The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3D – Conclusion

Statement 7: On the Authority of the Church

We have all grown up in times where it is assumed that the church has authority in the spiritual realm and the state in the physical realm. This is a misunderstanding. Yes, the church’s authority is a spiritual authority, but we misunderstand spiritual if we presume it means non-physical. The church’s spiritual authority has effects in the physical world. When an adulterer is excommunicated he is excluded from the Lord’s table and from the fellowship of believers until such time as he repents.

This misunderstanding of ‘spiritual’ has caused an unhealthy spiritual/physical divide. The church now has abdicated its authority in the material world to such a degree that when the state government orders it to close for months because of a virus, it complies. Without even a whimper. There seems to have been no widespread outrage at the state presuming it has the authority prevent Christ’s church from gathering.

Now part of this of course is fear. Anyone in New Zealand who is even half aware of what’s going on will realise that we have not been led by particularly courageous men in these times. (I do not write this because I am courageous. I’m not and would be no better if I were a leader in the church.) We know there would be public outrage against us if we decided to flout these man-made rules. So there has been barely a whisper on the closure of the churches. So let’s not berate our leaders too much. Most of us laity too have been cowed in these times. We need to assist them and help them develop courage. They need to know we the laity are behind them. We need to encourage them. So encourage your pastor, minister or priest. Ask them about standing up to this seemingly endless shutdown of the gathering. We are, after all, the ecclesia, the church or the gathered. It’s somewhat ironic that we aren’t gathering.

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The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3C – In the Church

It’s been a week since we began our third part in The Resistance series. We are focusing on how Christians and the church have been captured by dualism. Today we are looking at statements 5 & 6 from the original article. I’ll post them here again to refresh your memories before we take a machete to them.

Statement 5: The pinnacle of service to God is full time paid Christian ministry because saving souls is the most important business on this earth. Our job in this world is to seek to see people saved from hell – worrying about society is like polishing the brass on a sinking Titanic. We are heaven bound. Earth is important but doesn’t matter as much

Statement 6: For those who are laity, their most important service of God is found in personal evangelism and doing things for the local church institution. This is what the works of service spoken about by Ephesians 4:12 is talking about – welcoming visitors to the Sunday service, playing in the music team, making cups of teas and running the AV desk.

In evangelical circles, dualism has spread to such an extent that the pinnacle of service to God is seen as full time paid Christian ministry. While many pastors and church leaders would perhaps not express the concept in such a stark manner, the implication is there in much of the church’s current practice.

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Tenacity and Intransigence

In the golden era of the Roman Empire, Pliny the Younger advised Emperor Trajan that Christians should be executed solely for their tenacity and intransigence. “Whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakeable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.”…

Would we be convicted today for being stubborn, tenacious, unbending and obstinate? It is surely undeniable that only rarely in Christian history has the lordship of Jesus in the West been treated as more pliable or has Christian revisionism been more brazen, Christian interpretations of the Bible more self-serving, Christian preaching more soft, Christian behavior more lax, Christian compromise more common, Christian defections from the faith more casual, and Christian rationale for such slippage more spurious and shameless.”

Os Guiness in Impossible People

Westminster Confession of Faith 1.6

We continue our survey of the Westminster Confession of Faith after a weeks hiatus. In our last instalment, we looked at WCF 1.4 & 1.5 and focussed our discussion on the authority of Scripture. Today we look at WCF 1.6 which highlights the sufficiency of Scripture, an important and somewhat neglected doctrine of late as alluded to in The Resistance series.

VI. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word: and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed.

There are a few key ideas we need to note as we look at this statement. Firstly, the framers of the Confession believe that God’s written Word is complete. It is the whole counsel of God and nothing is to be added to it. This includes adding to it now with new revelations of the Spirit or adding on the traditions of men. So for example, there are those who become concerned that you haven’t had God ‘speak’ to you and others who rely on a ‘Word from the Lord’ from spiritual people in their congregations. While these might be nice and encouraging, they are not necessary, and God’s Word provides you with everything you need to live a God-honouring life. At the other end of the spectrum, you might have some churches that believe church traditions are needed to supplement God’s Word. We must not add to Scripture and we do not need to.

Secondly, there is the idea of sufficiency that we have already flagged. God’s Word contains all things necessary for the glory of God, man’s salvation and the life of faith. What we need is either expressly written down in the Scriptures, or by Spirit-filled reasoning can be deduced. This deduction from Scripture is not without danger, and incorrect deductions can be made. However, the practice itself is not wrong. Indeed Christ himself deduced things from Scripture. When dealing with the Sadducees on their silly question about the woman who had seven husbands who died he said, “And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.” This is a clear case of deducing the resurrection from the grammar of the text.

