|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2024 7:52:01 GMT -5
CREEDS, CONFESSIONS, & COOPERATION
MAR 2024
Combatting Self-Salvation: An Insight into the Early Creeds
By
JIM KNAUSS
Self-salvation is rampant among religious circles today. The idea that you can reach up and obtain the pinnacle of religious bliss is found in the eight-fold path of Buddhists and the five pillars of Islam. Even the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints shrouds a semblance of grace with an effort to save oneself when it claims, “For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace we are saved, after all we can do (emphasis mine).”[1] While our current cultural context in North America has its opponents to the gospel, the air around the early church saw a more dangerous situation. Self-salvation was a real threat, and action was time-critical. Christians responded by gathering from around the known world to produce the earliest creeds. These creeds headed off attempts to undermine and subvert the gospel in the church’s vulnerable infancy. In this article, I’ll give the background to these early creeds and show how they countered self-salvation.
1. Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2:23.
The Challenge of Greek Philosophy
A proper investigation into the church’s earliest creeds must start before the time of Christ with Alexander the Great. Shortly after the end of the Old Testament (~ 400 BC), Alexander the Great (b. 356 BC) rose to power and conquered the Persian, Egyptian, Hellenic and Macedonian empires—all before his twenty-seventh birthday! History records praise for Alexander as a military genius, but less people know that he was a student of Aristotle. Alexander’s dream was not just dominion over geography, but culture. Before his death in 323 BC, he set in motion a plan to deeply ingrain Greek education, writing, politics, and thought into the farthest reaches of his empire. While Alexander would not live to see his plan come to fruition, it was resoundingly successful. The Hellenization of most of the known world lasted for centuries (and in some ways even to the present day). A powerful testament to this is the fact that even though Rome was the dominant power at the time of our Lord, the New Testament was written in the common language of the day—Greek, and not the Latin preferred by Roman elites. Greek was king, and with it all its theological and intellectual doctrine.
The Aristotelian thought of the empire was downstream of Socrates and most importantly his student Plato. Plato had begun ideas of deity that saw traditional Greek polytheistic worship fade away. Platonic thought introduced concepts like that of a “One” or “highest god” that was superior to helping deities such as the “Word (logos)” and “World Spirit.”[2] Salvation was a work of the self by education in having the “Word and World Spirit” help you up to the “One.”[3]
2. Donald Fairburn and Ryan M. Reeves, The Story of Creeds and Confessions: Tracing the Development of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 52.
3. Norman Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999), 594.
Early in the third century AD, Platonism began to infiltrate the church and produce a particular philosophy in what is known as Christian Platonism. Theology from Christian Platonists like Origen (185–253 AD) led to ideas that the Father only is the “One”, or highest being, and the Son and Spirit simply help humans work their way up to the Father. This backdrop, resulting from the fallout of Greek thought and culture, was what the early Patristics were up against in confronting the heretical ideas of their day.
The Nicene Creed
Fast forward half-a-century to a charismatic theologian named Arius. Arius took the baton from the Christian Platonists and furthered the idea that true salvation is caused by the Son initiating and aiding an upward ascent to the Father. The Son, he argued, was created. For Arius, God would never make the humiliating descent to mankind. Instead, God would provide a way up to himself. The result was a sharp division of theology in and among Christian churches. This division prompted the first Christian emperor Constantine to summon all 1,800 bishops to Nicaea in the year 325 AD. Although only around 300 bishops attended, the product of the council was what became known as the Creed of Nicaea. This creed took a more solid form after Constantinople in 381 AD and was finalized after the Synod of Toledo in 589 AD.
The Nicene Creed accomplished two goals in combatting the heresy of Arianism. First, it claimed the Father, Son, and Spirit possessed the exact same “essence” or “substance” (homoousios) not simply a similar “essence” or “substance” (homoiousios). This led to the second goal in claiming that as the eternal God of the universe, the Son “came down.” It is no coincidence this phrase is central both doctrinally and spatially in the creed.[4] The fathers at Nicaea wanted to cement the doctrine that the Son was God and that he came down to save humans because humans could never come up to him and save themselves.
4. Fairburn and Reeves, The Story of Creeds, 83-90.
The Chalcedonian Definition
The church never enjoyed full unity in the aftermath of Nicaea. In fact, other heresies such as that of Sabellianism (mid–third century) found new life in claiming the Son was homoousios with the Father. Sabellius’s theology became what is known as Modalism, which erases personhood within the Trinity altogether. Nicaea was a step in the direction of rooting out self-salvation, yet the battle continued as the church found new fronts.
The next closest front after Nicaea came in the teachings of Apollinaris (d. 390 AD) and Nestorius (d. 450 AD). Apollinaris taught that Christ had a human body, but not a human mind. The Nestorians perpetuated the idea that Christ was a divinely indwelt man who could lead humans up to God. While each would say they affirmed the confessions coming out of Nicaea, Christ became essentially two distinct persons with two distinct natures. Nestorius thus walked down the same heretical road as Arius: Christ was a creature, a graced man. Therefore, salvation rested in one who was not fully God, and by extension humans needed to be led up to God.[5] Cyril of Alexandria became a stalwart against this teaching and his Formula of Reunion sought to establish the hypostatic union in claiming Christ was one person with two natures. While his work bore some fruit, it wouldn’t be until several years later at Chalcedon that the church staked its claim in Cyril’s doctrine. In a council that lasted about a month, the body produced a creed that contained one central paragraph concerning the incarnate Son. This paragraph became known as the Chalcedonian Definition and cleared up any ambiguity left over from Nicaea pertaining to the person and nature of Christ. Christ was one person with two natures who came down to save humans. Once again, the church reaffirmed a staunch defense against man’s ability to save himself.
5. Ibid.
The Apostles’ Creed
The attention thus far has been on the two creeds resulting from the first and fourth ecumenical church councils at Nicaea and Chalcedon. However, in the background of these councils was a pivotal formulation in what would eventually be known as the Apostles’ Creed. The earliest form of this creed was found in the 5th century, but many believe its roots lie in what was known as the Old Roman Creed used in baptismal confessions.[6] Scholars can trace mentions of the creed’s 12 components in the works of men like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen dating back to 140 AD[7] with the first recording of the final form showing up in the Swiss Alps between 710-724 AD.[8] The history of the creed’s development is somewhat ambiguous, but it was probably written to educate the Christian populace. In the Apostles’ Creed, the church sought a simple and memorable creed that people could recite. In the east this was against the backdrop of Arianism in the fifth century, but in the west, the Frankish monarch Charlemagne solidified the Apostles’ Creed’s for educational needs. Between 811–813 AD, Charlemagne was successful in convincing Rome to adopt the Frankish kingdom’s creed. This became the Apostles’ Creed in the form we know it today—a universal work to summarize the gospel. The centrality of Christ, his person and work, along with explicit language concerning “the remission of sins” provided the church with another weapon to combat the perpetual desire for humans to save themselves. The universal and easily adoptable nature of the Apostles’ Creed saw Christianity slowly became not only the dominant religion of the ancient world, but the dominant thought concerning human anthropology and soteriology.[9]
6. Fairburn and Reeves, The Story of Creeds, 109.
7. Justin Holcomb, Know the Creeds and Councils (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 26.
8. Fairburn and Reeves, The Story of Creeds, 112.
9. Ibid., 114-115.
Conclusion
The reach of Alexander’s influence was a powerful and formidable enemy of the gospel as it cemented itself in the minds of the elites and common folk in the early church’s context. Greek policy and thought had significant literary tailwinds, and overcoming them would require much of the same weaponry. The early creeds provided this essential documentation and confession as to what the Scriptural witness so clearly stated. Human pride is as old as man himself. It seeks to puff up and conquer in all aspects of human endeavors, including that of salvation. In these pivotal early creeds, the person and work of Christ was the central and crucial testament leaving the confessor only two choices: 1) reject and elevate yourself or 2) accept and cry out that we like sheep have gone astray and only the person and work of Christ can save us. Calvin opens his Institutes with, “We cannot aspire to him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves.”[10] Let us echo Calvin’s posture and praise God that he opened the church’s early confession and literature by arguing with the world that man cannot save himself but must himself be saved through the person and work of the Son.
10. Calvin, Institutes, 1.1.1.
†
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2024 7:54:48 GMT -5
By
TOM J. NETTLES
Aconfession of faith reflects the New Testament attestation of a “faithful saying” (1 Tim. 1:15; 2 Tim. 2:11) and seeks to reflect the apostolic confidence of the thoroughness and absoluteness of revealed truth in their ministries: “Therefore, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15 NKJV). A faithful synthesis of apostolic teaching will seek clear expression in at least these four areas of Christian truth: historic biblical orthodoxy, soteriology, the necessity of confessing, and ecclesiology. In this article, I will walk through these distinctives and make brief application to the current debate on female pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention.
1. Historical Biblical Orthodoxy
We depend on revelation for our knowledge of God. A good confession will leave no doubt that all of its teachings and affirmations depend on an accurate interpretation and synthesis of biblical propositions. Paul admonished Timothy to pay attention to Paul’s doctrine as well as the “Holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:10, 15). The early creeds of the church from the Apostles’ Creed to the Formula of Chalcedon will figure prominently in a clearly constructed biblical confession. For example, in the Second London Confession, one paragraph on the doctrine of the Trinity draws from this early language in a clear and powerful way:
In this divine and infinite Being there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word (or Son), and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole Divine essence, yet the essence undivided, the Father is of none neither begotten nor proceeding, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, all infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being; but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties, and personal relations; which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God, and comfortable dependence on him.
Commensurate with trinitarian theology is an unambiguous statement of orthodox Christology. With no loss of the divine nature, the Son of God took on himself our nature through conception, birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and session (Christ being seated at the right hand of God). He thus combines the “tenderest sympathies with divine perfections” and in this way is “qualified to be a suitable, a compassionate, and an all-sufficient Saviour” (New Hampshire Confession, IV).No matter what differences lie in other doctrinal areas, it is impossible to be Christian without this orthodoxy. It is indeed the “foundation of all our communion with God.”
2. Soteriology
A rightly developed confession that is indeed a “faithful saying” will express clearly the evangelical doctrines of the Reformation. The affirmation that Christ alone is Savior and the only Mediator between God and man who gave his life as a ransom (1 Timothy 2:5, 6) dying the “just for the unjust” (1 Pet. 3:18) gives a foundation to all evangelical doctrines. A confession must leave no ambiguity concerning this central issue that Jesus “bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, having died to sin, might live for righteousness” (1 Pet. 2:24). Such a confession will give clear voice to the fulness of Christ’s work of redemption, to the efficacious operation of the Holy Spirit in regeneration, and to the consequent and necessary human responses of repentance and faith. For Baptists, of course, church membership depends on a personal confession of these truths and clear evidence that the Spirit has indeed done his work of regeneration in the heart.
