Between the Apostles
and the Parousia: Bearing the Burdens of Change
and of Knowledge
This is the time in which we are now
living. It continues and is like the apostolic age in many ways: the
already and the not-yet, the empowerment of the Spirit, the
Great Commission mandate, looking forward to Jesus' return. It is
also different in some ways: the charismatic gifts of prophecy
and tongues (I believe) have ceased, being replaced in effect by
the written canon of apostolic teaching. The apostles as leaders
of the church have been replaced by elders and deacons,
officers whose teaching does not have the foundational
infallibility of the apostles, but which must be subject to that
apostolic authority in the Word. There are also, of course, changes
of cultural and social kinds, changes in technology and the
like. Through all the changes, however, God is present with his
people: in the word, in the sacraments, in the body of believers, in
the Spirit's inward witness.
Historical change is an important
part of the ethical situation. As we apply the law of God, we must
understand how it applies to each situation that comes before us. That
work never ends. We may not assume that the Reformers or the Puritans,
for example, finished the task, no matter how great our respect
for these great ministers of the word. The Puritans did not have
to evaluate nuclear warfare, genetic engineering, modern science,
or the "new age" from Scripture; but we cannot avoid those tasks
in our own time.
I must warn you against taking
certain popular shortcuts. (1) For example, it is not scriptural to
approach ethics with a mere traditionalism, a desire merely to emulate the
Christianity of a past age. Whether or not we believe that past ages
were "better" than this one, our mandate is not to repristinate or recreate a past situation; it is to
apply the scriptures to the situation of today. I fear that some Reformed
churches seek to be mere museum pieces: historical artifacts where people
can go to hear old-fashioned talk and experience older forms of
church life; spiritual versions of Colonial Williamsburg.
On the contrary, Christian worship is to be contemporary (because it must be intelligible, I Cor. 14), and
the church's preaching must adapt (insofar as Scripture permits) to the
language and habits of the target population (I Cor. 9).
(2) The task is also avoided
illegitimately by people who pit divine sovereignty against human
responsibility and therefore refuse to make use of modern technology,
demographic studies, etc. All modern tools must be evaluated by the Scripture
as to what we should use and how we should use it. But the fact
that God is sovereign in salvation does not invalidate human
study, strategy, plans, techniques, efforts. Otherwise there would be
no point in seeking even to communicate effectively; we could
walk into a crowd, say any dumb thing we please, and wait for God
to act. We all know that is not right. We all see the importance of
studying the languages and culture of our target audiences, and in
preaching classes we learn to speak effectively. In doing so we have no
thought that such human preparation violates divine sovereignty. Why
should we not extend this logic to demographic studies and modern
communicative techniques?
If we avoid these shortcuts, we will
have to face the fact that ethics in our time, theology as well, to say
nothing of church life and evangelistic strategy, should be different
today, in important ways, from all past ages of church history including the
New Testament period. We face situations (both difficulties and
opportunities) that were not faced by Machen, Kuyper, Hodge, Edwards, Owen, Calvin, Augustine,
Paul. The word must be applied to those new situations. Of course, I grant
that we are in the same warfare as the older saints, and that we must use
the same spiritual weapons. But in its specifics that war is different now. Those who take the lazy way, the way of
shortcuts, will be left behind. They may be instructive
historical artifacts, but they will not be powerful instruments to
bring people to Christ. God can, of course, use the
feeblest instruments; but he typically honors the work of believers
who count the costs and seize the opportunities.
Besides laziness, there is a certain
selfishness about the shortcut mentality.
[1]
Shortcutters
are those who feel comfortable with certain "tried and true"
forms of life and witness, forms that God has used in the past. Then they
seek to produce a theological rationale for keeping those forms even when
times have changed. They talk as if they are fighting for biblical
principle, though in fact they are merely arguing for a certain application of scripture that was
appropriate to a past situation.
The debate is confused, of course,
by words like "conservative," which are applied both to
defenders of scriptural principle and to those who merely defend past ways
of doing things without scriptural justification. But defending
authentic biblical principle is one thing; defending the continuance
of past applications into our own time is something very
different. Both shortcutters and critics of shortcutters need to be more aware of this
distinction.
But what masquerades as a battle for
biblical principle is often at bottom a mere rationalization of selfish
impulses, a desire to stay comfortable, to avoid having to change
familiar patterns. Often, however, Scripture itself is on the side
of change! I Cor. 9 is an important text in this respect. Paul
was willing to be a Jew among the Jews, a Gentile among the
Gentiles, that some might be saved. He did not seek his own comfort,
even his own rights. Indeed, he allowed his body to be buffeted,
lest while preaching to others he himself should be a castaway. He
tried "to please everybody in every way. For I am not seeking my own
good, but the good of many, that they might be saved" (ICor. 10:33). And note: Immediately after this verse, he
urges "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ" (11:1).
This means that in our evangelistic
methodology, indeed in our worship (for that too has an evangelistic
element, 14:24f), our goal must not be to please ourselves, but to
bend and stretch, to accept discomfort and the trauma of change, in order
to speak the Christian faith into the contemporary world.
Let me also discuss here another,
rather different, problem connected with our historical distance from the
New Testament. That problem is that our present historical
situation is something of an epistemological burden. We are around
1,920 years removed from the later books of the New Testament
canon. Now in some ways this is an advantage. We have had much more
time to study Scripture than did the early church fathers like
Clement and Justin Martyr. And in some ways, I think, contemporary orthodox
Reformed theology has a far deeper and more precise understanding of the
gospel than did the church fathers.
