Nielsen’s Nook

Introduction

What follows is a piece that I needed to write for myself and those around us who love us and pray for us. If you are hunting for polemic, I pray you will be greatly disappointed here. Rather, this is a personal reflection about personal reasons that my family and I joined the Episcopal Church. It is an attempt to articulate these reasons which have led me away from pastoral ministry in the vibrant Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) to pursuing holy orders in The Episcopal Church (TEC) which is at the best in dire tumult.

Our confirmation in the Episcopal Church on June 1, 2008 was the culmination of a complicated process that started while we were serving in Russia from 1998-2002, flowed through Westminster Theological Seminary (WTS) and was tutored by John Calvin and other pre-modern scholastic reformers. This is a short documentary of self-realization and pilgrimage. It is one with which you will likely find all sorts of inconsistencies and yet it is my journey, together with my wife and daughter. I hope you will also find a sincere pursuit of the Lord Jesus who lives and reigns with the Father and Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

I have a feature in my blog engine that alerts me when people cite a post I have written. While that sounds like a cool feature, it was quite strange when I saw today for the first time a citation of an article I wrote, entitled “A Reformed Liturgical Diet,” from October 2006. The article itself is an exegesis of the Westminster Shorter Catechism which was aimed to show that Reformed churches have historically had a much higher view of the Sacraments than present day instances.

As one who deeply loves, cherishes and practices expository preaching, you can imagine my shock when the name of the post citing “A Reformed Liturgical Diet” was entitled “Expository Preaching under attack.” I would have appreciated the opportunity to interact with the post 2 years ago; however, since I didn’t then, I will do so now. So before you go any further, please take a moment to do the following:

1. Read my original post A Reformed Liturgical Diet
2. Read Expository Preaching under attack at the Two-Edged Sword blog including the comments.

A Two-Edged False Dichotomy

First, for the record, I believe deeply that expository preaching is crucial in the churches of Jesus Christ. So I take exception to the way I have been misrepresented. Preaching is “Christian storytelling” and it is every bit as sacramental as the Lord’s Table. God, after all, is not words of any language. He certainly transcends the confines of vocabulary and exegesis. Nevertheless, the Church has been picked up and carried throughout history through the Spirit’s attending to the preaching of the Word of God. In fact, I would say that to the extent we unfold the Word of God to the people is the extent to which God empowers the sermon. The point of my article is to urge readers back toward the balanced liturgical diet given us in the Scripture of Word and Sacrament. To pit the preaching of the Word over against the Sacraments is a false dichotomy, at least in the Christian economy.

Second, historically speaking the Reformers were fighting for an increased frequency of the Lord’s Table in worship. At the time of Luther the Eucharist was celebrated only once a year and then the laity only received the cup. Calvin is fairly clear that he would have preferred a weekly communion but had to settle for quarterly with the council at Geneva. So it is a bit strange to me, historically speaking, to hear modern-day Reformed so dismissive of sacraments for which our tradition gives instances of those who were once willing to give even their lives for them. Calvin’s seminary graduates had a life expectancy post graduation of about six months. Influences on Calvin, perhaps we should call them teachers, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli in turn had great impact on Thomas Cranmer such that the 1552 Book of Common Prayer is dedicated to Vermigli.

Third, when “Mr. Baggins” comments that “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about. They are attacking preaching itself,” I am compelled to remind us all that my piece was an exegesis of the Westminster Shorter Catechism on the subject of the Lord’s Table itself. I have spent a bit of time in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, in particular to study the nature of the Sacraments in the life of the Reformed churches. I do not want to impute such lack of engagement to Lee at Two-Edged Sword; however, Mr. Baggins makes assertions without even hobbit sized amounts of substantive argumentation. Consequently, it is hard to see how he is not dismissing the Westminster Confession and significant influences on its development like John Calvin and other Magisterial Reformers all in one broad stroke.

In short, I would expect that Lee and I have different universes of discourse in approaching the question of the role of the sacraments in the life of the Church. John Chrysostom would never have gone for preaching apart from the sacraments and yet he is held up as substantiating Mr. Baggins assertions. What I leave you is not a gauntlet (for I have no desire to engage in polemics here); but, instead an exhortation to consider how Chrysostom, himself a huge influence on Calvin and other reformers, would approach the balance that has historically always existed between Word and Sacrament.

