In his book, The Progress of Redemption: The Story of Salvation from Creation to the New Jerusalem, Old Testament scholar Willem VanGemeren notes that the creation still waits to be consecrated. Upon finishing his work of creation, God declares everything to be very good, but he only consecrates the Sabbath day. Thus, though creation is very good in God's sight, it is not perfect in its original state and anticipates a move toward perfection.

For VanGemeren, creation has both a christological and an eschatological focus. He writes, 'Creation anticipates a telos, or end. The God who freely, graciously, and powerfully rules creation has a goal: the new creation in his Son Jesus Christ' (62). Right from the start, God has in mind the history of redemption culminating in the restoration and perfection (consecration) of creation, achieved through the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. Interestingly, VanGemeren observes that with the fall into sin, the consecration of creation moved from being a possibility to a necessity. I am not sure what he understands by the possibility of consecration, especially if he sees the work of Christ in consecrating creation as something planned from the beginning. But certainly the necessity is there – what has been corrupted by sin must be rescued and redeemed, or 'put to rights', to borrow a phrase from N.T. Wright.

With the promise of the consecration of creation, God's people are given the responsibility of bearing witness to the future eschatological fulfillment of that promise. '[Israel] had received a foretaste of the promises of God in their special status as a covenant people and were guaranteed a greater restoration in the Promised Land' (61). The prophets later point forward 'to the restoration of all things in the messianic age' (62), which Jesus demonstrates in a powerful way during his life on earth. At his ascension, he promises the Holy Spirit, who will guide his people in bearing witness to his coming Kingdom (Acts 1:8). We don't just wait in hope for that which is to come, but we eagerly anticipate the consecration of creation. By living in fidelity to God's rule and proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom, we offer a foretaste of what is to come.

From VanGemeren's perspective, then,

the Garden of Eden is a prototype of the world planned by God – the world of restoration. The history of redemption, therefore, does not begin with a high point only to end up with the new earth as an equally high point. The new creation is better than the first because it will be perfect, holy, and characterized by the presence of God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Rev. 21:22)... For that purpose, we must look upon Christ as the very purpose of God's creation. He is what Berkhof calls 'the pattern of existence for which creation is intended.' His redemptive work...was fully in view when God created the world. Creation is, therefore, the beginning, or the preamble, of the history of redemption (64).

Thoughts?

There is a guest post on the Faith and Theology blog today remembering John Stott, which focuses on Stott's strong belief that Christians must be engaged with the world around them. Stott would argue that Christians should follow Christ's call to be salt and light, seeking societal transformation in a world God loves.

The author of the post wonders why other evangelicals don't feel the same way. He points to something Tim Challies once wrote as a conclusion to a book review:

There is a time and a place for humanitarian work, no doubt. Christians can carry out great ministries serving the poor and the oppressed and in so doing can have remarkable opportunities to share the gospel. And yet still the history of Christianity shows that when Christians do this, the gospel quickly becomes secondary and the work itself becomes the gospel. I still see the Bible primarily emphasizing charity given to other believers; when I look at Acts and the epistles, this is what I see most—Christians helping other Christians as a sign of love and fraternity. Now of course there will be some who engage in humanitarian work outside the context of the local church, but it seems to me that the closer we come to making this a necessary part of the Christian mission, the more likely we are to see the gospel diminish.

I have two reasons for bringing this up. First, the author is right to critique evangelicalism's general avoidance of the calling Stott believed we all had. But second, he commits the error that has been committed by far too many people ever since that blasted TIME article came out a couple of years ago – he calls Challies a Neocalvinist.

Challies is not a neocalvinist. He is a New Calvinist. A Neocalvinist would never say what Challies has said above. 

Stop confusing the two!

A minister, by nature of the office, is in a position of power. Far too often, that power is abused and the minister no longer approaches the calling with humility. Edmund Clowney, former professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, offers these helpful words in his book, Called to the Ministry:

A minister is a servant; Christ is the one Lord, who must rule until all his enemies are put under his feet (1 Cor 15:25, Col. 3:1). No one is called to lord it over the flock of Christ (1 Pet. 5:3); no throne is set in the church but the one at God's right hand.

That last line is absolutely key.

There are quite a lot of incredible images being posted online from the riots in London over the past few nights, like this one of a burning bus. It is hard to believe that these riots are really happening just a couple of hundred miles south of here. In some ways, it is hard to get your head around this, to see people setting random cars on fire, throwing things at store windows, huge numbers of police in riot gear rushing to restrain people hurling bricks at them.

