Contra rebellem Christianismum

I wrote this post back in November of 2020. It remains unaltered. 

"Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see the kingdom of God." I used to think this was talking about being a person of valor or having really pure motives or intentions. Now I realize that it's talking about one's mindset and whether it is cleared of false and rebellious ideas. Only these people get to see the kingdom of God, both now and in the eschaton. They can see it because all of the eye goop in the sights of other men isn't there. They see the authority and rule of God now and they will live in that authority then. But Christianity in the West has become something else these days. It has become a religion of goop.

Remember when churches used to gather as a church because it was about cultivating a spirit of submission to God's authority rather than flipping the government off? It's all about the spirit that is being cultivated, whether one of submission or one of rebellion. I have to say that I don't see a whole lot of the submissive spirit displayed among the Reformed these days, and that was long before the COVID thing came into our lives. What I see instead is a lot of people using the guise of obedience to the Bible to unleash their disdain for authority and spew venom toward restrictions they don't like. We can't be upset with God directly for anything going on of course. That would be wrong. But we can flip off His messengers by saying that they don't really represent Him and that allows us to say that they can go take a long walk off a short peer when they attempt to exercise actual authority over us. 

What is very clear, I think, to most people, even the rebellious, is that we are in a season of judgment. But that means that God will be giving people over to chaos, not just by sending viruses and financial distress, but also by giving them over to their spirits of rebellion and deception. They are rebellious because they are miffed when authorities restrict their "freedoms" and they are deceived in thinking that they don't need to submit to these authorities, that government no longer has authority whenever it gets in the way of our God-given, Declaration of Independence, card-carrying egalitarian freedom to do as I choose as long as, in my own eyes, I am obeying the Bible. Not quite the argument of the early church or that of 1 Peter but then again this was never about obeying the Bible anyway. It's about satisfying the fleshly desire to rule as god of my life. If I was a slave, then slaves obey their masters, even when it gets tough, even when its harsh and I don't think the masters deserve my obedience; but since I'm a god, how dare anyone restrict my reign. I'll let God do that occasionally when He agrees with me, but I am not going to allow a lesser god, even if he represents God in His authority, to tell me what to do. Jesus died so that I could be a god without restriction by others. At least that's what the Mormons, New Agers, and Secular Humanists tell me. 

The one question I have is this, however, "When exactly did the conservative Reformed church that whines so much about critical race theory, adopt liberation theology and its attitudes toward government? Of course, I already know this answer. It was adopted when people started to adopt political theories of liberation. It was adopted with the Libertarian view of government, which oddly adopts with it, at least amongst theonomy types, a strange application of the permissive principle that limits government to whatever specific laws are mentioned in Scripture and allows people to govern themselves in everything else. 

Most will talk about general equity but not necessarily in terms of applying that general equity to what laws one can have. So for instance, one might argue that having a fence railing on one's roof in the ancient Near East is equivalent to putting a gate around a pool, but then completely fail to see that it should apply to speed limits on the roads. Government has a household. That household is the country. If it does not regulate how fast cars can go or how they can drive, it is not being responsible in governing potentially unsafe space. Yet, the is the very reason one must put a railing on the roof. I could argue it's the responsibility of each person who comes to my home to govern himself and his children and I have no obligation to babysit people and their actions, but as a good theonomist we all must say, "By what standard?" God obviously does think it's your responsibility to make safe space that could be potentially dangerous.

It's my responsibility to make sure the food I serve is not poisoned. It's government's responsibility to do the same for its household. Yet, how many libertarian theonomists argue that the FDA is overreaching? 

What this also means is that if my home is filled with sickness, I have an obligation to quarantine and ban people from meeting there. The government has the same obligation with its home, the country. It has the right, according to the application of the general equity of the law, to make potentially unsafe space safe. 