3. The Necessity of Confessing
A mature confession that is indeed a “faithful saying” will affirm the necessity of both corporate and personal confession. We confess that we are bound to confess the truth (1 John 2:22); we are bound to confess that Jesus is Lord and has come in the flesh (Phil. 2:11; 1 John 4:2, 3); we are bound to confess that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:10, 11); we are bound to confess our sins—knowing that he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (Psalm 32:5; 1 John 1:9); we are bound to confess him before men—knowing that he will confess us before the Father in heaven (Matthew 10:32; Luke 12:8). Thus, in our personal lives, we make our confession of Christ as Savior according to revealed truth and its transforming effect on the heart. In our corporate witness to the gospel, we make sure that we have a clear confession of the truth that expresses our unity in Christ and in the faith (“one faith” Ephesians 4:5, 6).
4. Ecclesiology
A confession that is indeed a “faithful saying” will affirm an ecclesiology that expresses all these other areas of truth in a consistent way. Baptists will claim that their understanding of the church more fully expresses each of these areas of truth than any other kind of doctrine of the church. A practice of believers’ baptism and regenerate church membership assumes that Paul’s condensed statement of Christian profession should be the unifying factor among all the members of the body: “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart . . . because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” When this truth finds its manifestation in perfect fulfillment, then the church and the confession are one. That is the Baptist goal and that demonstrates the powerful fruit of a confession of faith.
Believer’s Baptism
The doctrines of ecclesiology that in one sense in broadly-conceived Christianity are “secondary” are, nevertheless, of primary importance for Baptist distinctives. Unity in these distinctives of ecclesiology defines the unified witness of Baptist Christianity vis-à-vis other expressions of evangelicalism. Baptists unite confessionally in the biblical nature of baptism as for believers only and by immersion, simulating death, burial, and resurrection. A refusal to confess this is an admission that a person is not a Baptist. Church membership consists only of those who have confessed Christ’s person and work for the salvation of sinners, trusted in him, and expressed that trust in him publicly through baptism. Rejection of regenerate church membership compromises and relativizes a Baptist standard. Baptists believe in the independency of congregations and that each congregation is given authority under Christ’s revelation and present Lordship for self-governance. Adoption of episcopal or presbyterian systems of inter-church relations negates a defining Baptist distinctive.
Church Leadership
Benevolent ministries of the church, both internal and external, are led by deacons, one of the two offices of the church. The teaching ministry is given to elders, also called bishops, and pastors (see 1 Peter 5:1–4; Acts 20:18-35). Qualifications for this office are detailed in 1 Timothy 2:11–3:7 and Titus 1:5–16. In the texts, women are specifically and clearly excluded from the teaching office in the church (1 Tim. 2:11-15) which is then described in 1 Tim. 3:1–7 as a “faithful saying.” The texts describe qualifications of a man (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:6) related to personal character, hospitality, self-possession, benevolent and consistent authority in the home, maturity, doctrinal soundness, teaching ability, humility, public character, and courage necessary for the office. This is not an office to be designed by each local church, but one that has significant descriptive details for qualifications, a departure from which amounts to a confessional error.
Female Preachers?
The Philadelphia Association, therefore, was not wrong in stating as a matter for associational unity that “Hence the silence, with subjection, enjoined on all women in the church of God [1 Tim. 2:12], is such a silence as excludes all women whomsoever from all degrees of teaching, ruling, governing, dictating, and leading in the church of God.”[1] “In the church of God” means in the public assembly for worship of the whole body, the time for congregational instruction and exhortation. This same association, the first Baptist association in America explained that one of the powers of an association was to withdraw “from a defective or disorderly church.” Though the association has no power over the autonomy and the internal operations of the church, yet the very structure of an association that depends on their “agreeing in doctrine and practice … before they can enter into a confederation,” authorizes the confederation, or association, to “exclude the delegates of a defective or disorderly church from an Association and to refuse their presence at their consultations” (Minutes, 61, 62).
1. Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association from A. D. 1707 to A. D. 1807, ed. A. D. Gillette (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1851) 53.
The Baptist Faith and Message article, therefore, that reads, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture” is a biblical and historically Baptist position. It is, indeed, a “faithful saying.” Consequently, exclusion of a confessionally disorderly church and its messengers from participation in the privileges, responsibilities, missional purpose, and benevolent actions of the denomination is a matter of biblical obedience.
Conclusion
If an article of a confession is biblically justified and denominationally confirmed by its inclusion in the confession, and if it is elemental to the distinctive doctrine of the denomination, then relativizing its importance and its defining character is simply wrong. Either dismiss the article entirely by discussion and vote of the denomination or allow its authority as a biblically-derived affirmation to have its proper influence. The Baptist Faith and Message was adopted under the assumption that churches desiring such a confederation considered themselves of like faith and order. Arguments that unity is built on sameness of mission, not sameness of doctrine, miss the point that mission is defined by doctrine. A church-planting mission, in addition to clear Christological and soteriological doctrinal unity, must be particularly careful to maintain unity in commitment as to who will be the qualified teachers of these churches. This is seen as warranted by the plain meaning of Scripture and comparison with several biblical texts listed in the proof text apparatus of the Baptist Faith and Message.
The comment of B. H. Carroll on the passage in 1 Timothy 2:9 and following (where he also considers 1 Corinthians 14:34, 35) summarizes the clarity and the seriousness of these Pauline injunctions:
The custom in some congregations of having a woman as pastor is in flat contradiction to this apostolic teaching and is open rebellion against Christ our king, and high treason against his sovereignty, and against nature as well as grace. It unsexes both the woman who usurps this authority and the men who submit to it. Under no circumstance conceivable is it justifiable.
In writing about the phrase, “the pattern of sound words,” Carroll added, “Modern people say, ‘Don’t have much creed, and when you state it, don’t let it take any particular form. Somebody might object.’” He then sealed his point in saying, “No man is true to the faith who departs from the pattern.”
Those who object to the Baptist Faith and Message confessional article limiting the office of Pastor/Teacher to qualified men—or those who think that it is unworthy of strict conformity—should consider seriously both parts of Carroll’s pungent observations. To hold lightly and with flexible conviction a confessional article and argue that a church is free to ignore and contradict it relativizes a plain ecclesiological proposition of Scripture. It violates the terms on which the confederation of churches was established. It says, “Paul’s instructions can be followed by those so disposed, but others may choose their own way.” The creed, so goes the objection, must submit to varieties of opinion and the personal sense of mission of individual Christians. We must beware, however, that we do not engage in “flat contradiction to this apostolic teaching,” and set ourselves “in open rebellion against Christ our king.”
†
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2024 7:57:14 GMT -5
CREEDS, CONFESSIONS, & COOPERATION
MAR 2024
Complementarian Confessional Conflagration
By
DENNY BURK
There aren’t five reasons to oppose the Law Amendment. There isn’t even one.
If you had told me ten years ago that female pastors would become an item of contention again in the Southern Baptist Convention, I probably would not have believed you. It was not very long ago that most of us were under the impression that the issue had been settled by the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 (BF&M), which says that the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. Nevertheless, here we are in 2024, and the issue is before us again.
The surprising thing this go round is that the debate appears to be an intra-complementarian conflagration as both sides at least claim to affirm the BF&M. Nevertheless, a profound difference exists among us about the propriety of cooperation with churches who have female pastors. To put it very bluntly, you have one set of complementarians who do not wish to cooperate with churches that have female pastors, and another set that do.
Enter Rob Collingsworth, who recently penned an essay for The Baptist Review arguing that Southern Baptists ought to be willing to cooperate with at least some churches that employ female pastors. For this reason, he is keen to persuade Southern Baptists to vote against the Law Amendment at our annual meeting this June in Indianapolis. If passed, the Law Amendment would clarify what the SBC Constitution already says—that cooperating churches should closely identify with the BF&M’s teaching about qualifications for pastors. Collingsworth believes that it would be bad for the Southern Baptist Convention to alienate churches who have female pastors but who would otherwise wish to contribute to our cooperative efforts. And for Collingsworth, the Law Amendment would alienate many such churches.
He gives five reasons for opposing the Law Amendment, each of which I believe to be problematic.
1. Should the SBC Cooperate with Churches that Employ Female Pastors?
First, he believes the SBC should be willing to cooperate with churches that give women the title pastor. As long as those female pastors don’t actually do the work of pastors, why should we split hairs over the title pastor? After all, the term pastor is “semantically challenged,” and we ought to recognize that some female pastors are nevertheless aligned with the “spirit” of the Bible’s teaching, if not the letter.
Collingsworth fails to recognize that the problem we are facing isn’t merely with churches that are confused about titles. I can think of two prominent examples right off the top of my head. One of the churches represented on the SBC’s Cooperation Committee employs a female executive pastor who preaches from time to time on Sunday mornings. Another church represented on the Cooperation Committee employs a variety of female pastors and has a senior pastor who publicly disagrees with the BF&M’s teaching about a male-only pastorate and who has publicly opposed the SBC’s removal of Saddleback. Neither of these situations represents mere confusion over nomenclature, but something far more substantive. Collingsworth doesn’t really explain the real scope of the problem right now in at least some cooperating churches. Voting down the Law Amendment would likely exacerbate that confusion, and yet that’s precisely what Collingsworth urges Southern Baptists to do.
2. Would the Law Amendment Exclude Churches that Subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message?
Second, Collingsworth argues that the Law Amendment would exclude churches that hold to the BF&M. For him, while egalitarian churches with female pastors should be excluded from friendly cooperation, “complementarian” churches with female pastors should not. If churches are willing to give their money to a convention that does not share their views, why should the SBC refuse to cooperate with them?
The reason is because cooperating churches send messengers to the annual meeting. Messengers at the annual meeting vote on what the policies and priorities of the convention will be. How long will the SBC affirm the Bible’s teaching about a male-only pastorate if messengers increasingly disagree with what our confession says about a male-only pastorate? Cooperation is not merely about collecting money. It’s about messengers determining what our mission and priorities will be in our efforts to reach the nations for Christ. Do we want those messengers to agree with what our confession says about qualified male pastors? I think we do, and the Law Amendment helps to clarify our intention in this regard. Voting it down would send the opposite message.
3. Is the Law Amendment Out of Step with SBC History?
Third, Collingsworth argues that the Law Amendment would be out of step with how our Convention has operated for most of its history. The SBC was formed in 1849 but did not adopt the BF&M until 1925. And even then, it did not require cooperating churches to agree with the BF&M. It only required them to send in contributions. It wasn’t until 2015 that the convention adopted a requirement that cooperating churches “closely identify” with the BF&M. Nevertheless, Collingsworth contends that “closely identifies” allows for churches to contradict what the BF&M says on any given point, including what the BF&M says about the qualifications for pastors. He says that the chair of the SBC Executive Committee that proposed the “closely identifies” language confirmed to him privately that this is the case.
