Body of Divinity 3

In attempting to formulate a proper illustration that coalesce proper church government and a compulsory--and normative--obligation for church attendance, I was bemoaned to find one. However important it was for me to find a suitable illustration, Calvin's Geneva looked like a Republic, respectively. And that being the case I sought to find a political jeremiad, like the current state of the economy, and relate it to the current state of Christian theism and her view of the Church. Unfortunately, many imbibe a sort of existential view of the church in its current malaise. There are more citations of Sartre (in philosophy) and Kierkegaard (theology) than there is of Christ in the Church. Calvin, too, bemoans this in his Institutes; if it was found in his day, it most certainly will be found in ours. Christians think more of their outlook than their theology; and if they do think of their theology, it is bereft of a proper theology of God as a Covenant Lord—yes, I didn't misspell it by adding the article "a"—and the theology of the Church. In evaluating the current state of the Church, we then must churn (or postulate with the proper Biblical data) a proper view of those two ideas.

Christians today hardly have an acquired knowledge of philosophy, so I will have to do some defining without too long a respite (or taking too much time in defining all my terms and ideas).

Herman Bavinck, best known for his voluminous Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (Eng. "Reformed Dogmatics") in four volumes, wrote a compendium of that work in brief form. The title of that work is called Our Reasonable Faith which he published in 1909 under the title The Wonderful Works of God. The content of that work seems to be concentric to a Jesucentric theology, meaning it is surrounded around Christ and Redemption. Having browsed only in cursory detail, after he deals with the Christian doctrine of sanctification he outlines his doctrine of the church by which the Christian receives the benefits of Salvation and all that follows it. In his short volume, he surveys and properly shows that the Christian, to be called a Christian, must unite himself to her (the Church); in other words, one cannot be duly called a Christian without belonging to the Mother Church. He also notes that like a natural birth, one needs a father and a mother. In the same manner, the state of the Christian as a Christian (Christian qua Christian) contains anthropologic faculties, like the one stated above: God is Father and the Church is the Mother. My apparent dilemma surrounded not the benefits of salvation and the Church but the necessary binding of the Christian to its mother, the Church. However, in this climate of intellectual promiscuity—also called thus by me in a letter called "A Public Letter to the Christian Church: Intellectual Promiscuity"—the church has largely forgot her place in this present evil age (Gal. 1:4). This is the outline or preliminary course, the reason for writing this, of the beginning of my Body of Divinity. Many notables in theology have already taken this stand in the public arena, like Dr. M. Horton, professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Seminary California, Professor R. Scott Clark who is author of Recovering the Reformed Confession. I only hope that this serves as a private attempt to correct many in the Christian community to forsake her existential philosophy in religion and begin thinking in more Reformed ways, that is, that a true and systematic theology is a biblical one. (In fact, Iwould treat the terms Reformed and biblical almost synonymous, since they imply each other.)

Francis Schaeffer wrote in his The God Who is There that existential philosophy entered into religious thought after the modernism of Immanuel Kant. How that affects the Church as a structure impacts many areas of theology, more specifically in the area of Justification and Law (see Horton, Christless Christianity, chapter 3). For instance, Horton notes that the idea of Law and gospel have become so equivocal that deeds are often mistaken for gospel, and vice-versa: All A is B and all B is A. This is just bad logic:

P1. All horses have four legs.

P2. Therefore, all four legged creatures are horses?

Is this really the thinking of contemporary theology (religion)? In similar parlance (or manner in speaking), people who belong or belonged to the church would think like this: All of life is worship; therefore going to church is similar to an everyday occurrence of worship. Though in some qualitative sense it is true that going to church is worship and that all days in the Christian life is worship, there is a difference. However, this same logic of equivocation is pervasive in the thinking of modern Christians. This equivocation has produced an amassed pessimism in the church and a call for existentialism. This pessimism is seen under a two-story approach; Schaeffer called it "the line of despair."

RATIONAL = CRITICAL (PESSIMISM)

SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIAL = LEAP OF FAITH (OPTIMISM)

Those who deny the Reformed view of the church typically fall under these two categories. Which really shocks me is that those who claim the upper story tend to lend their ears to a formal lower story: "I am the church; ergo, I don't need the church." Do you see the equivocation here? One affirms "the church in themselves" (step 1) and in effect denies the church (step 2) by the end of the syllogism. The Christian cannot even begin to define his or her "Christian-ness" without falling into the sea of skepticism, the upper story. So what does the Christian do? He falls into the sea of existential thought. Somewhere along the line we stopped doing Biblical-exegetical thinking. We have forgotten the Lord who instituted the Church, the sacraments, church discipline in Paul's writing, etc. These means of grace are now seen under this two-story approach, i.e., it is either a rational matter (critical pessimism) or an existential matter (naïve optimism).