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.

Dr. Craig Higgins, Pastor of Trinity Church in Rye, New York wrote an article in the Journal of Biblical Counseling, “Spiritual Formation and the Lord’s Supper: Remembering, Receiving, Sharing,” which I mentioned yesterday when I shared a Robert Bruce quote from the article. I have put together a reflection on the article that largely agrees with it, focusing on elements of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) and its Shorter Catechism (SC). The goal here is not in any way to project that this is the only way to read the WCF or SC but it is a way that I find is both plausible and has historical precedent.[1]

WCF 21.5. The reading of the Scriptures with godly fear, the sound preaching and conscionable hearing of the Word, in obedience unto God, with understanding, faith and reverence, singing of psalms with grace in the heart; as also, the due administration and worthy receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God: beside religious oaths, vows, solemn fastings, and thanksgivings upon special occasions, which are, in their several times and seasons, to be used in an holy and religious manner.[2] (emphasis added)

I read this section of the WCF chapter entitled “Of Religious Worship, and the Sabbath Day” and see that there is a list given of liturgical elements that are at the very least assumed to be part of “ordinary religious worship.” I take “ordinary religious worship” to mean at least Sunday Worship but conceivably more often. [3] The list is essentially 1) Word preached to obedient hearts, 2) singing, and 3) sacraments.

Section 5 comes in the context of 21.1) Worship must be scriptural, 21.2) Triune, and 21.3-4) lawfully prayerful. So, the implication from my reading of the WCF seems to be clear. If we lack the preaching of the word in our corporate worship is that not un-ordinary? If we did quarterly sermons, would that not be un-ordinary? The same with singing. Interestingly, prayer seems to be assumed as the atmosphere but not listed out as one of these “parts of the ordinary religious worship of God.”

My point about the Eucharist in light of the WCF is furthered when we take in to consideration the list that follows the phrase “are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God.” There we see things that appear most obvious to be the sorts of things that would be appropriate in Corporate Worship but unnecessary. Hence, even the explicit “upon special occasions” and “several times and seasons” is given.

In elucidating the vital role that Word, Sacraments and Prayer play in the spiritual health of a believer, the Shorter Catechism Questions 85 - 96 answer the question “What does God require of us to escape the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin?” Answer: Faith, Repentance and the diligent use of all the outward means where by Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption. (Dr. Higgins points this out in his article). Those outward means are of course defined as the Word, Sacraments and Prayer - all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation (Q88). The sacraments are those sensible signs which Christ has blessed and in which the Spirit works to give us Christ and the benefits of the New Covenant (Q92).

Dr. Higgins also made mention of Q92 in the paper. Frankly, the language of representing and sealing can obfuscate the matter (at least to contemporary ears). Either Christ is given or he is not. Certainly he is represented; we would expect that if Christ is given in something instrumentally or otherwise. Whatever the case, we have established it is Christ who is given and in giving himself in the Eucharist we are “made partakers of his body and blood” to our “spiritual nourishment and growth in grace.”

Scripture teaches at least this about the Eucharist and it is, after all, our confessional document returning us to the tradition of our fathers which is the milieu in which we both interpret scripture and execute its practice. We submit ourselves to scripture in the context of tradition that we may not be impaled upon the pike of private interpretation, dislocated from the Church that has handed down to us the faith that we hold dear.

That being said, let me ask a question that is intended to provoke discussion, but not wrath or divisiveness. Does any minister or church body have the prerogative to withhold the very means of grace given to us by Christ from His sheep at any point of Ordinary Religious Worship especially when our own Presbyterian tradition has said that the Eucharist is part of the “ordinary religious worship of God?”

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[1] I am writing to a Presbyterian audience, but I hope that any Christian would be able to engage this article.

[2] Thanks to Matt Bradley for pointing these distinctions of the WCF out to me.

[3] In other words, it would be quite un-ordinary if churches decided to meet only monthly to engage in corporate worship.

In light of the post a few days back on The Role of the Eucharist in the Sanctification of the Christian, I found a great article by Dr. Craig Higgins, Sr Pastor of Trinity Church PCA in Rye, New York. I commend the article, Spiritual Formation and the Lord’s Supper: Remembering, Receiving, Sharing (Summer 2006, Vol 24, No 3, pp 71-78), to you and wanted to share an insightful quote from Robert Bruce, the Scottish Reformation era pastor on the nature of Christ received in the Eucharist:

It is certainly true that we get no new thing in the Sacrament; we get no other thing in the Sacrament, than we get in the Word. For what more would you ask that really to receive the Son of God himself? Your heart can neither desire nor imagine a greater gift than the Son of God, who is King of heaven and earth…. Why then is the Sacrament appointed? Not that you may get any new thing, but that you may get the same thing better than you had it in the Word. (Robert Bruce)

HT: Paul Buckley at Words, Words, Words for directing me to this article and to Pastor Craig for writing it.

