Dr. Raymond A. (Randy) Blacketer – Page 4 – Reformation Historian, Historical Theologian

The Marks of a Missional Church

On September 23, 2014

In Missional Church, Pastoral Ministry, Worship

In the last Focus I introduced the term “Missional.” It describes a church (or other community) that is intentionally outreach-oriented. To be missional is to be intentional about connecting with people in your community, in your neighborhood, who may have very little exposure to the Christian faith, and very knowledge of the Bible, and perhaps none at all. A missional church is one that recognizes that the church exists entirely to put into practice the mission of God in the world, namely, to make disciples. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, identifies six main characteristics of a missional church in an online video that I recommend. He goes deeper into these themes in his book Center Church, a textbook for urban church planters. His points apply just as much to a suburban church, though in some ways, suburban ministry might be even more challenging, because people tend to be isolated from each other. Here are Keller’s six marks, which I am examining in more depth in our Sunday evening teaching services:

1. A Missional Church Knows the Idols of the Culture. In other words, a missional church is aware of what it’s up against. And a missional church understands that the world’s leading idols (sex, money, and power, according to Keller) are not just problems for unchurched people. Believers bow the knee to these idols as well, just as the Israelites were tempted to worship Baal on the side. And so, as closet idolaters, we should sympathize with our neighbors, not just judge them.

2. A Missional Church has to Contextualize and Speak in the Language of the Culture. A missional church needs to know the culture well, and also love and respect people outside the church subculture. To “contextualize” means to translate the gospel into terms that our unchurched neighbors can understand. (In doing so, by the way, we also come to better understanding of our faith and our God.) It means knowing about what people are reading, what shows they watch, what movies are popular. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should watch Game of Thrones, which seems to glorify the idols of our culture (I have never seen it, but the show is notorious for its explicit content and brutality). But it doesn’t hurt to know what the show is about (getting ahead by any means necessary), and that it is wildly popular.

3. A Missional Church Equips Believers to Live their Faith in a Secular Culture. Instead of being a fortress to protect ourselves and our children from the world, a missional church views itself as a training ground for incursions into the world with the message of the gospel. For example, I believe good Christian schools can help equip our children and youth to be missional; but there have been times when people experienced them as a way to protect our children from the outside world (the fortress mentality). And even as we promote and support Christian schools, we must respect families who choose public education and not treat them as second class.

4. A Missional Church has a Reputation for Being Both a Contrast and a Servant Community. This is important. We should critique what’s wrong with our culture, but not in a self-righteous or arrogant way that disrespects people or comes off as judgmental. People will listen when we show that we care about them, when we act as their servants, and not as judges.

5. A Missional Church Conducts its Events Deliberately Expecting and Speaking as if Non-Believers are Present. Ok, maybe not council meetings, but most of our activities. We can’t assume our neighbors know the stories of the Bible. We can’t assume that people believe in God or an afterlife the way that was more common just a generation ago. And we should try to avoid churchy jargon that unchurched people don’t understand (and probably our kids don’t, either). And avoid simplistic clichés, like “God has a reason for everything.” That might be true in some sense, but we often cannot see any plan or purpose in our times of pain. Or: “God will never give you anything you can’t handle.” Try telling that to someone suffering from extreme anxiety, or recovering from a nervous breakdown. On second thought, don’t!

6. A Missional Church Practices Unity on the Local Level as Much as Possible. If the main message that comes through in our church life is how other Christian are wrong, and if we act as if we represent the only legitimate form of the Christian faith, that’s a bad witness. Working together with churches and Christian faith traditions is a great witness. That does not mean that we fail to teach, treasure, defend, and even celebrate our own tradition, our own denomination, our own congregation. Older evangelism strategies encouraged our churches to downplay the Christian Reformed part and try to be more like non-denominational churches. That’s a game we lose just by playing, because, frankly, we stink at being non-denominational. It’s not who we are. Tim Keller does not hide his denominational ties (Presbyterian Church in America), and that didn’t stop his church from growing to 5200 members. He does not downplay what is distinctive about the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition of Christianity. It does mean that we shed the older attitude that we are the only true church. It means openness to learning from and being enriched by other Christian traditions in the one, holy, catholic (universal) church, and working together in matters of common concern, such as supporting the local food bank. One of my favorite events in the small town of Barrhead, Alberta, was our ecumenical Advent service, which included the local clergy, choirs, and music groups of the various churches. It was a visible manifestation of our unity, and it had a great impact on many people in the community.
(First Cutlerville CRC Focus, September 2014)

On Being a Missional Church

By Raymond Blacketer

On June 30, 2014

In Missional Church, Pastoral Ministry, Worship

First Cutlerville CRC Focus article, June 2015

“Missional” is a fairly new term for describing a church that is intentionally outreach-oriented. The term is new; the idea is as old as the church—even older, if you go back to Abraham’s calling in Genesis 12. My family was evangelized into a missional church long before the term was fashionable. But not every congregation is outreach-oriented. Some are much more inwardly-focused. That kind of church can be very comfortable, as long as you’re not a visitor, or someone new to the congregation. That kind of congregation can be supportive; it can have good fellowship, solid preaching, and attractive programs. It might even have a nice outreach statement on paper. But an inward focus not what it means to be church.

Ultimately, an inward-focused church will not grow. It may grow in the short term, but not from evangelism. Growth will largely come from people switching churches based on their preferences. But members will also leave when things change, because the most important thing has become: Does the worship experience fit my needs? It is a consumer approach to church.

Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, knows what it means to be genuinely missional. He planted a congregation in the most gospel-resistant part of the nation’s largest city, in Manhattan. It’s now a multi-site congregation with over 5,000 members. But it’s rather different from most mega-churches. It is confessionally Reformed. The worship employs liturgy and readings. The sermons are deep and doctrinal. The music is mostly classical, with some services that use jazz or contemporary worship songs.