I am not sure what to make of that last part. I have had my own private correspondence with the 2015 chair of the Executive Committee, and he confirmed to me in writing the opposite of what Collingsworth claims in his essay. I’m not saying that either Collingsworth or the former chair are lying. I’m sure that if we all sat down together face to face, we would probably sort out the discrepancy. In any case, we still have to contend with the language of Article 3 of the SBC Constitution, and it says that cooperating churches should have a faith and practice that closely identifies with the BF&M. And then it gives an example of what not closely identifying would look like, and that example is a contradiction of the BF&M’s teaching on homosexuality. The most plausible reading of Article 3, therefore, is that closely identifying with the BF&M means not contradicting the BF&M.
In an article for this month’s theme at Christ Over All, Colin Smothers points out that the language of ‘closely identifies’ comes from the preamble to the 1963 BF&M. That preamble says the following:
This generation of Southern Baptists is in historic succession of intent and purpose as it endeavors to state for its time and theological climate those articles of the Christian faith which are most surely held among us.
Baptists emphasize the soul’s competency before God, freedom in religion, and the priesthood of the believer. However, this emphasis should not be interpreted to mean that there is an absence of certain definite doctrines that Baptists believe, cherish, and with which they have been and are now closely identified.
It is the purpose of this statement of faith and message to set forth certain teachings which we believe. (emphasis mine)
Notice that “closely identified” refers to certain definite truths that are held in common by all Southern Baptists. In other words, “closely identified” refers to the fact that all of the doctrines in the BF&M (not some of its doctrines) are “most surely held among us.” Likewise, we should understand “closely identifies” in Article 3 of the SBC Constitution to refer to all of the BF&M’s doctrines, not some of them.
Collingsworth seems to think that because the SBC spent most of its history without a confessional requirement for cooperation, we should feel free to ignore the confessional requirement that messengers overwhelmingly adopted in 2015. Yet the SBC has self-consciously been moving in a more confessional direction, and that began decades before the “closely identifies” language was added to the Constitution in 2015. Shouldn’t we celebrate the advance of that confessional clarity? Isn’t such clarity needed in the post-Christian culture that we are called to reach for Christ? Now is not the time to retreat from confessional cooperation but to lean into it. Let’s not turn back the clock to a time when the only thing required to be a Southern Baptist Church was to make financial contributions. We have a confessional form of cooperation, and passing the Law Amendment would only help to clarify that.
4. Will the Law Amendment “Weaponize” the SBC Constitution?
Fourth, Collingsworth opposes the Law Amendment because he thinks it will be used to “weaponize” the SBC Constitution against “other pastors.” The amendment calls for biblically qualified men to serve as pastors, and we don’t want our credentials process to be addled by a flood of inquiries into whether or not churches have qualified pastors.
In my view, this concern misunderstands both our polity and what is most likely to cause “weaponization” of our Constitution. Messengers are already free right now to challenge the credentials of churches on the basis of pastoral qualifications. They can do that with or without the Law Amendment. In fact, they are doing that, and I’m told that the Credentials Committee is already overwhelmed with all kinds of referrals. It’s not the Law Amendment that has allowed for the so-called “weaponization” of the SBC Constitution. Rather, it’s the change the Convention made in 2019 to make the Credentials Committee a standing committee, and then opening up an online portal so that anyone with an internet connection can challenge a church’s credentials. I believe there were good motives behind that change in 2019, but it has had unintended consequences that are not good for our convention. But again, the problem here is not the Law Amendment (which hasn’t even been enacted yet), and it’s a misunderstanding of our polity to say that it is.
5. Will the Law Amendment Set a Troubling Precedent?
Fifth, Collingsworth worries that the passage of the Law Amendment will set a precedent for the SBC “to closely monitor the ecclesiological practices of its churches.” If the SBC starts policing churches on female pastors, what’s next? Alien immersion? Malfunctioning deacons? Violations of religious liberty? Is the SBC going to start policing an ever-narrowing set of issues in cooperating churches?
This concern also misunderstands our polity. The passage of the Law Amendment does not give the Credentials Committee or any other Southern Baptist group the power “to closely monitor” the internal workings of churches. The Credentials Committee does not lean forward with doctrinal tests for all SBC churches. On the contrary, the Credentials Committee receives referrals and can only respond to those referrals. It cannot initiate inquiries on its own or otherwise police churches. I would recommend all Southern Baptists read Bylaw 8 to understand how the Credentials Committee actually works. If someone challenges the credentials of a church, the Credentials Committee may ask that church questions, but it cannot “investigate” that church or otherwise “closely monitor” that church (see Article IV of the SBC Constitution and Bylaw 8.C.5). Collingsworth’s fear on this account is entirely misplaced in my view.
Conclusion
Collingsworth’s article is one more piece of evidence that at least some people oppose the Law Amendment because they are willing to cooperate with churches that have female pastors. The space for such a thing in the SBC is already pretty narrow, as the votes against Saddleback and Fern Creek last summer demonstrate. The Law Amendment would clarify beyond a reasonable doubt what the position of the SBC is on the matter. Some are fighting the Law Amendment because they want to leave space for cooperating with at least some churches that have female pastors. Is that the direction that the SBC wishes to go? I haven’t seen any evidence that it wishes to do so, and I don’t understand why anyone would think otherwise after the decisive votes in New Orleans last summer.
For these reasons, I am not persuaded by Collingsworth’s objections to the Law Amendment. On the contrary, the Law Amendment simply clarifies what our Constitution already calls for—close identification with the BF&M. Messengers have already proved their commitment to hold the line on the BF&M’s teaching on female pastors. I am hoping and praying that they will prove it again in Indianapolis by passing the Law Amendment.
†
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2024 8:00:18 GMT -5
s the Southern Baptist Convention prepares to meet in Indianapolis in June 2024, the question of the authority of the Convention in relation to the autonomy of local churches is front and center. Messengers expect to hear a report from the 20-member, presidentially appointed “Cooperation Group” tasked with studying how the Convention should deem churches to be “in friendly cooperation on questions of faith and practice” as written in Article 3 of the SBC Constitution. Messengers will also have the opportunity to vote to ratify the Law Amendment to Article 3 of the SBC Constitution, adding a sixth criteria for what it means to be in “friendly cooperation.” If this amendment receives a two-thirds vote in Indianapolis in June, then the SBC constitution would state that a cooperating church only “Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”[1]
1. SBC Annual (2023), 90.
Some have suggested that such moves to amend the constitution violate “local church autonomy” by commanding “rigid conformity” in ways that will undermine the Convention’s “missional vitality.” Others have argued for the sufficiency of the Baptist Faith and Message, and that further amendments to the Constitution are unnecessary given the clarity of the BFM2000 on the office of pastor. Behind these arguments lurks the lingering question of the power of a voluntary association—such as the Southern Baptist Convention—with regard to independent, autonomous, member churches. After all, the BFM2000 affirms that local churches are “autonomous” and that associations “have no authority over one another or over the churches.” So what have Baptists taught historically about the authority of a voluntary association to disfellowship or otherwise cut ties with member churches?
This article traces the history of Baptist associations in America to argue that Baptists have consistently affirmed the authority and responsibility of voluntary associations to disfellowship disorderly churches.[2] Beginning with the first Baptist association in America, the Philadelphia Baptist Association formed in 1707, this understanding of the authority of associations spread across the north and the south, informing the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. Historically, Baptists have understood church autonomy to mean that the congregation is the highest court of appeals for matters of discipline, doctrine, and the appointment and firing of ministers. However, when a church strays out of step with the association’s beliefs and practices, the churches of the association have the responsibility to step in. Doing so preserves associational unity without violating church autonomy.
2. This article develops with greater detail, the argument made by Michael Haykin, in his longform, “Baptist, A Confessional People.” christoverall.com/article/longform /baptists-a-confessional-people/.
America’s first Baptist Association: the Philadelphia Baptist Association
When five churches gathered to form the Philadelphia Baptist Association (PBA) in 1707 to “consult about such things as were wanting [i.e., lacking] in the churches, and to set them in order,” they knew they were setting a pattern for Baptist churches in the New World.[3] As the “mother” of subsequent associations—the Charleston Baptist Association in 1751, the Ketocton Association of Virginia in 1766, and the Warren Association of New England in 1767—the PBA became a model for Baptists in America. As Baptist historian A.H. Newman wrote in 1894, “No agency did so much for the solidifying and extension of the Baptist denomination in the American colonies as the Philadelphia Association.”[4]
3. A. D. Gillette, ed., Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, 1707 to 1807: Being the First One Hundred Years of Its Existence (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2002), 12.
4. A.H. Newman, A History of the Baptist Churches (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1894), 210.
The Philadelphia Baptist Confession (1742)
In their statement of faith—the Philadelphia Baptist Confession of 1742—the churches affirmed the independence of member churches, insisting that an association of churches is “not intrusted with any church-power properly so called; or with any jurisdiction over the churches themselves.”[5] Or as Benjamin Griffith wrote in the PBA’s manual of church discipline, “Such Delegates thus assembled, are not intrusted or armed with any coercive Power, or any superior Jurisdiction over the Churches concerned, so as to impose their Determinations on them or their Officers, under the Penalty of Excommunication, or the like.” Nevertheless, Griffith continues,
5. Philadelphia Baptist Confession of Faith, 27:15. The archaic spelling is left intentionally intact here and throughout.
Such Messengers and Delegates, convened in the Name of Christ, by the voluntary Consent of the several Churches in such mutual Communion, may declare & determine the Mind of the Holy Ghost, revealed in Scripture, concerning Things in Difference; and may decree the Observation of Things that are true and necessary, because [such things are] revealed and appointed in Scripture. And the Churches will do well to receive, own and observe such Determinations, on the Evidence and Authority of the Mind of the Holy Ghost in them.[6]
6. Benjamin Griffith’s A Short Treatise of Church-Discipline was printed in and included as an appendix to A Confession of Faith, Put Forth by the Elders and Brethren of Many Congregations of Christians (Baptized upon Profession of Their Faith) in London and the Country. Adopted by the Baptist Association Met at Philadelphia, Sept. 25. 1742. The Sixth Edition. To Which Are Added, Two Articles Viz. of Imposition of Hands, and Singing of Psalms in Publick Worship. Also a Short Treatise of Church Discipline. (Philadelphia, PA: B. Franklin, 1743), 59–62.
In other words, associations are voluntary, but churches ought to hear and heed the association’s decisions. But what about areas of disagreement when the association “decrees” what is “true and necessary” but a church refuses to “receive, own, and observe such”?
“The Power and Duty of an Association” (1749)
This question prompted the PBA to enlist Benjamin Griffith to write another essay, “respecting the power and duty of an Association.”[7] This essay, unanimously adopted by the messengers of the churches of the PBA on September 19, 1749, is perhaps the most definitive and influential statement on the authority of Baptist associations ever written.
