The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the grace of the Spirit into a kingdom of God (112).
That is one seriously loaded statement. But it lays down the sort of holistic understanding of Christianity that we so desperately need.
(Our staff team meets for devotions and prayer each morning from Monday-Thursday, and this week I'm leading those devotions. I'm reflecting on some of the themes of Advent, and I thought I would share those reflections here. This is the second post in the series.)
We saw yesterday that this season of Advent calls us to be forward-thinking, prepared for the day when Christ comes again. But what does that mean for how we live now? It calls us to pursue righteousness as we recognise that when Christ does return, he will come in judgement, "like a refiner's fire," Malachi says.
John the Baptist was the messenger Malachi spoke of, preparing the way for Jesus by calling people to repent and to seek forgiveness for their sins. It was a warning that the judgement of God was coming, but also a call for the people to prepare their hearts. The unrepentant heart would not be ready to receive Jesus.
This is no less true for us today. When Christ comes again, he expects us to be ready to receive him, to be holy and blameless, to be "filled with the fruit of righteousness" (Phil. 1:11). We need to undergo that process of refining even now, turning away from sin and seeking to live according to the rule of our King.
But God does not leave us to our own devices here. He has given us the Spirit to begin that refining work already now. When we submit ourselves to him, we begin a lifelong process of refinement, one that God carries out in us by his Spirit. He breaks down all of our idols, ambitions, and impurities so that, as Paul says, "he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. 1:6).
This process won't be easy. It may come with trials and pain. The Spirit's work of purifiying us can hurt as he breaks our grip on the things of this world that we cling to and worship. But when we accept his refining work, it opens us up to the joy we find as we cling to and worship Jesus instead.
We live in expectation of Christ's return, and in expectation of one day dwelling in his presence in the Kingdom. As we wait, then, we pray that God will continue to refine us by his Spirit, that he will continue to prepare us for life in his Kingdom. We pray that he will continue that process of making us pure and blamless until the day of Christ.
When we submit ourselves to him, we can be confident that because of Christ's finished work, by which our sins our forgiven and by which we are raised to new life with him, and because of the Spirit's work to sanctify us, we will be able to "endure the day of his coming" (Mal. 3:2), and we will welcome him with joy.
I have been reading John Bolt's book, Christian and Reformed Today (which is available free as a PDF here), and already in the first couple of chapters I have found some particularly important things regarding the trinitarian emphasis in Reformed theology. Bolt argues that, although most Christian traditions certainly claim to be trinitarian, they often focus on one person of the Trinity to the exclusion of the other two. Only in the Reformed tradition, Bolt asserts, can one find a fully trinitarian Christianity.
For the purposes of defintion, Bolt says, "A Reformed person is trinitarian in theology and catholic in vision" (21). Expanding first on the trinitarian aspect of his defintion, Bolt cites Herman Bavinck, who writes, "The essence of the Christian religion consists therein, that the creation of the Father, destroyed by sin, is again restored in the death and resurrection of the Son of God, and recreated by the grace of the Spirit to a Kingdom of God" (29). It is notable that though all three persons of the Trinity are equal, there is a logical flow that begins with God the Father and creation.
When Reformed trinitarian theology begins with the Father, this has some important implications. It means specifically that creation has priority over salvation, that salvation is not escape from or elevation above creation but the restoration of creation. It means that the most important question in life is not, "What must I do to be saved," but "How can I glorify God?" As the Westminster Catechism so beautifully states it, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." It means that the Reformed tradition places a great deal of emphasis upon the idea of vocation or calling, upon serving God in this world rather than escaping from it (28).
So we see that a trinitarian theology begins and ends with God as Creator. This means that Christianity which is fully trinitarian will understand the end goal of the Christian life differently than a Christianity which lays more or less stress on one person of the Trinity. Most common in evangelical Christianity is the tendency to elevate the second person of the Trinity, thus making individual salvation the primary focus. As Bolt suggests, when the question, "What must I do to be saved?" becomes fundamental, the Christianity that emerges becomes too narrowly focused and fails to take into account the work of God to restore his creation and establish his rule as King. The biblical narrative is framed by creation and new creation, and our faith and theology must take this into account.