But here we are. As I have been following the events unfold on Twitter, a lot of the blame seems to be focused on policies the Conservatives have implemented. I am certainly not an authority on the political scene in the UK, but these kinds of blanket accusations are never helpful, nor are they accurate, because of the complexity of the situations. Certainly, the economic conditions in Britain right now are not good, but if terrorizing your community is is how you voice your protest to the situation, the issue goes far deeper than your frustration over not having work. This is symptomatic of significant cultural and social problems, and they are just coming to the fore in an ugly way.

This blog is not usually a forum for commenting on current events, but since this is so close to home, there are a few things I think are worth discussing. In the first place, I don't think you can properly understand the situation without recognising that at the core, human beings are religious beings. Everything we do is either in service to God, or to an idol. The events transpiring in London are fundamentally spiritual in nature. Some people have observed that the youths who are organising and leading a lot of the rioting are laughing and seem to think of this as something of a cheap thrill. In reality, though, it is reflective of the idolatry of their hearts. This is, ultimately, an act of worship in service to the false gods they devote themselves to.

James K.A. Smith, in his excellent book, Desiring the Kingdom, puts forth the idea that human beings are primarily directed to act according to what they love or desire. We do what we do because of what we love, and because we are oriented toward a vision of human flourishing. The problem comes when our ultimate love is reserved for anything but God. We then serve idols and pledge ourselves to distorted ideas of what it means to be human. And so, while the situation in London right now might be allieviated presently by means of significant police presence, and in the future by means of different economic policies, these will never get to the root of the problem. We are not really addressing the issue if we are not addressing the underlying problem of sin and idolatry.

Secondly, and pertinently, the church needs to speak into this situation because these sorts of events testify to the ongoing battle that rages for the heart of the city. We have a tendency in the modern West to avoid talk of the spiritual and the supernatural, but we cannot deny and must not ignore that cities are prime targets for the forces of evil. In the face of this, we need to loudly proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, sharing the love of Jesus, and embodying the true justice, peace and freedom that come from acknowledging his Lordship over all of life. It is in worshiping and serving the risen Christ that human beings find their true worth and dignity. The rioting in London testifies to the despair of a generation that is searching and longing for these things. Local churches in the city right now need to seize on to the opportunity to bring hope into a desperate situation.

As the evening draws near again, and the people in London continue to deal with the unrest caused by the riots and the fear of what another night might bring, the collect for Aid against all Perils from the Evening Prayer service in the Book of Common Prayer is fitting:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Lord, have mercy.

John Stott once said, "One of the major reasons people reject the Gospel today is not because they perceive it to be false but because they perceive it to be trivial." Because of that, he founded the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity in 1982 to be a resource to help Christians grow in their understanding of what it means for Christ to be Lord over all. The mission of LICC, according to their website, is "to envision and equip Christians and their churches for whole-life missionary discipleship in the world. We seek to serve them with biblical frameworks, practical resources, training and models so that they flourish as followers of Jesus and grow as whole-life disciplemaking communities."

Here is Mark Greene, the institute's director, talking a bit more about their mission:

This is very encouraging. It's always exciting when Christians really understand that Christ's Lordship extends over all of life.

(HT: Bob Robinson)

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.

Acts 2:42-47 is a favourite passage of those who like to talk about an ideal of what the church should be like, and for good reason – we have in these few verses one of the clearest biblical pictures of a vibrant, living, and active church. Mike Goheen and Craig Bartholomew, in their book, The Drama of Scripture, discuss the marks of the early church in this passage:

As Luke describes the young church, it has three defining qualities. The first is devotion: this new community devotes itself to the apostles' teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer so that they might more and more experience the life of the kingdom (2:42). The church's second defining quality is that the life of Christ in manifested both in the lives of individual members and in the life of the community considered as a whole. The church is thus known by convincing signs of God's saving power within it (2:43), by justice and mercy in its communal relations (2:44-45), by joyful conviviality (2:46), and by worship (2:47). Third, as the liberating life of the kingdom becomes more and more evident in the church, we hear that the exalted Lord "[adds] to their number daily those who are being saved" (2:47). This too fulfills the Old Testament prophecies about God's kingdom. The prophets pictures the drawing power of a renewed Israel (Isaiah 60:2-3; Zechariah 8:20-23): "A decisive element of the prophetic conception of the pilgrimage of the nations to Zion is that the Gentiles, fascinated by the salvation visible in Israel, are driven of their own accord to the people of God. They do not become believers as a result of missionary activity; rather, the fascination emitted by the people of God draws them close." This newly formed community of the early church is attractive to outsiders. The life of the believing community radiates the light of the kingdom and thus draws people from darkness (cf. Ephesians 5:8; 1 Peter 2:9).