7. Printed in A. D. Gillette, ed., Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, 1707 to 1807 (Philadelphia, PA: American Baptist Publication Society, 1851), 60–63. For further discussion, see Francis W. Sacks, The Philadelphia Baptist Tradition of Church and Church Authority, 1707–1814: An Ecumenical Analysis and Theological Interpretation, Studies in American Religion, v. 48 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 260–1.
In the essay, Griffith argues that each individual Baptist church possesses complete power and authority from Jesus Christ over the administration of gospel ordinances, the reception and expulsion of members, the trial and ordination of officers, and the exercise of gospel discipline. This authority is independent of any superior judicature and cannot be overturned by another body without violating the local church’s God-given powers. As Griffith writes,
Each particular church hath a complete power and authority from Jesus Christ, to administer all gospel ordinances, provided they have a sufficiency of officers duly qualified, or that they be supplied by the officers of another sister church or churches, as baptism, and the Lord’s supper, &c.; and to receive in and cast out, and also to try and ordain their own officers, and to exercise every part of gospel discipline and church government, independent of any other church or assembly whatever.[8]
8. Ibid., 60–61.
Nevertheless, associations have a real and positive authority by virtue of the voluntary consent of member churches and their original statement of theological agreement in doctrine and practice. Thus, the association has the power to exclude delegates from a defective church, advise other churches to do the same, and bear witness against the defection. Though not “a superior judicature, as having a superintendency over the churches,” Griffith argues that “an Association of the delegates of associate churches have a very considerable power in their hands.”[9] Since churches had joined the association voluntarily, and expressed their agreement to the association’s “doctrine and practice,” if a church deviates from sound doctrine or practice, the association has the authority to withdraw from that church and exclude it from the confederation. As Griffith writes,
9. Ibid., 61.
for if the agreement of several distinct churches, in sound doctrine and regular practice, be the first motive, ground, and foundation or basis of their confederation, then it must naturally follow, that a defection in doctrine or practice in any church, in such confederation, or any party in any such church, is ground sufficient for an Association to withdraw from such a church or party so deviating or making defection, and to exclude such from them in some formal manner, and to advertise all the churches in confederation thereof, in order that every church in confederation may withdraw from such in all acts of church communion, to the end they may be ashamed, and that all the churches may discountenance such, and bear testimony against the defection.”[10]
10. Ibid., 61.
Griffith is clear that such a “withdrawal” is not merely a negative action (i.e. a cessation of cooperation). But by virtue of each church’s obligation to be a “pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15), churches ought to take the positive step of publicly severing ties with errant churches. Though this power is not one of excommunication, such an act of exclusion consists in refusing “their presence at their consultations, and to advise all the churches in confederation to do so too.”[11] In a word, excommunicating members is the business of local churches. Disfellowshipping churches is the business of associations. As Griffith summarizes the powers of an association,
11. Ibid., 62.
an Association, then, of the delegates of associate churches, may exclude and withdraw from defective and unsound or disorderly churches or persons, in manner abovesaid; and this will appear regular and justifiable by the light and law of nature, as is apparent in the conduct and practice of all regular civil and political corporations and confederations whatsoever; who all of them have certain rules to exclude delinquents from their societies, as well as for others to accede thereunto.[12]
12. Ibid., 62.
To defend the associational principle, Griffith points to the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 where messengers from the church at Antioch seek counsel from the church at Jerusalem regarding the false teaching of the Judaizers.[13] Griffith concludes from this text that an association has the power to condemn false teachers and false doctrine (Acts 15:25) and to delegate certain persons to deliver their decisions to be ratified by individual churches (Acts 15:24). “Thus,” Griffith writes, “an Association may disown and withdraw from a defective or disorderly church, and advise the churches related to them to withdraw from, and to discountenance such as aforesaid, without exceeding the bounds of their power.”[14]
13. Ibid., 62.
14. Ibid., 63.
Griffith’s essay shows that Baptists in America have not only prized the autonomy of the local church; they have cherished the independence and autonomy of Baptist associations. Baptist historian Walter Shurden sums up this view: “The association was, just as a local congregation, an independent and self-governing body. This meant that the association could and should ‘withdraw’ from churches or individuals ‘defective in doctrine and practice.’”[15]
15. Walter B. Shurden, “Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association,” Center for Baptist Studies.
It is striking that amid Griffith’s discussion of the powers of an association, no limits are placed on what kinds of actions would warrant disfellowshipping. As Griffith had written earlier in his Treatise on Church Discipline, an association’s powers extended to matters “revealed in Scripture” and “things [held] in difference.” While the PBA tolerated diversity in practice—for instance, by not insisting on agreement regarding the question of whether or not a church should have a plurality of elders or a plurality of deacons—it reserved the right to declare any deviation in doctrine or practice out of step with the Association. For instance, in 1781, the churches of the PBA brought a unanimous recommendation for the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia to excommunicate their pastor, Elhanan Winchester, for preaching universalism, a doctrine that placed him outside of the doctrinal bounds of the Philadelphia Baptist Confession of Faith.[16] The church responded by firing their pastor along with forty-six members who had come to hold that doctrine, demonstrating the effectiveness of denominational authority in protecting doctrine.
16. Gillette, 174.
While such powers may seem poised to effect a “tyranny of the majority,” historian David Benedict could write in 1813 that such an approach to associational authority “has now been in operation 106 years, and I do not find that it was ever complained of for infringing on the independency of any church.”[17] Associational accountability, in other words, did not undermine church autonomy; it shored up associational unity.
17. David Benedict, General History of the Baptist Denomination in America and Other Parts of the World (Boston, MA: Manning and Loring, 1813), 596.
Samuel Jones’s Treatise of Church Discipline (1798)
As a supplement and further elucidation of the PBA’s beliefs and practices, Samuel Jones wrote A Treatise of Church Discipline in 1798.[18] Jones’s treatise demonstrates that in the fifty years between Griffith’s essay and his own, the PBA had not shifted at all on the question of the association’s authority. Jones wrote that associations should “exclude from the connection” disorderly churches. “The association has a right to call any delinquent church to account,” wrote Jones, for “disregard of those things recommended to them, or any material defect in principle or practice; and if satisfactory reasons are not given therefore, nor reformation, then to exclude them.”[19] Like Griffith, Jones is clear, that such an act of disfellowshipping or excluding does not violate church autonomy.
18. Samuel Jones, A Treatise of Church Discipline and a Directory (Philadelphia: S.C. Ustick, 1798).
19. Samuel Jones, A Treatise of Church Discipline and a Directory (Philadelphia: S.C. Ustick, 1798), 16–17. Cited in Dever, ed., Polity, 158.
Let it not be thought, that this power of the association over the churches in connection with it disannuls or destroys the independence of those churches: for if any church of the associated body should become unsound in their principles, or act irregularly and disorderly, and will not do, what may be just and right; such a church will still remain an independent church, though an heterodox and irregular one.[20]
20. Ibid. Italics mine.
In other words, despite being disfellowshipped by an association, a church retains its powers to exercise the ordinances, exercise discipline, and appoint ministers. Nevertheless, action on the part of the association is still necessary to preserve the order and discipline of its member churches. After all, Jones continues, “It would be inconsistent and wrong in the association, to suffer [allow] such a church to continue among them, since, besides other confederations, they would hereby become partakers of their evil deeds. The association can take nothing from them, but what it gave them,” namely, fellowship, partnership, and associational membership.
The Influence of the Philadelphia Baptist Association Beyond Philadelphia
Griffith’s essay was unanimously adopted by the churches of the Philadelphia Baptist Association and enshrined in its record of minutes as the definitive statement regarding the powers of an association. And as Baptist associations spread across the early Republic, modeled after the Philadelphia Association, Walter Shurden writes that “most definitions of associational authority agreed with Griffith’s explication of the power of an association.”[21] This was especially true of the Shaftsbury Association.
21. Walter B. Shurden, “The Baptist Association in Colonial America, 1707–1814,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 13, 4 (Winter 1986): 113.
Shaftsbury Association Circular Letter of 1791
Established in 1780 and encompassing churches in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York, the Shaftesbury Association enlisted three pastors in 1791 in preparing a statement regarding “distinctions really existing between the power of churches, and that of an association.”[22] After describing the authority of local churches over matters of discipline and doctrine, the authors affirmed the authority of associations to “withdraw” from disorderly and apostate churches:
22. Printed in Stephen Wright, History of the Shaftsbury Baptist Association, 1781–1853 (Troy, NY: A.G. Johnson, 1853), 30–35.
But in case any church, or churches shall apostatize from the faith, and become corrupt, on information from sister churches, who have taken gospel steps to reclaim them, and have not succeeded, but have necessarily been called “to withdraw from them,” it is the duty of this association to sympathize with those grieved churches in their sorrows, and to inform the churches in general, that we consider those churches who have fallen, no longer in our fellowship.[23]
23. Ibid., 34.
The Shaftsbury Association affirmed this position again in 1799, clarifying the association’s power to “withdraw” from disorderly churches, writing,
The Association take this opportunity of declaring their sentiment;—that it is gospel-wise for the Association, whenever they receive official information that any church in the Union has fallen from the faith and practice of the Gospel, that the Association may and ought to withdraw their fellowship from such church as fully and publicly, as they formed fellowship with them at first.[24]
24. Wright, 61.
So important was this teaching on the power of the association, that in 1805, the association amended its constitution to make this authority and duty even more explicit:
If any church of the union shall become corrupt in doctrine or practice, it shall be the duty of any sister church who may have knowledge of the same, to labor with said offending church. If satisfaction is not obtained, it will then become necessary for the aggrieved church to call for the advice and assistance of other churches; and if they judge there is sufficient ground to suspend fellowship with the delinquent Church, their testimony and report to the Association shall be a sufficient reason to drop it from the minutes, and to publish to the world, that they have withdrawn that fellowship which they had given to said delinquent Church.[25]
25. Wright, 192.
In other words, Baptists in the Shaftsbury Association understood the principle of Matthew 18:15–20 (“If your brother sins against you…”) to extend to inter-church relationships within an association. If a church was in error, the other churches had an obligation to warn them, and if they remained obstinate, to bring the matter to the association, resulting ultimately in exclusion. Again, such an act was never termed “excommunication.” As a voluntary association, they could not deprive an independent church of its authority to appoint ministers or admit and see out members. But an association could and should police the doctrinal boundaries of its fellowship.
