Luther on the Sacraments

Though some of Luther’s sacramental theology may not be agreeable to Calvinists, his view on the topic more generally can be wholeheartedly acknowledged by any who hold to the centrality of Word and sacraments:

Preserve us from that! We know well that water, bread, and wine do not save us, but how does it please you that in the Lord’s Supper it is not simple bread and wine, or in baptism it is not merely just water? Instead, God says that he intends to be in baptism. It is designed to cleanse and wash us from sin. And in the Lord’s Supper, under the bread and wine, the body and blood of the Lord Christ are given. Do you want to have contempt for God and his sign and concentrate on the water in baptism and regard it as the same things as the water that flows in the Elbe or the water with which you cook? Or do you want to regard the Word of the gospel as the words or speech that a peasant would utter in a pub or tavern? For God has said, “When the Word of Christ is preached, I am in your mouth, and I go with the Word through your ears into your heart.”Therefore, we have a sure sign and sure knowledge that when the gospel is proclaimed, God is present there. He intends to be found there. There I have a physical sign, by which I can recognize and find God. He is also in the same way in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, for he has bound himself to be there. If I run to Saint James [that is, his shrine in Compostella in Spain] or to Grimmental [a Saxon pilgrimage locale], if I go into a monastery, or seek God somewhere else, I will not find him. When the sectarian spirits preach that just as monastic life, invocation of the saints, the mass, and pilgrimages are nothing, and likewise baptism and the Lord’s supper are nothing, they miss the mark by far. For there is a big difference between that which God has ordained and established and that which human beings have set up. Indeed, you are to believe that God’s ordinances and what he has set up, revere them and hold them in great honor, as he said to Moses, too [in this text, Exod. 15:17].
In every age God has given a physical sign on this earth a person, place, or location where he wanted to be found with certainty. For where we are not bound and [our attention] caught through a physical, outward sign, every person will seek God where it pleases him. Therefore the holy prophets wrote a great deal about the tabernacle, the dwelling and house, where he intended to be present. God acted in this way again and again, and in the same way he has also built for us Christians a temple, where he intends to dwell, namely the oral Word, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, which are physical things. But our false prophets, the sectarian spirits and ravers, have contempt for this Word and discard it as if it had no power, and they say, “Yes, I want to sit and wait until a flying spirit and a revelation from heaven come to me.”

…Luther believed that God does not abandon his people to the fickle flow of their own inner thoughts and feelings. Instead, he nailed down his promise in the body of Christ on the cross and in the Word that comes from the cross in oral, written, and sacramental form.

- Robert Kolb and Charles P. Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic) 177-8.

Marilyn Manson or Ned Flanders?

What would a “Satanic” city look like? See Inwoo Lee’s post here.

Sanctification without Imputation: Just Another Self-Improvement Program

Although it is not itself a renovation, justification issues, as an effective Word, in a completely new reality. The God who declares the wicked righteous simultaneously (though distinctly) makes the dead alive. Acquittal and acceptance lead inevitably to new life and new obedience, not vice versa. While our first impulse is to return to the law and self-effort in order to stem the tide of antinomianism, Paul and the Reformers call us back to the gospel, whose power in the face of continuing sin we have not sufficiently weighed. Apart from the imputation of righteousness, sanctification is simply another religious self-improvement program determined by the powers of this age (the flesh) rather than of the age to come (the Spirit).
- Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ (Louisville, KY: WJK), 250.

Law and Love, Legal and Relational, or Law and Gospel?

Modern dogmatics and biblical theology have tended to contrast law and love, the legal and the relational, at least since Ritschl. However ironic it may seem, this is an intrusion of modern Protestant ethics on the Hebrew Scriptures and Judaism. Paul knows nothing of this contrast before or after his conversion. Love, in fact, is the fulfillment of the law–and in this he was not only following the teaching of Jesus but also of the Old Testament. For him the real antithesis that he recognized after the Damascus road encounter was not between law and love but between law and gospel, the principle of works and the principle of grace alone with respect to justification and the inheritance of all the benefits promised to Abraham and his heirs.
- Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ (Louisville, KY: WJK), 65.

In addition to the quote above, it is interesting to notice that the Heidelberg Catechism does not list the ten commandments, but Christ’s command to love God and neighbor as the requirement of the law. Christ himself says that all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. In light of this, it is puzzling to hear Christians speaking of the gospel as just loving God and others as if it is easier than keeping the whole law perfectly. Having a latitudinarian attitude towards doctrine in order to just love is nothing but reverting back to works righteousness.

Did Second Temple Judaism Understand Sinai?

Classical covenantalism recognizes that the old Mosaic order (at its foundational level–that is, as a program of individual salvation in Christ) was in continuity with previous and subsequent administrations of the overarching covenant of grace. But it also sees and takes at face value the massive Biblical evidence for a peculiar discontinuity present in the old covenant in the form of a principle of meritorious works, operating not as a way of eternal salvation but as the principle governing Israel’s retention of its provisional, typological inheritance.