So what are we to conclude with these libertarian theonomists who only want the specific laws mentioned in Scripture to limit governmental authority? I would argue that (1) a general equity view of the law does not limit diddly squat unless one compartmentalizes and arbitrarily decides to limit the application of such laws (2) the disposition of one in subjection is, wait for it, subjection, regardless of whether one agrees with their authorities or not (that's the actual point of having that relationship--if you agreed with everything, there would be no need of said relationship), (3) it's all a very big excuse to satisfy the rebellious nature of the flesh in a way that one feels allowed, and even encouraged by God, to do so, (4) it tends to be Gnostic in that it wants me to care for souls and not bodies unless the Scripture makes me care about bodies too and then I have to, (5) it has conflated a bit of liberation theology which itself stems from Enlightenment egalitarianism with Christian duty so much that now a contradiction exists between hearing these guys make their arguments and listening to Paul and Peter on the matter. Paul, if by any other name, rather than twisted would simply be rejected, and Peter would be viewed as a cowardly Christian, again, if we weren't supposed to actually see him as an apostle of Christ. Since we have to see them as having God's authority, we try to find better excuses to consider what they say cowardly and reject it.

Our motto as a church has been, "Obey until you can't obey," but it is clear that many in Reformed circles have the opposite motto, "Disobey until you're forced by Scripture into admitting that you may have to obey a little bit in such and such an area." This has become the religion of rebellious men and infects the rest of the body like a cancer. But that is the test of God's judgment. No one gets to stand except those who pure of heart, for only they will see the kingdom of God in the kingdom of men.

Justification and Sanctification, the Image of God, and the Distinction in Genders

There seems to have been some confusion about my previous post concerning the image of God and how the woman partakes in the image, so I've opted to attempt to explain it as plainly as I can.

There is often a breakdown in an egalitarian understanding of genders due to antinomian assumptions of salvation. If salvation is nothing more than justification then when Paul says something like "there is neither male nor female but all are one in Christ" that describes the equality of men and women in their union with Christ then equality in Christ completely defines the identity of the man and the woman. "There is no" male or female, so genders are not distinct. Both have become the new man, the restored image of God, and that is the end of the story.

The problem is that justification via unification with Christ is not the sum total of salvation as though antinomianism was true. Those who have been created in Christ Jesus must now realize that they have been created in Him, united to Him, for the purpose of putting His character on like a new garment (Rom 13:14). 

In Ephesians 4:24 // Colossians 3:10, believers are exhorted to put on the new man, which is being renewed into the image of God. In other words, they have been restored as the image through Jesus Christ and His imputed righteousness, holiness, and true knowledge but they must now put this on, which implies that they do not have this character already. The new man is being conformed to it in sanctification, which assumes that the new man is only the image positionally but not practically. The image of God in Christ that has been imputed to both males and females must now become who they are not only positionally but practically. 

The question now becomes whether the character of Christ expresses itself differently through the male and female, and therefore, whether their sanctification, their Christ-clothes look different. In other words, does the positional image in a man work itself out in a different way than it does in a woman?

We see throughout the Bible that they do. The man and woman are created for different roles in the first work with which God tasks them, i.e., to be fruitful and multiply. Adam's role as husband and father is to govern as king and priest. Eve's role as wife and mother is to help him in submission to his role. She joins with him in order to participate in his work rather than assigned a separate task by God. 

Likewise, in the restoration of this created order in Christ, Paul tells us that the sanctification of the man in the family looks very different than the sanctification of the woman. He is to love and sacrifice himself for her. She is to acknowledge his God-given role and submit to him.

This means that she does not express the new man in the same way that he does. She is not sanctified the same way that he is. Although she is imputed the image of God through Christ positionally, as the man is, having positional equality with him in Christ, she does not practically become that image of God in the same way that he does, as this would be to argue that she is sanctified as a woman in the same way that he is sanctified as a man.

Hence, Paul argues that the woman should not take upon leadership roles in the church over men because she is to be saved/sanctified through childbearing, i.e., motherhood, the role of Eve, in submission to the men in authority over her life (1 Tim 2:11-15). Instead, the man is to take upon leadership positions because that is fitting to his role and how he is saved/sanctified. 

In both Ephesians and Colossians, we are told that the man's new man/person is conformed to the image of its Creator via loving his wife in a leadership role but the woman's new man/person is conformed to the image of its Creator via submitting to her husband, her federal head. 