Chapter 14 of Calvin’s Institutes is a marvelous treatise on the Sacraments, which are “another aid to our faith related to the preaching of the gospel.” [1] It is the words that accompany the Sacraments that makes them what they are. [2] “A sacrament is never without a preceding promise but is joined to it as a sort of appendix, with the purpose of confirming and sealing the promise itself, and of making it more evident to us and in a sense ratifying it.” [3]

At this point Calvin seems to be saying, that God conveys grace to his people through the symbiosis of Word and Sacrament. It is not “enough if the priest mumbled the formula of consecration” to himself; rather, the words of institution should be “added to the element and it will become a sacrament.” As such the sacrament “requires preaching to beget faith.” [4]

Sacraments as Seals

Calvin then deals with an objection that apparently was contemporary with him. The objection went something like this. If the word that precedes the sacrament is the true will of God then the sacrament adds nothing to it. If the word that precedes is not the will of God, then the sacrament that is predicated on that word will not teach it.

Calvin replies concisely that the sacraments function much like government seals. If the seals were attached to a blank piece of paper, these seals would be in vain; however, when they are “added to the writing, they do not on that account fail to confirm and seal what is written.” [5]

The sacraments, being signs or tokens of God’s covenant, are therefore, “exercises which make us more certain of the trustworthiness of God’s Word.” As “visible words,” sacraments represent “God’s promises as painted in a picture.” [6] Calvin goes on to say that we are free to call sacraments “the pillars of our faith”:

For as a building stands and rests upon its own foundation but is more surely established by columns placed underneath, so faith rests upon the Word of God as a foundation; but when the sacraments are added, it rests more firmly upon them as upon columns. Or we might call them mirrors in which we may contemplate the riches of God’s grace, which he lavishes upon us. For by them he manifests himself to us (as has already been said) as far as our dullness is given to perceive, and attests his good will and love toward us more expressly than by word. [7]

Conclusion

It seems explicit that for Calvin, to have the word alone, preached or read, is expressly deficient in the attestation of God’s good will and love towards us. That is not to say that the Word is not sufficient for our salvation. Rather it is to say that the Word on its own terms establishes the sacraments as an outward means by which Christ communicates to us Himself and all the benefits of redemption.[8] As such “Christ is the matter or (if you prefer) the substance of all the sacraments; for in him they have all their firmness, and they do not promise anything apart from him.” [9]

I’d welcome your reflections on this. I would expect, but cannot promise, that my wife will have a pretty insightful reflection on this at Per Caritatem.

[1] Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John Thomas McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., The Library of Christian Classics ; V. 20-21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 4.14.1.

[2] Ibid., 4.14.6.

[3] Ibid., 4.14.3.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 4.14.5.

[6] Ibid., 4.14.6.

[7] Ibid. Emphasis added.

[8] This is purposefully Westminster Confession language which I hope will be helpful for Reformed Christian readers of a Presbyterian or Reformed heritage. See specifically questions 85-97 in the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

[9] Calvin, 4.14.16.

For further reading see, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology)

The introduction and first section of Osborne’s article in the IVP Dictionary of Paul and His Letters is concerned with “recent hermeneutical issues.” It is where Osborne defines foundational trajectories that will carry and influence the more practical sections of the article the follow. The scope of my interaction here is not to critique each of his interactions with the variety of interpretive traditions Osborne critiques, but to identify and briefly reflect upon some of the foundational elements of Osborne’s own thinking that seem to rise to the surface as he considers these other interpretive traditions. Osborne begins:

Classical hermeneutics has always identified the goal of interpretation as ascertaining the author’s intended meaning. Even in the Middle Ages, with the “four-fold sense” (literal, allegorical, tropological/moral, anagogical), scholars felt they were drawing out the meaning of the text (the “literal sense” on which the other senses were based). Recently, however, this approach has come under increasing attack, as attention has shifted from the author to the text (semiotic theory) and then to the reader (postmodern theories) as the locus of meaning.¹

Classical hermeneutics (CH) is a term that this writer wishes would be defined rather than assumed. From this opening paragraph, CH is clearer only by way of remotion. It is not obvious whether it includes the hermeneutic of the Middle Ages, which employed the so-called ‘four-fold sense’. However, CH is apparently other than (and over against?) the traditions Osborne considers in this section on “recent hermeneutical issues.”