Such associational powers could doubtless be abused. Yet the effect of associational authority, writes Shurden, was to promote unity and prevent “irregularities in doctrine and practice.”[26] Thus even Isaac Backus, ever skeptical of concentrated authority, was forced to confess the beneficial effects of associational accountability. “If the church departs from her former faith or order, she is left out of the association,” wrote Backus in his history of Baptist churches in New England. “By these means, mutual acquaintance and communion has been begotten and promoted; the weak and oppressed have been relieved; errors in doctrine and practice have been exposed and guarded against; false teachers have been exposed, and warnings against them have been published.”[27]
26. Walter B. Shurden, “The Associational Principle, 1707–1814: Its Rationale,” Foundations 21, 3 (September 1978), 221.
27. Isaac Backus, Church History of New England, Vol. 3 (Boston, MA: Manning & Loring, 1796), 117.
The Baptists of Virginia
Nor were these views peculiar to the north. After the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, Charleston-native and pastor of Richmond’s Second Baptist Church, wrote an influential treatise on church government—Church Polity; or the Kingdom of Christ (1849)—which made extensive use of Griffith’s 1749 essay on the authority of an association. As Reynolds wrote, an association consisted in the “union of churches” around “uniformity of faith and practice.” Then, after quoting Benjamin Griffith’s essay on the powers of an association affirmatively at length, Reynolds concluded by saying that if any member church should “depart from the principles of the union, by embracing error, abusing its power over its members, or neglecting attendance on the meetings of the association, it is the right and duty of this body to remonstrate, to advise, and if the church proves incorrigible, to withdraw fellowship from it.”[28] Southern Baptists, apparently, were not averse to withdrawing fellowship from churches that embraced error.
28. J.L. Reynolds, Church Polity or the Kingdom of Christ (1849) in Dever, Polity, 393.
Like Reynolds, the General Association of Separate Baptists encapsulated the authority of associations into their governing documents on May 13, 1771. After agreeing that “the Association has no power or authority to impose anything upon the churches,” they declared their conviction that “we believe we have a right to withdraw ourselves from any church.”[29] Historian Robert Semple interprets these articles of agreement to mean that the association may withdraw from a church that is not only disorderly in practice but heterodox in sentiment. As Semple concludes, “To give an association power to deal with, and finally to put such out of their association must be proper, and, indeed, must be what is designed by the above article. By no other means could a general union be preserved.”[30]
29. Robert Baylor Semple, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia (Richmond, VA: Pitt & Dickinson, 1894), 71.
30. Semple, 75.
Like the Separate Baptists, the Ketocton Association of Virginia likewise in their statement of purpose, affirmed that when an association received intelligence of “any church proving erroneous in principle,” if they “cannot be reclaimed, are excluded from the association.”[31]
31. William Fristoe, A Concise History of the Ketocton Baptist Association (Staunton, VA: William Gilman Lyford., 1808), 16.
Nor were these views without effect. In his history of the Georgia Baptist Association, Jesse Mercer recounts how the Association responded to several preachers who adopted “the Arminian scheme of doctrine.” After due deliberation, Mercer writes, “it was determined, that there was no propriety in Associational intercourse, where there was no union.” Thus, by “a large majority,” the Association voted to advise the churches “to call these ministers to account.” The Association could not remove pastors. But they did believe they were obligated to warn the churches. The churches responded to the admonition of the association and proceeded to exclude the Arminian pastors.[32] As in the case of the PBA and the universalism being taught at the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia, this example illustrates the power of an association over otherwise autonomous, independent churches. As Walter Shurden has written, “Paradoxically, a Baptist association exerted more power over local churches by means of its advisory functions, than through any other means.”[33]
32. Jesse Mercer, History of the Georgia Baptist Association (Washington, GA: 1838), 26–27.
33. Walter B. Shurden, Associationalism Among Baptists in America: 1707–1814 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 135.
E.K. Love and Associational Authority in Black Churches
Across north and south, Baptists in America universally acknowledged the authority of associations to disfellowship disorderly churches. Such a view of the authority of an association extended to African American Baptist churches as well. In a sermon delivered before the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia in 1882, Rev. Emmanuel K. Love, the influential pastor of the First Baptist Church of Thomasville, Georgia, argued that severing ties with “disorderly churches” did not interfere with the principle of church autonomy but rather served to protect and strengthen the convention as a whole.
We claim that our Convention is not an ecclesiastical body and therefore, we cannot try church cases. That we cannot settle church troubles, you and your humble speaker are agreed. But we can discountenance disorderly churches. We can say which one is right, (when called upon) and therefore fit to unite with us. In this way we would hinder many splits and confusions in the churches and add largely to the cause of Christ, and advance our denominational interest in the State.[34]
34. E. K. Love, Wait on the Lord: A Discourse Delivered by E.K. Love (Augusta, Ga.: Georgia Baptist Book and Job Print, 1882), 7. Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress.
The context of Love’s comment was the early controversies over the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture in the late nineteenth century due to the encroaching effects of higher criticism. Rather than tolerating the churches who called pastors who taught such doctrines, Love demanded that associations exercise their God-given responsibility by separating themselves from error.
The Authority of the Southern Baptist Convention
Despite any disanalogies between an association and the Southern Baptist Convention, the same principles regarding the authority of a voluntary association of churches apply. The SBC has long recognized this authority, both through requiring conformity to the Baptist Faith and Message and through decisive constitutional amendments to Article 3, clarifying its terms of cooperation. In this sense, the clarity sought by the Law Amendment does not demand “rigid conformity” or threaten the SBC’s “missional vitality” any more than the SBC’s previous constitutional amendments regarding homosexuality, racism, or sexual abuse.
For instance, in 1992, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to disfellowship two congregations in North Carolina for their actions “in regard to homosexuality,” which the Convention argued were “contrary to the teachings of the Bible on human sexuality.” Of the two churches in question, one had ordained a practicing gay man as a pastor. The other had held a “marriage-like ceremony” for two homosexual men. Both churches had previously been disfellowshipped by their local Baptist associations.[35] Yet this decisive action did not prevent the Executive Committee from simultaneously proposing an amendment to Article 3 of its Constitution. In their proposed amendment, first affirmed in 1992 and then ratified in 1993, the Executive Committee sought to clarify that, “Among churches not in cooperation with the Convention are churches which act to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior.”[36] Contrary to some voices, the Southern Baptist Convention has therefore not pitted constitutional amendments against the Baptist Faith and Message, but has taken a variety of approaches to counteract doctrinal error.
35. “Maryland/Delaware Baptists Seek Unity but Debate Issues,” Baptist Press, November 12, 1992.
36. SBC Annual (1993), 46.
In fact, the continual appeal to “church autonomy” by churches seeking to circumvent the associational accountability of other churches has become such a repeated refrain that in his President’s Address at the 2001 Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, James Merritt sought to set the record straight regarding the true meaning of church autonomy.
I want to say this straight, and I want to make it plain. I believe in local church autonomy. I don’t want any leader, agency, institution, or convention giving orders to me or my congregation. But hear me, and hear me well. The ocean of church autonomy stops at the shore of biblical authority. Local autonomy, without biblical authority, becomes spiritual anarchy.
It is the height of spiritual cowardice and theological hypocrisy to hide behind the skirt of church autonomy, or the priesthood of the believer, while pretending that churches can do anything they want to do, or believe anything they want to believe, and still be Baptist.
I appreciate our Baptist distinctives. I am grateful for those beliefs that make us Baptist. But any time a so-called Baptist distinctive is used as an excuse not to follow sound Bible doctrine, at that point it may be distinctive, but it is certainly not Baptist.[37]
37. “The Battle of New Orleans,” Southern Baptist Convention Presidential Address, SBC Annual (2001), 93.
Since then, the SBC has adopted constitutional amendments declaring sexual abuse and the toleration of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity grounds for disfellowshipping member churches. Such actions are entirely consistent with the history of Baptist associationalism. In line with this, Bart Barber argued in a 2012 blogpost for the SBC to disfellowship Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church (Jacksonville, Florida) for calling a sex predator as a pastor. He advocated that “withdrawal of fellowship is the only punitive action open to Southern Baptist cooperative structures.” Such an action, Barber argued, did not constitute a violation of local church autonomy. The SBC could not remove Christ Tabernacle’s pastor. But Barber rightly noted, “We do, however, have the authority to determine which churches are those with whom we walk in cooperative fellowship.”
If such an action is consistent with Baptist history and Southern Baptist practice, why would further clarity regarding the office of pastor/elder suddenly threaten the Convention’s unity? As Barber wrote in 2012, “Historically, gross error in the selection of pastors has been among the most widely recognized grounds for disfellowshipping churches from Baptist associations.” Thus, as Barber continued, “It is a late, flawed idea in Baptist life that a local congregation’s decision to call a pastor is no business of the other congregations in fellowship with that church.”
Conclusion
This article has reviewed the writings of Baptists in America regarding the authority and responsibility of associations to disfellowship disorderly churches, from 1742 to the present. As these writings from Baptist history have abundantly demonstrated, local church autonomy is not incompatible with mutual accountability. True church autonomy consists in a church’s right to call the officers they deem fit and oversee the church’s membership. However, whenever a church’s practice or doctrine violates the stated beliefs and practices of an association of churches they have voluntarily joined, they face the likelihood of associational repercussions. Such a church has no ground to appeal to “church autonomy” as a shield from associational accountability. Rather, such a church ought to change its practice to conform to the association, or voluntarily withdraw. That’s the way Baptist associationalism started. And that’s the way Baptist associationalism at every level should continue.† ABOUT THE AUTHOR
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2024 8:02:25 GMT -5
This month, Christ Over All has been exploring the roles of creeds and confessions in the life of the church. We commend the work done by Dr. Carl Trueman on this important topic, and we are grateful for the opportunity to share a portion of his recent work Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity here. In this excerpt, Dr. Trueman lays out four counter-cultural presuppositions underlying the case for confessions.
Content taken from Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity by Carl R. Trueman, ©2024. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Four Assumptions
My conviction that creeds and confessions are a good and necessary part of healthy, biblical church life rests on a host of different arguments and convictions; but, at root, there are four basic presuppositions to which I hold that must be true for the case for confessions to be a sound one. These are as follows:
1. Human beings are not free, autonomous creatures defined by feelings but creatures made in the image of God and always defined by external relationships to God and each other. We as human beings do not exist in isolation; nor do we exist in a world that is mere “stuff,” a kind of cosmic playdough of no intrinsic significance that we can simply make mean anything we wish. Our identity is determined by the fact we are made in God’s image and placed from birth in a network of relationships that have a binding authority on us and determine who we are. In short, our identity at base is not something we invent for ourselves; it is something we learn as we learn about the objective nature of the world in which we live.
2. The past is important and has things of positive relevance to teach us. Creeds and confessions are, almost by definition, documents that were composed at some point in the past; and, in most cases, we are talking about the distant past, not last week or last year. Thus, to claim that creeds and confessions still fulfill positive functions, in terms of transmitting truth from one generation to another or making it clear to the outside world what it is that particular churches believe, requires that we believe the past can still speak to us today. Thus, any cultural force that weakens or attenuates the belief that the past can be a source of knowledge and even wisdom is also a force that serves to undermine the relevance of creeds and confessions.
