The March edition of Comment magazine—yes, I'm a little late in picking up on this—has three articles dealing with each aspect of the biblical story: creation, fall, and redemption. Understanding the biblical narrative in this way is characteristic of the school of thought known as neocalvinism, which Comment roots itself in. All the pieces in this three-part series are excellent, and all worth your time (as is Comment as a whole—incidentally, Comment publishes five times more material online than in print if you wanted to read it on a regular basis). A taste of each piece follows.

First, Al Wolters writes on a biblical view of creation:

The first thing most people think of in connection with creation is the so-called 'natural world'—that is, the physical and biological world. We think of stars and galaxies as well as molecules and atoms, of trees and flowers as well as birds and beasts. But that is a very limited view of creation. In the biblical view, creation is everything which God has ordained to exist, what he has put in place as part of his creative workmanship. To be sure, this includes the great variety of physical entities and processes, and the enormous diversity of flora and fauna that God has created 'according to their kind,' but it also encompasses much more. Creation includes such human realities as families and other social institutions, the presence of beauty in the world, the ability to appreciate that beauty, the phenomena of tenderness and laughter, the capacity to conceptualize and reason, the experience of joy and the sense of justice. An almost unimaginable variety of objects, institutions, relationships and phenomena are part of the rich texture of God's creation.

Then David Naugle addresses the consequences of the fall:

[The fall] is the second 'act' in the overall narrative of the Scriptures, the next major theme in a biblical view of life and the world. First, there is the good news of creation, but now we have the bad news of the fall. It introduces fundamental conflict into the biblical drama, which must be resolved before God's story ends. It shows, contrary to other worldviews, that evil is not rooted in creation itself, but in the moral rebellion of the human race against the divine authority of the holy God. I sometimes call this episode the 'uncreation' because of the damage it did to God's very good world: how it twisted his intentions for humanity, for our knowing and loving and culture-making, and for all the earth.

And finally Jamie Smith paints a wonderful portrait of God's all-encompassing redemption:

Our good Creator has not left us to our own devices. While we ruptured the plenitude of creative love, our condescending God has also ruptured our brass heaven, along with our desire to enclose ourselves in immanence, appearing in the flesh—our flesh—as the image of the invisible God. Jesus of Nazareth appears as the second Adam who models for us what it looks like to carry out that original mission of image-bearing and cultivation. The Word became flesh, not to save our souls from this fallen world, but in order to restore us as lovers of this world—to (re)enable us to carry out that creative commission. Indeed, God saves us so that—once again, in a kind of divine madness—we can save the world, can (re)make the world aright. And God's redemptive love spills over in its cosmic effects, giving hope to this groaning creation.

So our redemption is not some supplement to being human; it's what makes it possible to be really human, to take up the mission that marks us as God's image bearers. Saint Irenaeus captures this succinctly: 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.' Redemption doesn't tack on some spiritual appendage, nor does it liberate us from being human in order to achieve some sort of angelhood. Rather, redemption is the restoration of our humanity, and our humanity is bound up with our mission of being God's co-creative culture-makers.

Be sure to read all of the articles in their entirety. It is this three-part framework (alternatively construed as wonder, heartbreak, and hope) that forms the point of view from which Comment looks at the world, a point of view which, my friend and the magazine's editor Gideon Strauss writes, manifestly reveals the love of the triune God. This love "evokes—from our whole person and in unity with the whole people of God—a life of worship, a love of our neighbours, and a respectful caring and disclosure of all of creation. Lives ordered by the love of God are ordered well, and can be lived well."

Abraham Kuyper, in that oft-quoted dictum, rightly declares that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our worldview needs this truth as its foundation. We do not begin to live our lives well, to borrow Gideon's words, unless we begin with the recognition of His total claim over all of creation and His holistic work of redemption. Indeed, as Cornelius Van Til once said, "Man cannot be man unless God is God."

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If you are not familiar with Lesslie Newbigin's story, he grew up in Britain and studied at Cambridge, where he was converted and trained for the ministry. After getting married, he spent nearly forty years in India as a missionary. When he was in Britain as a child and a student, it was still something of a "Christian" society, but upon his return in 1974, he discovered a country that he could describe as nothing less than pagan.

Michael Goheen, in his doctoral dissertation on Newbigin's missionary ecclesiology (which is available online for free!), writes that Newbigin had come to understand the church's relationship to the culture as a missionary encounter because "the church embodies the gospel as an alternative way of life to the culture in which it is set and thereby challenges the culture's fundamental assumptions" (365). Newbigin borrowed language from the sociology of knowledge to express this notion of a missionary encounter in his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. He writes,

The gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls into question, those that govern all human cultures without exception (9).