Worship style is not what makes a church missional. Style varies and changes with time. What is more important is being intentional about outreach. A church that makes it their number one priority to reach people with the message of hope and new life in Christ, and embodying that good news in concrete ways—and a church where that is more important than whether I feel comfortable or feel I get all my needs met—that is a missional church.

Tim Keller ministers in a very secular and skeptical context. But in reality, our context here to the southwest of Grand Rapids is heading in the same direction. We can no longer assume that people believe in God or an afterlife. We cannot presume that people will take the Bible as God’s Word. But Keller reminds us that it’s not all about making a rational argument for the existence of God, or the reliability of the Bible. He emphasizes that we have to show that Christianity makes emotional sense before we can talk about it making rational sense. (By the way, Tim Keller has written an excellent book about how the Christian faith makes sense, entitled, The Reason for God). In other words, we have to show people that the gospel really changes us in order for people to take seriously the claim that the gospel can change their lives. We can show that the good news of Jesus makes “emotional sense” by our hospitality, by our welcoming embrace of our neighbors, by our willingness to tolerate unsanctified language and undisciplined children, by our commitment to persons and families that are deeply broken, and often chronically broken.

Tim Keller talks about six characteristics of a missional church. Stay tuned…I will talk about those six features in the next edition of the Focus!

Sin and the Radio DJ

By Raymond Blacketer

On June 24, 2014

In Christian Life

John Balyo, a former radio host for the local Christian station WCSG, has been arrested for sexually abusing a child, and allegedly admits to at least some of the accusations. This gave rise to a question by one of my pastoral colleagues in a closed forum. The gist of the question was: Does the church bear some responsibility for this, because we do not provide a place for sinners to openly confess their sins and struggles? If we lack of a venue to talk about temptations in a safe environment, a place to hold each other accountable and in which to find forgiveness and healing, does this lead to heinous sins such as child molestation?

It was a valuable question, but a complicated one.

It’s complicated by the nature of the case used as an example. The question also went sideways when we got into a debate about whether all sins are the same.

On that last question, there is one and only one sense in which all sins are the same. All sins make a person a sinner. Any sin, and even the condition of original sin, leave each one of us guilty before God and in need of forgiveness and salvation. The bad news is that everyone is equally a sinner; the good news is that God in Christ extends forgiveness for every variety of sinner. He stands ready to forgive all sins (save one). This was the point that the Pharisees tended to forget. Jesus needed to remind them that just because they did not poison the guy next door and hide the body, they still harbored hateful thoughts against him in secret. This mental malice, Jesus says, is also a species of murder, and a violation of the sixth commandment. It also counts as a failure to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This sameness of all sins is what the vast majority of Christians (in my experience) emphasize the vast majority of the time. The intentions are good, even godly. We want to hold out the promise of forgiveness and healing to everyone without exception, even perpetrators of abuse. The tendency to equate all sins may also be a reaction to the old tradition of shaming people for public transgressions, particularly the sin of adultery. There was a day when a couple that got pregnant before marriage would have to publically confess their intimate moral failure before the congregation. Making all sins equal may also be a reaction against harsh attitudes homosexual behavior (or even orientation). But like all pendulum swings, it is an over-reaction.

Apart from Jesus’ important correction to the Pharisees, the sameness of all transgressions is not the dominant emphasis in the Bible. In light of biblical teaching about sin, I think it is a serious mistake to default to the position that “all sins are the same,” despite the fact that it does seem to be the default position among average believers nowadays. Not all sins are of equal weight, not even in God’s eyes. Jesus declared that Herod was “guilty of a greater sin” than Pilate who stood in judgment over Jesus. Herod was a Jew (at least in name) and should have known better. There is the “sin against the Holy Spirit,” which Jesus says is unforgivable. Paul makes it clear to the Corinthian church that sexual transgressions are worse than other sins, I Corinthians 6:18. The intimate joining of bodies in sex also joins souls; to join them casually, with no strings attached, as friends with benefits, scars the soul. This stands in contrast to our culture’s minimizing of the life-creating and soul-binding potential of sex which has the potential for profound beauty and profound harm. There is no such thing as casual sex. Paul declares that another sexual sin to which the Corinthians were turning a blind eye (a man having an affair with his step-mother) was much worse than the sins commonly seen among their pagan neighbors (I Corinthians 5). The apostle’s strong rebuke of the Corinthians for their tolerance of this sin is based in the fact that this particularly vile offense harms the reputation of Christ’s church, and thus harms the cause of the gospel. The Corinthian church itself was committing a sin by standing by and doing nothing, sending the message that this behavior is acceptable to followers of Christ. And in words that might shock our modern nonjudgmental sensibilities, Paul says that it is our duty to judge those who are members of the church. In many practical ways, all sins are not the same. All sins do not bring about the same degree of destructive consequences. Not every transgression is as intentional as another. Some sins arise more out of weakness than malice.

The problem with defaulting to “all sins are the same” is that it minimizes the destructive power of our choices. For example, a person who decides not only to have an affair, but also to abandon their spouse and children and pursue the illicit relationship, can easily tell themselves that these choices are no more sinful than wishing you had your neighbor’s new car rather than the old clunker you drive to work every day. All I have to do is ask forgiveness and move on with my new life with my new partner and my children will be happier because I am happier. And believe me, people do rationalize and minimize their sin this way, and our simplistic Christian clichés can contribute to this casual attitude toward sin.

