Chapter 09, The Church, Ecumenism

Ecumenism

            The final section on this work of systematic theology is ecumenism, which pertains to the conversation and actual practice put in place to attempt to unify the church, both outwardly and inwardly.  It intends to participate fully in Christ’s prayer that all who follow him would be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:22).  To place it at the very end is not intended to make it seem unimportant, but it is only once we have surveyed the breadth of Christian theology that we can begin to understand ecumenical dialogue in a proper way.  First, we will discuss some of the problematic ways of thinking that the ecumenical movement has operated with over the last hundred years and then to attempt to draw attention to some people who have been pursuing the conversation in a different and more productive way.

             Traditionally, the questions that have been at the forefront of ecumenical dialogue surround ecclesiological issues (that is, issues that we have discussed in this chapter), such as the sacraments, ordination, church government, and the like.  Various documents have been drawn up outlining what people perceive needs to happen in order to bring about real unity and they have achieved wide-ranging acceptance, especially among the mainline denominations.  Indeed, the problem with them lies precisely in that acceptance.

            What is interesting is that to focus on issues like ordination, church government and the sacraments presumes that this is what is most important to each denomination.  This is simply not true.  Churches that have a low view of those issues, who treat them as peripheral, don’t care to have serious conversations about them, because they do not matter to them.  This, however, does not mean that they are willing to concede the point to those who have a high view of them, as that, too, would betray their convictions.  Often, Christians outside of the mainline do not tend to get excited about ecumenical dialogue because they perceive it to be a sacrificing of their integrity.  If they believe in things like speaking in tongues or predestination, or any of a host of controversial issues, why would they want to join with people who thought those were not consistent with real Christian faith?  If those are the things that are important to them, how could ecumenical dialogue of this kind not tend to make them give up their identity?

            There has been much conversation along these lines over the past century and there has been some fruit.  For example, it has prompted tremendous effort on the part of biblical scholars to try to understand what the Bible teaches about things like church order, ordination, and the sacraments.  However, it does not seem to have actually healed breaches between traditions, just make them less hostile to one another (which is, however, an important victory nonetheless).

            There have been a few others who have taken a radically different approach to ecumenical dialogue.  For example, Thomas F. Torrance, a Scottish Reformed theologian who has influenced the content of this work tremendously, led a dialogue between the World Council of Reformed Churches and the Pan-Orthodox Communion.  Everyone came in expecting to fight about bishops and communion and ordination.  However, this was not the case.  Torrance insisted that they begin by trying to find some common ground on the doctrine of God (the Trinity).  After many years of discussion, this body eventually produced a statement on the Trinity that both sides could agree with.  Agreement between East and West on the topic of the Trinity has not happened for a thousand years.

            The basic insight of this approach is that the differences that most of ecumenical dialogue has focused on is the outworking of various presuppositions that lie deeper than those issues.  By working hard to deal with the symptoms instead of the underlying causes, no real unity is achieved, there is just clarity as to the particular views.  However, by working from the very center of the Christian faith by asking questions like, “Who is God?”  “How should we understand the incarnation?” we enable ourselves to clear the way, to find a basis on which real unity can rest, and then proceed to other topics.  Further, this way of thinking allows us to draw on the insights of those core doctrines to shed light on questions of ordination and the sacraments.

            It seems that this approach is more consistent with the way that God has taken to interact with us and affect change.  Jesus comes first to take our place, to be both our representative and our substitute.  First, God changes who we are, then, and on the basis of that, he changes what we do.  The attack on human evil launched by God is from the inside out.  Perhaps this is how we should approach the issue of Christian unity.

Chapter 09, The Church, Order, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational

Order

            Church order is another hot topic in ecumenical debate.  Very few churches share exactly the same kind of order and nearly all of them consider the way their church is organized to be the “right” way.  Because I believe most of this debate to be useless, there will not be much commentary on how the church “ought” to be structured, but as a way to help laypeople understand some of the major differences that do exist, here are the three major structures of church government.

Episcopal

            There is a denomination in America called the Episcopal Church; however, there are churches that have Episcopal forms of church government outside of this denomination.  This form of government has been the predominant one throughout the history of the church, being used by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Church (of which the Episcopal Church in America is a part).

            Episcopal church government simply means that government is primarily by bishops (the word Episcopal comes from the Greek word επισκοπος which means overseer).  Bishops are the highest administrative office and wield the most power over how things are done.  Historically, the church has held councils of large numbers of bishops to make church-wide decisions (such as the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon).  In any particular area, the bishop is where final authority rests.

            The United Methodist Church fits into this category but in a modified form.  Whereas in most episcopally governed churches, bishops are considered a third order, in the United Methodist Church, this is not the case.  Traditionally, one is ordained as a deacon, then ordained as a priest or elder, then ordained once again as a bishop.  This means that, once one is ordained as a bishop they are no longer an elder; they have left that behind just as they left their lay status behind when they were ordained in the first place.  The United Methodist Church does not ordain bishops, but consecrates them to a particular office.  Bishops are not “higher” than elders, but they do fill an important office.

            The advantage of episcopal church government is that it is somewhat streamlined.  Everyone knows where authority lies and to whom they are to appeal.  As the church is structured from “the top down,” as it were, it can make decisions quickly and efficiently.  The disadvantage it has is that it places the power in the hands of a few.  If the few are particularly qualified and effective, things go well (just like, throughout history, it was in a land where there was a good king).  If they are ill qualified, on the other hand, it can be extremely problematic.

Presbyterian

            Once again, there is a denomination that bears the name “Presbyterian,” but there are other churches, such as the Reformed Church of America, the Church of Scotland, and others, that have a Presbyterian government.  As the name implies (Presbyterian comes from the Greek word πρεσβυτερος, meaning elder), presbyterian churches are governed by elders.  These elders include the various ministers of word and sacrament, who are called “teaching elders,” but it is not limited to them.  The governing body of the local church is made up of members who are elected as elders.  These people are eligible to participate in various assemblies to make decisions that affect larger portions of the church.

            Another note regarding the United Methodist Church is in order, partly because it is the denomination to which I belong, partly because it has such unusual polity.  It could be argued that, though it is governed by bishops, the United Methodist Church practices presbyterian ordination.  The final decision of whether to ordain someone is not made by the bishop, but the board of ordained ministry, a group of ordained pastors (in the United Methodist Church, pastors are ordained as elders).  The bishop functions as the chief elder in the ordination, but is accompanied by a group of elders in the actual act of ordination.

Congregational

            There are many churches that operate with congregational forms of church government including about any church with “congregational” in the title, the United Church of Christ, various Baptist churches, and, presumably, most nondenominational churches (it can only be presumed because there is no rule that insists that any nondenominational church uses a particular form of church government.  In theory, a pastor of a nondenominational church could have autocratic rule, which would make it more episcopalian than congregational).  In this form of government, the congregation is the highest source of authority to which everyone else, including the minister, is ultimately subject.