What this means is that the woman's path of sanctification is through submission to her federal head, as this restores who she was created to be as a woman. Hence, if the image of God is not only relational but functional, she is restored to the image via unification with Christ relationally and in participation with her federal head functionally. She, therefore, allows him to function as the image of God practically, as one cannot be father without a mother nor husband without a wife. 

Both are the renewed human in Christ but that renewed human expresses itself through each human's respective gender and not in disregard of it. But this means that they do not participate in the work of the image of God in the same way, and hence, if the image of God is functional, and they do not function the same way, they are not the image of God in the same way. 

Although the woman is the image of God relationally through Christ, she now functions as the image through participation in the man's functional expression of the image. In other words, having been restored as the image of God, the man receives his task given to him in the garden back to him and so does the woman, which means that the woman is not the functional image of God by herself but must become his helper in her role in order to become/put on the image practically. The man, likewise, would not become the image of God practically if he shunned his role by rejecting the task God gave him in creation. Hence, as many theologians in history have argued, her practical function as the image of God is derivative of the man, as it requires her to be connected to a federal head in order to be practically conformed to the image of God. As many have described it, her glory is that of the moon's light that is dependent upon the sun's. She must join with a man (e.g., father, husband, elders) in order to work out her character in Christ.

This brings us back to the antinomianism of egalitarianism. It would be absurd to say that one was united to Christ and justified by Him if he or she rejected the role of the image given to him or her in the renewed human. Hence, sanctification is the sign of justification. To argue that one is the image of God due to unification with Christ but deny the need to express the image in the respective roles of each gender is to deny the necessity of sanctification that always follows justification. If the woman must participate in the functional image through a federal head then to reject this is to reject the biblical path of sanctification, and therefore, to give evidence of a lack of justification and unity with Christ. In other words, being restored to the image of God in Christ positionally will always lead to the differing expressions of the male and female roles whereby each engendered human becomes the image of God practically in different ways, i.e., each by applying him or herself to the task given to them in creation.

The Path to the Right Church

 I often get asked the question, "How do I know what church is the one teaching the truth when there are so many opinions everywhere?" People seem to want some sort of intellectual key to figure it out, and if they don't have it, they get scared and confused as to whether they are in the right church, hearing the right things, living out the truths of God or just religious fictions made up by men. But this is not the path to understanding.

The Bible teaches that the path to the truth is through humility. Not worldly humility where one acts like nothing can be known, as though God is incapable of leading His sheep to green pastures, but biblical humility that evidences that one is teachable to whatever God may have for him. 

Biblical humility is the assumption that one does not know until God, through the ecclesiastically interpreted Word, reveals the truth to him. He does not arrogantly assume his own feelings, experiences, and reason is any sort of measuring stick for what is true and what is not. Isaiah 66:1-2 says,

This is what the LORD says:

“Heaven is My throne,

and earth is My footstool.

What kind of house will you build for Me?

Or where will My place of repose be?

Has not My hand made all these things?

And so they came into being,” declares the LORD.

“This is the one I will look to indwell:

he who is humble and lowly in spirit,

who trembles at My word.

God's Spirit leads the one who is lowly in spirit, who does not lift himself up. But what does this look like? It looks like submitting to church leadership by deeply contemplating its biblical interpretations and not assuming that you know the truth on your own. It looks like seeking to understand from the authorities God has placed over you, even if those authorities might be wrong. It's coming with an open hand rather than a closed fist, an empty cup rather than a full one. That's because being led into the truth isn't about you figuring it out. You are fallen and not able to figure it out. Your flesh won't allow you to do so. It suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. It will not allow you to reason your way there, and God does not honor self-reliance but rather faith and reliance upon Him. It's about God leading you into the truth and God does not lead the rebellious, arrogant man, but the one who seeks Him with all his being and subjects himself to the process of learning through those placed over you. 

Because of this, God may have you in a church that doesn't have all of the right answers for a while. It is how you respond to that church that will show whether your self-assessment of humility is accurate. If you cannot submit to a local church body then you are not humble, and if you are not humble, you are not led by the Spirit into the truth. It's as simple as that. 

It is being teachable to where you are, seeking to learn what you can, questioning yourself and denying yourself within the times and places God has placed you. Many, and I do mean many, fail this test. Every man wants to believe he is teachable but so few are. 