But getting back to the original question: Is the church to blame when pedophiles act on their impulses? I think the answer is no, even though I can agree that churches do not always create or foster adequate and effective opportunities for our members to practice mutual confession and accountability. I don’t think most persons who have a compulsive drive to abuse children would open up about these impulses if only they had a small group where they felt free and safe to confess their deepest, darkest desires. And so using the Christian radio DJ as an example, pedophilia as an example, inevitably makes the question about how the church ministers to sinners go sideways. In my very real and all-too-painful experience, the tragedy is not that churches take this kind of sin against children too seriously, but that they naïvely treat it just like any other sin. Pedophilia is not like any other sin. It is an enslaving, enduring compulsion. You cannot simply forgive and forget child sexual abuse. You can forgive (if in fact you are a victim of it; one cannot forgive a sin committed against someone else); but you must not forget. For the sake of the children in the congregation, you may not forget, and even for the sake of the offender, you may not forget. To forget is to invite your own culpability in the future abuse of a child. Pedophilia is not a passing phase. It is not a sin like any other sin, and it is exceptionally unhelpful to suggest that other sins like using pornography can lead just about anyone to become a child sexual predator, as this post may or may not imply (I don’t know the author’s intention, but some people read it that way, and it’s not hard to see why.) Pedophilia is typically a lifelong compulsion, a form of bondage, with which a person may struggle to their dying day—even for those who put their faith in Christ and who seek forgiveness and reconciliation. In addition, manipulation is a major part of how child sexual offenders gain access to their victims. Child sexual predators can be extremely convincing, because they have learned to be emotionally manipulative in order to gain access to their victims and to prepare (“groom”) them for abuse. And the harsh reality is this: those who prey on children will sometimes use the goodwill of decent people, including church members, in order to gain access to potential victims. Many offenders were victims of abuse themselves, but it is the nature of this compulsion that the predator will often use that fact to gain sympathy and to secure the too-easy forgiving and forgetting of persons who do not understand the nature of this sin. But we do not do the offender any favors by minimizing his or her sin, and making it the same as speeding on the highway. Worse, we put children at risk when we don’t take it seriously. The person trapped in this harmful compulsion needs grace and healing, but we can help such persons without putting children and the vulnerable in harm’s way.

Sometimes we even blame the victim. We then become complicit in the abuse; we re-abuse the victim. Please understand this: When an adult has sexual contact with a minor, it is not the minor’s fault. I have heard Christian people say, “Well, she was troubled, she was promiscuous, so it’s not all his fault. She’s partly to blame.” Yes, it is all his fault. No, she is not partly to blame. Especially if she was troubled, if she was promiscuous. The perpetrator is entirely at fault because that adult person intentionally took advantage of a child or teen who was hurting and vulnerable. That’s what sexual predators do. They have a kind of radar that can sense this vulnerability, and that’s when they start grooming their victims for abuse. The Christian community, particularly in its most conservative manifestations, often gets this terribly wrong, sometimes even blaming the victims of abuse, as this article points out. This is why it is so important that we have a Safe Church Ministry in our denomination, and why we should listen to their advice (which is forged from experience) when it comes to doing all that we can to create safe environment in our churches.

Using the radio DJ as an example made the question go sideways, but it is still a very important question. Do we create safe places for our members to experience true, transformative community? When I was administering the biblical-theological examination for Dr. Suzanne McDonald at the last meeting of our Classis, she made excellent observation that young adults are hungering for community. I think perhaps we all are. That’s why I find what Josiah Gorter and his companions are doing at The Grace House in Sacramento so interesting. But what can we do here in our corner of Gaines and Byron Townships to create a place where people can forge relationships that are more than casual acquaintances?

God calls the church to be a hospital for sinners. I can’t imagine anyone disagrees with that. But an obstacle we face is that we don’t seem to have the opportunity—we don’t have the mechanism, or a spiritual practice—by which we can open up to each other about our sins and find forgiveness and healing (James 5:16), a place where we can share our burdens and help each other carry those burdens (Galatians 6:1-2). In order to do this, we have to forge relationships that go deeper than the superficial, and that is exceedingly difficult in a culture where we isolate ourselves from each other in suburban homes, where we live in a “development” that is not quite a neighborhood in the fullest sense of the term, where we drive to and from work alone, daily appearing and disappearing behind an automatic garage door. That, to me, is the hard question. I have seen a few examples of congregations in which these relationships were fostered, in mentoring relationships, or in small groups. It can be done. The real question may be: are we willing to take the risk of being vulnerable? And will we find someone who is willing to take on, as a ministry, the work of creating these opportunities for mentoring and small group fellowship and accountability? Will we see it as just adding one more thing to our busy lives? Or would it be the one thing that we add that puts the rest of our lives into perspective? Would it be the one commitment by which we can really hear God speaking to us by his Spirit, where we can concretely feel the grace of Christ expressed in the people who together form his Body? I know that we can, because we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength. I cannot do it all myself, because I am not the Christ, and I am not the church. Nor am I exactly sure about how to do it, beyond my sense that perhaps a very intentional small group ministry would help us in the life of discipleship. Perhaps there are also other ways to meet this need; maybe some creative ideas will come from our members, or from other church leaders in our area. But I know we can do it, together, with God’s help.

Got Religion?

By Raymond Blacketer

On March 31, 2014

In Biblical Interpretation, Christian Life, Religion

Originally published in The Banner, January 2010.

I’m about to say something just a bit shocking. It’s highly controversial.

Here it is: We Reformed people are religious. The Christian faith is a religion. There, I said it.

Why is that so controversial?

It’s because “religion” has become a bad word in Christian circles. People outside the church want to be spiritual but not religious; and people inside the church want to have a relationship but not religion. In his wildly popular book The Shack, William Young has Jesus say, “I’m not too big on religion, and not very fond of politics or economics either.” It has become common for Christian leaders to claim that the good news of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with religion.

But it’s a mistake to talk about religion like that, a big mistake, with big consequences. Religion refers to the universal human characteristic of making something, or someone, ultimate in our lives, and pursuing the object of our devotion as the ultimate good. Every person, then, is religious. God made all people with a religious receptacle at our core.

