Once upon a time, there was me. Me, being a good little Reformed boy knew the Heidelberg Catechism like the back of my hand. For fun, I used to page through the tune name index of the gray hymnal and looking for congruences between the Canons of Dort and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Now I find myself in a place where none of that really matters, where we daily walk the line between the Church falling apart and staying together, and where I learn lessons everyday about how the majority of Christendom operates. This is Arminia.
Not very many towns in America are absent of some sort of Presbyterian Church. The ones that are usually have some sort of UCC or Reformed presence somewhere in their midst. Rarely, especially in Michigan, do you find a town where there is not a Reformed soul to be found. A town where the Lutherans are almost ready to close the last of their 3 churches, the baptists welcome people to town with condemning phrases from the KJV, and the Christian minority is almost entirely Catholic, Congregationalist or Wesleyan. Welcome to Greenville.
I wouldn't be surprised if I was the first Calvin Seminary student/graduate every to work in this town, of if I was the first commuter to the Calvin campus in the city's long history. Reformed thought is irrelevant here, it would seem.
Ironically, however, I would like to dissuade people from believing that Arminians are inevitably bent on their own personal choice to the exclusion of all else, that they baptize every congregant every Sunday, and that a Reformed person can get chewed up and spit out within a few Wesleyan sermons. I believe that this is untrue just as much as I believe its untrue that election is a core belief in many of our Reformed communities in this country. The Church is a melting pot, just like the US, and that might just be okay.
People often ask me how I can exist at an Arminian church. How can you reconcile your beliefs with theirs? How can you sit through a worship service, a sermon, an altar call? How do you deal with perfectionism and the like?
Many people describe my senior pastor and I as people who have "agreed to disagree" on some theological topics, and since we get along well, you might think that. However, I think the greater truth is that we both acknowledge what I wrote about in my previous blog. Calvinism and Arminianism, while both eloquent and well defended against one another, are simply a peephole into the grandness and wondrousness that is the actual theology of God, or that which God knows about himself. How we speak about God, our theology, is but a speck of dust compared to God's theology, or how he speaks about himself. If any theologian would deny that to me, I think I might have to pop him in the face.
My senior pastor, Dave, is not an hard-core Arminian. He does not believe that people can achieve perfection this side of glory, as Wesley hinted at in his later years. He's offended by determinism and fatalism, the flaws that he sees in Reformed thought, especially hyper-Calvinism. But then again, so am I. I shudder at the thought that we're just stagnated linemen on some cosmic foosball table, and I don't think its Biblical either. I like theologians, like Aquinas, who give me a way out here. They identify God as the primary actor, but do not push the ideas of election/predestination/etc. While I might confess those if you held a sword to my neck, its not necessary for my daily ministry that I push those on my laity. In fact, I think Dave and I would both say quite openly that while we're comfortable in our own theological recliners, neither of us would be surprised if, at the end of time, Jesus lays out a far different theology than anything Calvin, Wesley, Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Chrysostom, or anyone else has laid out. Why? They're not God.
While we've come a long way from the way Calvin treated Servetus and how the Reformers treated the Anabaptists, its sad that we really still just don't get it. In communities around the world, ecumenism is broken down by theological cockiness. There are a lot of pastors and churches that just plain weird me out. Some of them are Arminian, some of them are Reformed, and some of them are so "out there" that I can't identify them. Recognize the affinity that you have with people across denominational lines because they, like you, hold up the primacy of Scripture, which is so trampled in today's world and because learn from the things they do better than you. Our church's worship library is now a fully-integrated Reformed/Wesleyan resource, and I hope the same would be true if I find myself in a Reformed congregation someday.
Few Reformed people get the opportunity that I get to see the inner workings of a solid, comparable, Arminian denomination from as up close and personal as you can get. I continue to urge as many people from both sides of the table to sit down and talk....sit down and cooperate. Often times, you will have far more in common than you think. And remember, no matter how big your allegiance to Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, or Wesley is, your greater allegiance is to the Lamb of God, who is not a follower of any of those four. Let God's theology of Himself and His Church increase as your theology of God and His Church decreases. And let all churches, Calvinistic and Arminian alike, ascent "soli deo gloria."