I am encouraged to see Protestants considering interpretive traditions that precede the Reformation. However, it does not seem clear that Reformers saw their own hermeneutical methods as antithetical to the medieval tradition’s many senses of scripture. Nevertheless, the abuses of fanciful interpretations were surely something reformers sought to avoid.

Calvin may provide an interesting addition here. One of the greatest differences this writer sees between Calvin and his own Presbyterian and Reformed heritage is the interaction and employment of the patristics. Gamble observes that while Calvin rejects the allegory of Augustine, Origen, Jerome and other patristics, “he also maintained that there were many senses of Scripture.”²

At this point, I believe we have only clarified a bit of the scope Osborne may have had in mind with CH. If as Protestants the rubric of classical hermeneutic is going to truly be classical, i.e., connected to Christian interpretation throughout history, then it would seem to be necessary to make room for Calvin and Luther. Calvin rejects allegory while Luther employs it; both adhere to a multi-sense meaning of scripture.

If what is meant by classical hermeneutics is narrowly the notion that only the grammatical historical approach has been recognized by the church as legitimate, then we find that such a narrow scope on the definition becomes problematic. For such a narrow definition, seems to cut out those reformers who most certainly held that the meaning of the text was much larger than the so called “literal sense.” Luther, being an Augustinian monk, is known for his allegorical interpretations of scripture.

If the narrow scope is more representative of Osborne’s view then “classical hermeneutics” seems to not be so classical at all. It would not seem to account for patristic, medieval, or Reformation hermeneutics that all hold that the meaning of the text is multidimensional in its meaning.

Yesterday, Kevin Johnson at ReformedCatholicism.com has started a thoughtful discussion on the centrality of preaching in the worship of the church. Or better stated of all the outward means that the Holy Spirit uses to nourish Christ’s sheep, the preaching of the Word is central. The comments are worth reading too as the discussion unfolds.

I am preaching on Psalm 70 several times over the next month. This is a psalm that was referenced by many Eastern writers in the third and fourth centuries as a great aid to prayer. In fact the monks included it in their “hours” of prayer. It does seem to be a prayer that one is wise to pray always, whether at the heights of faith or at the depths of despair. No one stays on the mountaintop. We are broken by sin and will take the blessing of God’s presence and grow content. Indeed we are all poor and needy.

It is precisely this idea of repetitiveness that the Enemy uses to torment Christ’s sheep. We fall and fall and fall. We find that we wrestle with the same stinking stuff every day. Satan would have us believe that the struggle is a sign of death and infidelity. Christ has declared that it is a sign of the new Life beating back sin and death in us. So John Calvin comforts those who will hear:

Although I was miserable and poor, God did think upon me. As according to the extent in which any one is afflicted, so is he despised by the world, we imagine that he is disregarded by God, we must, therefore, stedfastly maintain that our miseries in no respect produce on the part of God a feeling of weariness towards us, so that it should become troublesome to him to aid us.¹

My wife and I not knowing much about fine art, purchased a course on the paintings on display in the Louvre and have been amazed at all that can be found in a single painting. One famous painting, now infamous thanks to Dan Brown, that we learned about was the Mona Lisa. Up to this point, my education on the Mona Lisa was through Looney Tunes. I was stunned to see how much professor Richard Brettell was able to open my eyes to the painting I have seen all of my life: the angular and mysterious landscape beyond the young woman in the picture for example - or the smirk on her face.

You will notice in John 1:35-51 the phrase “come and see” is used three times (twice in v 39 and in v 46). A question that the Gospel of John elicits at this point in the narrative is, “What do we expect to see when we come?”

John has given us a tremendous prelude to his Gospel in John 1:1-18. The one who made all that is has come to dwell with us in the flesh, demonstrating himself to be the exegesis or explanation of the Father. John the Baptist is introduced in John 1:19-34, testifying as the forerunner to the Incarnate Word described in the previous section. He adds one more significant detail to our understanding of the Incarnate Word. This Incarnate Word is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. This is the second categorical bomb that we read in John. It explodes our minds and fills us with hope.

