As much as we long for unity, however, Satan is hell-bent on
destroying that unity. He does this by disturbing the gospel, by insinuating
corruptions into the message. This is the entire history of the church in a
nutshell:
one [AM2]challenge
to the gospel after another.
By Heresies Oppressed
In 1866, one stalwart Anglican vicar, Samuel Stone,
ministering in the baddest part of town in London, planted his flag for the
church’s unity on the authority of the Bible. John Colenso, an Anglican bishop
in Africa, had begun teaching that the Bible contained truth but was not the
infallible, inerrant, God-breathed revelation of the redemptive purpose of God
in Christ. This was too much for gospel-loving Stone.[2]
Though he was an unimportant, nobody vicar, serving in an
unprestigious part of London, he did what he could. He wrote a hymn, “The
Church’s One Foundation.” Stone knew his Bible and he knew when and where to
plant his flag. He knew that when men tamper with the meaning of the Bible,
they will soon enough be tampering with its central figure, Jesus Christ. Stone
knew that without Jesus there could be no salvation for sinners in his
flock—and he cared deeply about his flock.
The story is told that Stone came upon several young toughs
trying to hurt a little girl in his congregation.[AM3] Stone,
who had been a championship athlete in his university days, rolled up the
sleeves of his clerical robe and punched the stuffing out of the boys. In
another fashion, Stone rolled up his poetic sleeves and wrote a hymn to inflict
blows on the Enemy of the gospel and his minions. But the hymn is not finally
controversy centered; it is a glorious celebration of the unity of the
invisible church: “Elect from every nation, yet one o’er all the earth.” By the
enemies of the gospel the beleaguered church he so much loved was “sore
oppressed, by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed.” Not only did Stone
know there was a serious problem, he knew the solution, “Yet saints their watch
are keeping.”[3]
Pastors equipping their flocks to keep watch, to be vigilant
in the pew, to search the Scripture as they listen is the only solution.
Knowledge of the Bible’s message as codified in confessions of faith is the
great bulwark protecting the unity of what the church believes and preaches.
The Justifiable Slap
There truly is a war on, and the church must never lay down
its arms when the gospel is under attack. The Enemy does not want us to realize
that it’s a counterfeit of unity that gives the Enemy a place at the table.
This side of the church’s heavenly rest, enemies of the gospel will [AM4]insist
on a place at the table, all in the name of unity, but it’s a cheap charade of
unity. Where there is a discrepancy between the visible unity of the church and
the truth of the gospel, the church must always find its unity, not around the
name of a denomination or an individual minister, but around the pure doctrine
of the gospel.
Though there are sad examples of churches splitting over
paint colors, many of the church’s divisions down through the centuries have been
the result of faithful pastors and theologians holding the gospel line against
the encroaching error of the enemies of the gospel. It is in the heat of these
controversies that the church’s greatest creeds and confessions have been
forged. Without men standing for the unity of the truth, rolling up their
sleeves and entering the fray of controversy, there would be no pure gospel
message left.
One particular gospel-destroying challenge to the church’s
unity was confronted by the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century. This
disturber of unity wasn’t [AM5]the
color of the carpet. Ministers were denying the deity of Christ.
According to tradition (or legend), St. Nicholas got worked
up listening to Arius blaspheme Jesus, saying that Christ is not the Son of
God, the only Savior of sinners. Fed up with the blasphemy, St. Nicholas rose
to his feet and slapped Arius across the mouth.[4]
Indiscreet as that may have been, out of the heat and blows
of that conflict came the glorious credo, the Nicene Creed: “I believe . . .
in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . God of God, Light of Light, very
God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by
whom all things were made.” Where would the church be without this confession?
Where would the unity of the gospel be without this glorious truth?
Why does this matter? For Reformer Ulrich Zwingli it mattered
because there is no salvation outside the atoning sacrifice and imputed
righteousness of Jesus Christ. “Who seeks or points out another door errs,” wrote
Zwingli, “yes, he is a murderer of souls and a thief.”[5]
Put it like that, and a slap on the mouth doesn’t sound so out of place after
all.
Unity of Truth
Historically, men who champion the drift away from the
confession are often the same ones who are quick to declare all who disagree
with them as schismatics disturbing the unity of the church. But doesn’t it
seem more logical that the divisive ones are those who want their individual
interpretations, their pages of criticisms of the confession, to become the new
articles of faith?
Loyalty to an individual (1 Cor. 1:12–13), to a
celebrity preacher or a particularly learned one, may prove to be more of a
setup for unity faking than for real oneness. Like artificial additives in your
favorite meal, artificial unity is never good for the genuine unity of the
body. Loyalty to an individual, sooner or later, erodes the church’s larger
unity around the pure doctrine of the gospel summarized in a confession of
faith.