Because we are designed to be in relationship to God, designed for worship and reverence, people are inescapably religious. But because of our sin, our rebellion against God, we seek to replace God with something or someone else. We direct our religion, our devotion and reverence, toward created things rather than the Creator. We create self-serving spiritualities because sin has tainted our religious longings, just as it has tainted our politics and economics and sexuality. We create alternate stories to explain the world and our place in it.

But that doesn’t mean religion is a bad word. We are religiously broken, but God’s good news in Jesus Christ enables us to experience religious wholeness. The gospel is not the enemy of religion but its true form. The gospel is the answer—a surprising and radically unique answer—to our deepest spiritual longings.

If I say that I am spiritual but not religious, what I really mean is that my homemade religious opinions are better than yours. If I say that I am rational, not religious, I mean that my faith in science is much more respectable than your belief in a God who has never made an appearance in any photos from the Hubble telescope. If I say I prefer a personal relationship with Jesus to “organized religion,” I likely mean that I have a self-centered, private kind of religion and have little use for the messiness of living in a community of worship and discipleship.

Even though all people are religious, many people deny that aspect of their humanity with an almost evangelical passion. All people have a “seed of religion” buried in their hearts, John Calvin said. Left to grow wild that seed ends up yielding nothing but weeds. But watered with the gospel and cultivated by God’s Spirit, it grows into devotion to God, blooms into discipleship, and bears fruit in service to the least and the lost of the world.

It’s extremely important for our witness to the world that we reclaim the word religion. Why? Because the gospel calls people to find the answer to their deepest longings, their religious longings, in Jesus Christ.

When Paul brought the good news to the sophisticated people of Athens, he grabbed their attention by saying, “I notice that you are very religious” (Acts 17:22). Paul used the universal human longing for relationship with the Creator—our desire for a story that makes sense of the world and history and human life—as an entry for the story of Jesus. Then he introduced the Athenians to the one God, the “unknown God,” who created them, loved them, and sent his own Son to die for them.

Rather than a human effort to obtain salvation, the Christian faith is the one religion in which God seeks us out and finds us. It is the one religion in which God comes to broken people and makes them whole again. It is the one true story about the meaning of life in this world, and it turns out to be a love story.

FOR DISCUSSION:

1. What does the word “religion” mean to you? Why does it have a negative effect on some people?

2. What does it mean to be “spiritual”?

3. How is the word “religion” tied to our Christian identity?

4. How can we reclaim this word?

5. How can we best cultivate the “seed of religion” buried in people’s hearts?

Help Wanted

By Raymond Blacketer

On March 31, 2014

In Christian Life, Pastoral Ministry

The ministry of the church is a joint effort. The calling of pastors is to “equip the saints for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Eph. 4:12). We, the Blacketers, have been here at First Cutlerville for a year and a half, but the congregation still seems very new to us in some ways. Since I have been teaching catechism immediately after the morning service, I find I have much less time to connect and interact with members. There are still many people in the congregation whom I recognize, but your name doesn’t come to me right away. We were probably introduced when we arrived, but I have this professor brain that remembers numerous dates from the life of John Calvin, but your wife tells me her name is Linda and five minutes later I call her Lynne. Some of my fellow pastors can hear a name once and remember it forever. I’m not one of them. I have to work hard at it, and I often embarrass myself by getting it wrong. And then there are many of you whose names I get right, but I still don’t know much about you; I haven’t heard your story.

So I need your help in the ongoing process of getting to know each other. One way involves the nametags that I saw everyone wearing were quite helpful when we first came. We should continue to use those, and not only for the absent-minded professor-pastor. They also help to promote a feeling of welcome and hospitality for visitors, and also new members, who still may not know very many people at First Cutlerville. And if you don’t know me very well, I would love to get to know you. Starbucks, anyone? I would like to have more pastoral visits that are just for the purposes of getting to know you and connecting with you.

And speaking of hospitality, that is another area where I need your help. We are known as a caring congregation. So I encourage you to extend that caring to the newcomer, the visitor, the person who sits on the other side of church whom you don’t know that well. It’s impossible for me to develop a close relationship with everyone in the church; but it’s not impossible for every family to make a commitment to invite a newcomer over for lunch on a Sunday.I also need your help when it comes to the vision of this congregation for reaching out into our community, and to our neighbors, to those who could really be blessed by a supportive church community like First Cutlerville. What are some of the good ministries that were happening when there were two full-time pastors at First Cutlerville? Are there ways for members to take the lead in some of these areas? Are there visitors whom you have noticed, and who may need to be connected with a Bible study, or invited to meal night?And I need your help if you are a regular attender, but you have held back from getting involved. Maybe you’re waiting to be asked. Please don’t wait. We need people like you to help out with our Gems and Cadets, or our Kids’ Hope mentoring ministry to at-risk kids in Marshall Elementary. And those are just a few examples.We’re all in this together, this thing called church—the community Jesus creates, guides, loves. He uses his bride the church to draw people to himself, and to help lost people can find their way, by encountering the love of Jesus in us. Your help is needed, and wanted.

Extremism is no Virtue, and Moderation is no Vice

By Raymond Blacketer

On December 6, 2013

In Christian Life, Christianity and Politics

“Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice.” So said politician Barry Goldwater in a famous speech. The fringes of the political right embrace this dictum. Today it seems to be the motto of political talk radio. And many conservative Christians seem to think it ranks right up there with Churchill’s wartime exhortations.

Except that it’s utter foolishness.

Lately, Christians seem to be living by this maxim, evidenced by their over-the-top political rhetoric, displayed in their Facebook feeds, their bumper stickers, and their endlessly forwarded junk emails—all the great forums of political discourse. As I write this, the top conservative radio talk show celebrity has just labeled Pope Francis a Marxist. This radio entertainer has no education in political science, economics, or theology, yet he feels competent to analyze the Pope’s recent apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) and judge him to be a commie. I roll my eyes so hard I can almost see inside my brain. This kind of incendiary ignorance promotes hatred, foments division, and fosters bigotry. But lots of conservative Christians will think it’s just great.

