “works,” and though this is not said, what is implied are something like Herculean labors, something beyond merely remaining faithful.

But that’s not what happened. Jesus simply remained faithful. He did not do any heroic works — there is no heroism in the gospel anywhere; only faithfulness. In a large sense, all of Jesus’ “work” was “passive.” He did not “go beyond” mere faithful obedience to the Law. But as a result of doing just that and no more, He matured into full adulthood. Notice that He was proclaimed king when He arrived at Jerusalem, was tried as a king, was robed as a king, and was crucified as a king. Contrary to Presbyterian theology, Jesus did not die primarily as a priest but as Melchizedek, as a king. That is, as an adult.

Or, better, as the One who was on the brink of becoming king, as the anointed Prince. Passing through death on the tree and then being resurrected in a transfigured state, Jesus became fully King and Adult.

Jesus resisted Satan in the wilderness. That’s what Adam failed to do. From that point on, for three plus years, He matured in faith, beyond the point where Adam failed. He matured to the point of being ready for adult responsibilities. Through his death, he became fully mature and was given dominion over ALL nations, over the wider world into which Adam had been prematurely cast.

That is the point of Galatians 3-4. Formerly we were children, but now in union with Jesus Christ we have become adults. What we have received from Jesus is not a collection of “merits,” but rather His maturity.

A fuller discussion of this theme of maturation can be found in James B. Jordan, From Bread to Wine: Toward a More Biblical Liturgical Theology, available for $15.00 from Biblical Horizons: www.biblicalhorizons.com

See also: Dying He Shall Die

ART: In the Garden of Eden, Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

or Getting a Handle on the Scandal

“We are on the right track as long as we have biblical horizons.”

Peter Leithart has been put through the ringer with accusations and trials for having some “Romish” doctrines. He’s posted some good defenses (links posted on here recently). Basically, Protestantism threw out some baby with the bathwater, and we need it back.

Now it turns out that the gent at the centre of the condemnation of Dr Leithart for going over to the dark side was himself a Sith Lord in training.

I’m thick when it comes to legal details, but this is what it boils down to: the Westminster Confession is treated by some as a sort of “paper Pope.” That is, it has an earthly authority over the Scriptures. The accuser says that holding Dr Leithart to account because he wasn’t submitting to this paper Pope, even while he himself was moving on up to a real pope, was entirely logical. Logical, perhaps. Human, no.

Before this post gets boring, here’s a good summary if you are interested.

The only reason I’m interested, and posting about it (despite being a fanboy of Dr Leithart and concerned that he was being demonized) is what’s going on theologically behind the opprobium and the personalities. What’s really at the heart of it all, and how can I get a  handle on the scandal?

The Spirit gathered the Church by the Scriptures, and the Church gathered the Scriptures by the Spirit. We don’t like that idea. We want control. And Protestantism is messy. [1] But growing up always is. This sin of Roman Catholicism, a desire for a certainty we cannot have (at least not all in one go) has led that church into certain error.

And I guess we can have no doubt that treating any confession as if it were inspired will have a similar result over time, more or less. Doing so is desiring kingdom–the fruit of the second tree–before God’s time. The Bible shows us that this is what is behind every turn to the dark side in the history of Church and State. It is simply a lack of submission to the Word and Spirit of God. We are on the right track as long as we have biblical horizons.

Dr Leithart has some words here on confessionalism:

…essential as the past is, for Protestants the past ought never become an ultimate standard. Even the fixed points can be freshly formulated (cf. recent developments in Trinitarian theology and in Pauline studies). Beyond those few fixed points, much remains up in the air (for Catholics and Orthodox too), and will for centuries to come, as Christians continue to pore over the Scriptures and seek unity of mind concerning what they teach. Scripture remains fixed and immovable, the test and touchstone always of everything. Our understanding doesn’t stay fixed. Protestants should be perfectly comfortable with that.

_______________________________
[1] See A Priesthood of All Believers Can Be Messy.

The “Too catholic to be Catholic” goodness continues, with Rich Bledsoe and James Jordan pitching in from different angles:

Excerpt from Rich Bledsoe – We’re All Protestants Now

“High places” belonged to the childhood of the human race (cf. Galatians 4). The idolatries practiced by Rome and Orthodoxy, are childish practices… Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy seem to be in the same soup as Presbyterians and Lutherans and Baptists in terms of the kind of idolatry that we are really struggling with. Converts to earlier forms of the church have simply complicated things by making ideologies of childhood toys.

Excerpts from James Jordan – One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church

The Eucharistic Meal is not what you or I think it is or may be; it is what Jesus does. If I’m wrong about the theory, does that mean Jesus is not present?…

Catholicity of practice is, sadly, missing from Orthodoxy, Hard-core Baptists, the Church of Christ, and most of Rome. Rome won’t “rebaptize” Protestants, but neither will she give us communion unless there happens to be no Protestant church in the area we can attend. This is at least an improvement over how things were when I was a child, before Vatican II. Orthodoxy says our baptisms stink, and have to be cleansed by “chrismation,” a ritual nowhere found in the apostlolic scriptures. As Peter Leithart wrote recently on his blog, anyone who is truly committed to catholicity will have a hard time joining one of these sects…

…is the church Apostolic? Here again, we have sects that claim something called “apostolic succession,” a notion that cannot be found in the Bible. In fact, Paul is at pains repeatedly to deny any succession from the earlier apostles. I’m happy with the notion of ministers ordaining ministers and Christians baptizing Christians, but ultimately the succession in the Church is by the Spirit.