            The main advantage this has is that it is theoretically impossible for the authority of the church to make a decision that is disagreed with by the congregation because the congregation is that authority.  This means that each congregation is free to carry out its business as it sees fit.  The main disadvantage is effectively the same thing.  There are times when local congregations are in the wrong about one or more important issue and, left to themselves, will only perpetuate the error.  Accountability to a larger body would be helpful to restrain the tendencies of maverick congregations.  As a side note, congregational “denominations” do not function in nearly the same kind of authoritative way that others do.  There is tremendous freedom to agree or disagree with official denominational proclamations.

            It is difficult to make a case that says that one particular form of church government is the form that is taught and insisted upon by the New Testament (though some have certainly tried to do so).  Bishops, elders and congregations are all spoken of as having a say in how the church is run, but none are afforded the kind of supremacy that would seem to lie behind such exclusive claims that a particular form of government is “right” that some people make.

Chapter 09, The Church, Sacraments, Baptism, Holy Communion

Sacraments

            The sacraments have provided the major topics of debate within the church for hundreds of years.  As such, there are a multitude of different ways to understand the sacraments of the church, and I do not intend (nor could I) go into them all here.  I hope to simply articulate an understanding that seems to be consistent with the thinking put forward so far in this work and deal with some very broad issues.  It seems that, more than anywhere else, it is in a tradition’s sacramental theology that their hidden presuppositions come to light.  As such, they are symptoms rather than critical issues in themselves.  This is why they are being dealt with in the very last chapter of this work.

Baptism

            The first of the two sacraments that we will treat is baptism.  It should be noted that the Roman Catholic Church celebrates seven sacraments, but Protestantism has been more or less agreed that there are two (with the exception of some who believe that footwashing should be included as well).  Baptism is a profoundly moving ritual as it marks the very beginning of a person’s life of obedience to Christ.

             The place we need to look in order to understand the meaning of baptism is in the life of Christ.  Back in chapter three, when we were considering various important events in the life of Christ and what meaning they bore for our understanding of the Christian faith, we discussed his baptism in the Jordan.  When Jesus was baptized, he was baptized with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  However, Jesus is the sinless one, the one who had no sins of which to repent.  We must understand Christ’s baptism as a vicarious act (one done on the behalf of others), on our behalf and in our place, repenting for us because we are not even able to repent correctly.  Our repentance, even at our best, is half-hearted and insincere, when compared to the comprehensive sorrow and change of heart demanded by the gospel.

            What does this mean for the practice of baptism?  It means that it is the sacrament of our justification, that is, it is the sacrament that bears witness to the once-for-all-ness of our salvation.  God has accomplished our salvation in such a way that it will not, and indeed, cannot be repeated.  It marks a person as partaking in the act of God that was done, not in response to the work of humanity, but prior to any human act, purely out of grace; as Paul says, “while we were yet sinners.”  Baptism reminds us in a clear and tangible way that God has taken our place both in life and in death.

            This once-for-all character of baptism is why it would be terribly inappropriate to baptize someone more than once.  To do so would be to say, effectively, that Christ’s substitution was not good enough, that we need to do it again.  Actually, the reason that is often cited to support people being re-baptized are deeply related to the arguments against infant baptism, so it is to this topic that we will turn.

            There are those who claim that infant baptism is not legitimate.  The argument goes something like this (though there are, of course, variations):  Baptism is to be done as part of a public declaration of faith to confirm the faith of the individual.  Infants cannot make such a public declaration; in fact, they are not truly aware of what is taking place when they are being baptized and they will certainly not remember it later in life.  Therefore, infants should not be baptized.

            There is a deep problem with this way of thinking and it lies in its presupposition of the meaning of baptism.  Is baptism indeed a response to faith that a person already has?  It seems somewhat unlikely.  After all, Jesus was baptized on our behalf and in our place long before anyone had saving faith.  We see, at the beginning of John chapter four, that the disciples are baptizing people.  However, it is clear that it is only after the resurrection of Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church that people really have faith in the sense that is spoken of in the New Testament.  So, if so much baptizing was going on before there was real Christian faith, how can baptism be primarily a response of faith?  There are examples in the evangelism of the apostles where people come to faith and then are baptized, and it is true that we have no record of the apostles baptizing anyone against their will, but that does not mean that one must believe before being baptized.

            The insistence that the person who receives baptism must have made a personal decision for Christ before doing so owes far more to secular Western philosophy than it does to the New Testament.  Baptism becomes a sign, not of what Christ has done but of what we have done.  Even if we stress the primacy of grace in our faith, we still end up affirming that baptism is to confirm what already exists, rather than being the sign of God’s grace that precedes all our own choosing of God.

            When we remember that baptism is more about what God does than it is about what we do, these questions and problems fall away.  It becomes clear that it does not matter if we remember our baptism in the literal sense (we can still “remember our baptisms” and be glad, because we remember that we were baptized, even if we cannot recall the event).  After all, the point is that Christ has taken our place and that we cling to that reality.  There is no need to attempt to point to the time and day that Christ took our place in our lives because, in point of fact, he took our place when he was born of the virgin Mary, and again when he died and rose again for us and our salvation.  The act of substitution took place two thousand years ago.  It the reality of the fact that Jesus has taken our place that is primary over even our recognition of it.

Holy Communion

            If baptism is the sacrament of our justification, or of the once-for-all aspect of our relationship with Christ, Communion is the sacrament of our sanctification, that is, the ongoing aspect of our Christian lives.  We have indeed had our places taken by Christ once and for all and nothing can undo that fact (even if we insist on damning ourselves to hell, it does not change the fact that Christ has taken our place; it simply means that heaven is not the best place for us in that instance.  See the discussion of hell in chapter 7).  And yet, we are still creatures who have fallen.  The kingdom of God has drawn near, it has broken into our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit, and yet, the old age still lingers on.  Because of the brokenness of the fallen world, we always have a need to be reminded of the grace that God has for us, to be recalled to repentance of our own ways, and return to the ways of Christ.

            When we participate in Holy Communion, we are engaged in the tearing down of idols, but in order to understand this, we need to consider the long history of the Passover.  In Exodus 12:1-13, we read of the preparation of lambs to be killed as part of a meal while the Israelites are still captive in Egypt.  They are to slaughter a lamb and take its blood and smear it on the doorframes of their house.  When the angel of death passed through the land, taking the lives of all the firstborn sons, it would see the blood of the lamb, and it would pass over that house and the children would be safe.  This has been carried out year after year in remembrance of how God had delivered them and made a distinction between the people of God and the people who hated God.