We have here a church which understands that the gospel is about more than just saving souls, and is more than just a belief one needs to hold in order to guarantee eternal life. The gospel is an announcement that in the person of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has come. The gospel calls people to be members of this Kingdom, to serve King Jesus, and to have their whole beings transformed by the power of the risen Christ. The church, believing this message, begins to embody a new reality that testifies in word and bears witness in deed to the rule and lordship of Christ over all of creation. By its words and deeds the church then invites people to an encounter with the Kingdom of God and the true freedom, justice, and peace that comes through the rule of the sovereign Lord, in order that they too might confess that Jesus is Lord and be baptised into this new life.

Well aware of the fact that I said just yesterday I would not be posting again until after Easter, I could not pass up sharing this with all of you. Steve Bishop posted the following on his blog yesterday, a summary of the contours of the Neocalvinist tradition drawn up by Mike Goheen and Craig Bartholomew. Clarifying what Neocalvinism is all about is especially important because there are many misleading caricatures of Neocalvinism by its opponents, particularly those who hold to something known as two-kingdom theology, and because of the constant misapplication of the term "Neocalvinist" to the New Calvinists (men like John Piper, Kevin DeYoung, Mark Driscoll), thanks to a careless terminological error in Time magazine last year.

Neocalvinism finds its roots largely in the thought of Abraham Kuyper, who has famously said, "In the total expanse of human life there is not a square inch of which Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, 'That is mine!'" With that as its overarching perspective, Neocalvinism, according to Goheen and Bartholomew, can be further summarised further as follows:

1. Neocalvinism begins with Christ and this focus opens up into a full Trinitarian faith.
2. Christ is rendered to us truly in Scripture, which is fully trustworthy as God’s Word.
3. Christ stands at the centre of the biblical story and the good news he proclaimed is about the kingdom as the goal of history—God restoring his rule over the whole of human life and creation.
4. Since Christ has revealed and accomplished the end of history the Scriptures have a storied shape, and as such tell the true story of the whole world.
5. A central theme in the biblical story is God’s election of a people to embody the kingdom, to be a preview of the goal of history, and thus to bear witness to Christ’s rule over all of life – this constitutes mission.
6. The comprehensive gospel of the kingdom has been narrowed and consigned to a very minor place within the dominant Western humanist worldview, and this calls for a conscious articulation of a biblical worldview in relation to the cultural worldview to enable the church to recover the all-embracing scope of the good news.
7. The good news reveals the restoration of the creation from sin, and thus a neocalvinist worldview insists on a comprehensive and integrated understanding of creation, fall and restoration.
8. The fundamental backdrop of God’s drama of restoration is creation and thus neocalvinism articulates a rich doctrine of creation including its good and dynamic creation order and humanity’s place within it.
9. History is part of God’s order for creation and thus neocalvinism affirms the historical development or differentiation of creation.
10. The implication of the fall is that the power of sin and evil now radically twists every part of creation, and while the structures of creation remain good the distorting power of sin means they have been radically misdirected.
11. The Bible tells the story of restoration centred in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the recovery of God’s originally good purposes for the whole of his creation and all of human life.
12. Since God’s restorative power is at work in the creation by the Spirit, and the forces of evil remains at work in the creation, neocalvinism recognizes an ultimate religious conflict in the whole of human life.
13. God is at work leading his creation to its destiny of a new heavens and a new earth, and only then will the kingdom finally come. Until then the church is called to participate in God’s redemptive mission—the missio Dei—as witnesses to his victory, but since we await the final victory there is no room for triumphalism in neocalvinism.

While there is much more that can be said about this, Goheen and Bartholomew have here given a very helpful summary of the Neocalvinist tradition. There are many other resources available for exploring Neocalvinism further. To begin with, Bob Robinson has written a few blog posts highlighting the differences between Neocalvinism and the New Calvinism (see also here). Steve Bishop has also worked tirelessly to compile a wealth of resources from different leaders and thinkers within the Neocalvinist tradition at his site, All of Life Redeemed.

There are many resources you can avail yourself of for understanding the Neocalvinist tradition. For helpful introductions to Neocalvinism in book form, be sure to read the transcriptions of Kuyper's Stone Lectures, delievered at Princeton Seminary in 1898, compiled in Lectures on Calvinism, and Al Wolters' excellent book, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. Goheen and Bartholomew have two books  which are worth your time; The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story, and Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview. The former is an overview of the biblical story, while the latter helps the reader develop an understanding of a biblical worldview as it relates to contemporary culture.

I know this is only a very short introduction to Neocalvinism, but hopefully it piques your interest to explore the tradition further. And now the next time someone tells you that Piper is a Neocalvinist, you can lovingly correct the person, give them a copy of Creation Regained, and let them see for themselves what Neocalvinism is really about.