Hermann Sasse, a twentieth-century Lutheran theologian, had this to say regarding humanity's efforts to create an ideal church:

Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia, 'Where Christ is, there is the church'. With this saying one of the oldest church fathers spoke of the mystery of the church. The saying also sums up Luther’s faith in the church. It is not the power of our faith, nor the holiness of our life that constitutes the church, but rather that 'Where Christ is, there is the church'. When the church is called a holy people, a communion of saints, it is not to be understood in the way it has often been understood in the history of the church: 'the church should be a holy people, therefore only the holy shall belong to her. Away with all the unholy! The honour of Christ demands it!' When the worst of sinners must be excluded from the fellowship, one must then begin to classify sins in order to determine which ones lead to exclusion. How often has not that been attempted, both in the past and more recently. How imposing was the strictness of the ancient church, when people sought to create a holy and pure church (as also happens now). Or consider the Donatists, who demanded that at least the clergy should be free of mortal sin. Whenever the attempt has been made to create an ideal church, the end result has always been bitter disappointment. The community of saints turns into a community of Pharisees.

As the Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck, notes in the fourth volume of his Reformed Dogmatics, 'according to Scripture the characteristic essence of the church lies in the fact that it is the people of God' (298), of which Christ is the head. The church exists because Christ 'gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith' (Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 54).

The church is not primarily an institution, nor is it a group of people who live perfectly holy lives or believe all the right things. To be sure, the church does have an institutional character, and its members do strive to be increasingly holy and to be faithful to Scripture in their doctrine. But none of these precede the fact that the church people of God, over which Christ is Lord.

(HT: Anthony Bradley, via Paul McCain)

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Ellen Charry, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote a book about a decade ago called By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine. She argues, using the example of some of the most significant theologians in history, that theology must be done first and foremost for the service of the church. Theology is a key component of discipleship and an essential part of growth in faith. In a chapter on the Swiss reformer, John Calvin, she notes:

[Calvin] was concerned with engaging Christians in understanding God deeply and personally...he believed that Christians need moral strengthening and that God is the proper agent of reform. Training in godliness is the purpose of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, stated in the opening paragraph of his prefatory address to King Francis I, which accompanied the first (1536) edition: 'My purpose was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness'... And in the prefatory note to the final (1559) edition, Calvin repeats that he had 'no other purpose than to benefit the church by maintaining the pure doctrine of godliness' through his 'zeal to spread [God's] Kingdom and to further the public good'... Calvin begins by identifying himself as an aretegenically oriented teacher of the church who understands the implications of theology for public life.

If we take doctrine and piety as belonging to two separate fields, one academic and the other pastoral, we will never understand Calvin. For Calvin, the purpose of treating articles of religion is to enhance godliness. If that treatment is comprehensive, so much the better. The modern academy eliminated spiritual and moral formation from scholarly inquiry, rendering the modern disciplines of marginal use to the church. Calvin would stand down from this decision (199).

Calvin's perspective here (and, by extension, Charry's) is the reason I maintain such an interest in theology. While one can certainly study theology at an academic level, that person then has a responsibility – indeed, a duty – to use the fruits of that study in service of the church and for the building up of the body of Christ. I noted last year how Jamie Smith makes this same contention, and was reminded of his words again today as I was reading this portion of Charry's book. One of my professors at RTS, John Frame, would frequently make the same observation. His defintion of theology as "the application of God's Word by persons to all areas of life" makes the point explicitly. It's not just intended for the ivory tower of the academy.

(As a side note, I find it odd that given Calvin's perspective on theology, we treat the Institutes as some sort of rigorously academic textbook, when instead Calvin intended it for the people in his congregation, as a means to help them understand the Bible more fully, and thus as a tool for discipleship.)

The church needs theology, there is no getting around it. Jesus commanded his disciples to make disciples by teaching them all that he had commanded them. Growth in faith correlates with a growth in knowledge. Theologians, do your work for the service of the church that God's people might increasingly learn to live for his glory.

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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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John P. Burgess, in his book, After Baptism: Shaping the Christian Life, writes the following:

Hunger and thirst...teach us that humans ultimately live in a state of dependence. If we understand them rightly, we have to confess that we receive life as God's gift. Even the energies that we expend in taking care of ourselves and our basic needs are finally sustained by powers and forces beyond ourselves. Every day of our lives, we are dependent on food and drink to keep us alive. We never eat and drink once and for all; we have to eat and drink again and again, and so we continually pray, 'Give us this day, our daily bread.'
 
So too we are dependent on God's grace for our basic identity. We can never simply choose to be whoever we want. Nor will we ever know ourselves well enough to say, 'I finally have it all together. I have no need of God or others.' Dependence on daily bread symbolizes our dependence on God for our life's meaning and purpose. Our baptismal identity, like our physical energies, must be renewed every day. We need daily sustenance in the life to which Christ has called us. For that reason, 'one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God' (Matt. 4:4).
 