Never would I believe that any of the pastors I was ever under were infallible or knew all the right answers but I sought to learn what I could from the churches I was under. I see the things I see today, not because I was smarter than anyone else but because God led me to see them, and I believe He led me to see them because I didn't assume that I knew already but always sought to understand, submit myself to where I was and under whom I was placed, and never stopped reforming because I wanted to know Him and His life-giving truths more. Always seeking, always asking, always knocking on the doors in front of me rather than always second guessing as to whether they were the right ones. I explored every question put in front of me and sought to listen to every answer that those who had authority to speak uttered to me. Whether they ended up being right or not wasn't the point. The point was to seek the truth from those God put over me rather than disregarding them to find it through my own religious experiences and reason.

My point to all of this is that one will never know enough to know whether he is in the right church. He may be fully convinced in his abilities to know but this is arrogance, and if this is his hope, he should be afraid. 

Instead, one needs to have his full confidence in God, that He is the Shepherd of His flock, and that if His sheep will follow the shepherds He places under Him in humility, no matter how imperfect their theology may be, He will guide them to green pastures. 

You want to know if you are in the right church? How submissive are you to its teaching? How much do you assume your inability to know versus your ability to rely on your own religious experiences, private biblical interpretations, traditions, knowledge, and reason? God casts down those who exalt their own abilities but He exalts the humble who trust in and seek Him with open arms toward those He has placed over them in various times and seasons of their lives. 

The path to the truth is the path of honest questions and a desire to listen to the answers no matter what they may be, but the one who assumes the truth before God has led him into it is lost. So if you want to know whether you are in the right church, do not ask what you need to know in order to evaluate it. Ask, instead, whether you are teachable enough for God to have guided you there.

When Is a Reformer Not a Reformer

 There are many claims as to what it means to be Reformed. To me, it means entering into a battle with tradition and human reason that conflicts with a solid exegesis of the Bible. In other words, it means the highest commitment to the banner of sola Scriptura as we march out to wage war with other ideas inside and outside the church.

I would strongly argue that the Reformers did not see their role as innovators but as discriminate preservers of orthodoxy. This means that when they came across ideas that were biblical, they attempted to keep them. When they came across ideas that stemmed from tradition or philosophy, they sought to be critical of them using the standard of sola Scriptura, i.e., Scripture as the ultimate judge, the norm that norms all other norms. 

When they innovated, and they did, they failed at their job, and it is my contention that it is our job to see where they failed and to correct it if we wish to take upon ourselves the role of reformers ourselves. 

They were wrong about divorce and remarriage. They were wrong about paedocommunion. They were wrong about the Sabbath. 

Interestingly enough, each of the above were all contrary positions to that of the church for the first 1000-1500 years. The reasoning as to why they took a contrary view to the historical understanding of the issue of divorce and remarriage was not on biblical grounds but human reasoning. The reason why it adopted a practice against the historic church's concerning paedocommunion was based upon a medieval tradition and the eisegesis of 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. The reason why it adopted a position contrary to the historic church's concerning the Sabbath was again based upon tradition and ignoring the biblical reasoning given by the early church concerning the day. 

In essence, it was tradition and human reason that led them to conclude contrary to the early church's positions on these issues, not a consistent commitment to sola Scriptura when it came to these. By their own job descriptions as Reformers, they have failed to fulfill their role. We must now do this for them. 

When is a Reformer not a Reformer? When he fails to decipher between what is tradition based upon the Bible and what is merely traditional. If sola Scriptura be not the highest banner in our theology, let our ideas lay slain upon the battlefield forever.

Federal Vision: A Critical Assessment, Part 1

 It's difficult to write much about the Federal Vision view, as one can say the same about it as has been said about many positions, "There are as many views of Federal Vision as there are Federal Visionists." But there are broad strokes one can make concerning what seems to be the main issue it seeks to address, namely, how one evaluates whether someone is a member of the covenant community and should fully partake in its spiritual life without any added restrictions that other regular members of the Body of Christ do not have placed upon them. 

Much of this boils down to its argument concerning whether we determine one's election by regeneration or by baptism. Baptism is the objective sign. Regeneration is the subjective sign, subjective in that it must be discerned subjectively via experience (individual repentance, individual profession of faith, individual good works).