3. Language must be an appropriate vehicle for the stable transmission of truth across time and geographical space. Creeds and confessions are documents that make theological truth claims. That is not to say that is all they do: the role, for example, of the Apostles’ and the Nicene creeds in many church liturgies indicates that they can also fulfill doxological as well as pedagogical and theological roles; but while they can thus be more than theological, doctrinal statements that rest upon and express truth claims about God and the world he has created, they can never be less. They do this, of course, in words; and so, if these claims are to be what they claim to be—statements about a reality beyond language—then language itself must be an adequate medium for performing this task. Thus, any force that undermines general confidence in language as a medium capable of conveying information or of constituting relationships is also a force that strikes at the validity of creeds and confessions.
4. There must be a body or an institution that can authoritatively compose and enforce creeds and confessions. This body or institution is the church. I address the significance of this in more detail in subsequent chapters, but it is important to understand at the outset that confessions are not private documents. They are significant because they have been adopted by the church as public declarations of her faith, and their function cannot be isolated from their ecclesiastical nature and context. This whole concept assumes that institutions and institutional authority structures are not necessarily bad or evil or defective simply by their very existence as institutions. Thus, any cultural force that overthrows or undermines notions of external or institutional authority effectively removes the mechanisms by which creeds and confessions can function as anything other than simple summaries of doctrine for private edification.
If these are the presuppositions of confessionalism, then it is clear that we have a major problem, because each of these four basic presuppositions represents a profoundly countercultural position, something that stands opposed to the general flow of modern life. Today, Western culture is dominated by expressive individualism, the idea that we are defined by our inner feelings, that our relationships with others place no natural or necessary obligations upon us, and that we can pick and choose them as they serve our emotional needs. This idea plays into the general cultural assertion of individual autonomy and rejection of external authority—or at least of traditional external authority—that requires some sacrifice of ourselves for others. Whether it is the child rebelling against the parent or the individual rebelling against the sex of his or her own body, today autonomy and personal desire are king; and these press against anything from outside that tells us who we are, what we should believe, or how we should live. Next, the past is more often a source of embarrassment than a positive source of knowledge; and when it is considered useful, it is usually as providing examples of what not to do or of defective, less-advanced thinking than of truth for the present.
Third, language is similarly suspect: in a world of spin, dishonest politicians, and ruthless marketing, language can often seem to be—indeed, often is—manipulative, deceptive, or downright wicked but rarely transparent and worthy of taking at face value. Finally, institutions—from multinational corporations to governments—seem to be in the game of self-perpetuation, bullying, and control for the sake of control. They are rarely seen as entities that exist in practice for the real benefit of others. As noted, above, in a world where expressive individualism rules the cultural roost, this tendency is only intensified. Thus, the big four presuppositions of confessionalism fly in the face of the values of contemporary culture, and confessionalists clearly have their work cut out to mount a counterattack. And such a counterattack begins with the simple truism of every successful campaigner, from wartime leaders to the coaches of high school track teams: know your enemy. In this context, knowing the enemy may also help us realize how, in our defense of the unique authority of Scripture, our understanding of what that means is sometimes shaped more by the hidden forces of the world around us than by the teaching of Scripture and the historic life and practice of the church.
Expressive Individualism
Various trajectories of modern culture have served to make expressive individualism normative in Western society. With the advent of the Reformation, the authority of the church as a solid and stable institution that gave religious identity to all came to an end. Religion slowly but surely became a matter of personal choice, and as it did so, the authority of personal choice became greater even as that of the church as institution declined. With this development came an increasing emphasis on inner psychology as offering the foundation for personal knowledge. René Descartes, whose philosophy of knowledge and certainty is typically summarized as “I think, therefore I am,” offered perhaps the most famous expression of this, but this move inward was not the monopoly of scientific philosophers seeking epistemological certainty.[1] With Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schiller, and then the Romantics, more and more emphasis was placed on the importance of feelings and emotions as being critical to personal identity. And with them too came a rebellion against granting external institutions the kind of authority they had once enjoyed. We might put it somewhat simplistically, though not misleadingly, as follows: the idea that it is society, with its traditions and institutions, that messes people up became a deep-seated belief of the modern world.
1. See René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1982), 5.
To this intellectual trajectory we can add the impact of technology. This will also feature in the devaluation of the past discussed below, but it is worth noting here that technology feeds the sense of autonomy that lies at the heart of expressive individualism. Technology instills us with a sense of power and makes us feel that the world is not something to which we have to conform ourselves but rather something that we can overcome or bend to our will. The most obvious examples come from biology. Diseases that were once death sentences can now be cured with a simple course of antibiotics. Sexual promiscuity once carried unavoidable risks of sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies. Medical developments have significantly mitigated those risks and allowed us to imagine that we are sovereign and autonomous in the sexual realm. And it is not just biology: cheap transportation has reduced the significance of geographical distance, as has the advent of technologies such as Zoom and Skype. Each of these feeds the idea that we as individuals are in control of the world. Nature lacks the authority it once possessed.
What is significant about expressive individualism for this book is what it does to the notion of institutional authority. In short, it dramatically weakens it. If the purpose of life is individuals being whoever they want to be, or whoever they think they should be, then institutions change from being places of formation to places of performance. They are no longer places of external authority but rather vendors of particular visions of what it means to be me, and I can choose whichever one suits my inner feelings and makes me feel happiest. I have no obligation to the institution, or to anybody else, that does not help in my own program of self-realization. And that renders thoroughly implausible the idea of the church as the place where I am told who I am, who God is, what I am to believe, and how I am to worship and live in light of that.
[Editor’s Note: For more on the crisis of confidence and the goodness of confessions, listen to the Christ Over All podcast with Carl Trueman.]
†
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Trueman
Carl Trueman
Carl R. Trueman taught on the faculties of the Universities of Nottingham and Aberdeen before moving to the United States in 2001 to teach at Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. In 2017-18 he was the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Since 2018, he has served as a professor at Grove City College. He is also a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor at First Things. Trueman’s latest book is the bestselling The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. He is married with two adult children and is ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2024 8:04:53 GMT -5
By
JASON GRAY
Allow me tell you the story of Trinity Baptist Church.
Trinity Baptist Church in rural West Texas has been a long-standing church within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). They are active in their local association and the state convention. They give faithfully to the Cooperative Program, even after times got tough in their rural community. They have been in the SBC for almost 100 years, and have the last remaining SBC Women’s Missionary Union in a 100-mile radius. Their Sunday School material has been faithfully ordered from Lifeway from long before it was even named Lifeway. They are Baptist through and through. They have never heard of Calvinism or elders. They have congregational votes every other month and take care of their pastor in the aging parsonage next door to their historic building.
But about two years ago, they started a practice in their church that was very foreign to them. The pastor made the suggested change, and the people followed his leadership. While they may have been hesitant at first to adopt this new practice, they find now that they would never want to go back to the way it was before, even though this change of practice was more recent. This new practice has allowed them to be more relevant to other families who want to be a part of the church, and it is such an encouragement to the members of the church. After all, they love Jesus and they love each other. They love his Gospel, and this practice is in no way a rejection of primary orthodox Christian beliefs. This is a mere secondary issue. The only hang-up is that this practice put the church out of step with the practice of other Southern Baptists, and also with the Baptist Faith and Message (BFM). No one could question if they were in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC. They loved being SBC. They never want to leave; this is their people.
Yet, there were some that said this disagreement put them outside of the cooperative agreements and positions of the SBC. But how could that be? This is only a secondary issue, not primary. Good Christians can disagree on this issue and not be anathematized. Why were some of their fellow SBCers so close-minded about an issue that did not affect their congregation? Have those SBCers forgotten the cherished principle of local church autonomy? Trinity Baptist has the right to do as they wish, or so they remind others. They’re not demanding that others agree or make the change that they made; they simply want to practice this secondary issue and be left alone. They still want to be in friendly cooperation—even if they disagree with the Baptist Faith and Message on this issue. One could even argue their practice is not forbidden by the Baptist Faith and Message; it is simply an unaddressed addition—but it is definitely not following the Spirit of the document.
But how could anyone want them removed from the SBC? How could anyone violate local church autonomy? How could anyone get involved in their particular practices? Can we not disagree about the minutiae of how churches practice their ecclesiology? Why are these people acting like fundamentalists, close-minded, and harshly demanding uniformity on a secondary issue? This is not how Baptists act! Why are they trying to close the borders of the tent and kick out faithful churches who preach the Gospel, who give to the Cooperative program, and have faithfully been a part of the SBC for so many years?
Why on earth would a church that now practices paedobaptism be excluded by the SBC?
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
The Defining Importance of Secondary Issues
Why would I tell this parable? Because sometimes people hear “secondary” issues, and they assume that this means “unimportant.” But the SBC is built on secondary issues. We affirm that credobaptism is the correct biblical view of baptism. We believe that paedobaptists are very wrong on the issue. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ, yet we cannot gather together in churches together because the very practice of baptism would undermine any attempt at unity. We can partner with them on many things, but not on the planting of local churches. This “secondary” issue is an issue of theological identity and cooperation. Credobaptists and paedobaptists have understood this, and this is why our denominational and associational efforts are separate from one another. Secondary theological issues truly matter.
But today there is a move within the SBC to try and downplay denominational accountability on these secondary distinctives and strike at the very heart of our Baptist confessional identity. The SBC has a statement of faith for a reason. As the Preamble of the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) states: “Baptist churches, associations, and general bodies have adopted confessions of faith as a witness to the world, and as instruments of doctrinal accountability” (emphasis mine). By adopting that statement, we were clarifying to the world around us what we as an association (convention) of churches believe, and we also affirm that we use this document to hold each other accountable. Secondary issues, like baptism, matter.
Let me be clear: I am aware of no one seeking to bring paedobaptist churches into the SBC. That idea seems far-fetched. This is a parable after all. But other secondary issues are under fire, as seen with the responses to the Law Amendment and the Baptist Faith and Message’s statement that: “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” This may be a secondary issue, but it is crucial in how churches are structured and operate, and thus influences church-planting and missions. Yet, despite the importance of this secondary issue and the clarity of the Baptist Faith and Message, there are some who want us to turn a blind eye to churches not in alignment with the SBC and Baptist Faith and Message on this issue. They say the mission is primary and that any doctrinal disagreement should be downplayed in service to the mission of the SBC. They want us to include in friendly cooperation churches who contradict our beliefs on a secondary issue—and therein lies the parallel to baptism. The same people who would never fathom the idea of allowing a paedobaptist in the SBC are arguing that this is not a big deal.
I suggest this is a very big deal. Our doctrinal statement matters. It serves as a means of “doctrinal accountability” for us as a Convention. We cannot cooperate together in church planting and missions if we don’t have agreement. The mission of the SBC is very important, but it flows from doctrinal agreement. Clarity on key doctrinal issues, like baptism and church leadership, do not take away from “missional vitality” as some allege. Secondary issues define our churches and our associations. We cannot be flippant over this. We must hold the line, not in sacrificing the mission, but for the sake of the mission—for the sake of seeing disciples made and Baptist churches planted. May we not grow tired in working toward that end. Let’s pass this Amendment in June, and let us continue to work beyond then to strengthen our commitment to our Baptist beliefs as stated in the Baptist Faith and Message.
