Sola Scriptura: the Scriptures are self-relevant
The following are thoughts about comments that have been made over at Steve Camp’s blog regarding the emergent church (again).
It really does matter what we do and say in our ministry of the gospel. The Bible outlines what is right and what is wrong, not only in our belief, but in our practice. It is the text that tells us what God accepts as valid in ministry and what he doesn’t. Ministry is not a one-size-fits-all. Christ’s statement about “the broad way” and “the narrow way” has everything to do with our entrustment of the gospel. Just because a ministry has numbers does not necessarily mean that God applauds it. “Success” in ministry can be manufactured to look like the real thing (see 1 Cor. 3:15). It *is* possible to compare contemporary ministry philosophy and methodology with Scripture’s prescription for ministry and say, “this isn’t biblical”.
We hear much today about the need to be relevant. While it is true that we must make sure that we are not imposing artificial barriers between the proclamation of the Word and our flocks, we must always insist that The Word is self-relevant. This is the essence of Sola Scriptura, the belief that the Bible is sufficient for life and godliness that functioned as the backbone for the Reformation. The Scriptures do not need our help in being relevant to the culture. If they did need our help, our helpful efforts would function as the authority for life and godliness, not the text. The gospel needs no "enablement" help in order to be more real or “impactful” to the people who hear it.
Dan Kimball, author of “The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations”, has stated that he believes much of our worship, including the use of pulpits, pews, and rhetorical preaching are examples of how the church in history, including the reformers have contextualized the gospel in order to make the gospel and the Word culturally relevant. And he believes Calvinists have been party as much to contextualization of the gospel, as some of us are now have critiqued the Emerging Church (I find it interesting that he and others in the EC movement have taken to using Calvin “against” Calvinists).
Some have suggested that the Calvinists and the emergents are talking past each other. Steve and Dan are not talking past each other. The issue is not contextualization, but how contextualization is defined and the methods being employed in the name of contextualization. Of course the gospel is contextualized, if by contextualization one means how the message is conveyed. Steve isn’t against contextualization per se. After all, he’s been giving the gospel message in a rock and roll package for the last 50... uh... 30 years. :-) Contextualization isn’t the point. Dumbing down the message in the name of contextualization is the point.
Those who are conservatives in the EC make the claim that they can contextualize and are contextualizing the gospel and the faith once for all delivered to the saints without dumbing down or changing the message. And therein lies the rub and the flashpoint for debate. While those of us in the reformed and Calvinist community agree that the message *can* be contextualized, the methods being employed even by conservatives in the EC movement go beyond what is compatible with scripture in contextualization. For instance, shock preaching, despite the feeble attempts to ground its use in Pauline practice, is beyond what is compatible with scripture in contextualization. Devaluation of the proclamation of the word in preaching by making it merely one of many components of worship (rather than THE primary impetus for the assembly as is reflected in the NT) is beyond what is compatible with scripture in contextualization. And this list could be extended ad infinitem.
To reiterate what I think grates some of us about even the conservatives in the EC movement (those who attempt to place themselves within orthodoxy and ground themselves in the text), the EC movement is Arminianism in postmodern clothing. If one studies closely the critique against the EC movement one realizes it is very similar, if not the same, to the critique that has been made against the seeker-friendly models: the seeker/worshipper/congregant has been placed front and center as the primary consideration for contextualization. Being “missional” has replaced intentional growth and evangelism as the primary purpose for the church’s existence on earth; yet, the underlying paradigms are essentially the same. While we’re all for evangelism and winning people to Christ, and influence on culture and social reform is all well and good (though the cultural transformation that pervades the EC paradigm is also problematic...that’s another discussion), we must insist with our Reformed forbears that those are not the primary purposes for the church’s existence on earth. These constructs are inherently Arminian and ultimately, unbiblical.
The “missional” model is still shackled by Charles Finney’s moralism which for the past 150 years has generally defined the church as an agency of personal and community reform. The church was not left here on earth to win the world for Christ. The church is not biblically defined, either explicitly or implicitly, as “missional”. Evangelism is *a* function of church body life, but not THE primary purpose for its existence Bringing glory to God in the proclamation of the Word in preaching and sacrament *is*, to put it simplistically, the biblical understanding of the primary purpose for assembly; God’s people, having fed on Christ in word and sacrament then spread God’s fame through image-bearing over the whole of the earth is the biblical understanding of the kingdom expansion.