Don’t be one of those people.

You might think I’m talking politics. I’m not. I’m talking the Bible and the Reformed Confessions. Scripture demands that Christians use civil language in debate. “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone” (Col. 4:6). The Apostle Paul also speaks to honoring and respecting the authorities ordained by God—and in Paul’s case, these were pagan Roman authorities who persecuted Christians. Some Christians today speak with less respect and more contempt of the president than Paul did of the Roman Emperor. “Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor” (Rom. 13:7). In the Belgic Confession, art 36, we confess: “Moreover everyone, regardless of status, condition, or rank, must be subject to the government, and pay taxes, and hold its representatives in honor and respect, and obey them in all things that are not in conflict with God’s Word, praying for them that the Lord may be willing to lead them in all their ways and that we may live a peaceful and quiet life in all piety and decency.” It’s that holding them in honor and respect that has been cast aside by too many Christians who think extremism is no vice.

But a vice it is: sinful, unbiblical, arrogant, harmful to the witness of the church.

You might think I’m some kind of liberal, or a Marxist, like that commie Pope in Rome. I’m not. I shoot guns. I don’t think big government is the answer to every problem. But to call the Pope a Marxist is slanderous nonsense. His letter reflects Catholic social teaching and concern for the poor that goes back a long time. In fact, it was shared almost point-for-point by some guy named Abraham Kuyper, the Reformed theologian and Dutch prime minister. Catholic social teaching, in turn, goes back to the Bible, which repeatedly urges Israel, and then the church, to care for the poor. But a big segment of the church today (including, recently, a well-respected financial guru) assumes the poor are lazy; they all feel entitled. But such attitudes are clueless; they reveal a simplistic and self-righteous perspective on poverty. Poverty is complex; it can enslave people in a cycle from which many cannot escape just by working harder. I know poverty. When I was a child, my single parent mother bought groceries with food stamps. She was able to get out of poverty only because she had certain advantages: supportive parents and a state-subsidized university. Not everyone has or can avail themselves of such advantages. The early church cared deeply about the poor (Gal. 2:10) and gave generously to the poor. But today all some Christians seem to give them is scorn and judgment.

Barry Goldwater, after claiming that extremism is no vice, followed up with the claim, “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

Wrong again. Particularly for Reformed believers, moderation is one of the highest virtues. John Calvin ranked it near the top of his list. Listening respectfully to someone who disagrees with you is a Christlike act, because it means putting your own cherished opinions on hold for a moment, in order to respect another person who bears the image of God. As James says, “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak…” (1:19). Moderation means confessing that I do not have all the answers, that I could be wrong, that people of goodwill can disagree.

I see the same sin in politically left-leaning Christians as well. Liberals, too, can speak of those who disagree with them as dimwitted Neanderthals. But this is not the predominant temptation in our community. And not all political cartoons or humor or critical posts cross the line; civil disagreement and even parody are revered forms of free speech. But lately it seems that the line is crossed so often that it hardly exists anymore. When I see your Facebook posts that are hateful and disrespectful to our current president, I try to ignore them. But I wonder if I should. Today I saw a post (not from a member) that showed a hangman’s gallows and the words: “Recall Process Simplified.” Funny? When the comments suggest our African-American president as the prime candidate for the noose, it is pretty hard not to associate this with the racist lynchings of our recent history.

Don’t be one of those people.

Don’t repost stuff that is borderline racist. Don’t post conspiracy theories about the president being born in Kenya or being a Muslim or hating America. Those are lies, violations of the commandment about bearing false witness. Disagree vigorously with the president’s policies (I’ll often agree with you), but do so with the respect and civility that God himself requires of Christians in Scripture, which we affirm in our Confession. Remember that what you say, what you post, what you forward, reflects on you as a Christian, and thus on the church of Jesus Christ, and its witness. Because extremism is no virtue, and moderation is no vice; particularly when those who bear the name Christian speak in the public square.

Blog Reboot; And, The CRC and Science

By Raymond Blacketer

On November 26, 2013

In Biblical Interpretation, John Calvin, Reformed Theology, Science

I originally created this blog to chronicle my sabbatical during the summer of 2009. I am now rebooting it for occasional musings for the First Cutlerville CRC community and anyone else who might be interested. Like a question that I just received from a member (I will always keep your information private); but this is a general question that other members may be interested in as well.

The enquirer reports that some of his friends think that the Christian Reformed Church is either apathetic or antagonistic when it comes to reconciling science and the Christian faith. To which I reply, “Say what?!” The CRC has been a leader in tackling these issues, though there is considerable diversity of opinion among CRC members, and we have also seen significant controversy in the CRC over issues of how the Bible and science are related. Faculty members of Calvin College have often been at the forefront of investigating this relationship, and also, not surprisingly perhaps, at the forefront of the controversy as well. The CRC position on Creation and Science is summarized as follows:

All of life, including scientific endeavor, must be lived in obedience to God and in subjection to his Word. Therefore we encourage Christian scholarship that integrates faith and learning. The church does not impose an authorized interpretation of specific passages in Scripture; nor does it canonize certain scientific hypotheses. Instead, it insists that all theological interpretations and all scientific theories be subject to Scripture and the confessions. Humanity is created in the image of God; all theorizing that minimizes this fact and all theories of evolution that deny the creative activity of God are rejected.