See also:
Too catholic to be Catholic
Separated Brothers

Peter Leithart’s blog is included on the blogroll here, and most readers here read PJL anyway, but his recent posts on Church unity are worthy of flags being flown everywhere possible.

His post Too catholic to be Catholic received a huge response, both positive and negative, which has enabled him to get down to his basis in biblical theology, specifically in the books of the Kings. The Catholic / Orthodox / Protestant divide is no different to the divided kingdom of Israel.

The idea is common on all sides of the divided church that there is in fact no divided church.  Some Protestants unchurch Catholics and Orthodox; on this view, Protestants constitute the only true, pure church, and therefore the line that divides Protestants from Catholics and Orthodox is not a line that runs through the middle of the church.  It’s instead a line that runs between church (Protestants) and non-church (everybody else).  There are forms of the same idea in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, though since Vatican II the Catholic church has acknowledged that while the church subsists in Catholicism, “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure” (Lumen Gentium, 8) and has famously recognized that some outside the Catholic church are “brothers,” albeit separated ones.

From the perspective of 1-2 Kings, this is altogether too sanguine a view of the state of the church. In the history of Israel, the line that divides the northern kingdom of Israel from the southern kingdom of Judah is a line that divides brothers, a line that divides two covenant nations, a line that runs right through the middle of Israel herself. At the beginning of the history of the divided kingdom, Yahweh warns Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, not to attack the northern kingdom and force them back into the Davidic orbit, and in that warning describes Israel as Judah’s “brothers” (1 Kings 12:24). The prophets pick up on similar familial language: Ezekiel describes Jerusalem and Samaria, capital cities of nother and south, as twin sisters (Ezekiel 23).  More remarkably, toward the end of the Northern kingdom, after a long history of calf worship and worse, Yahweh holds back from finally destroying Israel because of the promises He made to the patriarchs: “Yahweh was gracious to them and had compassion on them and turned to them because of His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (2 Kings 13:23).

Sectarianism is a comfort. If my church is the only church, then there’s no tragic division within Christendom, no rent in the fabric, to tearing of Christ’s body. 1-2 Kings gives us no such comfort: Christ has been divided in our divisions.

Leithart calls on all sections of the Church to tear down her “high places,” wherever they are found. He takes sides with no one but the Bible, and allows the Scriptures to highlight the tender mercies of God towards us in our carnality, which is what I love about the Biblical Horizons crowd.

“Catholicism and Orthodoxy are impressive for their heritage, the seriousness of much of their theology, the seriousness with which they take Christian cultural engagement.

Both, especially the Catholic church, are impressive for their sheer size. But when I attend Mass and am denied access to the table of my Lord Jesus together with my Catholic brothers, I can’t help wondering what really is the difference between Catholics and the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans or the Continental Reformed who practice closed communion.

My Catholic friends take offense at this, but I can’t escape it: Size and history apart, how is Catholicism different from a gigantic sect? Doesn’t Orthodoxy come under the same Pauline condemnation as the fundamentalist Baptist churches who close their table to everyone outside? To become Catholic I would have to contract my ecclesial world. I would have to become less catholic – less catholic than Jesus is. Which is why I will continue to say: I’m too catholic to become Catholic.”

James Jordan comments on the erroneous assertion of a “Covenant of works”:

[An] error, which has plagued some Calvinistic theology for generations, is to think that there were two covenants: a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. It is the phrase “covenant of works” that is the problem. Theologians vary in how far into error they go as they try to use this bad term, but one way or another the idea seems to be that Adam was supposed to earn eternal life through good works. Since he failed, Jesus came and did it for us. This error is compounded when some theologians say that we “receive” the “covenant of grace” by faith, as if Adam was supposed to earn his merits apart from faith!

This notion is in error. It is based on Roman Catholic ideas of merit that the Reformation did not fully overcome. There is no “merit theology” in the Bible. God does not expect us to merit anything, but to remain faithful and become mature. The issue is “merit versus maturity.”

Adam was created a child — that’s why he was naked — and he was supposed to grow up in the Garden (kindergarten) by remaining faith-full towards God and by keeping his hands off of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He was not supposed to “earn” anything. When he was mature, he would enter into a new phase of the One Covenant, the adult phase as we have described it. He would leave the Garden and go out into the wider world. Since he rebelled, he remained essentially a child, though since he claimed to be an adult, God sent him into the wider world. Humanity as a whole remained a child until Jesus became the first real adult. Now, in him, we are all adults.

To be sure, God does indeed deal with us by offering rewards for faithful obedience. But this way of dealing is secondary to God’s desire for us to grow up and become mature. There is nothing about meriting rewards in Genesis 2 or in any of the passages later in the Bible that reflect on Adam and his fall. When we were children, God offered us rewards along the way, but he only gave us the adult form of the covenant when we were mature. Now that we are adults, God still offers us rewards along the way, but becoming fully mature as elders will come only when we are ready, not as a result of specific actions that earn rewards.