Monday, June 25, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Baptizing at 150
First a couple of much-needed apologies:
1. To those of you who have been crazy enough to keep up with my blog over the past year, you were likely stunned when I stopped spouting off for a good while. Sorry about that. Rest assured, I'm back on track, and I'll be able to see who has an RSS Feed on my account when only a few people check in on this post.
2. Normally, I don't comment on proceedings in either of my denominations particularly, but this post will be as much relevant to some of my Arminian friends as it is to my Reformed ones, I promise :)
3. I'm getting a C.S. Lewis complex, even though I could never hope to author the kinds of works he did. I've gotten myself a leather chair and footstool for my office, purchased a "pipe rack" with six wonderful pipes, and even started in on a book, although I don't know what will become of it, so don't get your hopes up.
Belaboring my Point
If you were one of the lucky ones to attend the 150 celebration at Van Andel for the Christian Reformed Church a Sunday back, you may have run across my name in the worship booklet right around the centerfold (If you weren't, you can check it out here). The intuitive CRC person would recognize right away that a CRC contributer from Greenville is strange because there's no CRC in this city. Luckily, they didn't list home churches, or there may have been some real feathers flying.
I had all but forgotten writing this quote sometime back in the spring, but was amazed to see how accurately it reflected my vision not only for the CRC, but for the Church in general. It addresses a few problems with the denominations of which I've been a part. First, we suck at going into cities. We can minister really well to farmers and housewives, but we're particularly bad at ministering to urban and even suburban settings, which explains why our membership has been so stagnant over the years. Passion, yes. Humility, yes.
BUT, the major point of my theology that drives my professors nuts at seminary is shackled at the end of this quotation: "that our greatest theology is dwarfed by the richness of the mystery and transcendence of our holy God." If you want to package the Mark Hilbelink theology in one phrase, that's it. Look, I love theological discussion and debate. In fact, my seminary friends and I had a "Synod Party" to do just that around meat. But, every systematics class I take seems to assume that we know about 95% about God and 5% is left to mystery (give or take). There is the argument given that God has made himself sufficiently known to all creation for the purposes of salvation. Absolutely! But I would like to make the case that we worship a God that is so unfathomable and incomprehensible that 5% might just get us by with sufficient knowledge for salvation. In that sense, I wish that every systematic theologian from Aquinas to Wesley would have started their theologies by acknowledging that we are arguing and debating strictly the revealed part of God, which may be only a touching of the outer cloak of who God is. The reason they can't? It makes their own theologies less important. Bummer.
Dedicating our Children
For those of you who know me well, you'll know that I was watching this past CRC Synod on tiptoes waiting to see what it would do with the Alberta classis' overture for a committee to study the practice of infant dedication in the CRC and what that might mean for its future. I have long held the belief that infant dedication can be just as illegitimate a form of committing a child to the Lord as infant baptism within the Reformed context. Also, I like to ask the question: which of these seems more plausible: 1)That the apostles intended that baptism be a replacement for covenantal circumcision OR 2)That the Reformers maintained infant baptism from the Catholic Church in the Reformation because it would have rocked the boat too much to propose anything else.
I had an interesting conversation with the associate pastor from my home church in Iowa last Tuesday, who was, incidentally, a Synodical delegate. He had attended Mars Hill Church in Grandville the Sunday before and heard Bell's explanation of the baptism/dedication debate. While he affirms infant baptism wholeheartedly, he agreed with me that you could easily hold non-infant baptism position faithfully within the Reformed tradition. However, his argument, admittedly influenced by Bell, was that if you held that position, dedication was not necessary since its even less Biblically-based than infant baptism. My argument on the other side was that implementation of infant dedication within any Reformed tradition would have to include some sort of dedication, not as a sacrament, but as a commitment of the parents and Church family to maintain their covenantal responsibilities. I compared it to the laying on of hands, which is a very Biblical concept, seldom practiced in Reformed faith communities.
If we agree that baptism as a sacrament is nothing hokus pokus nor salvific, then it seems to me the sign should be a confirmation of election, as it described in the Bible, as Romans 8 says, "creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed". Instead, they continue to baptize infants based on the faith of their parents than on the power of the Spirit to raise up the elect.
That being said, I can stomach the Reformed position on infant baptism because I see virtually no practical difference between baptism/confirmation and dedication/baptism, but I wish the CRC would have taken the opportunity at 150 to let a committee seriously study this concept and its theological implications.