In the 1980’s, a number of professors of the science department began investigating this relationship and published a number of books, which were met with a mixed reception. Astronomy Professor Howard J. Van Till published his book The Fourth Day in 1986 to considerable controversy, not least of all for an unfortunate analogy whereby he compared the Bible to a granola bar: one takes off the wrapper (which corresponds to the Biblical form and genre) and throws it away, and consumes the nourishing content, whatever that content may be. Thus the literary form of the early chapters of Genesis could be dispensed with in favor of the theological content.

The problem is that one cannot so easily separate form and content; the content is determined by and communicated through the form. The book was condemned by many who held to a young earth, literal six-day creation perspective as nothing but godless liberalism. It was embraced by many others as a shining example of Reformed engagement with the sciences. Others welcomed the idea of engaging the issue with rigorous thought, but were less satisfied with Van Till’s method and result. This was my assessment, and that of my seminary professors at the time. When I studied this book in the late 1980’s, I found that it was strong on astronomy (as far as I could tell) and exceptionally weak on theology, Biblical studies, and Biblical hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation). During those years I sometimes got the impression from a few scientists that, while one obviously needs a PhD to be an astronomer or physicist, any amateur can be a theologian. And today some scientists still presume to be able to dictate what is or is not possible theologically on the basis of the present state of scientific knowledge. The former Prof. Van Till, it seems, has moved beyond orthodox Christianity and appears to have embraced some kind of pantheism and/or deism. There is probably a lesson somewhere in that fact, though people will draw different conclusions as to what it means.

Another thing that is quite unhelpful is a lack of sensitivity among some Christian scientists in the manner that they raise these issues. I have encountered a few professors over the years who seemed to take an unholy pleasure in demolishing the childlike faith of their students under the guise of educating them. One, in Alberta, wrote of children’s education about the Bible and science: “The ark should float in Grade 1, and by the time students leave Grade 12 to meet me at university, someone has to have sunk the ark for them!” What he fails to notice is that this kind of cavalier approach might make a shipwreck of a young person’s faith. A similar lack of sensitivity was likely a factor in the latest outbreak of controversy at Calvin College a few years ago, when two professors, this time from the Religion department, suggested that science proves that there is no Adam or Eve. This resulted in the departure of one of the professors from the Calvin faculty. These are extremely sensitive and momentous issues, and one should employ maximal caution and humility in the claims one makes.

Without creating an ideological straitjacket, we also have to navigate what it means to have a confessional college that affirms the Reformed standards of unity. Our college is not a secular university; its constituency and its stakeholders are (at least to a large extent) the church. On the other hand, I largely appreciate the efforts of many scientists in the Reformed tradition who seek to integrate the faith into their discipline in a responsible and sensitive way. I very much appreciated the book Delight in Creation: Scientists Share Their Work With The Church, put out by the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary, part of a project they call The Ministry Theorem. I do not necessarily endorse everything in the book or on that site; but I endorse the project of keeping the conversation alive between scientists, on the one hand, and theologians and pastors on the other.

If the CRC has erred, it is not in being disengaged or hostile toward science. It would be in the opposite direction, of sometimes equating the results of science with general revelation–a serious mistake that elevates scientific findings and theories virtually to the level Holy Writ. (On this point, see the incisive critique of the 1991 synodical report on creation and science by Nicolaas Gootjes, “General Revelation and Science: Reflections on a Remark in Report 28,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 [1995]: 94-107). Our Kuyperian heritage, with all its robust intellectual richness and curiosity, has at times led us to be triumphalist about our endeavors, and to forget the noetic limits that result both from our creaturely finitude and human sin.

Thus one must be exceptionally cautious about pronouncing on the impossibility of an original human couple, or declaring doctrines such as original sin to be outmoded by recent science, as a retired CRC pastor recently claimed in The Banner. Unfortunately, this caution and humility seems to be lacking lately. At the same time, we in the CRC do have members who understand little about science and who do seem to be antagonistic toward science, often because of a certain political agenda. Thus we see members dogmatically deny the possibility that the millions of tons of fossil fuels we burn every day could have an effect on the climate, and instead desperately cling to those on the fringes of the scientific community who deny this effect. More humility all around would help.

Answers in Genesis mocks other views of the relationship of creation and science as un-Christian.

This does not mean that I am sympathetic to the so-called “Creation Science” phenomenon, which is really a kind of fringe conspiracy theory that denies the validity of mainstream science, claims human beings frolicked with dinosaurs, and tries to understand sedimentary rock formations with appeals to the biblical Flood; I am not. I think that movement (represented by organizations such as the Creation Research Institute and Answers in Genesis) represents a fatally flawed, and peculiarly North American, form of fundamentalism that is a rather different animal than Reformed orthodoxy. I would guess that the majority of CRC pastors and scientists would judge that it represents neither sound theology nor sound science. Whatever reservations I may have had with The Fourth Day, I was completely on board with the critiques by Calvin College science professors of the “Creation Science” perspective, which tends to label all differing views as apostate, and not authentically Christian, and engages in attacks and mischaracterizations of opposing views that are uncivil and intellectually dishonest (as in the comic to the right, which clearly implies that those who do not hold to a young earth creationist view do not believe the Bible). Let me be perfectly clear: this viewpoint does not represent the Reformed faith. It does not do justice to God’s Word in Scripture, because it fails to interpret it on its own terms and with appropriate attention to biblical genre, among other things. And, ultimately, it makes God out to be a liar. It undermines the veracity of God (i.e. God’s truthfulness) with such claims that God created the earth and the universe with the appearance of billions of years of age, when in fact the earth and the universe, they claim, is only six thousand years old. But why would God create an earth that appears to be that old, an antique reproduction rather than a genuine antique, so to speak? These claims are completely incoherent; they are not supported by the vast majority of scientists who are also Christians, and they have serious negative ramifications for the Christian doctrines of God and Scripture.