Whereas many Presbyterians seem to want to say the latter confirms one's election, and therefore, grants access to the full spiritual life of the body, Federal Visionists want to argue that the sign of election is baptism, and therefore, if one is baptized, one should be granted full access to the spiritual life of the covenant community. 

Although I am appreciative of the corrections Federal Visionists seek to make, I think I would like to push back on both positions as being unbiblical. 

1. Federal Vision misses the mark when it characterizes the issue as one of objective and subjective signs of election. Most would say that regeneration is the result of election, and hence, if one is regenerate, he is elect. However, regeneration is invisible, as many Federal Visionists will point out. Something has to signify whether one is regenerate, and these signs are not objective, whether repentance, faith, good works on the one hand or baptism on the other. They are subjective because one can actually do these things and not be regenerate, which means that we are all relying upon the experience as a sign, regardless of whether we are arguing over what that experience should look like. The Bible is clear that one can be a part of the visible covenant community but be unregenerate. Hence, we cannot say that all are really in the covenant if being in the covenant is being a part of Christ's body. Christ's body will never undergo decay. Not one part of it. Hence, no part of Christ's body can perish. But in a Federal Visionist view, many parts of Christ's body fall off and perish. One may say that they are no longer Christ's body, but that misses the point. If they were at any time truly Christ's body, then what was His body has now perished having fallen away from it. Christ's truly loses what was once truly His.

2. On the other hand, Presbyterians who approach the covenant community with skepticism because they continually need reassurance that individuals are truly covenant members before they continue to grant full access to them to the life of the church have been sufficiently critiqued by Federal Visionists for failing to approach the covenant community the way that the Bible does, i.e., with an assumption that the entire community is elect and regenerate until individual members prove otherwise. In other words, I am fully on board with the critique of a position that holds baptized members of the covenant community guilty until proven innocent. There should be an assumption of election of the entire covenant community, of every member, as all of the biblical writers assume. To do otherwise is to play the guessing game in terms of who is really regenerate. One can say that he only uses faith and good works as the criteria, but the unregenerate man can claim faith and do good works in the eyes of men, so there is no fool-proof way to ever really know whether the person to whom you have administered communion, for instance, is truly regenerate and should partake of it. 

3. Although each group is flirting with the truth, both of missed the mark due to the fact that each seems to avoid addressing the issue of federal headship and how it relates to these things. 

A. First of all, Christ is the federal head of the household that is the church, and therefore, all who belong to that household are saved. Hence, the assumption of salvation should be given to everyone within it. This does not mean that everyone in the household will be saved, but only that those who are of the household are to be considered true members of it while in it, even if they are not really true members of that household secretly. 

B. Children or the disabled who are not able to express their own repentance, faith, and good works are a part of their believing parents' or parent's household, and therefore, do not need individual expressions of repentance, faith, and good works if their parents or parent already have/has them. 

Hence, I have come to a grant of full access to the spiritual life of the covenant community without having to get into the hairy details of whether each individual's election can be judged by his or her own separate expressions of it on top of a household's baptism and the repentance and faith assumed therein. 

This is why the only basis for excommunication is rebellion against the authority of Christ. It alone blocks access to the full life of the body. Until a baptized member is excommunicated, there should be no restriction to the body of Christ and its resources. In that regard, the Federal Visionists are right in their concern that access to the full spiritual life is being blocked by bad theology. My concern is that even more bad theology has been created to address it.

Much of this concern is likely somewhat related to the New Light controversy in Edward’s day and the subsequent revivalism, enthusiasm, and pietism that was inherited by modern Western Christianity. Does one need an experience on top of his baptism? Does one need to confirm that he has been converted beyond becoming a member of the church? And how does one discern this if no one can be infallible?

The answer is not to inherit an unbiblical declaration that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the invisible and the visible body of Christ but rather to assume the one-to-one correspondence of each until an individual or group within the visible community proves otherwise by their rejection of the faith either explicitly in a denial of Christ or through their unrepentant sin. This maintains both the integrity of texts that would indicate a reception of those who belong to the community into the full life thereof and the texts that indicate that not all Israel is Israel.