Some
will always become [AM6]enamored
with new ideas, with new discoveries that lead to new ways of reading books of
the Bible, with reconciling the Bible with science or modern psychology, and
then they will set to work recasting the confession of faith in the image of
the latest discoveries. The [AM7]Enemy
wants this to flourish, so he will help to shape the argument in ways conducive
to his object of corrupting and disturbing gospel unity. With careful handling
from behind the scenes, the argument will proceed with the enticing wording [AM8]of preferring
a biblical theology to a systematic
theology.[AM9]
A convincing-sounding assertion. Who doesn’t want to come
down on the side of biblical theology? Though it seems to be an effective
construction for taking the high ground in the discussion, there’s a nagging
problem. Men who use this argument are more than hinting that they no longer
think biblical and confessional theology agree. Bear-baiting the confession and
the Bible may be evidence that a minister no longer really believes the system
of theology he once vowed he believed.
Here’s
how this may sound. In one minister’s preaching, the doctrine of imputed
righteousness was so increasingly absent that an elder finally asked him if he
still believed the doctrine. “Well, imputation
is not a biblical term,” he replied. “I want a biblical theology, not a
systematic one.”[AM10]
Presumably many ministers who might make this kind of argument will,
nevertheless, still believe in and use the word Trinity, which is also not a biblical term but one used in systematic
theology. Wouldn’t it make sense to go all the way and stop using the word Trinity? The selective application of
this argument may reveal that, at the end of the day, what is at issue is not
simply a preference for biblical language over confessional. Rhetoric can
work well as a smokescreen. [AM11][DB12]
The gospel has been handed down to us in words, words that
have been carefully defined and codified in our confessions of faith. When the
plain meaning of those words gets toyed with, there’s probably a reason. Saints
keeping watch will sit up and listen when they hear this kind of doublespeak.
Judging from the Enemy’s schemes, the gospel is likely in the crosshairs.
Hence, it is only “by being vigilant in our confession, [that] we can protect
the church’s unity.”[6]
A Stream with No Banks
One ruinous counterfeit being substituted for the pure
doctrine of the gospel and eroding unity may sound particularly appealing to
families with kids. “Covenant faithfulness is the way to salvation, for the
‘doers of the law will be justified’ at the final judgment.”[AM13]
As with all error, there is a miniscule kernel of truth here (a stopped clock
is right twice a day). However appealing it may sound, point to our covenant
faithfulness rather than to the steadfast faithfulness of the Savior, and all
that remains is a counterfeit of the gospel. An attempt to swallow this kernel will [AM14]demand
a theological Heimlich maneuver to prevent death by choking.
Ministers who say these things to their congregations hasten
to tack on that this faithfulness is all done in union with Christ. Then they
hasten back to what seems to have become the main thing. I’m inclined to think
that when we hear confusing messages like this, we’ve just heard the fine
print. However vigorous the large-print affirmations of orthodoxy are, as with
politicians and journalists, [AM15]it’s
the fine print that reveals what someone really believes.
Although
a message of salvation by covenant faithfulness erodes grace[AM16],
advocates of this latest version of law-creep insist that their teaching is in
the broad stream of the reformational confession of faith to which they still
claim to ascribe. But to say that the way to salvation is by any degree of
law-keeping faithfulness is nothing short of a reinvention of justification in
the bland image of works righteousness—Rome without the bells and smells. If
the banks of the confessional stream were this wide, we’d be looking at another
worldwide flood, a confession with no boundaries at all.
Though I may be accused of being too meat-headed to grasp the
intricate theological nuances, there’s one nuance I do understand: what a
message like this produces in the flock. It will nudge hearers back into the
default mode of looking to their “covenant faithfulness,” to their performance,
to their obedience for their acceptance before God. Any teaching that does this
will inevitably diminish in our minds and hearts the glories of the finished
work of Christ in our place and will proportionately lessen our love and
gratitude to Jesus for all that he has fully accomplished for us.
Favorite Sound Bites
Men
who teach that “covenant faithfulness is the way to salvation” may also be ones
who scour the literature of church history to unearth sound bites that appear
to support their shifting ideas. Lifted out of context, these will then be used
in an effort to normalize their aberrant views. For example, they may prefer to
cite, and attribute to Augustine, the oft-quoted line, “Pray like everything
depends on God. Work like everything depends on you.”[7] These kinds of historical sound bites pair
nicely with isolated Bible sound bites such as “a person is justified by works
and not by faith alone” (James 2:24). And the hands are dusted and the
discussion is over, as if the Bible and Augustine need no context and have
nothing more to say on the topic.