Leading Reformed theologians of a century ago, such as J. Gresham Machen and B. B. Warfield, did not hold these views. In fact, John Calvin himself, in his biblical commentaries, warned against reading the Bible as if it were an astronomy textbook. In his day, astronomers had discovered that some heavenly bodies such as planets were actually larger than the moon; yet the Bible describes the moon as the greater light and the stars as the lesser lights. Calvin does not smugly deny the findings of the astronomers and arrogantly declare, “Well, I believe the Bible.” Note his comments on these passages:

Calvin on Genesis 1:6 (the creation of the sky or firmament):
“For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. [i.e. how the world looks to us, from our perspective]. He who would learn astronomy, and other difficult arts, let him go elsewhere.”

Calvin on Genesis 1:16 (on the greater and lesser lights, i.e. moon, planets, stars):
“Moses wrote things in a popular style which all ordinary persons who have common sense are able to understand without additional instruction; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the wisdom of the human mind can comprehend. Nevertheless, this study is not to be rejected, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons tend to boldly reject whatever is unknown to them.”

Calvin on Psalm 136:7 (He who made the great lights, his love endures forever):
“The Holy Spirit had no intention to teach astronomy; and, in presenting instruction meant to be shared by the simplest and most uneducated persons, he had Moses and the other Prophets use popular language…”

In other words, Calvin says, the Bible describes things as we experience them on earth, and its purpose is not to give us scientific information about the universe.

Tim Keller, the solidly Reformed pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has written a paper entitled: Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople. It is well worth reading on this subject. And it is particularly relevant to the latest controversies regarding the historicity of Adam and Eve. Keller (as well as other scholars such as NT Wright) rightly warn against mythologizing everything the Bible says about the origins of humanity. His conclusion (which also represents the mainstream of the CRC) is sober and balanced: “Christians who are seeking to correlate Scripture and science must be a ‘bigger tent’ than either the anti-scientific religionists or the anti-religious scientists.”

Sensory Sacraments

By Raymond Blacketer

On February 12, 2010

In Liturgy, Pastoral Ministry, Reformed Theology, Worship

I’m preaching on Ephesians 4:1-16 on Sunday, and we are celebrating both sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We’ve been discussing the sacraments quite a bit lately in our CrossTraining services, particularly the issue of admitting baptized children to the Lord’s Table; and on Sunday we will discuss in greater depth the role of Profession of Faith, and some of the challenges we as a church face in terms of young adults who are less enthusiastic about taking that step. While I was doing research for my lesson and sermon, I ran across a book by William Willimon, an author whose writings have been invaluable to me in my preaching and teaching. It’s called A Guide to Preaching and Leading Worship, and it turned up on Google Books, which generously showed me some very interesting pages about how the sacraments connect to our senses, and by doing so, connect heaven and earth, the new creation with the old, the “sacred” and the “mundane.” Publishers shouldn’t complain too much about Google Books, because after reading these few pages, I immediately ordered the book.

Here are some excerpts from pages 40-43:

“Sacraments…are everyday objects, like bread and water, and everyday actions, like eating and bathing, that when done among God’s people in worship convey both God’s love for them and their love for God. God uses everyday things we can understand—bread, wine, water—to show us a love that defies understanding.”

Willimon talks about baptism as a communal activity. There is no such thing as private baptism, nor could there be. Willimon says, “Baptism is a sign that Christianity is not a home correspondence course in salvation; it is a sign of a social, ecclesial, familial, gracious, communal way of life.”

“What do these sacraments mean? The Lord’s Supper means everything that any meal means: love, fellowship, hunger, nourishment. These meanings are given added significance because, in this meal, we commune with the risen Christ, who joins us at the Table. People may not know what redemption, atonement, reconciliation, sanctification, and all our other big words mean—but everybody, from the youngest to the oldest, knows what a meal means. …

“Baptism means everything that water means: cleansing, birth, power, refreshment, life, death. These natural, everyday meanings of water are given added power because the water is administered ‘in the name of Jesus.’ When we baptize, the congregation ought to see, hear, and feel water. Once again, some people may not know what justification, redemption, and prevenient grace mean—but everybody knows what it means to be thirsty, to be born, to drown, or to be dirty.

“…When we worship through wine, water, and bread, when we point to human events like a meal or a bath, we are linking our faith with daily life, spirit with flesh, the heavenly with the mundane. …Therefore we do a great injustice to the sacraments when we transform them into some ethereal, detached, ‘spiritual,’ exercise that has no support in everyday experience. Specifically when we celebrate these rites, we must use wine that tastes like wine and bread that looks and tastes like the bread we had for breakfast this morning. When we baptize, we must use water in sufficient amounts so that everyone sees, hears, and feels the experience of water.”

I hope this Sunday we see and hear and smell and taste and feel the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

On Religion, to its Uncultured Pomo Despisers

By Raymond Blacketer

On January 25, 2010

In John Calvin, Missional Church, Reformed Theology, Religion

Some people are wondering why I wrote that article in the January 2k10 issue of The Banner. Well, I wrote it because they asked me to write something, and they didn’t tell me what to write, which is a pain, because then I have to think of something.

So what I came up with was a defense and exposition of the term “religion.” Why? Because religious people who think they’re not religious say silly things about not being religious. And not only in popular stuff like The Shack, or in too-hip-for-my-haircut Emergent communities, but even among learned and respected persons. The one I have in mind is one of my favorite authors and pastors, Tim Keller. Love the guy. Wish I could have gone to his church when Sandy and I were in Manhattan. Love his book/DVD The Prodigal God, and used it for a teaching series in our church. Love his The Reason for God, and his YouTube defense of the Christian faith to the employees of Google. Love his new books that have come out that I haven’t read yet.