Even the missional model continues Finney’s shift of emphasis from Word and sacrament to the personal reform of the individual and social reform employed by the corporate body. Oh sure, the decisionalism that marked Finney’s paradigm and the generations that followed is consummately modern....as are the consumerist rock concerts that pass for worship services in many contemporary ministry models. But the EC doesn’t escape the critique against anthropocentric methodology in ministry. The EC, just like the contemporary church (what the EC calls *modern*), is infatuated with studying the culture. Thinking it has improved on the seeker-friendly paradigm it considers too modern, the EC still employs demographic and psychographic research to get the pulse of the culture. Much time and energy is spent, not just on contextualization, but finding the right contextualization, as if the church’s biggest sin would be to misinterpret culture. And it’s all done in the name of “mission”...helping the congregant experience the kingdom as Jesus would have experienced it. In the end, it’s the *experience* and *mission*, not the objective Word and sacrament, that rules the methodology. And *that* kind of methology in which the experience of the participant is central to the ministry is precisely our complaint.
The reality is that, regardless of the fact that the EC is not monolithic, there are *some* philosophies that are common to most, if not all, of the EC movement. There are some things in McLaren, Jones, and Bell that are common to Driscoll, Kimball, and Stetzer. One of the common philosophies, though its articulation is unique to the one who is doing the articulation, is what I’ve mentioned above: the church’s relationship to the culture is driving the ministry paradigms. What we see in the EC is the same “Enlightened” characteristic we see in the older church growth, seeker friendly movement: the enculturalization of the church. Culture, in the name of “mission”, is driving the agenda. Even though it has shifted the emphasis from the individual to the community, in the end, the EC has not shed modernity’s anthropocentrism. Its desire to not misinterpret culture and thus possibly fail the church’s (so-called) mission is its own indictment. The result is a church which is no different than the culture.
The infatuation with the culture is most prominent in the MarsHillification of missiology. The EC is addictively enamored with Acts 17. It doesn’t take more than 60 seconds for the EC proponents to throw Mars Hill into every discussion over methodology, as if the sole reason for the event’s inclusion in Luke’s contribution to the canon is “Missiology 101”. The Mars Hill card is overplayed. Way overplayed, as in the way John 3:16 was overplayed in Finneyan decisionism. Why not be enamored with “Herod’s Hall” where J-Bap lost his head or “Felix’s Festhaus” where Paul ensured his own imprisonment? Surely there are a multitude of other “missional” examples to be pulled from the text. Why this one? Because the culture is pagan like ours? Paul caused a riot in pagan Ephesus when he told them they had false gods. Surely he had forgotten to “contextualize” like he had done at the Areopagus.
The reality is that Paul’s missiology at the Areopagus is no different than his missiology at Felix’s Festhaus or John’s at Herod’s Hall. The only thing missing in the story is a riot and a headless corpse. Contra the claims made by even conservative ECer’s, Paul did not soft-pedal the gospel or adjust it to his audience. He used a pagan poem. But the pagan poem was a slap at Greek mythology, not an ethos-builder. Nearly the entire sermon is biblical language drawn from the OT. Do we really think the Mars Hill pagans understood the "righteousness" Paul speaks of in the manner in which he is using it? (Ps. 9:8; Isaiah 2:12) Do we really believe that those pagan philosophers steeped in Aristotelian rhetoric knew what he meant by "appointed"? "made the world and everything in it"? (Isaiah 42) "Adonai of heaven and earth"? (Deut. 10:14) "breath"? (Gen. 2:7) "temples made by man"? (Chron. 2:7) "repent" (Ezek. 18:30). It is highly improbable that the Athenians knew the full extent of any of these OT terms and references. Yet Paul doesn’t shrink from *proclaiming* an objective Word from the Septuagint. And he emphatically lands on the objective Resurrection of Christ, an offense to any Greek worth his Zeus salt. Paul saturated his speech with the Septuagint as “enticements” to get his pagan audience to pick up a Koine copy of the OT and be Athenians like the Bereans... if they didn’t riot first.