Meanwhile, others
attribute to Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and mastermind of a
movement designed to stamp out Reformation Christianity, the curiously similar
admonition, “Use human means as though divine ones didn’t exist, and divine
means as though there were no human ones.”[8] Good luck trying to find the original
source on either of these, but in your search you will discover, as I did, that
these variously attributed lines are also favorites among some Mormons, even
some Muslims—strange theological bedfellows, indeed.
I’m bewildered and
saddened by ministers whose favorite quotations—whether from the Bible or
church history—seem calculated to invite confusion about justification as a
one-time act of God. The flock is in grave danger when its ministers discover a
man-centered sounding nugget and then use it as authority to normalize their
theological shift and to convince their flocks that their adjustments ought to
be accepted as new articles of faith—grave danger, indeed.
How much worse
when men misuse Scriptural proof texts to cast doubt on the freeness of gospel
grace. Shakespeare must have observed this strategy among some of the clergy in
his day:[AM17]
In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text[?][9]
What’s more, the Bard knew that even
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O what a goodly outside falsehood hath.[10]
Making large-print affirmations of doctrinal orthodoxy
will always sound goodly on the outside; that’s what they’re meant to do. But
what a preacher believes is always in the fine print, and we can be sure the
fine print will always be backed up with a proof text.
Blessing confessional errors with proof texts never promotes
the doctrinal unity of the church. Rather, these deviations and methods create
a “perpetual guerrilla warfare within the church,”[11]
waged to lend credibility to the latest confessional departure.
Unity about Forgiveness
An example of a corruption of the gospel insinuating itself
into conservative Christianity that I referenced earlier is such a torpedo to
the gospel that it requires further consideration here. “Justification—whatever
else it is—is the forgiveness of sins. It is perfectly obvious that there is
such a thing as temporary forgiveness because the Bible says there
is. . . . Temporary forgiveness is a biblical datum.” [AM18]It
takes little imagination to hear ministers in post-Reformation Amsterdam or
Geneva saying similar things about justification.
However confidently asserted, this twenty-first-century
minister’s statement that the Bible teaches temporary forgiveness is not shared
by a single reformational confession of faith. I doubt Luther would have
thought a doctrine of temporary forgiveness was anything like entering the
gates of paradise, as he referred to his conversion. Imagine Luther’s glee at
the discovery: “At last, I get it. Whatever else justification is, it is
forgiveness, but only temporary forgiveness. O the joy! My burden is
lifted—sort of, at least for the moment.” Temporary forgiveness would be more
like having your head smashed in the gates of paradise as they clanged shut.
Or imagine a hymn of praise to God about temporary
forgiveness. The cry of the five bleeding wounds of the Savior in Charles
Wesley’s hymn would
[AM19]sound
more like this: “‘Sort of forgive,’ they
cry, ‘sort of forgive,’ they
cry; ‘Maybe not let that sort of ransomed sinner die.’” I can’t imagine a
doctrine of temporary forgiveness warming anyone’s heart to praise.
Not only does it make for ridiculously bad hymn poetry, such
a declaration is devastating to the central doctrine of justification by faith
alone; if justification is about forgiveness of sins and the Bible teaches that
you can be justified and have forgiveness of sins—and then lose or forfeit
it—the entire structure of reformational theology crumbles.
It is precisely here that the confessional standards help
Christians in every generation to continue to believe what the Bible teaches
and what the wisdom of our theological forebears taught and believed about the
gospel. In the Westminster Confession of Faith there is zero room for temporary
forgiveness, a justification that can be had and then forfeited. “God did,
from all eternity, decree to justify the elect, and Christ did, in the fullness
of time, die for their sins and rise again for their
justification. . . . God doth
continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified”[AM20]
(WCF 11.4–5, emphasis mine).
All the persuasive rhetoric to the contrary, what is a
confessional datum on the irrevocability of forgiveness is so because it is a
biblical datum: [AM21]“If
we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). The entire gospel depends on the
faithfulness of God to do what he promised. It is the character of God himself
that is at stake. God is unchangeable and so are his gifts. If forgiveness is
changeable, then God himself is changeable. The central doctrine of
justification is about something the immutable God has ordained and already
accomplished, as Puritan Stephen Charnock so richly elucidates:
What comfort would it be to pray to a God that, like the
chameleon, changed colors every day, every moment? The immutability of God is a
strong ground of consolation, and encourages hope and confidence. While we have
Him for our God, we have His immutability, as well as any other perfection of
His nature. Let us also desire those things which are nearest to Him in this
perfection: the righteousness of Christ that shall never wear out; and the
grace of the Spirit, that shall never burn out.[12]
The ground of all comfort and confidence for sinners is
that the immutable God justifies sinners based on the righteousness of his Son.