But he said something surprising on his website promoting The Prodigal God. And I quote:

“Religion operates on the principle: I obey, therefore I’m accepted. But the gospel operates on the principle: I’m accepted through what Jesus Christ has done, therefore I obey. So religion isn’t just a little bit different than the gospel; they are diametrically opposed. And unless you actually invite people into the gospel, in distinction from religion, if you just call them to give their lives to Christ in some general way, they’ll think you’re calling them into being a good person; they’ll think you’re calling them into being an elder brother. So you have to always distinguish the gospel from religion and irreligion and as you preach, because our churches are filled with elder brothers, and they don’t know they are. All they know is God isn’t very real to them, and their faith is a kind of a drudgery to them, and unless you preach to them the difference between religion and the gospel, they aren’t going to get renewed by the Holy Spirit; they’re not going to find the gospel beginning to transform their lives. One of the best ways to do that is by preaching the parable of the prodigal son. This parable will help us live out the implications of what it means to be gospel-transformed people. Not elder brothers, not younger brothers, but people living as images of our true elder brother, Jesus Christ.”
http://www.theprodigalgod.com/video.html accessed September 10, 2009, under the “Message for Pastors” link.

Surely, Tim knows better than that, since he must be pretty well acquainted with John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and the concepts therein like the semen religionis and the sensus divinitatis. But I presume he uses this language for strategic purposes. I just don’t think it was a good strategic choice, because it’s not entirely honest, and it creates problems when one tries to explain Paul’s arguments in Romans 1 about how all people are religious, and his own evangelistic strategy in Acts 17:16ff., and the fact that religion pertains to the fact that humanity is created to relate to its Creator. I just wish he had specified that what he’s talking about is “works-centered religion”or “human-centered religion,” otherwise the statement can sound potentially shallow or misleading.

That’s why I love it that there’s a Facebook group called “I am religious but not spiritual.” And yes, I’m a fan.

The Seed of Religion, The Christian Religion, and Religion as a Ruse

By Raymond Blacketer

On July 21, 2009

In Church History, Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin, Religion

I’m reading Calvin’s Institutes, a new translation of the 1541 French edition, for a book review for Calvin Theological Journal. It’s a good opportunity to re-read the Institutes in a different form than the one I read in college a few decades ago. I just came across Calvin’s discussion, in the early pages of the first chapter, of the “seed of religion,” that sense of the divine that is in all people, no matter what their culture or civilization may be. All people are religious, Calvin says. And it’s a good reminder that “religion” is not a bad word, contrary to what we hear from many Christian writers, as well as many non-Christian writers. Religion really means: a person’s sense or perspective on the big picture. Religion has to do with what’s ultimately important in life, and in your life. Religion has to do with what drives you in life, what life is about, what life is for, what life means. For many, religion is about having a good life, avoiding pain, and trying to be as prosperous as possible, and trying not to hurt anyone in the process. For some, religion is about pretending you’re not religious, and claiming, instead, to be “spiritual.” For others, their religion is a profound faith in science and technology, together with the hope that humanity will evolve and progress and just get better and better. (It’s a good idea for those whose religion is scientific progress to avoid the reading of history, otherwise they might have a crisis of faith). I heard recently of a new science cult which adamantly denies that it is a religious movement, even as its followers zealously promote its utopian view of the future where humans and machines will merge. Sounds like evangelism to me. Sounds like a vision of heaven…or hell.

The Christian Religion, as Calvin rightly and boldly calls our faith, finds the meaning of human life in the story of God the Creator, who is also God the Savior in Jesus Christ, and God the Healer and Restorer, the Holy Spirit. This is the story of God who draws his broken and rebellious people, his runaway sons and daughters, back into relationship with him. “Religion” should never be contrasted with “relationship,” as popular Christian authors constantly do, pretending that they’ve actually solved some kind of problem, or said something profound. The catchphrase “personal relationship with Jesus” is too vague, too individualistic, to small to sustain the weight of what God is really doing in the world. He is transforming the whole creation in Christ. He is reconciling the world to himself. Of course he does this by transforming individual hearts and souls and lives, but he always does this in community. Richard Mouw of Fuller Seminary recently wrote an article for Christianity Today about the proper balance between the individual and the community in Christian consciousness. While liberal churches ignore individual conversion and transformation, Evangelical churches focus far too exclusively on the individual. He writes, “We evangelicals never downplay the importance of individuals—as individuals—coming to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. We never say that an individual’s very personal relationship to God is not important. What we do say is that individual salvation is not enough.”

Then Calvin says something that suprised me. I’m sure I read it many years ago, but I had forgotten. Calvin speaks of the universal sense of divinity, the awareness that there is a God in all people. Then he writes, “That is why it is false to say (as some do) that religion was long ago contrived by the art and clever ruse of a few people, in order to control the naive populace in decency even though the ones who were urging others to honor God had no idea of the divine. I certainly admit that some delicate and deceitful people among the pagans have forged many things in religion to make naive people afraid and cause them scruples, so that they would be more obedient and easier to order around; but they would not have succeeded in this if people’s spirits had not first been fixed on the firm persuasion that there is a God. From that source came the whole inclination to believe what was said about religion.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1541 French Edition, tr. Elsie McKee, p. 26). Calvin wrote this 300 years before Karl Marx claimed that religion was just a tool used by the powerful to control the weak. Calvin, by contrast, says that while religion might be misused in this way, such abuse of religion does not explain the universal prevalence of religion. Marxism itself was a secularized religion, complete with its own world-view, values, and vision of a utopian socialist future. Its interesting that 500 years after Calvin’s birth, the same issues are being debated. Today we have Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins touting a new atheism, and a return to “reason,” without the slightest clue that their “new” atheism is really quite old, and–even more embarrasing–it is itself a religion, a view of how things should be, an argument about the meaning of life (or lack thereof). Not only that, but their arguments against belief in God can’t even hold enough water to spawn a newly-evolved life form. Disbelief takes just as much faith as belief; the atheist is just as religious as the believer.