So when we come to our section (1:35-51) we find a transition between the public ministry of John the Baptist and that of Jesus of Nazareth. It is no small thing to see one as regarded as John the Baptist directing his disciples Andrew and an unnamed disciple to follow Jesus (v 37). It builds upon our sense of expectation and yet the question remains: what is it that we are expecting?

Jesus does not wait for Andrew and the unnamed disciple to ask, but asks them, “What are you seeking?” Jesus begins the dialog of faith. These first disciples, the church of two, come and stay (μενοω) with Jesus. Whatever they ’saw’ in him during their time together moved them to tell others that he was the Messiah or Christ. Shouldn’t we also be amazed at the way Peter ‘comes’ to and ’sees’ Jesus. The first apostle among equals, Peter, was not the first whom Jesus called. He came through his brother Andrew. As Calvin exhorts us, “none of us, however excellent, may refuse to be taught by an inferior”.¹ Second, Simon is given a new name. In the Old Testament names were given on the basis of what had happened in the past (compare Genesis 17). Here Simon is renamed Peter on the basis of all that the Incarnate Word would make the future to be.

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¹ John Calvin. Calvin’s Commentaries (electronic ed.;, electronic ed. Garland, TX: Galaxie Software, 2000), Jn 1:40.

Recently my church has compiled a list of books that different pastors here felt were instructive on prayer or helped them to pray better. I have added a few of my own to the list and would love to hear from you, if you have suggestions. Please leave those suggestions as comments here from which all may benefit. Each listing is linked and will take you to the book on Amazon.com if you would like to purchase it:

• Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer
• So Amazing, So Divine: A Guide to Living Prayer
• Augustine on Prayer/No.171/04
• The Practice of the Presence of God: Writings and Conversations
• Purpose in Prayer: Library Edition
• Dangerous Duty of Delight: The Glorified God and the Satisfied Soul (LifeChange Books)
• A Journey to Victorious Praying: Finding Discipline and Delight in Your Prayer Life
• Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire: What Happens When God’s Spirit Invades the Hearts of His People
• Fresh Faith: What Happens When Real Faith Ignites God’s People
• When God’s People Pray: Six Sessions on the Transforming Power of Prayer (Zondervangroupware(tm) Small Group Edition)
• The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions
• Effective Prayer
• Praying the Savior’s Way: Let Jesus’ Prayer Reshape Your Prayer Life
• Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer & the Christian Life
• Lord and His Prayer
• The Lord’s Prayer for Today (New for Today) (New for Today)
• The Transforming Power of Prayer: Deepening Your Friendship With God
• Prayers from The Confessions
• Pray With Your Eyes Open: Looking at God, Ourselves, and Our Prayers
• Prayer That Works
• Madame Jeanne Guyon: Experiencing Union with God Through Inner Prayer & the Way and Rescues of Union with God (Pure Gold Classics)
• A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers
• Praying: Finding Our Way Through Duty to Delight
• Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (2 Volume Set) [Book III]
• On Prayer: Conversation with God

My wife and I are working to get a grasp on the sacraments and what the Bible teaches us about them: i.e., what they are, what they do, and why God gives them to us. One thing we have noticed in even a cursory consideration of the topic is that relative to the Protestant Reformation, viz. the Magisterial flavor, there has been an unbelievable degradation of the sacraments in the practice of Reformed and Presbyterian churches.One trajectory I am exploring with the help of Keith Mathison’s book, Given for You: Reclaiming Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, is that many Reformed and Presbyterian Protestants are quite estranged from their traditional heritage. For example, ninety-nine percent of the discussions I hear on Calvinism all revolve around the so called Five Points (as if Calvin were that simplistic) and hinge on the doctrine of Predestination. It is a strange contrast over against this contemporary caricature of Calvin (by self-professing Calvinists!!) that we find two significant points.First, Calvin does not address predestination until Book III of the Institutes which is the pastoral section, the place where Calvin seeks to comfort believers directing them to their assurance in Christ. Calvin did not lead with predestination and seems to primarily use the issue as a means of pastoral comfort to his believing readership.

Second, the orbit of Calvin’s theology does not circle around the constellation of the so called Five Points. By way of reminder, the Synod of Dordt did not convene until 1618. Calvin died May 27, 1564 in Geneva. The Dutch Reformed controversy with Jacob Arminius was not something to which Calvin was speaking (obviously). What does in fact seem to be the center of Calvin’s theology is the idea of Union with Christ (not predestination).