So what are the implications of this truth of sufficiency? Firstly, God has provided us all we need to be saved and to live for God’s glory. Scripture teaches this. Peter says, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.” Obviously, salvation can only come through the Word by the Spirit. However, for those who have the Spirit, the Word provides us with everything we need to live a life pleasing to God. This is how Paul sees things when exhorting Timothy. He says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

Now we must be careful not to misinterpret what is being said here. The scriptures do not talk about every topic there is. There are some things that Scripture does not touch on and God does not intend it to touch on. It is not, for instance, an engineering textbook, nor is it a book on nuclear physics. This is not a problem. God reveals to us all we need to know to bring glory to him and please him, but he gives us the opportunity to explore his world and discover what he has not revealed in Scripture directly as dominion makers. Then there are other things that He has not revealed and we cannot discover (Deuteronomy 29:29).

Finally, the writers of the Confession point out that there are some things that we ought to use our God-given wisdom in as Spirit-filled Christians. There are principles in Scripture that we ought to take and apply, but there is room for interpretation and wisdom in applying these in practical situations. The framers of the Confession point to the worship of God and the government of the church. For instance, the timing of our weekly gathering, whether we meet in a home or at a church building or how we run our annual general meetings are all examples of things Christians can use ‘the light of nature’ and ‘Christian prudence’ to decide. They are very careful to point out however that even in these situations the general rules of the Word must be observed.

The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3B – Economics

Statement 4: On Economics

What about Economics? How is our dualism seen here? Again many Christians do not think the Bible has much to say about Economics, when in fact, it is a central topic of Scripture. This is going to be a longer section because to the degree this topic has been neglected or dealt with superficially we ought to correct common unbiblical assumptions on wealth.

God created mankind for dominion over the earth. We were designed to rule over it and develop it and build a God-honouring culture. Wealth is an integral part of this. As early as Genesis 2 we see that God has placed gold nearby ready for his vice-regents to find. Although ultimately owning everything, God plainly approves of private property and disapproves of the confiscation of this property. We see this implicit in the Ten Commandments numbers 6 through 10. It is wrong to steal a man’s life, his wife, his property, his reputation or even to enviously covet what he has.

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The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3A

In the initial article in this series, we highlighted the perilous times we live in and outlined what we believe to be the approach Christian resistance ought to take. We began with repentance both individual and corporate. Last week we investigated how crucial the Word, the Spirit and prayer are to our efforts and I outlined some of my experiences as I have grown in this area of family life. Today we focus on one of the biggest issues the Church in the West faces, that of dualism.

We must confront the Church’s unholy dualism and learn once more to apply the lordship of Christ to all things.

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Techno Gnostics

…there will always be natural limits to the humanity and size of our churches. The optimum size of human communities that are bonded by face-to-face relationships, we are told, is around the magic number of 150 to 200. So as soon as any human community goes above that number, whether in the direction of a megachurch, with its tens of thousands, or a megacity with its tens of millions, it requires coordinating in ways that are other than face to face and fully human – whether lightly through the interconnections of the social media or more heavy-handedly through authoritarian political control. The nature and impact of that form of coordination then become critical.

For better or worse, these different ways of bringing and holding people together have their own identifiable dynamics that in the end will always determine the quality of the larger community. Modern megacities have reached a size that creates intrinsic problems of their own, and there can be grandiose hi-tech forms of the church that have similar problems. They will appeal to the techno-gnostics who lionize the brilliance of disembodied video images and abstractions and disparage what St. Francis humbly called “Brother Ass.” But they will never prove to be the wave of the future. The neighbourhood parish church is not just the church of the past but the church of the future. Scorned and overshadowed though it may be at times, it will never be outmoded while humans are humans and have bodies.

Os Guiness in Impossible People

Calling a Spade, a Spade

A Whole New World

Traditionally, in the West, lying has been seen as a vice and not a virtue. However, thanks to the growing influence of Critical Theory, this perspective has been flipped on its head. Instead of living by the truth and seeking to understand God and the world as they really are, our society seeks to impose outrageous lies upon us. In many ways we have cooperated with these lies without realising it.

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The Resistance – The Word and Prayer – Part 2C

Yesterday we sought to give some practical suggestions which will help Christians make the Word and prayer central to their households. This is an essential step as we build the Christian Resistance and seek to see New Zealand turn back to Christ. As each family cell in the Resistance is led by men who prioritise the Word and prayer, we should expect to see God working great things. His Word will not return to him empty but will achieve the purpose for which he sent it out (Isaiah 55:11). And we know that purpose: it is that the knowledge of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14).

4. Hold to the Sufficiency of Scripture Practically

It is also vital that as we read the Scriptures we hold to the sufficiency of Scripture. And I don’t mean just nod intellectually to this concept. I mean actually believe and act upon it. The Apostle Paul wrote these words that most Christians know by heart. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) Paul argues that Scripture can be applied so that the man of God can be complete and equipped for every good work.

Do we know what to think about helping the poor? The Scriptures are sufficient for developing a robust and Christ-honouring approach. Do we want to know how Christians should respond to the COVID-19 lockdowns and potential vaccine mandates? We should search the Scriptures. Do we want to know whether redistributive tax policy is a Christian approach to government? We have the Scriptures which enable us to be equipped for every good work, whether it is in politics, family life, work-life, economics or science.

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