            We must understand that this was the context for the last supper.  Christ and his disciples were sharing the Passover feast.  Christ took the symbols of the feast and reinterpreted them so that they bore witness to himself.  The bread that was broken was his body, broken for them; the wine that was shared was his blood, shed for them.  He was the lamb, the sacrifice, provided by God, so that the people could be saved from death.  Christ revealed himself to be both priest and sacrifice, both offerer and offering.

            What is interesting is that, though Jesus spoke often about the fact that he would die, he did not always go to great lengths to explain what his death meant.  Here, at the last supper, we have Jesus explaining to his disciples that his death was not accidental, nor was it simply tragic, but that it was full of divine meaning.  He was not just dying, he was dying for them (and also for us).  Had Jesus not spent this time instituting this sacrament that was to be done over and over again in remembrance of him, we would have a drastically inadequate understanding of his death.

            A word must be said regarding whether the communion table should be open or closed.  Above, the arguments against infant baptism were dismissed as being irrelevant to the real purpose of baptism and that, if we understand the real purpose of baptism, we will not be compelled to deny the baptism of infants while still rejoicing to baptize adults.  Similarly, there are some who argue that communion should be closed.  This often has an extremely excluding tendency.  In practice, this often means that a church that practices closed communion would require one to be a member of their denomination, if not their particular congregation, in order to participate in the sacrament.  The argument behind this practice is often to make sure that people are taking the sacrament “worthily” (1 Corinthians 11:27-30).

            In spite of the appeal to this way of thinking, a close reading of the letter from which this concern comes reveals that the problem in Corinth was not that sinners or outsiders were participating, but that communion was being used as a tool to foster divisions within the church.  Even still, the appeal must be made to the actual practice of Christ.  Christ shared his last supper with both Judas and Peter, one who betrayed him to his death and the other who denied him over and over again.  If there were ever two people who should not participate in communion, it would be these two.  And yet, our Lord does not hesitate to include them in this celebration.  If Jesus is willing to have such flagrant sinners dine with him (as he did throughout his earthly ministry), we should be willing to do the same.  After all, why should we deny this sign of incredible grace from those who might need it most?

Chapter 09, The Church, The Marks of the Church, One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

The Marks of the Church

            Towards the end of the Nicene Creed are the words, “We believe in the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic church.”  These are extremely potent, carefully chosen words that carry tremendous meaning.  Because of this, we must be extremely careful as to how we interpret them.  Many people have approached them from different angles and have had sharp disagreements over them.  It is not my intention to explain every possible view, as seen throughout church history, but rather to present their most natural meanings when we define them in light of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

One

            The fact that the church is one has been the subject of a multitude of conflicts, especially because the Roman Catholic Church has tended, historically, to define the church in terms of its external expression and by its allegiance to the pope.  This, of course, is an unacceptable interpretation in the eyes of Protestants, as that would immediately exclude them from the church.  There are others who, wanting to exclude those who exclude them, define it in similarly external ways, but in a way that is congenial to that particular group.

            In point of fact, there can be no real question as to whether or not there is only one church or even how this oneness is constituted.  There can be only one church because there is only one Christ, in whom and through whom alone the church can exist.  To say that there is (or even that there could be) more than one church is to say that Christ can be divided.

            The issue of how this oneness is constituted should make perfect sense in light of all the preceding discussion throughout this work.  All those who are in Christ make up the church.  It does not matter they are affiliated the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches or any of a multitude of Protestant Churches, if they are truly in Christ, they are part of the one church.  The only thing that can truly separate one from the church is if they are separated from Christ.  Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage in North Africa in the third century is famous for saying, “Outside the church there is no salvation.”  This has also been interpreted in many ways, but it seems to be most true when we consider that the church and the group of all people who are in Christ are coterminous (that is, they extend equally far).  The only way to be saved is to be part of the church (though this is the one church of the creed, not a particular manifestation of that one church) because they are one and the same.  The point that we need to remember is that it is not possible to be in Christ and somehow avoid being in the one church.

Holy

            This is the mark of the church that was of particular interest to John Wesley.  His basic insight will be explained presently.  The question that has been asked is, “What makes the church holy?”  Classically, and I agree, it has been stressed that it is Christ who makes the church holy because it is first and foremost his holiness that matters.  If we take the idea of substitution seriously and the fact that, by taking on all of human nature and living a human life, God has taken our place in every aspect of our lives and not just our deaths, we can come to no other conclusion than that it is because Christ is holy that the church is holy.

            However, is there not an implication for the actual believers who participate in the holiness of Christ?  This was the conviction of John Wesley.  Wesley was surrounded by people who argued that, because Christ was our total substitute, there was nothing that we needed to do in response.  This is, of course, not how total substitution has been portrayed in this work.  Wesley insisted that the holiness of Christ manifested itself in the lives of believers.  Using terminology of the time, Christ imparts righteousness to every one to whom he imputes righteousness.  That is, every single person for whom Christ is the total substitute also has a life that is fundamentally changed.

            This cannot be doubted in light of the discussion of the person and work of Christ and the Spirit.  If, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are grafted into Christ so that it is no longer we who live but Christ lives in us and that the Spirit takes the things of Christ and makes them ours, how can we not begin to manifest the righteousness of Christ in our own lives?  Now, we are by no means any more loved by God because of this righteousness; indeed, while this righteousness is, in one sense, our own as it is working itself in our lives, it is still Christ’s righteousness.  This is one of the crucial insights that Wesley had in the face of the antinomian (“without law”) teachers who surrounded him.

Catholic

            The catholicity (or universality) of the church is closely connected with its unity.  If there is only one church, this church must be universal.  There can be none who are grafted into Christ who are somehow outside the scope of the church.  In this very basic sense, the church is catholic.

            There are, however, two other ways in which the church is catholic or universal.  The church is catholic because, by its very nature, it is meant to span the globe.  There is no part of the world that is somehow excluded from the promises of the gospel and so there is no place where the church is not meant to be set up.  The fact that the church is not yet an earthly and historical manifestation of this global catholicity just goes to show that the church is not yet is it should be, for none are to be left out of the promises that have formed it and to which it bears witness.  The other way that the church is catholic or universal is in regards to the human person.  Absolutely all of the person is implicated in the gospel.  As this was explored in greater depth in the last chapter, no more will be said of it here.

Apostolic

            This is a crucial mark of the church and has a few layers of meaning.  First, to say that the church is apostolic is to say that the church is founded on the witness of the apostles.  This means that the church’s thinking and practice is explicitly built on that witness as the foundation on which sound thinking can be derived and a core set of data from which alone appropriate conclusions can be drawn.