†
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2024 21:17:00 GMT -5
THEMES
“‘The Exodus He Accomplished at Jerusalem’: The Gospels’ Theology of Exile & Return in the Cross & Resurrection”
By
NICHOLAS PIOTROWSKI
It is impossible to overstate the theological magnitude of Israel’s historic exile.[1] It sits like a gravitational loadstar in the middle of sacred history. Everything prior is drawn towards it, and everything after it is trying to climb out of it. For the exile is not only an expulsion from the land of promise (though that of course is bad enough), but the exile also marks the destruction of Israel’s temple and the toppling of David’s royal line. Insofar as those three theological icons—land, David, and temple—form the emblems that reassure that “God is with us . . .”, the exile amounts to the devastating conclusion (as Hosea 1:9 puts it) that Israel is “Not my People.” Just devastating!
1. Content adapted from Return from Exile and the Renewal of God’s People by Nicholas Piotrowski, ©2025. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, crossway.org.
No wonder Israel’s prophets are obsessed with the exile—what it means, how to endure it, how it will end, and what the world will look like when it does. In so doing, the prophets reach for many metaphors so that readers experience something of the catastrophe that is the exile. It is a prison for the nation (2 Kgs. 24:11–16). It is a reversal of creation (Jer. 4:23–26). It is darkness (Isa. 8:22). It is Egypt all over again (Hos 8:13). In short it is death (Ezek. 37:1–2). Not surprisingly, therefore, the return from exile can be described as nothing less than release (Isa. 42:7; 61:1), new creation (Amos 9:13–15), light (Isa. 9:2), and a new exodus (Hos. 11:11). Indeed, it will be resurrection (Ezek. 37:12–14).
In turning to the Gospels readers should be struck with the kind of return-from-exile language that pervades the evangelists’ descriptions of Jesus’s birth, teachings, and miracles. In him “light is shining upon those who sit in darkness” (Matt. 4:12–17). He himself traverses a new exodus (Matt. 3:13–4:11) and begins to call others to follow him on his road to redemption (Matt. 4:18–25). This essay focuses particularly on that redemption: the cross and resurrection as the necessary exile-ending sacrifice and concomitant end-of-exile resurrection from the dead. In sum, the cross and resurrection were for Jesus a personal exile and return, vicariously accomplished on behalf of his people. He himself enters into the curse of exile in order to lift his people out!
What follows here is a slight revision of a chapter in my book Return from Exile and the Renewal of God’s People (Crossway, 2025). It builds upon several Old Testament ideas that deserve a quick mention here at the outset. First, there is a theological relationship between the function of Eden and the role of the temple in the Old Testament.[2] To come into the Most Holy Place—as the High Priest does every Day of Atonement—is to return liturgically to the Garden of Eden.[3] Second, Israel’s prophets portray the exile as a form of death and the return from exile as a resurrection.[4] Third, the end of the exile is also described in the Old Testament as an ultimate and international new exodus.[5] And fourth, Israel’s exile is theologically nestled within the larger context of all humanity’s exile from the Garden of Eden.[6] The resolution to Israel’s exile, therefore, is the harbinger to all the nations returning to their primordial earthly dwelling with God.
2. Either Eden was a proto-temple (G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God [NSBT 17; Downers Grove: IVP, 2004], 66–80), or subsequent sanctuaries were “miniature Edens” (Daniel I. Block, “Eden: A Temple? A Reassessment of the Biblical Evidence,” in From Creation to New Creation: Biblical Theology and Exegesis [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2013], 3–29).
3. L. Michael Morales, Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (ESBT; Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2020), 91–103.
4. Donald E. Gowan, Theology of the Prophetic Books: The Death & Resurrection of Israel (Louisville: WJK, 1998).
5. Nicholas G. Piotrowski, “Exodus,” in Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023), 235–41.
6. Roy E. Ciampa, “The History of Redemption,” in Central Themes in Biblical Theology: Mapping Unity in Diversity (ed. Scott J. Hafemann and Paul R. House; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 254–308.
With that, we turn our attention to the return from exile theology surrounding the cross and resurrection in the Gospels. While the evangelists portray Jesus’s birth, teachings, and miracles as end-of-exile tremors, each book climaxes in Jesus’s death and resurrection, the sine qua non of return from exile. Jesus’s death is the necessary sacrifice that effects the release from exile foretold in Isaiah 52–53 and constitutes his own personal exile from the presence of God. He himself goes into exile, “cut off from the land of the living . . . for the transgression of [God’s] people” (Isa. 53:8). Equally, Jesus’s literal bodily resurrection marks his own personal return from exile, initiating the new creation wherein one man has reentered the very presence of God. As such, he leads his people on their own return from exile.
The Death of Jesus Christ: The New Passover of the New Exodus
After the prologue, the first half of Matthew focuses on Jesus’s teaching and miracles (Matt. 4:17–16:20). Then, beginning in Matthew 16:21 the focus turns to Jesus’s death and resurrection, and it stays there until the end of the Gospel.[7] Jesus speaks of it three times on the way to Jerusalem (Matt. 16:21; 17:22–23; 20:17–19). Then, right before entering Jerusalem, he says this:
7. Jack Dean Kingsbury has convincingly argued that the repeated phrase “From the that time Jesus began . . .” in Matthew 4:17 and 16:21 divides the Gospel into three parts: Matthew 1:1–4:16 as Jesus’s origins; Matthew 4:17–16:20 as principally Jesus’s “preaching” about the Kingdom of Heaven; Matthew 16:21–28:20 as leadup to and experience of Jesus’s death and resurrection. See his “Structure of Matthew’s Gospel and His Concept of Salvation History,” CBQ 35.4 (1973): 453–66.
“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (20:28).
Jesus’s language is drawn from Isaiah 52–53, where the theology of the Passover is employed to describe the new servant-lamb as the necessary substitutionary sacrifice of the new exodus.[8] In Isaiah 52–53 one called “the servant” of the Lord (Isa 52:13; 53:11) gives his life (Isa 53:5, 8–10a) “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter” (Isa 53:7; cf. Exod 12:1–28) in order to bear the sins of “many” (Isa 52:15; 53:12). Jesus is clearly drawing upon this climactic moment in Isaiah’s end-of-exile vision so that readers can equally understanding the meaning of the Gospel’s own climactic moment: his own long-predicted death. Jesus is the Passover lamb and the end-times servant-lamb whose death atones for sins and releases his people from exile.[9]
8. R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 762–63.
9. Jesus’s language in Matthew 20:28 is also a direct reference to the Passover (cf. also Rev. 5:6–14). In Exodus 6:6 the Lord says, “I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment.” The word translated there as “redeem” is go’el in Hebrew and lutroō in the LXX. Leon Morris says Exodus 6:6 “pre-eminently” stands behind the term “ransom” in Matthew 20:28 (lutron) as the exodus “furnished the pattern for describing the later deliverance from Babylon as a redemption” (The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross [3d rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965], 21). Jesus “gives his life” to redeem/ransom his people just as the Passover lamb did for Israel in Egypt (cf. also Mark 10:45). It is a substitutionary death (Morris, Apostolic Preaching, 34–38).
Jesus reiterates the same idea the night before his death. In Matthew 26:26–29 Jesus and his disciples are eating a Passover meal (cf. 26:17) when he takes bread, breaks it, and says, “this is my body.” He then takes a cup and says,
“this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28).
He then gives this bread and cup to his disciples to eat and drink (cf. Exod 12:8). So much is going on in this moment. For our purposes, we need only to observe that Jesus is applying the meaning of the Passover meal to his coming death, again refracted through the expectations of Isaiah 53:12 where the end-of-exile servant-lamb “poured out his soul to death…[and] bore the sins of many”[10] (note the same bolded words in each passage). Once again, we see that Jesus understands his death as the end-times realization of the Passover meal that Isaiah foretold would commence the release of his people from exile.[11]
Finally in Matthew, the cataclysmic events surrounding Jesus’s death—darkness, torn temple veil, earthquake, splitting rocks, open tombs (Matt. 27:45, 51–54)—are Old Testament images of exile and restoration.[12] Jesus’s death is the most earth-shattering event in all of history! If humanity’s ultimate problem is exile and alienation from God because of sin, it is no surprise to see such cosmic upheaval at the ultimate moment of atonement and release from exile.
10. France, Matthew, 993–95.
11. It is also worth pointing out that Jesus’s instruction to the disciples to eat the bread and wine parallels the instruction to Israel to eat the lamb the night of the Passover. By implication the disciples become the initial members of the end-times priesthood. See e.g. Brant Pitre, “Jesus, the New Temple, and the New Preisthood,” Letter & Spirit 4 (2008): 70–82.
12. See particularly Young S. Chae, Jesus as the Eschatological Davidic Shepherd: Studies in the Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and in the Gosspel of Matthew (WUNT 2/216; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 330–40; Daniel M. Gurtner, The Torn Veil: Matthew’s Exposition of the Death of Jesus (SNTSMS 139; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–52, 160–69, 159–201.
Luke helpfully adds an additional layer of understanding when he records the same Passover meal (Luke 22:14). There Jesus says, “This cup which is poured for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20).[13] The only place in the Old Testament that uses the language of “new covenant” is Jeremiah 31:31, where the Lord promises forgiveness of sins at the end of the exile. Here again we see Jesus’s understanding of his death in the language of another prophet’s end-of-exile expectations.
Luke’s account of the transfiguration also stands out by calling Jesus’s death and resurrection “his exodus, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31; cf. 9:22, 44, 51). Most translations render this as “departure,” but the word is clearly exodon (ἔξοδον), just as in the Greek translation (LXX) of Exodus 19:1. On the calendar of prophetic expectation, the next “exodus” is the end-times return from exile. Thus, the road out of exile passes necessarily through Jesus’s death, followed inexorably by his resurrection.[14]
The fourth Gospel also applies the prophets’ end-of-exile expectations to Jesus’s death. In John 10 Jesus calls himself “the good shepherd” (John 10:11), clearly drawing upon Ezekiel 34, which describes the Lord God as the shepherd who gathers his exile-scattered sheep.[15] And in the very next breath Jesus adds, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11; cf. also 10:15). Thus, Jesus has linked the laying down of his life to Ezekiel 34’s vision for the end of Israel’s exile. Furthermore, in John 10:16 Jesus adds, “And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” Surely this is a reference to Gentiles.[16] He will gather them too through the same life-giving sacrifice. And just as in the other Gospels, here too Jesus immediately also speaks of his resurrection: “I lay down my life that I may take it up again” (John 10:17–18). Jesus’s death and resurrection are inseparable for his sheep-gathering end-of-exile mission.