1. To those of you who have been crazy enough to keep up with my blog over the past year, you were likely stunned when I stopped spouting off for a good while. Sorry about that. Rest assured, I'm back on track, and I'll be able to see who has an RSS Feed on my account when only a few people check in on this post.
2. Normally, I don't comment on proceedings in either of my denominations particularly, but this post will be as much relevant to some of my Arminian friends as it is to my Reformed ones, I promise :)
3. I'm getting a C.S. Lewis complex, even though I could never hope to author the kinds of works he did. I've gotten myself a leather chair and footstool for my office, purchased a "pipe rack" with six wonderful pipes, and even started in on a book, although I don't know what will become of it, so don't get your hopes up.
Belaboring my Point
If you were one of the lucky ones to attend the 150 celebration at Van Andel for the Christian Reformed Church a Sunday back, you may have run across my name in the worship booklet right around the centerfold (If you weren't, you can check it out here). The intuitive CRC person would recognize right away that a CRC contributer from Greenville is strange because there's no CRC in this city. Luckily, they didn't list home churches, or there may have been some real feathers flying.
I had all but forgotten writing this quote sometime back in the spring, but was amazed to see how accurately it reflected my vision not only for the CRC, but for the Church in general. It addresses a few problems with the denominations of which I've been a part. First, we suck at going into cities. We can minister really well to farmers and housewives, but we're particularly bad at ministering to urban and even suburban settings, which explains why our membership has been so stagnant over the years. Passion, yes. Humility, yes.
BUT, the major point of my theology that drives my professors nuts at seminary is shackled at the end of this quotation: "that our greatest theology is dwarfed by the richness of the mystery and transcendence of our holy God." If you want to package the Mark Hilbelink theology in one phrase, that's it. Look, I love theological discussion and debate. In fact, my seminary friends and I had a "Synod Party" to do just that around meat. But, every systematics class I take seems to assume that we know about 95% about God and 5% is left to mystery (give or take). There is the argument given that God has made himself sufficiently known to all creation for the purposes of salvation. Absolutely! But I would like to make the case that we worship a God that is so unfathomable and incomprehensible that 5% might just get us by with sufficient knowledge for salvation. In that sense, I wish that every systematic theologian from Aquinas to Wesley would have started their theologies by acknowledging that we are arguing and debating strictly the revealed part of God, which may be only a touching of the outer cloak of who God is. The reason they can't? It makes their own theologies less important. Bummer.
Dedicating our Children
For those of you who know me well, you'll know that I was watching this past CRC Synod on tiptoes waiting to see what it would do with the Alberta classis' overture for a committee to study the practice of infant dedication in the CRC and what that might mean for its future. I have long held the belief that infant dedication can be just as illegitimate a form of committing a child to the Lord as infant baptism within the Reformed context. Also, I like to ask the question: which of these seems more plausible: 1)That the apostles intended that baptism be a replacement for covenantal circumcision OR 2)That the Reformers maintained infant baptism from the Catholic Church in the Reformation because it would have rocked the boat too much to propose anything else.
I had an interesting conversation with the associate pastor from my home church in Iowa last Tuesday, who was, incidentally, a Synodical delegate. He had attended Mars Hill Church in Grandville the Sunday before and heard Bell's explanation of the baptism/dedication debate. While he affirms infant baptism wholeheartedly, he agreed with me that you could easily hold non-infant baptism position faithfully within the Reformed tradition. However, his argument, admittedly influenced by Bell, was that if you held that position, dedication was not necessary since its even less Biblically-based than infant baptism. My argument on the other side was that implementation of infant dedication within any Reformed tradition would have to include some sort of dedication, not as a sacrament, but as a commitment of the parents and Church family to maintain their covenantal responsibilities. I compared it to the laying on of hands, which is a very Biblical concept, seldom practiced in Reformed faith communities.
If we agree that baptism as a sacrament is nothing hokus pokus nor salvific, then it seems to me the sign should be a confirmation of election, as it described in the Bible, as Romans 8 says, "creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed". Instead, they continue to baptize infants based on the faith of their parents than on the power of the Spirit to raise up the elect.
That being said, I can stomach the Reformed position on infant baptism because I see virtually no practical difference between baptism/confirmation and dedication/baptism, but I wish the CRC would have taken the opportunity at 150 to let a committee seriously study this concept and its theological implications.
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