And this misinterpretation of Acts 17 isn’t the only example of the EC’s faulty hermeneutic, especially in its use of Acts as justification for miscontextualization of the gospel. The EC reads like a “back to Acts” movement, as if everything about our church body life and our worship has been contextualized beyond biblical recognition. Kimball believes that the worship gathering today is barely recognizable from what the early church practiced. Not only is there a presumption that we know just *what* the early church practiced (as if the book of Acts is exhaustive in its description), again, the reality of what the text says was taking place in Acts and what the EC tells us was true of the early church aren’t all that compatible (further... and I don’t have time to get into here... there is an implicit denial in the “back to Acts” mentality that our current ecclesiology represents a divinely ordained progression of ecclesiology in redemptive history; IOW, the Great Shepherd who has been overseeing his church in redemptive history from his throne never planned for the church to function “just like it did in Acts”). Did the early church have pulpits? No. But the pulpit (and robe) is representative of another biblical reality of the early church: the centrality of the word proclaimed in preaching and sacrament. The presence or non-presence of a pulpit is not the issue. Singing before or after the sermon is not the issue. The centrality of the Word proclaimed in preaching and sacrament *is* the issue. And while it is true that there are various applications of contextualization of that proclamation, it is not true that the proclamation itself has multiple applications. And it is not true that our preaching today bears little resemblance to the early church’s preaching. There’s only so many ways the Word preached and the Word given in sacrament can be prominently central in the assembled body of believers on a Sunday. The proclamation has never been dialogue. It has never been discussion. Yet the emphasis on the Word as conversation and dialogue is the way some in the “back to Acts” movement seemingly portray the practice of the early church. The text (and history) simply doesn’t bear out that portrayal.
We applaud the desire of some in the EC movement to move the church away from the consumer driven models of ministry. The answer for what ails evangelicals is not more programs and self-help groups. The EC has rightly fingered many of these ailments. But its answer to date has been replacing one anthropocentric paradigm for another. Despite the EC’s shift from the inward focus of the consumer model, the missional focus is still centralized in the individual and his/her participation in the kingdom. Personal experience is still primary. What was once called “seeker” is now called a “postmodern” and the postmodern is dictating the ministry paradigm (via contextualization) rather than Christ through His text. The EC would have us believe that for disciples to be made and God’s fame to be spread one must get in touch with the culture. The text doesn’t call us to get in touch with our culture. Christ through His text objectively calls His people to gather and feed on Him through the Word proclaimed in preaching and sacrament. It is through the proclamation of the faith once for all delivered to the saints that disciples are made of all nations and God’s fame is spread over the whole earth. -- crb
It really does matter what we do and say in our ministry of the gospel. The Bible outlines what is right and what is wrong, not only in our belief, but in our practice. It is the text that tells us what God accepts as valid in ministry and what he doesn’t. Ministry is not a one-size-fits-all. Christ’s statement about “the broad way” and “the narrow way” has everything to do with our entrustment of the gospel. Just because a ministry has numbers does not necessarily mean that God applauds it. “Success” in ministry can be manufactured to look like the real thing (see 1 Cor. 3:15). It *is* possible to compare contemporary ministry philosophy and methodology with Scripture’s prescription for ministry and say, “this isn’t biblical”.
We hear much today about the need to be relevant. While it is true that we must make sure that we are not imposing artificial barriers between the proclamation of the Word and our flocks, we must always insist that The Word is self-relevant. This is the essence of Sola Scriptura, the belief that the Bible is sufficient for life and godliness that functioned as the backbone for the Reformation. The Scriptures do not need our help in being relevant to the culture. If they did need our help, our helpful efforts would function as the authority for life and godliness, not the text. The gospel needs no "enablement" help in order to be more real or “impactful” to the people who hear it.
Dan Kimball, author of “The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations”, has stated that he believes much of our worship, including the use of pulpits, pews, and rhetorical preaching are examples of how the church in history, including the reformers have contextualized the gospel in order to make the gospel and the Word culturally relevant. And he believes Calvinists have been party as much to contextualization of the gospel, as some of us are now have critiqued the Emerging Church (I find it interesting that he and others in the EC movement have taken to using Calvin “against” Calvinists).
Some have suggested that the Calvinists and the emergents are talking past each other. Steve and Dan are not talking past each other. The issue is not contextualization, but how contextualization is defined and the methods being employed in the name of contextualization. Of course the gospel is contextualized, if by contextualization one means how the message is conveyed. Steve isn’t against contextualization per se. After all, he’s been giving the gospel message in a rock and roll package for the last 50... uh... 30 years. :-) Contextualization isn’t the point. Dumbing down the message in the name of contextualization is the point.