Bolt continues with an explanation of the second part of his definition:
The second part of the suggested definition has already been hinted at, namely that a Reformed person is catholic in vision. The Reformed view of life in the world is dominated by the idea of God's sovereignty over the entire cosmos. Abraham Kuyper in his Lectures on Calvinism put it this way: The dominating principle of Calvinism 'was not, soteriologically, justification by faith, but in the widest sense cosmologically, the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.' That is what is meant by catholicity—the Reformed vision is cosmic or universal. The Reformed person is not satisifed with the salvation of his or her soul, as crucial as that is to being a Christian. The kingdom of heaven, the great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck was fond of saying, is not only a pearl of great price, the treasure a man finds in a field and must obtain at all costs. It is that indeed, but it is also a leaven and a mustard seed which grows and expands. The gospel is a message for the world as well as for in the individual (29).
The stream of the Reformed tradition that has come to be known as the New Calvinism has a tendency to hear this and levy accusations both of transformationalism and a neglect of personal piety and holiness. That is a misunderstanding, however, and I think Bolt's emphasis on the trinitarian nature of the Reformed tradition is significant in correcting this misunderstanding. The focus of Reformed theology, as Bavinck notes above, is on the work of the triune God – not individuals – in restoring his creation and establishing the Kingdom of God. In turn, the people of God are called to embody the new reality that the coming of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ inaugurates. Holiness, then, is living according to the rule of the King in every part of life.
In my first year of seminary, I was assigned a paper in which I essentially had to think about the idea of sacred space from a biblical standpoint and determine, more specifically, if this had any bearing on the architecture of church buildings. I found it to be a very interesting and challenging assignment, and though I came to no firm conclusion on the matter, I still find myself thinking about it often.
Recently, I finished reading N.T. Wright's excellent book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. Wright, an outspoken champion of biblical idea that redemption extends as far as the curse is found – in contrast to many Christians who view redemption as something spiritualised and otherworldly – helpfully guides the reader through a discussion of what this holistic redemption means for space, time, and matter. Wright says the following about how the redemption of space might give us pause to think about our church buildings:
The renewal and reclaiming of space has recently involved, among other things, a fresh grasp of the Celtic tradition of 'thin places,' places where the curtain between heaven and earth seems almost transparent. This is in fact just one aspect of a much wider theology of place, which has been under serious threat in the West since the Enlightenment. We urgently need to recapture this theology before, to use an obvious metaphor, all the ancient trees are cut down to make room for a shopping centre and parking lot just when people are starting to realise how much shade those trees provide in summer, how much fruit they bear in autumn, and how beautiful they look in spring. Jesus does indeed declare that God calls all people everywhere to worship him in spirit and truth rather than limiting worship to this or that holy mountain. But this doesn't undercut a proper theology of God's reclaiming of the whole world, which is anticipated in the claiming of space for worship and prayer. Church buildings and other places...are not a retreat from the world but a bridgehead into the world, a way of claiming part of God-given space for his glory, against the day when the whole world will thrill to his praise.
It is nothing short of dualistic folly, then, simply to declare without ado...that old church buildings and the like are irrelevant to the mission of God today and tomorrow... Many are rediscovering in our day that there are indeed such things as places sanctified by long usage for prayer and worship, places where, often without being able to explain it, people of all sorts find that prayer is more natural, that God can be known and felt more readily. We should reflect long and hard on a proper theology of place and space, thought through in terms of God's promise to renew the whole creation, before we abandon geography and territory.
David J. Bosch wrote the following in December 1979 issue of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa. Bosch, a renowned missiologist, wants us to think about what it means to recognise and acknowledge the Lordship of Christ over all of creation. 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 am signing off for the next couple of weeks, and so during that time I will leave you to draw out the practical implications of Bosch's excellent words. Any comments you have in response would be most welcome. We need to be talking about this since it is so crucial to discipleship and to the church's mission in the world.