Therefore, Kline adds, “Paul does repeatedly oppose a Judaistic misinterpretation of the law, but their error was not the assertion that there was a works principle operating in the old covenant. Rather, it was the application of that principle to eternal salvation instead of to the typological level of national Israel’s history.” Those who regard “covenant” as a univocal concept that is always gracious in principle have to somehow reduce, relativize, or explain away the obvious biblical references to the works-principle, treating them as merely hypothetical. Yet, Kline concludes:

The law’s principle of works was not just something hypothetical. It was actually applied–and with a vengeance. It was the judicial principle that governed the corporate life of Israel as recipient of the national election and controlled Israel’s tenure in the typological kingdom of Canaan. Termination of that typological order and Israel’s loss of the national election in the divine execution of the covenant curse in the Babylonian exile and again in A.D. 70, exactly as threatened in the Torah treaty, emphatically contradict the notion that the law’s stipulations and sanctions were mere hypothetical formulations…. On the classic covenantal understanding, the law that came 430 years later did not annul the promise (Gal 3:17)–not because the old covenant did not really introduce an operative works principle, but because works and faith were operating on two different levels in the Mosaic economy.

- Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ (Louisville, KY: WJK), 98.

Christless Christianity

If you have an hour listen to Michael Horton’s interview on his new book Christless Christianity here.

During the month of October you can purchase his book for 50% off. For information go to the Christless Christianity website.

This is the most urgent issue of the day. The seeker-sensitive movement, Emerging church movement, prosperity gospel, and sadly most Evangelical churches each have this fundamental problem at their core: Christ is not preached. Religion without the true gospel becomes moralism or some vague spirituality. It’s not enough to preach Scripture. The Pharisees were masters of Scripture, but they failed because they did not see Christ at the center. What separates Christianity from every other moralistic religion is this: ours is grounded in what Christ has done for us in history. It’s not about us “following” him as a religious teacher, but primarily about us believing in Christ as the one accomplished our redemption.

Machen on the Reformed Faith

When a man has once come into sympathetic contact with that noble tradition of the Reformed faith, he will never readily be satisfied with a mere “Fundamentalism” that seeks in some hasty modern statement a greatest common measure between men of different creeds. Rather will he strive always to stand in the great central current of the church’s life that has come down to us through Augustine and Calvin to the standards of the Reformed faith.
- J. Gresham Machen, Selected Shorter Writings (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing), 551.

What is Evangelism?

Three thousand were converted on the day of Pentecost. They were converted by Peter’s sermon. What did Peter’s sermon contain? Did it contain merely an account of Peter’s own experience of salvation; did it consist solely in exhortation to the people to confess their sins? Not at all. What Peter did on the day of Pentecost was to set forth the facts about Jesus Christ–his life, his miracles, his death, his resurrection. It was on the basis of setting forth of the facts about Christ that the three thousand believed, confessed their sins, and were saved.
…Christian evangelism does not consist merely in a man’s going about the world saying: “Look at me, what a wonderful experience I have, how happy I am, what wonderful Christian virtues I exhibit; you can all be as good and as happy as I am if you will just make a complete surrender of your wills in obedience to what I say.” That is what many religious workers seem to think that evangelism is. We can preach the gospel, they tell us, by our lives, and do not need to preach it by our words. But they are wrong. Men are not saved by the exhibition of our glorious Christian virtues; they are not saved by the contagion of our experiences. We cannot be the instruments of God in saving them if we preached to them thus only ourselves. No, we must preach to them the Lord Jesus Christ, for it is only through the gospel which sets him forth that they can be saved.
If you want health for your souls, and if you want to be the instruments of bringing health to others, do not turn your gaze forever within, as though you could find Christ there. No, turn your gaze away from your own miserable experiences, away from your own sin, to the Lord Jesus Christ as he is offered to us in the gospel. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” Only when we turn away from ourselves to that uplifted Savior shall we have healing for our deadly hurt.
- J. Gresham Machen, Selected Shorter Writings (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing), 139-41.

Holding Out Ethics Apart from Scripture’s Redemptive Core

The admixture of public and religious interests was objectionable to Machen not just because it threatened the free exercise of religion but also because it corrupted belief itself. Thus, Machen extended his critique of the mainline churches to include Protestant assumptions about the Christian character of American society which often equated Protestantism with the ideals of liberty, equality, and civic virtue. He believed that historic Christianity was fundamentally narrow, exclusive, and partisan and, therefore, could not provide the basis for public life in a free society. To do so, he argued, was to mistake ethics for salvation. Using Christian morals to promote public duties gave the faulty impression that people could do good without grace. “When any hope is held out to lost humanity from the so-called ethical portions of the Bible apart from its great redemptive core, then the Bible is represented as saying the direct opposite of what it really says.” This was precisely the danger that Machen perceived in the mainstream churches’ support for social reform. Christians and churches could still endeavor to correct society but would have to do so from a basis upon which believers and nonbelievers could agree.
- Darryl G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing), 138-39.

Conservative is Not Enough: J. Gresham Machen and the Presbyterian Controversy

Here’s an excerpt from Darryl Hart’s biography on J. Gresham Machen underlining the importance of having a church guided by theological, rather than merely pragmatic, convictions. The difference between Machen and Charles Erdmen (who, though being theologically conservative, ended up siding with the modernists against Machen) was not in doctrine, but in the priority given to that doctrine. It is one thing to believe the right things, another to emphasize those things above sentimentalism and “unity.”

Throughout the debates the Princeton faculty and administration split  split into two distinct camps. On the one side were strict Calvinists, a group that included Machen and the majority of professors (seven of eleven) and the majority of board of directors (nineteen of twenty-eight), the body responsible for faculty and curriculum. On the other side were moderate evangelicals who were led by Erdman and Stevenson and included a majority of the board of trustees (seventeen of twenty-two), the officers responsible for finances. Contrary to the view that both sides at Princeton were conservative and therefore shared identical theological convictions, in fact, these groups held different views of the importance of theology and its role in the nature and mission of the church.
- Darryl G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing), 125.