Those who are conservatives in the EC make the claim that they can contextualize and are contextualizing the gospel and the faith once for all delivered to the saints without dumbing down or changing the message. And therein lies the rub and the flashpoint for debate. While those of us in the reformed and Calvinist community agree that the message *can* be contextualized, the methods being employed even by conservatives in the EC movement go beyond what is compatible with scripture in contextualization. For instance, shock preaching, despite the feeble attempts to ground its use in Pauline practice, is beyond what is compatible with scripture in contextualization. Devaluation of the proclamation of the word in preaching by making it merely one of many components of worship (rather than THE primary impetus for the assembly as is reflected in the NT) is beyond what is compatible with scripture in contextualization. And this list could be extended ad infinitem.
To reiterate what I think grates some of us about even the conservatives in the EC movement (those who attempt to place themselves within orthodoxy and ground themselves in the text), the EC movement is Arminianism in postmodern clothing. If one studies closely the critique against the EC movement one realizes it is very similar, if not the same, to the critique that has been made against the seeker-friendly models: the seeker/worshipper/congregant has been placed front and center as the primary consideration for contextualization. Being “missional” has replaced intentional growth and evangelism as the primary purpose for the church’s existence on earth; yet, the underlying paradigms are essentially the same. While we’re all for evangelism and winning people to Christ, and influence on culture and social reform is all well and good (though the cultural transformation that pervades the EC paradigm is also problematic...that’s another discussion), we must insist with our Reformed forbears that those are not the primary purposes for the church’s existence on earth. These constructs are inherently Arminian and ultimately, unbiblical.
The “missional” model is still shackled by Charles Finney’s moralism which for the past 150 years has generally defined the church as an agency of personal and community reform. The church was not left here on earth to win the world for Christ. The church is not biblically defined, either explicitly or implicitly, as “missional”. Evangelism is *a* function of church body life, but not THE primary purpose for its existence Bringing glory to God in the proclamation of the Word in preaching and sacrament *is*, to put it simplistically, the biblical understanding of the primary purpose for assembly; God’s people, having fed on Christ in word and sacrament then spread God’s fame through image-bearing over the whole of the earth is the biblical understanding of the kingdom expansion.
Even the missional model continues Finney’s shift of emphasis from Word and sacrament to the personal reform of the individual and social reform employed by the corporate body. Oh sure, the decisionalism that marked Finney’s paradigm and the generations that followed is consummately modern....as are the consumerist rock concerts that pass for worship services in many contemporary ministry models. But the EC doesn’t escape the critique against anthropocentric methodology in ministry. The EC, just like the contemporary church (what the EC calls *modern*), is infatuated with studying the culture. Thinking it has improved on the seeker-friendly paradigm it considers too modern, the EC still employs demographic and psychographic research to get the pulse of the culture. Much time and energy is spent, not just on contextualization, but finding the right contextualization, as if the church’s biggest sin would be to misinterpret culture. And it’s all done in the name of “mission”...helping the congregant experience the kingdom as Jesus would have experienced it. In the end, it’s the *experience* and *mission*, not the objective Word and sacrament, that rules the methodology. And *that* kind of methology in which the experience of the participant is central to the ministry is precisely our complaint.
The reality is that, regardless of the fact that the EC is not monolithic, there are *some* philosophies that are common to most, if not all, of the EC movement. There are some things in McLaren, Jones, and Bell that are common to Driscoll, Kimball, and Stetzer. One of the common philosophies, though its articulation is unique to the one who is doing the articulation, is what I’ve mentioned above: the church’s relationship to the culture is driving the ministry paradigms. What we see in the EC is the same “Enlightened” characteristic we see in the older church growth, seeker friendly movement: the enculturalization of the church. Culture, in the name of “mission”, is driving the agenda. Even though it has shifted the emphasis from the individual to the community, in the end, the EC has not shed modernity’s anthropocentrism. Its desire to not misinterpret culture and thus possibly fail the church’s (so-called) mission is its own indictment. The result is a church which is no different than the culture.
The infatuation with the culture is most prominent in the MarsHillification of missiology. The EC is addictively enamored with Acts 17. It doesn’t take more than 60 seconds for the EC proponents to throw Mars Hill into every discussion over methodology, as if the sole reason for the event’s inclusion in Luke’s contribution to the canon is “Missiology 101”. The Mars Hill card is overplayed. Way overplayed, as in the way John 3:16 was overplayed in Finneyan decisionism. Why not be enamored with “Herod’s Hall” where J-Bap lost his head or “Felix’s Festhaus” where Paul ensured his own imprisonment? Surely there are a multitude of other “missional” examples to be pulled from the text. Why this one? Because the culture is pagan like ours? Paul caused a riot in pagan Ephesus when he told them they had false gods. Surely he had forgotten to “contextualize” like he had done at the Areopagus.