This daily sustenance comes to Christians in Word, sacrament, and patterns and rhythyms of life together. God feeds us again and again. God continually renews our capacity to receive Christ's self-giving love and, then, to offer our very selves to God and others. 'Give us this day, our daily bread' is never just a call for physical nourishment, but is also a plea for the bread of heaven that is life in the risen Lord.
 
In the end, Jesus himself must feed us and quench our thirst. He declares, 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty' (John 6:35), for 'the water that I will give them will become in them like a spring of living water gushing up to eternal life' (John 4:14). Christians have found this spiritual food and drink whenever they have celebrated the Eucharist. Baptism first marks us in our new identity in Christ, while the Eucharist gives us strength to persist in our baptismal identity, even in the midst of trial and temptation. Baptism sends us into the world, and the Eucharist offers us food and drink for the journey. Baptism tells us who we really are, and the Eucharist deepens and confirms our identity. Font leads to table. The helpless baby we place in God's hands will surely receive the basic nutrition that she needs to live out her baptism (122).

The Eucharist is not just a memorial. Through it Christ sustains us and gives us life. Let us stop starving ourselves of the nourishment he gives.

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I have a number of reasons for blogging. However, I have never intended this blog to be a place to air grievances, a means of exposing "heretics," or a forum to tear down brothers and sisters in the church. Sadly, this is what a lot of blogs are used for.

Last week, Bruce Waltke resigned from his position as professor of Old Testament studies at the Orlando campus of Reformed Theological Seminary. It was quite clear from the outset that his sudden resignation was linked in some way to a video he had appeared in posted by the Biologos Foundation, in which he argued for the necessity of accepting theistic evolution, although there was no official statement released giving the details of Waltke's resignation.

Not surprisingly, then, the blogosphere lit up as many took the opportunity to offer their opinions and speculations (disguised, of course, as factual statements) regarding what happened. Also of little surprise were the scathing remarks the vast majority of these bloggers had for RTS claiming that the seminary had forced Waltke to resign and criticising the school both for its limiting of academic freedom and for its adherence to a position regarding creation that science has proven to be untenable.

A lot of us around the campus spent time last week trying to figure out exactly what had happened because we were not being given many details. Having only received a very short email from the administration saying that Waltke had resigned, and nothing more, we were especially confused when the reports started coming out that RTS had forced Waltke to step down. I expressed my desire to some of the staff members at the seminary to see an official statement filling us in on the details. On the one hand, this would make us aware of what was going on, and on the other hand, could prove the wide-ranging speculations being promulgated on the internet wrong, which they later did. You can find chancellor Ric Cannada's statement here, and Uri Brito has also posted a letter Waltke himself wrote to his colleagues regarding the situation.

The best report available online right now is provided by The Aquila Report, who the other day posted this extensive and helpful statement. It was affirmed by some of the staff at RTS that this is indeed the most balanced and fair treatment of the events that have transpired in the past few weeks, and although there are some minor factual inaccuracies (the details surrounding the relationship of Enns and Waltke, I have been told, are somewhat inaccurate), it largely avoids the mud-slinging and finger-pointing that have characterised so many of the others "reports." To that end, I ask that you please read this report instead of the incorrect and speculative posts you find on most blogs, including the unhelpful piece Inside Higher Education recently posted

As with almost everything else, there is an ethic when it comes to publishing information, be it in a newspaper or magazine, or on a personal blog. Perhaps the power to click the "publish" button on the bottom of the screen overrides better judgment in some cases, but unfortunately there is no way to control who is publishing what online. One of our professors was remarking yesterday that actual investigative reporting is on the wane these days. Reporters now have their sources in various places and use the information they receive from these sources to make their reports. While these are often regulated as much as possible with the necessary checks and balances to ensure factual accuracy, this can hardly be said for the blogosphere. Using wisdom and abiding by an ethical standard becomes solely the responsibility of the blogger. More often than not, then, Lord Acton's dictum rings true: "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Being a student at RTS Orlando, this hit very close to home. I was deeply saddened to hear of Waltke's resignation. Not only have we lost one of—if not the—most preeminent Old Testament scholar alive today, but we have lost a man whose love for the Lord was without measure, whose love for the church was inspiring, and whose love of the Word of God was infectious. One example I can share that demonstrates his character comes from working in the bookstore at the seminary. A number of times, Waltke has purchased some of his own books and shipped them, at great cost to himself, to pastors in countries in the developing world who had little or not access to good theological resources.

I do not believe the issue surrounding Waltke's resignation warranted such drastic action. While I do not adhere to theistic evolution myself, Waltke was clear in his affirmation of God as creator and of the historicity of Adam and Eve. As such, I do not think he falls outside the bounds of orthodoxy. It has been said a few times in the past week (though as far as I know, it remains unverified) that even one of the stalwarts of Reformed theology, B. B. Warfield, was an adherent of theistic evolution.

I never had the privilege of having Waltke as a professor, due to scheduling conflicts with my classes. But he has been an immense blessing to our community here at RTS, and to me particularly in his writing. Sad as we are to see him go, we wish him the Lord's richest blessings in whatever endeavour he undertakes next.

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