Somewhat to even my surprise, I have taken quite a bit of interest in the General Synod of the Church of England this year. In the last few weeks I heard that there is to be a discussion surrounding the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and whether or not the Church of England should enter into communion with that body. A number of students and staff here at RTS attend or are on staff with churches joined with the ACNA, and so I have had the opportunity to become more familiar with it over the past few years. I have been reading different things around the internet to try and get some perspective on the issue, but there is a lot of material to work through.

The woman who initially raised what is called a "private member's motion," Lorna Ashworth, published a document highlighting a number of what she calls injustices done by the Episcopal Church in the US against various bishops and clergy, including the deposition of men like J.I. Packer. She writes, "It is my desire to give Synod an opportunity to hear about the unfair treatment of people who have continued to maintain the Anglican faith in doctrine, practice and worship, and to express their continuing fellowship with them as loyal Anglicans." Expressed at the beginning of the motion is her desire to see the Church of England to enter into communion with the ACNA, the proposal of which will be discussed by the Synod on this coming Wednesday.

What makes this interesting is that, technically speaking, the ACNA is a schismatic body. Ashworth states that a number of bishops and clergy had been deposed from the Anglican Communion, but many others have voluntarily withdrawn and together formed the new organization. What would be the implications of the Church of England were to enter into communion with the ACNA? What does such a move convey?

It is no secret that the Anglican Communion worldwide is in trouble; it has been in such a state for quite some time now, as the GAFCON conference in 2008 brought to the forefront in a very visible way. Many conservative bodies around the world (such as the ACNA) demonstrated their difficulties with the pervasive liberalism in the Anglican Communion and its departure from general biblical teaching. So if the Church of England were to enter into communion with one of these conservative bodies, is that an indication of perhaps a new direction in the Anglican Communion? I know it is very premature to be talking about something like that, but it must be on a few people's minds, right? Then again, I may be totally off the mark.

For more information, be sure to visit the General Synod Blog. You can also check out Thinking Anglicans, who are regularly posting other documents and links to discussions on the matter, as well as the Church Mouse Blog. Additionally, many clergy and bishops can be found on Twitter via the lists compiled on the Twurch of England account, and they are using the hashtag #synod to keep track of what's going this week.

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R. Scott Clark, a professor at Westminster Seminary in California, wrote a book recently called Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our Theology, Piety, and Practice. The premise of the book is that the Reformed community is losing or has lost its sense of identity, and that it needs to recover it. Clark writes, "Much of what passes as Reformed among our churches is not. Its sources, spirit, and methods are alien to Reformed theology, piety, and practice. There are significant segments within the Reformed communion that define 'Reformed' in ways that our forefathers would not understand" (4).

Earlier today, John Frame posted a review of the book on his website. Someone apparently told Frame that the book should instead be called, Why John Frame is Wrong About Absolutely Everything. While that is humorous, it recognizes that there is a tension between Clark's and Frame's ideas of being Reformed, and that Clark is, in part, taking Frame to task in the book. If you're going to read the review, be sure to sit back in a comfortable chair—it is very long.

I haven't read Clark's book, and I won't if his writing in the book is anything like his blog (which I've had to stop reading because I have to keep my blood pressure under control). The problem with guys like Clark is that while they sometimes raise good questions—and I think the points in his book are largely worth discussing—they do it without humility and grace. Frame has taken to calling contentious voices like this the "Reformed Controversialists," and for good reason. More time seems to be spent on tearing others down than on constructively working through the issues at hand. It is unfortunate, because they could bring a lot of good questions to the table, and their voices could contribute a lot more to the building up of the Church.

In Ephesians 4, Paul talks about the need to speak the truth in love to preserve the unity of the body of Christ. As I've mentioned before, there is a reason that they honoured Frame by titling his festschrift with those words. All of us who have been privileged and blessed to study under him will tell you that there are few men who are willing to interact with those they disagree with as lovingly and graciously as Frame does. He has been a wonderful role model for us and for the Church. Jude 3 says that we must "contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints," something Frame devotes himself to. And he does it recognizing that, like Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, if he has not love, he has nothing.

I'll be the first to admit that our traditions are important, and that we cannot live in a historical vacuum, ignorant of where we came from and who we are. These are good things to talk about, and I think Clark is right to raise questions about our Reformed identity. But resorting to a sort of hostile polemic to argue a case and misrepresenting those who hold views you don't agree with is not helpful; indeed, it's harmful and destructive to the Church (again I must acknowledged that I haven't read the book, but have spent quite a lot of time reading Clark's blog). Maybe this is the reason large segments of the Reformed community don't want to be identified with that small (albeit disproportinately vocal) segment of the Reformed community.

Read Frame's review if you want his take on the nuances of Clark's argument. All I want to emphasize is that when we interact with others who don't share our perspectives, we must do it with love and charity. We do so because of our love for God, because of our love for our neighbour, and because of our love for the Church. Granted, this is a lot harder than just lobbing grenades at your opponents. But it is required of us, and doesn't leave a trail of destruction in our wake; instead, it leaves a Church that is strengthened, edified, and brought closer to the unity Christ calls us to.