            This leads us to the second layer of meaning of the word apostolic.  To say that the church is apostolic is to say that it cannot be any other way.  It is important to note that there is a very big difference between saying that it “can” not be otherwise than it is and saying that it “could” not have been otherwise than it is.  As we have discussed at a few other points before, God was, in theory, able to do things differently than he did; the creation might have been different, when God become a human being, he might have done so as a woman.  However, those possibilities do not enable us to build our thinking on these other possibilities.  God’s revelation is not utterly timeless and spaceless that can be reinterpreted and re-symbolized depending on our present culture and thinking, but God has revealed himself to us in time and space, as Jesus Christ, in Israel, two thousand years ago.  We cannot bypass that revelation.

            This is why the church cannot be anything but apostolic.  The actual revelation of God, which took place in time and space, created a community in which Jesus dwelt, day and night, preaching, teaching, and shaping the thoughts and lives of a particular group of men and women.  Even though the disciples did not understand at the time, after the resurrection of Christ and the pouring out of the Spirit upon the church at Pentecost, they remembered all of what Jesus said and did and understood what it meant.  This is what God has actually done in revealing himself to human beings.  To bypass the apostolic witness is to bypass the actual concrete revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

            To give some more concrete reflections about this, think about the New Testament witness.  If we were to avoid the apostolic foundation of the church, we would also avoid the entire New Testament.  Not only the epistles were written by apostles, but the gospels themselves, the lives of Jesus were written down either by apostles themselves or by others based upon the witness of the apostles.  To do away with the apostolic nature of the church is to do away with any reliance of the Bible.  Human beings are free, of course, to disagree with the Bible and even hate what is written in it (indeed, it is to be expected since it stands so strongly against the ways of human beings), but to say that the Bible has no authority, or even that it is not the normative authority, is to stand at sharp deviation from the church throughout the ages.

Chapter 09, The Church, Definition/Biblical Imagery

Definition/Biblical Imagery

            I have chosen to call this chapter “the Church” instead of the more formal word “Ecclesiology.”  This is due largely to the fact that this will be more of an extended reflection on various topics relevant to understanding the church and how believers fit into it than an in-depth study of all the problems that this topic is capable of.  These problems are so extensive that, if one wanted to deal with every one of them, the chapter might very well exceed the length of the rest of the work combined.  It is my concern to raise some classical issues and think them out in a way consistent with the rest of this work, that is, using Christ as the beginning, middle and end of our thinking.

            The church has been defined in different ways throughout the years.  Sometimes, and still within certain branches of the church, it is defined by outward association with a leader or a series of leaders (such as the Pope or the sum of the Eastern Orthodox bishops).  However, in more recent times, there has been a greater appeal to the scripture to define what the church is.  Interestingly, the mainstream of the Reformation looked to verses like Matthew 18:20 to define the church.  “For where two or three have gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst.”  This goes along with their definition of where the church is to be found:  Where the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments are rightly administered.

            The problem with this way of thinking is that it perpetuates the problematic thinking that the church is bound up by a particular gathering.  So long as Christians are gathered together for Word and Sacrament, we cannot doubt that a church exists according to this way of understanding it, but what happens when the people leave the gathering and go home?  Are they still part of the church?  Very few people would say that people who are part of the church when they are gathered together are no longer part of the church when they are no longer so gathered, but this just goes to show that Matthew 18:20 is not sufficient in itself (it might also be argued that it appears within the context of a chapter regarding church discipline, and not intended to define the church in the first place).

            John Wesley, the leader of the Methodist movement in England in the eighteenth century, took a somewhat different approach.  He was not concerned about establishing his movement as an independent church, for that was what he was hoping to avoid.  Instead, he was intending to foster an ecumenical spirit between the Anglican Church and the various nonconformist churches, members of whom were active participants in his Methodist classes and bands.  When setting out to write a sermon on the nature of the church, Wesley appealed, not to the common passage in Matthew, but from Ephesians 4:1-6.  “Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”

            The emphasis in this passage is not on a gathering, but rather the relationship of the believers with the Triune God of grace, bound together by baptism.  In light of this treatment of how the believers are to be related to one another, it can come as no surprise that Wesley did not make hasty judgments about whether a particular church preached “the pure word of God” or whether the sacraments were exactly “rightly” administered, but yearned that those who were already united in Christ would be united outwardly, or at

least not be harshly divided.  This understanding of the church is radically Trinitarian and thus radically participatory and relational (we are members of the church inasmuch as we participate in the life of God through Christ and in the Spirit).

            (It is important to note here that Wesley would be no friend of the rampant relativism found in much of the mainline church today.  It is true that, in his sermon “On the Catholic Spirit,” he wrote, “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike?  May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?  Without all doubt we may”  However, he did not mean that no opinions or doctrines, like the incarnation and the Trinity, were important.  He says later, “It is not a speculative latitudinarianism.  It is not an indifference to all opinions:  this is the spawn of hell, not the offspring of heaven.”  Wesley called for all Christians to be gracious and seeking unity, but more than that, he called for them to truly be Christians.)

            There are a few images of the church in the New Testament that are particularly potent.  One is the calling of the church the “body of Christ.”  This comes to marvelous expression in 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul says each believer comes to participate in the gifts of the Spirit (which are also the ministries of Christ and the effects of God the Father) and is empowered to work in complimentary ways so that we are all together the body of Christ, and are all parts of a single, though differentiated whole.  This is a wonderful way to think of the church, but it is important that we do not become fixated on the metaphorical sound of the image.  It does not seem that Paul meant this to be a true metaphor, that is, we are to think of the various people as being like a body, but rather that we are a body, we are intimately connected to one another as parts of a body and we must always remember that and let it govern our thinking.

            A second image is the church as the “bride of Christ.”  This only comes up explicitly a few, but important times within the New Testament; however, there are certainly several places in the Old Testament that imply that such an interpretation of the people of God is appropriate.  The idea is that the church is like a bride presented to a bridegroom, who makes her his own and gives himself to her completely.  This is a rich image, but we must be careful not to read every aspect of marriage, even marriage in ancient Israel, into it.  After all, a bride would provide a dowry, and we surely cannot think, in light of the person and work of Christ, that we are to provide a dowry to make the marriage worth Christ’s while.  No, instead, an idea latent in an allegorical understanding of the Song of Solomon (which not all agree with, it must be stated), is useful here.  There, we read about a wealthy king who takes a poor Shulamite woman to be his bride.  In this case, the bride has nothing to contribute to the king, but is the recipient of all blessings.