It is this center of Union with Christ which informs Calvin’s understanding of the Sacraments. “According to Calvin, each of the two sacraments [i.e., Baptism and the Lord's Supper] is related to the believer’s union with Christ. Baptism is connected with the believer’s initiation into mystical union with Christ. The Lord’s Supper is connected with the believer’s ongoing continuation in this union.”[1]

Recently, a PCA pastor friend of mine shared with me a story of a time he was at a baptism as a congregant in another church. He was sitting in the balcony and noticed that during the baptism, which in PCA churches is performed at the front of the sanctuary, two young men in the pews in front of him were goofing off, sending text messages to each other and basically dismissing the ritual. After the service, he reached forward and touched their shoulders. They spun around to face him and he said to them, “You missed it.”

They replied, “Missed what?”

“You missed the baptism,” he said.

“So? … I guess we did.”

“There was grace in that for you and you missed it,” the pastor continued.

My friend explained to me that baptism is not simply for that little baby in the front of the church, but it communicates the grace of Christ to the community of believers, the cloud of witnesses as it were, who very much are participating in the infant’s baptism. There is much assurance for the believing witnesses.

Calvin seems to resonate with a similar thought in the way he seems to have understood the sacramental union between the signs and the things signified. Mathison elucidates four main points. First, the union between the two is so close that the sign and the signified are practically identical. Second, the sign does not become the thing signified. A distinction is always maintained. Third, there is no analogy for this union in the natural realm, the only exception being the Incarnation. Fourth, Calvin consequently sees the Incarnation, the everlasting union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ, as the analogy that serves to govern his thought on the mystery involved in sacramental union.[2]

Unfortunately, this is but a jotting for me this morning and as such I think and hope I have laid out some notions that Mathison sees (and I have seen) in Calvin that for most readers will sound strange to their ears. The dissonance comes from two sources in the Protestant West. First, we do not understand our own tradition and in many cases we stand on the shoulders of mere caricature, something other than what has historically been Reformed Protestant tradition. Second, for reasons about which I might only speculate now, the Protestant West has largely forgotten the Incarnation and its cosmic ramifications upon all humanity and especially those whose life is now in Christ.

May God have mercy, sending His Spirit that all of the minds of all of His people would be all the more illumined. Amen.

[1] Keith A. Mathison, Given for You : Reclaiming Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Pub., 2002), 19.

[2] Ibid., 22.

I have always found it fascinating how much Calvin interacted with St. Augustine; however, did you know that he interacted tremendously with the Early Church Fathers? What is even more fascinating to me is how many Reformed people these days have forgotten that they come from a long meandering church tradition that stems from the Roman Catholic tradition and is influenced significantly from the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Luther simply wasn’t the first Christian. :-)

So let me share some statistics from Calvin’s work that I hope shows the girth of his interaction with the Fathers and other Saints of the Church:

• Name: (Commentaries # of references), (Institutes # of references)
• Irenaeus: (12), (12)
• Justin Martyr: (6), (1)
• Tertullian (35), (25)
• Origen (63), (2)
• Athanasius (3), (6)
• Gregory Nazianzen (1), (1)
• Bernard (5), (70)
• Augustine (275), (393)
• Ambrose (55), (51)
• Basil the Great (0), (1)
• Clement of Alexandria (2), (0)
• Clement of Rome (1), (0)
• Cyprian of Carthage (16), (50)
• Cyril of Jerusalem (2), (0)
• Pseudo-Dionysius¹ (1), (0)
• Eusebius (61), (4)
• Hilary (8), (11)
• Jerome (522), (37)
• Hipolytus (19), (0)
• Ignatius (1), (3)
• John Chrysostom (227), (56)

These are only a handful for which I had time to electronically search tonight. The numbers may be off a little because I did not have the time to read through every citation that my software showed as a hit. Nevertheless, I think this demonstrates that Calvin was very self-consciously standing on the shoulders of those who came before him, those with whom he agreed and those with whom he did not.

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¹ Pseudo-Dionysius was known to Calvin as Dionysius the Areopagite, referenced in his commentary on 2 Cor 12:1-5.