By all means, raise questions, provoke thought, discuss issues. But do so in love.

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Yes, dear church-goer, there certainly is. From the Westminster Larger Catechism:

Q. 160: What is required of those that hear the Word preached?

A. It is required of those that hear the Word preached, that they attend upon it with diligence, preparation, and prayer; examine what they hear by the Scriptures; receive the truth with faith, love, meekness, and readiness of mind, as the Word of God; meditate, and confer of it; hide it in their hearts, and bring forth the fruit of it in their lives.

Kind of flies in the face of that whole, "Here we are now, entertain us!" mentality of American evangelicalism, doesn't it?

Do forgive the cynicism. In reality, yes, this is a significant responsibility given to those who hear the preaching of the Word. But it is also one that comes with great blessing. Think of the words of Psalm 1: "Blessed is the man...[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither." That's a powerful image. And the corresponding negative is powerful too—without meditating on the Word we essentially become dead trees in an arid land, barely holding on, if at all.

Go read Psalm 119. It is telling that David's longest Psalm is about his love for God's Word. Oh, that we would sing praises like that for the Word of our Lord!

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One of my favourite shows on television is Top Gear (well, I actually watch it online since I don't get BBC America here). The show is brilliant, though. They test lots of great cars, have all kinds of different challenges, and all three hosts are funny and entertaining. It's no wonder they average 350 million viewers every episode.

In the third episode of the most recent season, they did a bit of a tribute to the Italian carmaker, Lancia, whom they consider to have built some of the greatest cars ever (for reasons I won't get into here—you'll have to watch the episode yourself if you want to know why they decided that). The end of the episode featured a Lancia Stratos kit car, which they handed over to their tame racing driver, The Stig, to take around their track for a power lap. The lap is actually the slowest they've ever recorded on their track, but The Stig, already a great driver, does some absolutely incredible driving on this lap. Watch the clip below.

They encounter a wet track fairly often, given the climate of Britain, but rarely has there been a car that has handled as terribly in the wet as this Lancia. Simply fantastic driving.

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For a number of reasons that I don't need to get into here, I am still finishing up some work from the Fall semester, but I will be done that by the middle of this month. And that's good, because tomorrow is the first official day of the Spring semester (and my final semester) here at Reformed Theological Seminary. In May, I'll be graduating with a Master of Arts in Theological Studies. Normally a two-year degree, I have spread it out over three. But it really is hard to believe that almost three years have gone already.

I'm looking forward to this semester. I will have two classes on campus, and two virtual classes. They are listed below, the first two being the ones I am taking on campus.

• Educational Ministry of the Church
• Exposition of Hebrews
• Systematic Theology IV (Ecclesiology and Sacraments)
• History of Missions

It will be a relatively light semester, which is good, because these next few months also require me to try and figure out what we will be doing come May. I've made mention of our plans a number of times on the old blog, and I have started to get in touch with some different people and make some contacts to get things rolling. To reiterate, what I am looking for is a position in a church where I could be involved with the educational and teaching ministry. Needless to say, it's both exciting and a little stressful. We could be in for some big changes in the middle of this year. But God has continually shown His faithfulness to us and we trust His leading. We can't wait to see what He has in store for us next.

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Writing on the legacy of post-Revolutionary era Christianity in America in his book, The Democratization of American Christianity, historian Nathan Hatch attempts to determine what the driving force was behind it all. He notes that American Christians certainly did not develop "a genius for ecclesiastical organization...[but instead] muddled along in a state of anarchic, free-market pluralism." It did not have leaders of great prestige, nor "an ability to make faith plausible to the modern world" (212-213). So what was the driving force, then?

A central force [in American Christianity] has been its democratic or populist orientation. America has lived in the shadow of a democratic revolution and the liberal, competitive culture that followed in its wake. Forms of popular religion characteristic of that cultural system bound paradoxical extremes together: a reassertion of the reality of the supernatural in everyday life linked to the quintessentially modern values of autonomy and popular sovereignty. American Christians reveled in freedom of expression, refused to bow to tradition and hierarchy, jumped at opportunities for innovative communication, and propounded popular theologies tied to modern notions of historical development. No less than Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson, populist Christians of the early republic sought to start the world over again. By raising the standard 'no creed but the Bible,' Christians in America were the foremost proponents of individualism even as they expected the open Bible to replace an age of sectarian rivalry with one of primitive harmony. Like the egalitarian credo of the early republic, this vision has taken a powerful hold on the American imagination despite the disparity between the quest for unity and actual religious fragmentation and authoritarianism (213).

There is no doubt that we continue to see this legacy today in American Christianity. I find it particularly interesting that while we so often attribute the problem of individualism to Enlightenment thought and its vindication of autonomous man, Hatch here demonstrates that, in American culture at least, individualism is in part owing to the forms of Christianity which gained such prominence in the early years of the republic.

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A friend and I are doing a bit of a research study on the history of Christianity in America, and one of the books we are working through is The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch. His book has been recognized by many scholars as one of the foremost works on the history of Christianity in America. The main thesis, which comes out a little in the paragraph I've quoted below, is that religious groups, led by the common people, both fostered democracy and profoundly shaped American culture in the early 19th century.