            A third image, used only once explicitly by Christ is that believers are branches on a vine.  This is more properly an image of the church than it is an image of the individual believer.  After all, we are not all totally separate branches on totally separate vines; rather, we are all branches on the very same vine of Christ.  This is important as it emphasizes that, at the end of the day, our life does not come from ourselves, but it is, as it were, the blood of Christ that pumps through our veins as the church.  We are so bound to Christ that we cannot exist outside of him.  As all believers are equally bound to Christ the same vine, they are all equally bound to one another, as each are bound to Christ.  This kind of imagery is implied every time we read Paul speak of believers as being “in Christ,” a phrase that appears in Paul’s writings well over one hundred times.  It is, in many ways the dominant imagery to speak of the life of faith, both individually and corporately, and was recognized as such by the reformers, but has been ignored in much of modern thinking due to the amazing primacy given to the concept of being forgiven.

Chapter 08, The Christian Life, Important Aspects of the Christian Life, Dynamic and Personal, Participatory

Dynamic and Personal

             We learn from Jesus that the life entirely devoted to God is not static, but dynamic.  To put that in other words, we come to realize that following God is not simply a matter of devising a complete list of what to do and what to avoid, as if following such a list with absolute rigor would be the same as the life that Christ lived.  When we look at Christ in the gospels, we see that Jesus continually surprises his disciples.  Jesus often broke social norms for the sake of mercy and yet did not entirely abandon those norms.  In spite of our best efforts to circumscribe the Christian life, there is no way to complete the statement “Jesus always...” with the exception of “behaves consistently with himself,” which, though true, is not particularly helpful in questions of practical living.

            Even saying that Jesus always does what is right or that he always shows mercy toward others, or that everything he does is good requires us to take the meaning of those terms from the life and example of Jesus himself.  After all, it is not difficult to point to places where Jesus was by no means right, merciful or good by independently and secularly generated definitions of those terms.  Jesus is often harsh with people, not least the Pharisees, made them look foolish, and broke the Sabbath, which was a command given by God himself to the people.

            The point is that, in spite of how helpful it might seem if we were to have a definitive list of appropriate and inappropriate behavior so that we would have an infallible rule by which to determine whether an action is right or wrong, such a list does not exist and is actually in contradiction to the dynamic nature of the life of Christ.  To imagine that we can contain the Christian life in a list of ethical norms is to collapse it into a static, impersonal code rather than what it actually is, the living, active, and personal God living in and through the believer.

            Indeed, the fact that Christ is not just dynamic but personal is extremely important.  When we say that the life of Christ and, therefore, the life of Christians, is not static, we do not mean that Jesus lived in any way that was random or misleading.  The fact that Christian behavior cannot be encapsulated in a series of propositions does not detract from its absolute reality.  Jesus is a person who lives consistently with his personal being.  It is one of the distinguishing aspects of a person that they do not always do the same thing, but are able to evaluate circumstances and behave appropriately to each circumstance as it arises.

            Let us look at this issue from another point of view.  If we were to say that God behaves in a certain way, regardless of changing circumstances and, because of the nature of things, God must do so, what we have done is established a way of behavior, an ethical norm that is not subject to God; indeed, God is subject to it.  God is indeed sovereign, even over ethics.  This does not mean that God willfully changes his mind regarding ethical behavior so that it is not connected in any way with the nature of God, but that the being of God is transcendent and supreme, even over our ethical formulations.  God is constant and faithful in every way.  Our perception of the Christian life and our understanding of the God who gives rise to it is not.

Participatory

            This subsection should not be surprising.  Its main point has been made in different ways in various other sections.  As a result, it will be very short.  From Jesus, we see that the Christian life is participatory.  Strictly speaking, we do not see this in Jesus, but rather we hear in from him.  In all of Jesus’ teaching on the Holy Spirit, we see that it is through that Spirit that we become partakers of the things of Christ.  When the apostles began to preach and teach, the idea of being “in Christ” quickly came to the forefront.

            What we mean when we say that the Christian faith is participatory has already been emphasized.  It is to say that the source and norm of our living are not found in ourselves but in Christ.  Just like we cannot think out the attributes of God except in light of Christ, just as we cannot think out how the culmination of God’s plans will work out except in light of Christ, so we cannot think about our life in Christ except in light of the incarnation.  It is to say that we are not free to think up our own way of living in isolation from Christ, but must allow the fact of the incarnation to shape our lives from beginning to end without exception.  It is not truly our Christian lives that we are living but Christ is living his life in and through us in such a way that every aspect of our humanity is implicated.

Chapter 08, The Christian Life, Important Aspects of the Christian Life, Holistic

Important Aspects of the Christian Life

            As should be clear from the preceding discussion, it is not appropriate to reflect on the Christian life in any way that bypasses the actual revelation of God in human flesh in Jesus Christ.  In him and only in him do we truly see what the life wholly devoted to God looks like.  Even in the lives of the apostles or the saint throughout the ages our insight is broken.  Each of them, in varying degrees, succeeded in following their Lord, but none lived their entire life, from cradle to grave, in absolute obedience to God; but Jesus did.  This does not mean that we cannot use the lives of eminent Christians to encourage us and to remind us of what the grace of God has actually accomplished in the midst of frail, disobedient human beings, but that we must always remember that it is Jesus who gives us our standard and must, therefore, be the focal point of our reflection.  There are a few things that are worthy of highlight that we learn from the actual example of Christ regarding the nature of the Christian life.

Holistic

            We learn from Christ that the Christian life is holistic, that is, there is absolutely no part of the life of a Christian that is unaffected by the fact that the Lord is God and that this God has made himself known to us in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit.  Well-meaning Christians have often reflected as to what extent their Christian faith should extend to the way they live their lives.  Should our faith have a concrete impact on our public lives, where others can see us and where our conduct most directly reflects upon God for the observation and evaluation of anyone who should come into contact with us?  Should our faith have a concrete impact on our private lives, where nobody sees us but ourselves, where we sin in secret and where we cultivate a distinct way of living unaffected by our evaluation by others?  Should our faith have a concrete impact on our intellectual lives, where we engage in mental activities and solve mental problems that seem to be so easily distinguished, if not separated from, daily life?  Should our faith have a concrete impact on our emotional lives, where we are beset by hormones and feelings that rage like a torrent that seem so utterly out of our control?

            The simple answer, in light of what God has actually done in Christ is “yes.”  The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ should play a role in every conceivable aspect of our lives.  Such a conclusion may be somewhat uncomfortable if we are not yet living in such a way where we have allowed the reality of God’s interaction with us to impress itself upon us in every way, but if we take just a moment to reflect on these issues, it should become clear.

            When we discussed the significance, in chapter three, of God becoming man, it took a two-fold form.  The first thing that was emphasized was that, in Jesus the living and active God of the universe has come among us in a real way so that, though God has drawn close, he is still the God he had always been.  The second major theme that was emphasized was that, when God came among us as Jesus Christ, God really and truly entered into our humanity.  This humanity was by no means deficient in any way, as we can see by the fact that God became incarnate in an actual, particular man, as one who was born of a woman and was equally descended from Adam and Eve as we are.