Goheen adds that "all cultures exhibit a plausibility structure that embody and transmit the fundamental beliefs of its inhabitants. Those fundamental beliefs stand in opposition to the gospel and if there is to be a missionary encounter, the church itself must be a community that embodies an alternative set of foundational beliefs" (365-366). If the church is faithful in doing this then three things will result: first, the foundational beliefs of a culture will be challenged; second, the church will offer the gospel as a credible alternative way of life; and third, the church will call the culture to radical conversion and invite it to live and understand the world through the lens of the gospel. At that point, the culture is left with the choice of accepting or rejecting the gospel and the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Newbigin expresses it in his little book, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches, the church that embodies the gospel

must necessarily clash with contemporary culture. It must challenge the whole 'fiduciary framework' within which our culture operates. It must call unequivocally for radical conversion, a conversion of the mind so that things are seen differently, and a conversion of the will so that things are done differently. It must decline altogether the futile attempt to commend the biblical vision of how things are by seeking to adjust it to the assumptions of our culture (53).

The fact that Newbigin would say something this provocative in the context he did was significant, for he was speaking about a culture that, to some degree, still believed it was a Christian culture, much like America today. But Newbigin understands that just because a certain percentage of a culture's population professes belief in God or attends church regularly does not mean its underlying worldview is shaped by the gospel.

Further, he rightly recognizes that the worldviews that give shape to a culture are religious in nature. Religion, in Newbigin's view, is not just a cultural form, and "it is more than an institution that embodies beliefs and practices concerning God and the destiny of the soul. It is a set of ultimate commitments about the nature of the world that gives shape, direction, and meaning to life and demands final loyalty" (Goheen, 367).

And here, then, is the reason the gospel needs to challenge the foundational beliefs of a culture—because all of life is religion, and everything we think, say, and do is either in service to God or an idol. Christ is Lord over all of life, and the church is called to proclaim and embody this truth. As witnesses to Jesus and the presence of his kingdom and rule, we cannot be satisfied to accept a sacred/secular divide and leave our culture to let its presuppositions inform certain areas while challenging its assumptions in other areas. All of life belongs to the Lord and our calling as the church is to unapologetically call to the world to recognize that truth.

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Regeneration, for Herman Bavinck, is not a matter of something entirely new being created within us, but instead is a re-formation of human nature to what it was originally intended to be. There is no new substance added to what is already there, he writes in the first chapter of volume four of his Reformed Dogmatics. He then extends the discussion to creation, and makes this profoundly important point:

Finally also the re-creation that will take place in the renewal of heaven and earth (Matt. 19:28) is not the destruction of this world and the subsequent creation out of nothing of another world but the liberation of the creature that is now subject to futility. Nor can it be otherwise, for God's honor as Savior hinges precisely on his reconquest from the power of Satan of this human race and this world. Christ, accordingly, is not a second Creator, but the Redeemer and Savior of this fallen creation, the Reformer of all things that have been ruined and corrupted by sin. Neither, for that matter, is sin a substance, but consists in lawlessness (άνομια); it is an actualized privation (privatio actuosa) that has indeed violated the form (forma) of the entire created world but did not and could not destroy its substance or essence. Hence, when the re-creation removes sin from creation, it does not deprive it of anything essential, nothing that was essentially and originally characteristic of it (though it was "by nature") and belonged to its essence. For sin is not part of the essence of creation; it pushed its way in later, as something unnatural and contrary to nature. Sin is deformity. When re-creation removes sin, it does not violate and suppress nature, but restores it.

This point cannot be made strongly enough, especially in evangelical circles where creation is often not of great concern. But the fact is, as Bavinck so clearly states, that if creation is not restored, sin gains victory and the Lordship of Christ is rendered null and void.

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When exploring the relationship between the Old and New Testament, we tend to pay lip service to the idea of continuity, while in reality we conceive of it more in terms of discontinuity. That modern evangelicalism tends to be one-dimensional does not help, nor does the great chronological distance between the era of Old Testament Israel and our own time.