America's nonrestrictive environment [in the late 18th and early 19th centuries] permitted an unexpected and often explosive conjunction of evangelical fervor and popular sovereignty. It was this engine that accelerated the process of Christianization within American popular culture, allowing indigenous expressions of faith to take hold among ordinary people, white and black. This expansion of evangelical Christianity did not proceed primarily from the nimble response of religious elites meeting the challenge before them. Rather, Christianity was effectively reshaped by common people who molded it in their own image and threw themselves into expanding its influence. Increasingly assertive common people wanted their leaders unpretentious, their doctrines self-evident and down-to-earth, their music lively and singable, and their churches in local hands. It was this upsurge of democratic hope that characterized so many religious cultures in the early republic and brought Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and a host of other insurgent groups to the fore. The rise of evangelical Christianity in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outline by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution.

Because there are so many factors at work in the study of the history of Christianity in America, it is at the same time both fascinating and complex. Books like Hatch's are very helpful in navigating through the panoply of persons, events, and circumstances that gave shape to American Christianity.

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I really like how John Frame, in his The Doctrine of the Christian Life, calls Deuteronomy 6:6-9 the "great charter of Christian education." The verses read:

And these words that I command to you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, an they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The point here—and one that is pervasive throughout Scripture—is that the Word of God is to give shape to our whole lives and our whole being. That, too, is to be the focus of Christian education. And that is why education is something more than just the imparting of objective knowledge. Education is formation.

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The words that follow belong to David J. Bosch, the renowned South African missiologist, who initially had them published in the December 1979 issue of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa. This is the kind of thing that simply electrifies me.

As Lord, Jesus was given 'all power in heaven and on earth' (Matt. 28:18). He is therefore repeatedly referred to as 'Saviour of the world' (John 4:42; 1 John 4:14). 'All things were created by him, and all things exist through him and for him,' says Paul (Rom. 11:36). It is the purpose of God to bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head (Eph. 1:10).

All this means that the Kingdom of God (or the Lordship of Christ) is without boundaries. Christ is Lord of all. Naturally, his Lordship his not yet openly and finally manifested. The ultimate is yet to come. We live in the penultimate. We still wait for the day of which Rev. 11:15 speaks, when, as it affirms 'the kingdoms of this world are to become the Kingdom of God,' when God 'will be all in all' (1 Cor. 15:28). For the time being Christ's Lordship over the universe is anonymous; he is not recognised and acclaimed as Lord.

We should, however, not deduce from this that God has handed the universe over to the counter-forces. He is not an absentee Lord whose estate is being ransacked by his enemies during his absence. To be sure, the enemy is active in God's world, extremely active, but we should never allow ourselves to accept that this world belongs to the enemy. If areas of the universe indeed appear to be enemy-occupied territory, let us never for one moment forget that they are occupied illegally, by a usurpur. Satan does not belong in this world. The earth is the Lord's.

If we forget this we commit the same mistake as those Christians who argue...that we had better withdraw from the world into a religious enclave. The terrible thing these Christians are doing is to grant legality to the spurious claim of the enemy that this world belongs to him, not to God! And when Jesus said to Pilate, 'My Kingdom is not of this world', his words should not be understood as meaning that his Kingdom is entirely other-worldly. It should rather, within the context of John's gospel, be understood to mean, 'My Kingdom does not operate according to the rules of this world which have been adulterated by Satan. My Kingdom is unique. But this does not make it other-worldly.' Did Jesus not, after all, teach his disciples to pray, 'Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?' Therefore, if we Christians surrender this world to Satan, we play right into his hands. And we betray the Lordship of Christ.

I will leave you to draw out the practical implications of Bosch's excellent words. They are legion.

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This evening as I was again paging through my copy of Political Visions and Illusions, authored by my friend, David Koyzis, I happened upon this great paragraph:

It has often been said that Christians are so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly good. This is a caricature of course, and one to which we should not too easily lend credence. At the same time, it must be conceded that many Christians in a variety of traditions often seem to behave in such a way as to vindicate this charge. Every time a believer says that, say, religion and politics do not mix or that we should concentrate on saving souls and leave the affairs of the world alone, she is implicitly denying the cosmic scope of Christ's redemption and thereby diminishing God's sovereignty. Every time a follower of Jesus forsakes a so-called secular occupation and claims an intention to go into 'full-time Christian service,' she is in effect relegating a huge portion of the total fabric of human life to something or someone other than the Savior of the world. For the biblically astute Christian, however, there are no 'sacred' or 'secular' occupations, only obedient and disobedient ones. The obedient farmer or carpenter is as much in full-time Christian service as the pastor or missionary (190).

David's implicit assertion here is that no part of life is left untouched by the lordship of Jesus Christ. He lays claim to everything, and as such, there can be no neutrality. This is why it can rightly be said that all of life is religion.

For one of, if not the, best expressions of this idea be sure to read Albert Wolters' masterful work, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. It will revolutionize the way you think.

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