            Early debates in the church raged over the nature of this humanity, some saying that Jesus did not take on real human flesh, others that he did not take on a real human mind.  The church came to reject such views, emphasizing that if there were any part of Christ’s humanity that was not held in common with our humanity, it called into question our salvation in precisely that area.  If Jesus did not have a fully human mind, our fully human minds would remain unredeemed.  If Christ did not share our actual human flesh, our flesh would remain untouched by God’s saving work.

            So, just as the incarnation of God entered fully into absolutely every aspect of human nature, it has touched and impacted every aspect of our lives.  It means that not only our outward behavior is condemned and regenerated in Christ, but our inward behavior, the thoughts of our minds and the emotions of our hearts are so as well.

            However, if we are not very careful, we will fall away from the concrete revelation of God in Christ at precisely this point.  As far as the Christian life is concerned, we are not interested in speculation as to what godly thoughts and emotions are.  If we were to think out the perfection of human emotion, not in accordance with the actual example of Christ, but in accordance with an independently generated way of thinking, we would probably conclude that emotions such as anger or sadness and grief are unworthy of the Christian.  However, if we came to such a conclusion, the reality of Christ stands against us.  After all, we see that Jesus displays anger and wrath as well as sadness.  To deny these to a Christian would be to say that we are to be something other than human, as true humanity is demonstrated in Christ.

            To take up the language of “What Would Jesus Do?” again, we might modify this by adding that we are concerned, not only with what Jesus would do, but also with how Jesus would think and feel.  After all, in Jesus, emotion and intellect were not divorced from being and action, but were all integrated together.

Chapter 08, The Christian Life, The Human Condition as Revealed in the Incarnation

The Human Condition as Revealed in the Incarnation

            In 1896, Charles Sheldon published a book called In His Steps, where the pastor of a church challenged his congregation to spend a year asking themselves “What would Jesus do?” before they did anything.  There is a certain profound truth in this question and a corrective comment that must be made.  The truth is that we must base our Christian lives, not on whatever we think that we should do, nor on the norms of our culture, nor even on the ideals of generations gone by, but solely based on the reality of God in flesh, Jesus Christ.  The correction that needs to be made is regarding the tendency of many people to make this question nothing more than speculation, thereby separating it from the revelation that God has actually made known to us.  That is, if we do not root our answer to the question “What would Jesus do?” in the answer to the question “What has Jesus done?” we will very quickly do precisely what we shouldn’t, that is, root our decisions in an abstract concept of morality that is more the product of our own imagination and culture than of God’s revelation.

            It is when we actually look at Jesus that we get a clue into what our lives ought to be about.  It is in Jesus that we actually see what godly living consists of.  There has been a question that has been asked throughout the ages.  “Is something (like murder) evil because God condemns it or does God condemn it because it is evil?”  This seems, at first glance, like a harmless question.  Does it make a difference why something is evil, so long as we can all agree that it is indeed evil?  In actual fact, our answer to this question is very important.  If we claim that things are evil (or good, for that matter) independently of God and that God can only ratify this, we are saying that there is an ethical code, independent of, and indeed superior to, God to which God is subject.  Once we make God subject to an independent morality, or, which is effectively the same thing, once we make Jesus merely the example of all goodness rather than the definition of that goodness, we have said that, whatever God may be, he is surely not almighty, nor ultimate in any meaningful sense of the word.  Taking a step like this means that, when we say, “God is good,” we mean that God conforms to our previous understanding of good, rather than being its very definition.

            The point is that we simply cannot understand the human condition or even begin to understand the implications of the gospel for our daily lives if we do not begin with the presupposition that Jesus is the incarnation of God and that God is the source of all being as well as the source of all that is good.  So we must look first and foremost at the actual person of Christ as the center of all our reflections about the Christian life.

            One of the things that we must certainly avoid, though it must be admitted that it is extremely common in contemporary times, is thinking of Christian faith in existentialist terms.  Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes existence as a virtue in itself.  It promotes self-reflection and living with conviction and decision.  There are certainly some areas where this overlaps with Christian faith.  After all, who can deny that the Christian needs to have a life marked by decision for Christ?  And yet, the reason why existentialism emphasizes decision among other things is because, in the end, there is no reality outside of the self.  The person must live with conviction and decision because, in the final analysis, that is all there is.  Decision is a virtue in itself, regardless of the content of that decision.

            When we attempt to apply this way of thinking to Christian faith, it often looks something like this.  I begin to think about the perfection of God (often considered in abstract terms, rather than in light of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ) and I think about how I measure up to it.  I come to realize that God is perfect and I am not, so I decide that I am going to pull myself up by my bootstraps and save myself.  However, I quickly realize that I cannot do it.  I lament and wonder to myself, “How can I be saved?”  Finally, I convince myself that God has come to my rescue.  At the very end of this line of reasoning, Jesus is often brought in, saving it from complete existentialism.  However, when we think this way, the perfection of God is not something that is understood by examining what God has actually done or who God has actually revealed himself to be, but by projecting our highest ideals back into God, or, as we might say, making God in our own image.

            The problem with this whole way of thinking is that the entire motivation for salvation is based on our perception of need.  The real goal of preaching and ministry in this view is to reveal to people their need for something outside of themselves, then showing that that something is God.  The difficulty with this is that we do not find this approach anywhere in all of the Bible.  The Old Testament prophets spoke words intended to drive people to repentance, but it was always within the context of Israel, a nation whose very identity was shaped by what God has done through mighty deeds.  The conviction was not meant to foster decision as a virtue in itself but to remind the people of God’s covenant with them.  In the New Testament, the closest to this way of thinking is found in the book of Romans.  However, even here, Paul is speaking, not to nonbelievers who he is trying to crush under sin so they are ready to receive the gospel, but believers for whom he is analyzing what God has actually done, especially trying to make sense of the apparent rejection of God by Israel.

            What we actually see in the Biblical witness is that God does not wait until we have an existential crisis, trying to live up to an impossible human ideal, and then ride in on his high horse to rescue us.  What we actually see is that God takes the initiative, giving of himself in a way that we cannot even begin to fathom, long before we ever had any realization that we needed saving.  The people at the time, before the resurrection, followed Christ because he healed people or because he was hoped to be a political leader who would overthrow the Roman authorities.  Their thoughts were in no way dominated by an idea that they were sinful at their very core and needed atonement and reconciliation that only God could work out.

            God is both the cause of and the solution to our existential crisis.  It is not as though we could discover the problem of sin on our own; we needed to be shown the problem in a piercing way.  We needed God to show us that there was even a problem, or else we would never have figured it out.  God is indeed the source of our salvation, but he is also the source of our lamentation over our sin.  Without Christ we would neither have redemption, nor have any idea that we needed redemption.