The reality is that Paul’s missiology at the Areopagus is no different than his missiology at Felix’s Festhaus or John’s at Herod’s Hall. The only thing missing in the story is a riot and a headless corpse. Contra the claims made by even conservative ECer’s, Paul did not soft-pedal the gospel or adjust it to his audience. He used a pagan poem. But the pagan poem was a slap at Greek mythology, not an ethos-builder. Nearly the entire sermon is biblical language drawn from the OT. Do we really think the Mars Hill pagans understood the "righteousness" Paul speaks of in the manner in which he is using it? (Ps. 9:8; Isaiah 2:12) Do we really believe that those pagan philosophers steeped in Aristotelian rhetoric knew what he meant by "appointed"? "made the world and everything in it"? (Isaiah 42) "Adonai of heaven and earth"? (Deut. 10:14) "breath"? (Gen. 2:7) "temples made by man"? (Chron. 2:7) "repent" (Ezek. 18:30). It is highly improbable that the Athenians knew the full extent of any of these OT terms and references. Yet Paul doesn’t shrink from *proclaiming* an objective Word from the Septuagint. And he emphatically lands on the objective Resurrection of Christ, an offense to any Greek worth his Zeus salt. Paul saturated his speech with the Septuagint as “enticements” to get his pagan audience to pick up a Koine copy of the OT and be Athenians like the Bereans... if they didn’t riot first.
And this misinterpretation of Acts 17 isn’t the only example of the EC’s faulty hermeneutic, especially in its use of Acts as justification for miscontextualization of the gospel. The EC reads like a “back to Acts” movement, as if everything about our church body life and our worship has been contextualized beyond biblical recognition. Kimball believes that the worship gathering today is barely recognizable from what the early church practiced. Not only is there a presumption that we know just *what* the early church practiced (as if the book of Acts is exhaustive in its description), again, the reality of what the text says was taking place in Acts and what the EC tells us was true of the early church aren’t all that compatible (further... and I don’t have time to get into here... there is an implicit denial in the “back to Acts” mentality that our current ecclesiology represents a divinely ordained progression of ecclesiology in redemptive history; IOW, the Great Shepherd who has been overseeing his church in redemptive history from his throne never planned for the church to function “just like it did in Acts”). Did the early church have pulpits? No. But the pulpit (and robe) is representative of another biblical reality of the early church: the centrality of the word proclaimed in preaching and sacrament. The presence or non-presence of a pulpit is not the issue. Singing before or after the sermon is not the issue. The centrality of the Word proclaimed in preaching and sacrament *is* the issue. And while it is true that there are various applications of contextualization of that proclamation, it is not true that the proclamation itself has multiple applications. And it is not true that our preaching today bears little resemblance to the early church’s preaching. There’s only so many ways the Word preached and the Word given in sacrament can be prominently central in the assembled body of believers on a Sunday. The proclamation has never been dialogue. It has never been discussion. Yet the emphasis on the Word as conversation and dialogue is the way some in the “back to Acts” movement seemingly portray the practice of the early church. The text (and history) simply doesn’t bear out that portrayal.
We applaud the desire of some in the EC movement to move the church away from the consumer driven models of ministry. The answer for what ails evangelicals is not more programs and self-help groups. The EC has rightly fingered many of these ailments. But its answer to date has been replacing one anthropocentric paradigm for another. Despite the EC’s shift from the inward focus of the consumer model, the missional focus is still centralized in the individual and his/her participation in the kingdom. Personal experience is still primary. What was once called “seeker” is now called a “postmodern” and the postmodern is dictating the ministry paradigm (via contextualization) rather than Christ through His text. The EC would have us believe that for disciples to be made and God’s fame to be spread one must get in touch with the culture. The text doesn’t call us to get in touch with our culture. Christ through His text objectively calls His people to gather and feed on Him through the Word proclaimed in preaching and sacrament. It is through the proclamation of the faith once for all delivered to the saints that disciples are made of all nations and God’s fame is spread over the whole earth. -- crb
posted by Chad Richard Bresson at 10/17/2006 11:03:00 PM
2 Participation