I am a member of The Inclings, a most wonderful reading group at Church of the Incarnation. The group is modeled after The Inklings, the reading group of which C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers and J. R. R. Tolkien were part.

The Inclings hosted a dinner with Archbishop Josiah Fearon last Thursday, September 27, that I was quite interested in attending. This past Sunday, September 30 was the deadline given by the Archbishop of Canterbury for the Episcopal Church USA to repent of their irregular ordination of the openly homosexual Bishop Gene Robinson and submit themselves to the 2006 Windsor report.

As many have said, this issue of the ordination of Gene Robinson is ‘not all about sex’. It is about the authority of scripture, consideration to the tradition of interpretation of scripture by those Christians who have come before, submission to those in authority, the failure of bishops to discipline their dioceses and simply doing what one says one will do. While this is a very brief summary, it is not my intent to get into the intricacies of the controversy in the Anglican church here. Rather, I want to remind my readers of the gravity and most basic nature of the controversy.

Over a hundred years ago Presbyterians were going through a similar controversy, the Modernist Controversy. Scripture was being denied as authoritative and consequently doctrines that the church catholic has confessed for hundreds of years as orthodox were being jettisoned. The controversy then in the Presbyterian Church and now in the Anglican Communion have the commonality of being fought over the authority of Scripture. It is my hope that the outcomes of the two controversies will be radically different. The Modernist Controversy sent the Presbyterian Church into a splintering spiral as you will see in the “Presbyterian Family Connections” diagram to the left.

In that fracturing, from my limited Presbyterian perspective, at least two significant and perhaps unexpected things occurred in the course of the century that would follow. First, the parts of the Presbyterian Church that resisted the Modernist Hetrodoxy have become precisely modernist. We resisted the notion of “I think therefore I am” and in resisting it, as Focault reminds us, we have become the very thing we resisted, saying now “I think therefore I believe.” Second, and relatedly, the Presbyterian Church has lost sight of its historical richness, settling for a broadly evangelical blandness, something that John Williamson Nevin and the Mercersburg movement were seeing when Princeton Seminary was still historically orthodox.

It is not that belief is somehow unrelated to thinking, but that the foundation of our belief has subtly shifted to a conservative form of modernism, which is other than the Spirit working through the Word, Sacraments, Prayer and the mystery of Providence to convict and convert sinners.

So what will be the case for the Anglican Communion? Will they splinter into a self-extinguishing spiral? Archbishop Fearon had some poignant words to share last Thursday evening. The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas has become significantly less conservative (for lack of a better term) because three large parishes have pulled out of it. This makes it far more difficult for those orthodox churches remaining.

In the address, Archbishop Fearon said that Americans do not like to be told what to do and that they have a propensity for trying to find simplistic solutions to any problem regardless of how complicated it is. “When America sneezes,” he said, “the rest of the world catches a cold.” The answer for the rest of the world is not “Advil.” The fight is going to be long for the Anglican Communion. The question is whether or not the orthodox elements, estimated to compose 70% or more of the Communion will stick together and persevere in prayer. I commend to you this informal address by Archbishop Josiah (linked below) and to pray for the Anglican Communion in this dark hour.

If the audio file cannot be listened to successfully using the player above, please visit the audio page containing this address and others at the Church of the Incarnation website. There is also an interview with Archbishop Josiah at the Anglican Planet that you may informative.

In my pilgrimage presently the Lord has my heart grieving over the fracturedness of the Church of Christ and the splinteredness of the fracturedness.  When Dante enters the intellectual Heaven of the Sun, where the great doctors of the Church have discourse, he then concludes that their perspectives of the truth, their partial truths have resolved into the One Truth. ¹ In light of this I wonder, just how much of the division and canibalism in Christ’s Church is not due to some Jack and Jill sort of arrogance that we can see all sides of even small things.  If all things are created to tell us something of the Creator then might we not do well to include more mystery in our thinking and contemplation.  Allowing for the ineffable is at least a component of spiritual health.