The rewards offered to Adam in the Garden were this: He would get to remain in the Garden and enjoy its easy free food. This is the same reward-promise given to Israel in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28: They would get to stay in the Promised Land and be blessed in it. The reward is not that someday they would earn the right to move out of the Promised Land and take over the world. Graduation to adult status is not a matter of reward, but of maturity.

The threat implied to Adam was that if he was unfaithful and disobeyed, he would not become mature. He would be driven into the world, where he would suffer under its afflictions, instead of graduating into the world as an adult and ruling it. The same threat is given to Israel. If they insisted on being like the nations, if they tried to “move into the wider world,” before they were mature, God would indeed send them there, but they would suffer and not rule.

Thus, it is not a matter of earning merits. It is a matter of remaining faithful and becoming mature. If we remain faithful, and wait upon the Lord, we will become more mature and be given greater areas of dominion to oversee. If we are faithless, our dominion will be decreased.

James Jordan has begun posting his Biblical Theology Basics on the Biblical Horizons blog. Everything they taught you in seminary is wrong, so get over there, or, better still, click on the link in the side bar and purchase Jordan’s complete works.

“If your eschatology sees something other than the progressive growth and universal influence of the Kingdom of God in time and history, the success and triumph of the Great Commission, then you’d better stop drinking the Kool-Aid.” George Shubin

That was my friend George’s comment after reading this article by George Weigel from First Things.

For 27 years, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has published an annual “Status of Global Mission” report, which attempts to quantify the world Christian reality, comparing Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The report is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative.

The provocation in the 2011 report involves martyrdom. For purposes of research, the report defines “martyrs” as “believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility.” The report estimates that there were, on average, 270 new Christian martyrs every 24 hours over the past decade, such that “the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately 1 million.” Compare this to an estimated 34,000 Christian martyrs in 1900.

As for the interesting, try the aggregate numbers. According to the report, there will be, by mid-2011, 2,306,609,000 Christians of all kinds in the world, representing 33 percent of world population—a slight percentage rise from mid-2000 (32.7 percent), but a slight percentage drop since 1900 (34.5 percent). Of those 2.3 billion Christians, some 1.5 billion are regular church attendees, who worship in 5,171,000 congregations or “worship centers,” up from 400,000 in 1900 and 3.5 million in 2000.

These 2.3 billion Christians can be divided into six “ecclesiastical megablocks”: 1,160,880,000 Catholics; 426,450,000 Protestants; 271,316,000 Orthodox; 87,520,000 Anglicans; 378,281,000 “Independents” (i.e., those separated from or unaffiliated with historic denominational Christianity); and 35,539,000 “marginal Christians” (i.e., those professing off-brand Trinitarian theology, dubious Christology, or a supplementary written revelation beyond the Bible).

Compared to the world’s 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: As of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.

Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025. Another astonishing growth spurt, measured typologically, has been among Pentecostals and charismatics: 981,000 in 1900; 612,472,000 in 2011, with an average of 37,000 new adherents every day—the fastest growth in two millennia of Christian history.

As for the quest for Christian unity: There were 1,600 Christian denominations in 1900; there were 18,800 in 1970; and there are 42,000 today.

Other impressive numbers: $545 billion is given to Christian causes annually, which comes out to $1.5 billion per day. There are some 600 million computers in Christian use, up from 1,000 in 1970. 71,425,000 Bibles will be distributed this year, and some 2 billion people will tune in at least once a month to Christian radio or television. 7.1 million books about Christianity will be published this year, compared to 1.8 million in 1970.

The big lesson of the 2011 Status of Global Mission report can be borrowed from Mark Twain’s famous crack about his alleged death: Reports of Christianity’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Christianity may be waning in Western Europe, but it’s on an impressive growth curve in other parts of the world, including that toughest of regions for Christian evangelism, Asia. Indeed, the continuing growth of Christianity as compared to the decline of atheism (in absolute numbers, and considering atheists as a percentage of total world population) suggests the possibility that the vitriolic character of the New Atheism—displayed in all its crudity prior to Pope Benedict’s September 2010 visit to Great Britain—may have something to do with the shrewder atheists’ fear that they’re losing, and the clock is running.

That’s something you’re unlikely to hear reported in the mainstream media. The numbers are there, however, and the numbers are suggestive.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

(I was listening again today to the Biblical Horizons Preterism lectures from 1999 and thought I could see the offices of the godly in the Bible Matrix. Here are some quick thoughts, so feel free to comment and criticise as always.)

The Bible Matrix structures life at many levels. It structures the act that brings conception. It is the journey from ovum to live birth (what was the “placenta” in AD70?). It is the process of the working day and the working life — and family life, too. It structures a Bible-based, Covenant-renewal worship service. It is also the process God uses to make us what James Jordan calls “Great Prophets.” In this, every saint is a Tabernacle under construction, and every saint is a New Creation in progress.

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