But is it true that we cannot come to an understanding of the problem of sin apart from Christ?  Surely we can understand that human beings are sinful and in need of help.  After all, it doesn’t take much to see that our world is no better off today than it was thirty or fifty years ago.  We have wars, genocides, an abused environment, human trafficking, and greedy corporations everywhere we look.  Our best attempts to legislate morality have shown that, while we certainly can restrain the outward manifestation of evil in our society, that evil is still alive and well, finding new and creative ways to make itself known.

And yet, is this really all that we mean when we say that Jesus shows us the sin of humanity?  Do our observations of the evil in the world really push us to no other conclusion than that, if God did not become a human being, and suffer and die on our behalf, we would surely be lost?  This is not the case.  The fact that it is not the case is evident because there is no shortage of people who are full of ideas about how to make the world a better place and to eliminate the evils that are practiced throughout it.  We come up with educational programs, newer and more creative laws, we protest injustices and hope that those in authority will take care of them; all of which are good, but none come close to doing justice to the human condition as revealed in the incarnation.

Part of the problem with allowing our thinking to be grounded outside of Christ is that, by doing so, we are rooting our thinking outside of the one objective reality that calls our whole way of thinking into question and exposes our situation in all its harshness.  So long as we think of our problems as something that human willpower can fix, we will always convince ourselves that our situation is not all that bad, that the problems can be solved if we were to all just decide to live differently.  We will never think that, left to our own devices, our situation is hopeless.  This is exactly what the gospel shows us.

When we allow the fact of Jesus Christ to determine how we think about our human condition, what do we find?  We find that, when God became a human being, he became a complete human being.  In doing so, God revealed that what we really needed was not information or more careful teaching, but that our alienation from God went down to the very core of our being.  Our entire humanity was assumed by God because our entire humanity was in need of healing and redemption.  When we look at what God has done, we see that nothing short of the Second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh, living the human life, being hated, mocked, spit at, and finally crucified, could wrench humanity out of the clutches of evil.  We also see that our human condition was so fearfully sinful that our deepest and most natural response to the grace and mercy of God is hatred and rebellion.  When God came in flesh to reach us, we nailed him to the cross, because we could not stand to be in the presence of God.

If we actually allow Jesus to show us who we are, it is a fearful picture.  However, divine judgment is never revealed by itself, but only within the context of redemption and divine love.  Paradoxically, the moment that our desperate condition is revealed (the crucifixion of the Son of God) is the exact same moment that God reveals his boundless mercy, love and compassion.  The cross was the single most evil act of human history and yet it is the moment we remember with joy, not because it reveals the evil of humanity, but because it reveals the compassion of a God who loves us with a love that will not let us go and has proven it by staking his very life for us and our salvation.  The two ideas, that of the revelation of the incredible depths of human evil and the revelation of the even more astonishing heights of divine love are the obverse of one another, that is, they are like two sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.

Chapter 08, The Christian Life, Some Introductory Remarks

  Some Introductory Remarks

            There are some who might argue that a chapter on the Christian life is the single most important within a systematic theology, if for no other reason than that it is here that “the rubber meets the road,” as it were.  There has developed, at least in certain streams of Christianity today, a kind of fear of doctrine, extensive thinking and talking about God in relative isolation from the actual practical needs of congregations or individual Christians, for fear that they might lose touch with the actual life and practice of Christian faith and become lost in a stuffy intellectualism.

            It is my contention that this need not be the case (though it often has been), though it will not likely convince such people as any talk of “systematic theology” has quite probably prevented them from even considering to read this work.  Indeed, this fear of a divorce of our speaking about God from the daily life of the Christian, and thus the fear that Christian doctrine would become “irrelevant” to ordinary people is often held by those who identify themselves as conservative.  This is particularly ironic because the cry for “relevance” is the product of classical liberal theology, where Jesus is considered in isolation from his significance as the incarnation of the God of Israel.

            It was contended back in chapter two that, because in Jesus, God took on human flesh and dwelled among us, the gospel is intrinsically relevant, that it implicates our humanity in such a way that we can accept it, reject it, or debate the finer points of belief, but we cannot finally ignore it.  In Christ, the eternal has entered into the temporal, the infinite has entered into the finite, the divine has entered into the human and an event like that cannot be anything less than supremely relevant to our daily lives.  The only way the fact that God has become a human being can be seen as irrelevant is if, in fact, we do not actually believe that it has happened.

            All of this is to say that, when we turn our attention to the Christian life, we must not do so as if we are developing a way of life that is somehow cut off from the actual life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.  Indeed, just as in every other aspect of Christian thought, we must consider Jesus to be the focal point of all our reflection, we must allow it to speak first and loudest in our wrestling for comprehension of the Christian life.  More than anything, we must be certain that we do not invent something that in any way bypasses God’s revelation in Christ.  We are not free to develop a way of life that is anything other than Christian, that is, we are not free to develop a lifestyle or ethical code that is not based in every way, from beginning to end, on the actual person of Christ.

Chapter 07, Eschatology, Implications of Eschatology

Implications of Eschatology

            I have made a point of emphasizing the main aspects of eschatology that have been affirmed since the New Testament, such as the resurrection, the return of Christ and the divine judgment.  Other topics have received brief coverage, if any.  However, some question may still exist as to why eschatology should be the first chapter after dealing with the reality of God.  Hopefully, this will become clear in this section.

            Keeping eschatology at the front of our thinking helps us to remember what is of central importance and what is only of peripheral significance.  This is important because always remembering the eschatological thrust of Christian faith helps us to keep a degree of urgency in our lives, as the final events are spoken of by Jesus as coming upon us as a thief in the night and, regardless of how long it has been since Jesus promised that he was coming back, the time is indeed still coming and we would do well to remember that these events could still be fulfilled in our lifetime and we should live as if they will be, yet not be disappointed or disenchanted if they are not.

            At the end of the day, we need to think about these last things in order to answer a very practical question.  For any given thing or pratice, we must ask, “Will it be in the eschatological kingdom?”  If the answer is yes, then it has a central place, secure from any challenge as something that will be part of God’s kingdom forever.  If the answer is no, then it is inherently marginalized and thus has no place dominating discussion.  For example, are our particular forms of church government going to endure and be a part of God’s final kingdom or will they be done away with?  It seems that they will not endure forever but will be replaced by the direct government of the living God.  If this is the case, we must not allow questions of church polity to take more than their share of our attention.  Being careful about how we organize the church is very important, but is only a matter of the good functioning of the church, not a part of its very essence.

            We can apply this eschatological criterion to our everyday Christian life.  We can ask ourselves if our lifestyle or even particular practices within that lifestyle are compatible with what God is actually doing and will bring to pass.  If the answer is no, then they must be revised and changed by the power of the Holy Spirit.  If the answer is yes, then we can trust that we are participating in the things of God.  We must always remember, though, that there is more than one way of living that is commensurate with God’s plans, so we must not insist on a deadening uniformity of practice.