For low among the dunces is his place
    Who hastens to accept or to reject
    With no distinction made ‘twixt case and case;

Thence come rash judgments, mostly incorrect
    And prejudiced, and stubborn all the more
    That self-conceit shackles the intellect.

Worse than in vain does any quit the shore
    To fish for truth, the fisher’s art unknowing -
    He’ll not return the man he was before;

…

No one should ever be too self-assured
    In judgement, like a farmer reckoning
    His gains before the corn-crop is matured,

For I have seen the briar a prickly thing
    And tough the winter throug, and on its tip
    Bearing the very rose at close of spring;

And once I saw, her whole long ocean-trip
    Safe done, a vessel wrecked upon the bar,
    And down she went, that swift and stately ship.

Let Jack and Jill not think they see so far
    That, seeing this man pious, that a thief,
    They see them such as in God’s sight they are,

For one may rise, the other come to grief.²

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¹ Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy III: Paradise. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 21.

² _____., Canto XIII, 115-123, 130-142.

Kevin D. Johnson at Reformed Catholicism has made another post that has grabbed my attention. Given the scope of Nielsen’s Nook (pastoral, ecumenical, irenic), there are a number of reasons I bring this lengthy post to your attention here. I summarize the article here:

Johnson had been a supporter of the Federal Vision (FV) in its initial articulations from 2002. Today he wonders whether FV is as consistent with Reformed theology as once claimed. In the last year of pastoring a church, and I take it - existentially feeling the weight of responsibility for those in his care, he has begun to think differently about the matter. He asks the question:

Is Federal Vision theology the appropriate pastoral response to the nominalism apparently latent in the late twentieth-century Reformed world? In the last five years has Federal Vision theology capably addressed this and related issues with any sort of effectiveness in calling youth and children back to Reformed or Presbyterian churches?

In his pastoral critique of FV he warns against of a tendency in which obedience to the commandments is emphasized in contradistinction to being a regenerate covenant member. Johnson sees this resulting in a sort of skewing of the work of preaching.

Second, a danger of raising clergy (teaching and ruling elders) to a place of authority which is contrary to historic Presbyterian polity and just as alarming is the resultant “negative treatment of women.”

Third, including himself explicitly here, Johnson states that:

… Federal Vision theology has often served to muddy the waters concerning the grace of Christ operative in the life of believers and in and among the Church.

Fourth, Johnson argues that to the degree in which Presbyterian and Reformed churches leave their Reformed traditions for Episcopalian/Anglican or Roman Catholic communions, FV demonstrates itself pastorally impotent to “properly combat nominalism in Reformed circles.”

Fifth, while Johnson argues elsewhere that the two sacraments of the Reformed churches are undervalued, he sees FV as swinging “the pendulum” too far. The result is that the sacraments become the emphasis and begin to eclipse the Lord Jesus who is signified in them. He gives a anecdotal illustration here of children in worship services in paedocommunion congregations who are allowed to sleep undisturbed through the entire liturgy except when the bread and wine are received. He makes a fine point when he says:

it is high time that gospel-centered, Christ proclaiming preaching took center stage again in these environments. The sacraments mean nothing without the accompanying Scripture being proclaimed in our services and I see more change in a congregation when the Word is properly proclaimed then I ever have through devotion to the sacraments.

He concludes by calling FV proponents to not hide behind misunderstanding, but to acknowledge the significant pastoral problems involved in adopting FV theology. While Johnson does not use this terminology, he seems to be arguing for the engagement of a semper reformanda disposition, a spirit of prayerful scriptural self-correction. Seeking to combat the nominalism that is present in Reformed churches (in those who propound FV, in those who oppose FV, and in those who don’t care) is a good thing; however, the answer does not seem to be without but has been with us since the beginning:

Heartfelt Holy Spirit inspired regeneration of the hearts of men who rely exclusively on Christ, the preaching and presentation of Christ in our churches, a centering on the grace of the gospel of Christ–these are the things that will fix nominalism in our churches and it is what will keep us away from implementing solutions which really can be a departure from the gospel if we’re not careful. We should be thankful for the heritage we have in those that have gone before us and look back once again at the classic formulations of our faith–’the faith once for all delivered to the saints’.

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Read Kevin D. Johnson’s post, “Problems with Federal Vision Theology and Practice” for yourself at Reformed Catholicism. When I posted this there were 114 comments on the post. I had not read them all but the ones I did read were stimulating.