He forgives my sins based on zero fitness in me, and he continues to forgive
them based on zero fitness in me. He freely justifies sinners, as the
Westminster divines put it, “for Christ’s sake alone. . . .
Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and His righteousness, is the alone
instrument of justification” (WCF 11.1–2). The apostle Paul declares without
equivocation that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom.
11:29). Whatever else that means, it clearly has to mean that the justifying
gift of forgiveness of sins is irrevocable too. In fact, “God does continue to
forgive the sins of those that are justified.”[13]
I, for one, am counting precisely on this fact: the
permanence and irrevocability of the forgiveness of my sins in the good news of
Jesus Christ. Tamper with forgiveness and all that remains is abysmally bad
news.
Confessing Our Unity
Whether from the various faces of law-creep or from the
enervating error of temporary forgiveness, “by being vigilant in our confession
of faith we can protect the unity that the Spirit has given us.”[14]
Everyone has their theological boundaries; some are in the
right place and protect the gospel from errors, while others remove the ancient
boundary stones and broaden the stream so as to enfold the latest new ideas and
errors. “To talk theology at all is to talk boundaries and always has been.”[15]
The great danger in the church, however, is when we ignore the boundaries, when
we arrogate our opinions over the enduring bulwarks of the gospel, and when we
stop openly and honestly acknowledging and submitting to confessional
boundaries.
The church will enjoy unity, walls of hostility broken down,
peace and harmony, only insofar as it stands “firm in one spirit, with one mind
striving side by side for the faith of the gospel” (Phil. 1:27). A confession
of faith is the “open statement of the truth” (2 Cor. 4:2), so critical to
maintaining the unity of the body.
The church of Jesus Christ, the city of God, is a
glorious body, made so by its Head and Savior, Jesus Christ. Though the church
is beset by corruptions of the gospel in every generation, the church’s
unshakeable foundation truly is Jesus Christ her Lord. We can take comfort that
Soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.[16]
Alas, when undershepherds set themselves above
confessional unity, we should not be surprised when the flock soon has plenty
of reasons for weeping, the sheep left defenseless, exposed to the ravages of
encircling wolves.
Douglas Bond, author of Grace Works! (And Ways We Think It Doesn't), from which this post is an excerpt, has written numerous books of historical fiction, biography, devotion, and practical theology. He is lyricist for New Reformation Hymns, directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, speaks at churches and conferences, and leads church history tours in Europe. Watch for his forthcoming book God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To). Learn more at bondbooks.net.
[1]
As Ephesians 2:11–22 is one of my favorite passages of Scripture, I have
written a hymn on its theme of the unity of the body Christ, included in
appendix A.
[2]
Erik Routley, Hymns and Human Life
(London: John Murray, 1952), 114.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Gene Edward Veith, “Putting St. Nicholas Back in Christmas,” The Lutheran
Witness, December 2011,
http://witness.lcms.org/pages/wPage.asp?ContentID=1153&IssueID=61.
[5]
Ulrich Zwingli, “The Sixty-Seven Articles of Ulrich Zwingli,” in Selected Works of Huldrich Zwingli, ed.
Samuel Macauley Jackson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1901),
article 4, http://www.chinstitute.org/index.php/eras/reformation/zwingli/.
[6]
Michael Brown, “Schism and the Local Church,” Tabletalk, May 2011, 25.
[7]
Variously attributed to Augustine and by some to Ignatius Loyola, though I was
unable to find an original source for the quotation other than in the vast
repositories of Christian clichés.
[8]
Though usually attributed to Ignatius Loyola, a form of the quotation appears
in Spanish Jesuit Balthasar Gracian’s Art of Worldly Wisdom (1637, maxim
251). In 1982, Joseph Jacobs translated the phrase as “Use human means as if
there were no divine ones, and divine as if there were no human ones.” See
Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly
Wisdom, trans. Joseph Jacobs, http://www.intellectualexpansionist.com/art-of-worldly-wisdom.pdf.
[9]
William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice,
III.ii.77–79.
[10]
Ibid., I.iii.96–100.
[12]
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God (Evansville, IN:
Sovereign Grace Book Club, 1958), 143.
[14]
Brown, “Schism,” 25.
[15] Carl R. Trueman, “Why Do We
Draw the Line?” Tabletalk, July 1,
2012, accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/why-do-we-draw-the-line/.
[16]
Samuel J. Stone, “The Church’s One Foundation,” Trinity Hymnal (Atlanta: Great Commission, 1990), 347.
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