[2]
I say this contrary to
those evangelicals who are joining Eastern Orthodox churches in order to
return to the supposedly more profound teachings of the early church
Fathers. Although the Fathers did wonderful work in their day, standing heroically
for the faith amid terrible oppressions, their writings were confused on
many important points. And although it is valuable to read them today
(often they look at things from angles that today are unusual and
edifying), we would be wise in perusing their writings not to confuse
vagueness with profundity.
So in some ways our historical
distance from the New Testament is an advantage. In other ways, however,
it is a disadvantage. If I were a Christian church elder in, say, A.
D. 62, and my church faced a controversy over, say, infant baptism, I
could simply fax the nearest apostle, in effect (I realize that this was
not always a perfectly simple process), and ask what the apostolic practice
was. That would settle the question. In the early generations following
the apostles, doubtless there were some reliable traditions dealing with
questions not explicitly answered in the New Testament. In my view, for
instance, the early church did not need to have an explicit New
Testament command to baptize infants. They just did it, for that was
the apostolic practice, and the church had always done it that way.
[3]
But we do not
have today such access to the apostles. And there are a lot
of questions which the early church could easily have answered, which
nevertheless perplex us today. Hence all the debates about baptism. We
cannot "fax the nearest apostle;" we must engage in a somewhat
complicated process of theological reasoning. Same with regard to the
nature of church government, the church's attitude toward war, the new
covenant application of the Sabbath commandment, the style of worship, the
grounds of divorce, the demands of Christ upon civil government, the
proper criteria for determining physical death, many other things. Some
things mentioned in the New Testament, and evidently well understood
by the original readers, are quite obscure to us, such as baptism for
the dead (I Cor. 15:29) and the covering of women "because of the
angels" (I Cor. 11:10).
Today, however, we are removed by
many centuries from the time of the apostles. And controversy in the
church, particularly during the time of the Reformation, has made it
impossible to identify any single strain of church tradition as unambiguously apostolic.
Thus, although we understand the central aspects of biblical teaching
better than the church fathers did, there are other aspects which we,
perhaps, understand less well than they did.
It is also the case, as we mentioned
before, that many issues of the modern day are not specifically discussed
in scripture. If we cannot fax the apostles to learn their view
of baptism, much less can we determine directly what they would say about
nuclear weaponry, the government role in welfare, the medical use of
life-support equipment. Here too, there are biblical principles which
apply; but the argument can be complicated. It is not as if the apostles
were readily available for interviews.
In facing our epistemological
disadvantages, the first thing to be said is that God understands. He is
the Lord of history. His providence has planned and controlled it. It is
no accident that we are in the present epistemological situation. That
situation, uncomfortable as it may be at times, suits God's purposes
perfectly, and we must be thankful for it. We should not murmur or
complain, as Israel in the wilderness. When someone calls and asks me a
hard question, say, about whether they should remove life support systems
from a dying relative, I usually begin by saying that these are, after
all, hard questions, and that God understands how hard they are for us. We
cannot fax the apostles, but He doesn't expect us to. He has left us
with Scripture and the Spirit's illumination, and He has
determined that that is enough. We may fumble around in searching
for answers. We may make decisions which we regret later on,
because we hadn't at first considered all the relevant principles
and facts. But God understa
In such situations, it is helpful to
remember that we are justified by faith, not by works, nor, therefore, by
ethical accuracy. That comfort does not, of course, excuse us from
hard thinking. If God has justified us, we will want to please
him, and we will make intellectual and other efforts to do what
he wants. But the sincerity of such efforts is not measured by
the perfection of the results. We may try very hard to apply
biblical principles and come up with an answer that later
proves inadequate. Yet God will still honor the attempt. He knows
the heart, and he takes into consideration the obstacles (including epistemological)
that we must overcome.
Thus when after prayerful, honest
searching of scripture you determine to let your mother die, and afterward
wish that you had kept her alive longer by life support, do not be
overcome with guilt. God still loves you, for Jesus' sake, more than
you could ever love yourself.
Beyond that, I think that our
"epistemological disadvantages" should give us more
understanding and forebearance for one another.
If God still loves the believer who honestly makes a decision which proves
wrong, we should also love and encourage that brother or sister. And Sabbatarians should have a greater love and
understanding for non-Sabbatarians and
vice versa; same with anabaptists and paedobaptists, premillenialists and
amillenialists, pacifists and just-war theorists. We
should not pretend that everything is cut and dried, even though
perhaps these issues were cut and dried in the New Testament
period itself. We should agonize a bit with those who are wrestling with these
issues. I am a paedobaptist; but what if I had been
raised in a baptist church? Would I have seen
things the same way? Would the same arguments carry with me the weight
they carry presently? I don't know. I believe I am right, and that
Scripture teaches infant baptism. I will present that truth as God's truth.
But I won't pretend
God in his good providence has given us advantages and disadvantages, challenges and opportunities, which are not precisely the same as those of any past generation. He calls us to meet those challenges and seize the opportunities for Christ. The church of past ages can help us, to keep us from merely repeating the mistakes of history and to give us a platform on which to build the next story of God's temple. But we must not shirk our responsibility. We must be modern (or post-modern!) Christians, focused on the world of our own time, and upon the Christ who is the same, yesterday, today and forever.