            The reason why we can apply this criterion is because we have been given a glimpse into the culmination of God’s plans.  We do not need to speculate unduly about what God is about.  We know what the final plan of God looks like, at least in part.  We should be about the things that God is about.  If God’s kingdom is a kingdom of justice, we should be about making our world just, not because we think that we can achieve this on our own or because we think that God will reign through us in a postmillennial sense, but because we are the people of God and so we do what God does and we value what God values.

            Even though we have been given this glimpse into the world that is to come, we need to always remember that the image we get in the book of Revelation is only partial.  Our glimpse is just that, a glimpse.  We do not yet have a full picture.  So we must always return to the reality of Christ in our reflections about what is to come.  We must look through the lens of Christ.  What does the kingdom of God look like?  It looks like Jesus.  How can we be a part of that kingdom here and now?  By doing what Jesus did.

            The difficulty that we come up with is that the kingdom has drawn near and has broken into our world, but it has not completely arrived.  That means that there are some aspects of God’s final kingdom that are manifest in our world here and now and other aspects that have yet to come to pass.  This has been expressed in Biblical studies and theology as the “already/not yet.”  The kingdom is already here and yet is still coming.  God’s work is finished, and yet there is more to do.  Various explanations have been made in order to ease this tension, but it seems that this tension must continue until God resolves it.  Our job in the midst of the tension is to live as faithfully as possible, trusting in Christ and Christ alone for our strength and sustenance.

Chapter 07, Eschatology, The World to Come, Chiliastic Views

The World to Come

            When we step back into eschatology proper, we must admit that, as the final kingdom of God in which we will participate fully is entirely beyond our comprehension, we can only sketch out in general terms what the world to come will be like, and we take our cue for our thinking from the person of Christ.

            The first thing that we need to emphasize again is that, whatever form the eschatological kingdom takes, it will be an embodied kingdom.  We will not be disembodied spirits eternally gazing at the beauty of God, sitting on clouds, as some theologians throughout the history of the church have implied.  We must not ever forget, or attempt to do without, the fact that Jesus is still incarnate to this day in the presence of God.  Perhaps some of the thought that we would not be embodied for all eternity is based on an assumption that the body simply holds us back and prevents us from really knowing God.  This is called into question by the fact that God has not been ashamed to bear a human body for all eternity.  If this is so, we also should not be ashamed of our embodied existence.

            Another question that is relevant for our consideration is what will happen to the world at the end?  There has been a long tradition of thinking that, when everything is culminated, the world will be utterly destroyed and exist no more.  This has a certain appeal because it means that we do not need to care for the earth.  However, the major teaching in the New Testament is that the world will be recreated and established on a more firm foundation.  This should not surprise us as it parallels the recreation of the body.  It is important that we keep this in our minds as we consider (briefly) the various millennial views of the end times.

Chiliastic Views

            In this section, we will be dealing with various chiliastic views of the end times.  The word “Chiliasm” comes from the Greek word for “Millennium” and Chiliastic views are concerned with various interpretations of the concept of “a thousand years” in Revelation 20.  Our discussion here will only be in broad brushstrokes.  Indeed, they will be so broad that some may be very disappointed or even upset.  However, they will be treated in brief, if for no other reason than because, historically speaking, they have only been a matter of serious debate recently.  All of them have to do with an earthly, historical reign of Christ that will last one thousand years and the relation of the return of Christ to that event.

            The first of these views is called premillennialism.  This view is, as we might expect from its name, that Christ will return before the millennium of Christ’s rule begins.  This view emphasizes that it is not possible for human beings to establish the kingdom of God on earth and that only by a dramatic and mighty display of power will God himself do so.

            Postmillennialism asserts that Jesus will come back, but only after he has reigned on earth for a thousand years.  This might seem to be something of a contradiction, but it is not intended to be.  Christ will reign, but not physically.  Christ’s reign will be inaugurated and sustained by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Most often, this view emphasizes the role of the church in the establishment of the kingdom of God, believing that, by changing laws and establishing righteous cultures, the church will participate so fully in God’s transformation of the world that God will establish his kingdom in and through the church.

            A word must be shared in critique of these two views, in spite of their history and wide number of adherents.  There is a sense in which there is a division between conservatives and liberals in that conservatives are less convinced of the power of humanity to establish the kingdom of God on earth than liberals and are thus more likely to be premillennialists.  However, a more significant division exists.  When the world situation is such that it seems that life is getting better and better and, as the church succeeds in shaping culture to a greater or lesser degree, postmillennialism becomes very popular.  This seems to be the case because the convictions of postmillennialists seem to be coming true.  Conversely, when world history takes a turn where things seem worse and worse (as they are at the time of this writing), premillennialism becomes popular, because it seems that human beings cannot get anything right and that nothing short of a direct act of God could overcome our sin.  In light of the fact that external circumstances play such a determinative role in these two views, it seems hard to take them entirely seriously.

            Preterism is not, strictly speaking, a chiliastic view, but, as it provides an alternative to the two main views, it should be touched on here.  Preterism comes from the Latin word meaning “past.”  While both Premillennialism and Postmillennialism look to the future for the fulfillment of God’s plans, Preterism claims that God’s plans have already been fulfilled.  There are many different strands of preterism (as there are for each of these views), but in its more extreme form, it claims that everything that is predicted in the New Testament, including the resurrection of the dead and the return of Christ have already happened and indeed had happened by 70 AD when Jerusalem was attacked and destroyed.  This has certain appealing aspects, especially in its more mild forms, but runs up against problems noted above as to the physical nature of the return of Christ.

            The final major view is amillennialism, which, as its name implies, does not believe that, when the book of Revelation speaks of a thousand year reign of Christ that it means it literally.  Instead, the view is often that the thousand year reign is roughly equated with the existence of the church, where God’s reign is established, at least partially.  There are perhaps more variations in this view than there are in the others, so it is extremely difficult to tack down in consistent terms.

            I have no intention of providing a detailed analysis comparing and contrasting these different views.  The main concern I have over the debate that rages in certain branches of the church (though, interestingly enough, is nearly completely ignored in other parts) is that it seems to be establishing an earthly and embodied reign that is somehow separate from the eschatological kingdom of God.  If the eschatological reality includes human beings who are resurrected in glory and embodied for all eternity, dwelling in a new heaven and a new earth with a Lord Jesus Christ who is also incarnate for all eternity, how can we distinguish a separate earthly embodied reign?  It is my fear, though some might disagree, that this acknowledgement of a physical reign hides a view of the ultimate destruction of the world and all flesh, including the humanity of Christ.