But there are many important parallels to draw between then and now. Andy Crouch, in his recent book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, explores the significance of place in terms of the location God chose Israel to occupy. The nation of Israel was at the center and heart of the Ancient Near East and was surrounded by a number of different larger and more powerful nations, each of which had direct contact and interaction with Israel. Crouch points out that

Israel's location...ensured that its unique cultural vocation would be lived out in 'public,' we might say, among the great nations of its day. As much as Israel might have been tempted to withdraw from the larger cultural currents over the centuries of its history, it simply never had that option (128-129).

To complicate matters, these larger, stronger, pagan nations exerted a great amount of cultural pressure on Israel, which found its faith constantly put to the test. God could have chosen to isolate them instead, Crouch says, perhaps in a remote valley of the Swiss Alps or the Brazilian rainforest, "but in such a location, neither would have Israel's extraordinary claim to worship not just its own local god, but the world's very Maker and Lord, made much of a difference in the wider course of history" (129). God's design and purpose for Israel required it to be center stage, for

it was only in 'public,' in the context of tremendous political and economic pressure, that Israel's cultural creativity could be made available to the neighboring nations big and small: its legal code with its keen sense of justice and responsibility toward the weak; its poetry of praise, thanksgiving and lament; its Scriptures bearing witness to the character of the one true God. Indeed, without those cultural pressures Israel's culture might have been substantially less creative in the first place. The exile into Babylon was the most devastating blow Israel suffered, an attempt at cultural eradication comparable to the Holocaust of the twentieth century. But the exile forced Israel to grapple with the implications of its faith beyond its borders, to ask what faithfulness looked like in a diaspora where neither kings nor priests had majority power, to cry, 'How could we sing the Lord's song / in a foreign land?' (Ps. 137:4) and begin to find an answer (129).

The implications and parallels for us are clear; Crouch has a way of stating the obvious without ever actually saying it. Although God's people find themselves in a radically different time and place today, our calling and purpose remains the same as Old Testament Israel's—to bear witness to the sovereign King of the Universe, and bring His rule to bear on all of life. Our place, living in the midst of this world and its various cultures, does not allow us to passively withdraw.

No less than Israel, we are to be a light to the nations. We live our lives in public.

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Over the past few weeks I have been leading an adult Sunday School class on worship, which has turned out to be quite an adventure. Of course, since worship is at the very core of who we are as humans (WSC 1), it follows that people should be so inclined to want to talk about it.

This past Sunday, our discussion turned to Reformed and Presbyterian worship. Because the church is a member of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), it was important to me that we talk about worship in our own tradition. Quite a number of the people in our church do not come from that background, and so I thought it especially important that they spend some time learning about how worship (specifically public or corporate worship, in this instance) is understood in the Reformed tradition.

Back in April, that topic came up on this blog and generated more comments and interaction that I have ever had in five years of blogging. The discussion of Reformed worship centers on what is called the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW), which basically says that in regards to public worship, whatever is not commanded in Scripture is forbidden. Essentially, the point is that only the sovereign God can determine how He is to be worshiped, and He has clearly revealed to us in His Word how we are to do that. In the comments to the post in April, I indicated that I had difficulties with this principle, but I must admit I spoke a little hastily. I have difficulty with some interpretations of the principle, not the general principle in and of itself.

Needless to say, this functioned as the bone of contention Sunday morning, for a number of reasons. For one, all of us are products of Western culture, a culture which dislikes both authority and rules and wants to be able to set its own terms for everything, including for what worship should look like. To many, the RPW seems to be just that—a bunch of rules and restrictions that hinder our ability to worship and allow the Holy Spirit to move and work among us.

Second, people approach worship with entirely subjective ideas of the true, good, and beautiful. Many come to the discussion with the presumption that the things they think constitute worship are valid on the grounds of their subjective reasoning alone. If they feel that a certain element evokes a powerful response in them, then it must be appropriate. But the sheer audacity of this is immediately clear, and the question again surfaces: who are we to tell God—the One by whom all standards of truth, goodness, and beauty are measured—what is appropriate for worship? Can we seriously believe that our conceptions of these things are sufficiently equal to the One who created them?

Third, almost all recognition of the authority of tradition has been done away with in evangelical churches. In part, this can be attributed to a reaction to the descent into traditionalism by some bodies. More to the point, however, this springs from the same "me- and-my-Bible" individualism and relativism wherein we choose to locate authority today. What needs to be recovered is the acknowledgment that the individual is part of something much bigger than himself. I emphasized Sunday morning that we as a Presbyterian church are heirs to a very rich tradition, one to which we owe a great deal. A specific understanding of worship is one of the things that comes out of this tradition.

It would be a great mistake to not honor the tremendous diligence and devotion with which our Reformed forebears studied the Bible in order to pass down to us the sum of what Scripture teaches for the life of the believer and the Church (in the Westminster Standards and the Three Forms of Unity). Appealing to the confessional documents, though, will usually prompt the reaction that their teaching, on worship in this instance, is just a product of historical context or circumstance. Granted, a healthy sense of the authority of tradition carries with it an implicit understanding that we do not hold to these teachings blindly. But a far bigger danger is to run headlong into an understanding of worship premised on the authority of subjectivity. The fact remains that theology must be done in community, and the authority of the church should always be held above that of the individual.

Abraham Kuyper, in his Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles, writes about the authority of the Church's traditions and confessions, and says that every theologian must reckon with the things taught by the history of the church, and “must take the dogmas of his church as his guide, and that he shall not diverge from them until he is compelled to do this by the Word of God” (577). We must begin, Kuyper says, with the assumption that the Church is right. For this reason the theologian should not view the confession as mere opinion over against his, but should recognize that the confession of the Church does not just presume to be true, it carries objective authority by virtue of the guidance of the Spirit (591).

Now, this creates a problem for those who have joined a local church who are not of Presbyterian or Reformed persuasion. In our church, we have a number of these. Membership in the PCA does not require subscription to the Westminster Standards, and so members do not need to adhere to the RPW in this case. However—and this is a point that is seldom emphasized—in becoming members of the church people are required to submit to the authority of the local church and to recognize that the church is constitutionally-bound, by virtue of its membership in the denomination, to uphold the teachings and theology of the denomination. What does this mean for the member in regards to this issue? In essence it means that if your theology of worship does not conform to that of the PCA, you are not allowed to subvert the authority of the church by raising a dissenting voice. Naturally, in this culture and in modern evangelicalism, this does not sit well.

While there are rules governing worship in the PCA because of its adherence to the RPW, a fair amount of liberty in working out the details of the principle is still granted. The Book of Church Order 47-6, says,

The Lord Jesus Christ has prescribed no fixed forms for public worship but, in the interest of life and power in worship, has given His Church a large measure of liberty in this matter. It may not be forgotten, however, that there is true liberty only where the rules of God’s Word are observed and the Spirit of the Lord is, that all things must be done decently and in order, and that God’s people should serve Him with reverence and in the beauty of holiness. From its beginning to its end a service of public worship should be characterized by that simplicity which is an evidence of sincerity and by that beauty and dignity which are a manifestation of holiness.

In working through this issue, I came across a post Tim Challies wrote in November of 2006, in which he pointed out the important distinction between the elements of worship and the circumstances of worship. The elements are the non-negotiables dictated by Scripture, while the circumstances can be equated with the forms mentioned in the portion of the BCO cited above. In the PCA that means, for example, that while singing is a required element of worship, the circumstance or form of that element (such as singing exclusively Psalms or incorporating contemporary music) is a matter of liberty to be decided by the local congregation.

As good as that sounds, in some sense I think it creates further problems. This is particularly the case when you begin to discuss aspects of worship in the Old Testament, for two reasons. One, it raises the question of what parts of worship belong to the dictates of the ceremonial law. But second, it raises a question of the nature of the ceremonial law itself—if the ceremonial law is abrogated today, does this necessarily entail that all its teaching on worship falls under the rubric of that which is forbidden in the RPW? Without a doubt we would wholeheartedly affirm that certain parts of it are, such as the sacrificial elements. But what about the music the Israelites employed in worship? What about David's dancing before the Lord (2 Sam. 6:14)?

I am going to leave that aside for now. To round this discussion off, I want to point out that while the RPW has often been perceived as legalistic and restrictive, there is a sense in which it is actually freeing. Just as we are most free when we submit our hearts to God and seek to live according to His will and rule, so we are most free in our worship when we submit to His rule for worship. The BCO is exactly right on that point: "There is true liberty only where the rules of God’s Word are observed and the Spirit of the Lord is."

Worship is not about us; it never is. It is all about Him. If we come to understand that and begin to seek only His will for worship, recognizing that only in doing His will do we truly glorify Him, then we will begin to faithfully worship our God. Many people talk about wanting to feel the presence and movement of the Holy Spirit in worship, but the only guarantee of that is to worship in spirit and in truth as God has revealed to us in His Word. Submission and surrender may be unpopular notions in our day, but there is absolutely no freedom in autonomy. And therein lies the heart of Reformed worship.

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