13. Matthew and Luke do not disagree here. It is clear that Luke simply records more of what Jesus said that night (Luke 22:14–22) and Matthew records less (Matt. 26:26–29)—only as much as is necessary for his own narratological and theological purposes, equally under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Neither claim to be exhaustive. In fact, John 13–16 records even more (and in some ways less)! See Nicholas Perrin, Lost in Transmission?: What We Can Know about the Words of Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007), 81–111.
14. Susan R. Garrett rightly adds the ascension to what is “accomplished in Jerusalem,” as a necessary component of Jesus’s exodus in leading his people out of bondage (“Exodus from Bondage: Luke 9:31 and Acts 12:1–24,” CBQ 52.4 [1990]: 656–80). Specifically, Garrett identifies Satan as the particular captor out from whose tyranny Jesus’ people are delivered.
15. Gary T. Manning, Echoes of a Prophet: The Use of Ezekiel in the Gospel of John and in Literature of the Second Temple Period (LNTS 270; London: T&T Clark, 2004), 100–35.
16. Herman Ridderbos, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 362–65.
Moreover, like the other Gospels, John also has a clear new exodus theology (John 1:14–17). Thus, much of the Gospel takes place in the context of Passover celebrations (John 2:13; 6:4; 11:55; 12:1), including the entirety of chapters 13–20 leading up to his death. John absolutely insists, therefore, that we read Jesus’s death against the backdrop of the Passover (cf. esp. John 13:1) and that we theologically align the crucifixion with the ceremonially slaughtered lambs (John 19:14–16).[17] In fact, 13:1 shows how the Passover provides the theological reference point for the very reason Jesus came into the world. When Jesus says, “It is finished” at the moment of his death (John 19:30) he means (among other things) that the telos and culmination of the original exodus is now complete![18] Thus in his death, Jesus has “finished” the exile through a new exodus self-sacrifice.[19]
The Death of Jesus Christ Reconsidered: A Personal Representative Exile
In addition to seeing Jesus’s death as the requisite Passover-like sacrifice to end the exile, we also see that Jesus’s death constitutes his own personal experience of exile on behalf of his people. This aligns with our observations above in how Israel’s prophets described exile as a form of death, and death is a mark of exile. For why were Adam and Eve removed from Eden and sentenced with death? Sin. And why was Israel removed from the land, and the exile portrayed as a national death? Sin. Equally, why is Jesus removed from the land of the living; why does he die? Sin. Not his own sin, but he bears in himself the consequence of the sins of his people (Matt. 1:21; 20:28; 26:26–28).[20] He endures the penalty for his people’s sins: death as an exile from the presence of God (cf. Matt. 27:43, 46). As N. T. Wright puts it, “Jesus went to his death, convinced . . . that Israel’s destiny had devolved on him and that he represented the true Israel in the eyes of God. His death would therefore be the means of drawing to its climax the wrath of God against the nation, forging a way through that wrath and out the other side.”[21] In short, Jesus enters into our deserved experience of exile in order to lift us up out of it.
17. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (PNTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 603–604.
18. Jacob J. Enz, “The Book of Exodus as a Literary Type for the Gospel of John,” JBL 76.3 (1957): 211, 284–86.
19. In the rest of book I also consider the new exodus theme in Paul, Peter and Hebrews.
20. I have argued elsewhere how the language of each of these passages in Matthew is drawn from Old Testament new exodus and end-of-exile contexts. See Nicholas G. Piotrowski, “‘I Will Save My People from their Sins’: The Influence of Ezekiel 26:28b–29a; 37:23b on Matthew 1:21,” Tyndale Bulletin 64.1 (2013): 33–54.
21. N. T. Wright, “Yet the Sun Will Rise Again: Reflections on the Exile and Restoration in Second Temple Judaism, Jesus, Paul, and the Church Today,” in Exile: A Conversation with N.T. Wright (James M. Scott, ed.; Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2017), 61.
It is worth glancing beyond the Gospels to further establish this point. Galatians 3:9–14 directly links Jesus’s death with the curse of exile.
9 . . . those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. 10 For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” 11 Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” 12 But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”— 14 so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.
Interpreting this passage depends on understanding Paul’s sources for the ideas of “blessing” and “curse.” Moses had promised “blessing” in the land when Israel is faithful (Deut. 28:1–14). But he equally threatened a “curse” if Israel is unfaithful (Deut. 27:9–26; 28:15–68). That “curse” would come specifically in the form of exile—just as Adam and Eve were blessed while in the garden and experienced curse outside the garden.[22] In Galatians 3:10, Paul invokes Moses’s sin and exile prediction by quoting Deuteronomy 27:26 (perhaps refracted through Dan. 9:11) to explain the ongoing condition of Israel under the “curse” of exile.[23]
22. David P. Barry, The Exile of Adam in Romans: The Reversal of the Curse against Adam and Israel in the Substructure of Romans 5 and 8 (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2021), 41–45.
23. James M. Scott, “Paul’s Use of Deuteronomic Tradition,” JBL 112.4 (1993): 657–59; idem, “Restoration of Israel,” DPL 801–802; Matthew S. Harmon, Galatians (EBTC; Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2021), 149–51.
Yet, Moses also promised a restoration from exile (Deut. 30:1–10). Thus, in Galatians 3:13 Paul tells us that Christ provides the solution to this ongoing-exile dilemma. He “redeemed us from the curse of the law.” This does not mean that the law itself is a curse, but the curse of exile (still employing the language of Deuteronomy) that comes from “not abid[ing] by all things written in the Book of the Law” (Gal. 3:10).[24] That would be enough, but Paul goes on specifically to add that Jesus accomplished this “by becoming a curse for us.” If “curse” means exile, then this means Jesus experienced a personal, representative (and therefore substitutionary) exile on behalf of his people.[25] As Matt Harmon concludes, Jesus “takes on himself the curse of exile that Israel (and by extension humanity) deserves for rebellion against God.”[26] The result is that through his own representative-exile Jesus can bring “blessing” (the opposite of exile) to all who have faith like Abraham (Gal. 3:9, 14, 29).[27]
24. C. Marvin Pate, Communities of the Last Days: The Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament & the Story of Israel (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000), 164–65.
25. I argue more extensively in the book regarding the relationship between biblical “cursing” and exile.
26. Matthew S. Harmon, Rebels and Exiles: A Biblical Theology of Sin and Restoration (ESBT; Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020), 97. C. Marvin Pate et al. also conclude, “Jesus vicariously bore the Deuteronomic curses for the sins of others” (The Story of Israel: A Biblical Theology [Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004], 210). Wright also comments, “In Galatians . . . the curse of exile that had bottled up the promises and prevented them from getting through to the Gentiles, leaving Israel itself under condemnation, is dealt with by the death of Jesus. He takes Israel’s curse on himself . . .” (“Sun Will Rise,” 66).
27. So too Pate et al., Story of Israel, 209.
To summarize, the Gospels understand Jesus’s death within many theological categories. I think it is impossible to exhaust the meaning of the cross. For this essay nonetheless, we have observed that Jesus’s death comprises a personal substitutionary exile, and the Passover-like atoning sacrifice that releases his people from exile. Sin got Adam and Israel expelled from the presence of God and enjoyment of true life; only Jesus’s atonement can forgive and bring sinners back.
Yet we have also seen that Jesus never talks about his death without also emphasizing his resurrection in the same breath.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: One Man’s Return to the Sacred Abode of God
The Old Testament often links return from exile with resurrection hopes (Ezek. 37:12–14; Isa. 25:6–8; 26:19; Dan. 12:1–4; Hos. 5:14–6:3; Hab. 2:2–4). This is not hard to understand since the original Garden of Eden was characterized by life. Outside is the domain of death. Thus, returning from exile will mean passing out of the realms of death back into the place of life.
In turn, Jesus’s resurrection is “the launch of the real return from exile, the ultimate liberation of the people of God, from the exile that lay deeper than the exile of Egypt or Babylon.”[28] We see this particularly in the New Testament’s description of Jesus’s resurrection as the re-enthronement of the House of David and the rebuilding of the temple of God. Again, this is not hard to understand given what we know about the connection between Israel’s temple and the Garden of Eden. Rebuilding the temple, especially by the hands of David’s greatest son, means reconnecting heaven and earth. Thus, in Jesus’s resurrection the dwelling place of God is re-erected. Now sinners can reenter the divine presence through Jesus.
28. Wright, “Sun Will Rise,” 61.
We start briefly with Matthew, Mark, and Luke on this point. These synoptic Gospels theologically relate Jesus’s death to the destruction of the temple of God (Matt. 26:61; 27:40, 50–51; Mark 14:58; 15:37–38; Luke 23:44–46).[29] This is dramatically symbolized when Jesus dies and the temple veil ruptures from top to bottom (Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45). Greg Beale and Mitch Kim write, “The tearing of the curtain is a symbolic picture of the destruction of the entire temple and the entire old creation that the temple symbolized, which begins at the crucifixion . . . so his resurrection was the beginning of a new temple and new cosmos, a new creation.”[30] Jesus’s resurrection, therefore, amounts to rebuilding the permanent temple of God that opens the path back to the experience of God’s presence.[31]
29. Nicholas G. Piotrowski, “‘Whatever You Ask’ for the Missionary Purposes of the Eschatological Temple: Quotation and Typology in Mark 11–12,” SBJT 21.1 (2017): 97–121.
30. G. K. Beale and Mitchell Kim, God Dwells Among Us: Expanding Eden to the Ends of the Earth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2014), 92–93. Part of the evidence in this lies in that “the embroidery on the temple veil represented the starry heavens of the old cosmos. Consequently, the tearing of the curtain suggests symbolically the tearing and the beginning of the destruction of the old world, as the presence of God breaks out of the Holy of Holies and begins to create a new world” (ibid., 84).
31. John Paul Heil, “The Narrative Strategy and Pragmatics of the Temple Theme in Mark,” CBQ 59.1 (1997): 96–100; Piotrowski, “Whatever You Ask,” 97–121.
But it is in John wherein we find the clearest articulation that Jesus’s resurrection amounts to the rebuilding of the true temple of God. In John 2:19 Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Of course, Jesus’s audience did not understand what he meant, but John makes it clear for us in John 2:21–22: “he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this.” Notice the connection between the raising of Jesus and the raising of the temple. When we reflect on the significance of the temple in the OT, John 2 truly comes alive with meaning! That singular divine dwelling place reminiscent of the Garden of Eden is indestructibly rebuilt in Jesus’s resurrection! In such he becomes the lone access point for sinners to enter back into the presence of God.
Related, it is no coincidence that John then tells us that many of the last events of Jesus’s life occur in a garden (John 18:1, 26; 19:41), and that in the first resurrection sighting Mary supposes him “to be the gardener” (John 20:15). In this moment John is pleading with the reader to think with him through the discourse of his Gospel. The work that started “In the beginning…” (John 1:1) now ends with “ garden, a tree in the middle, two angelic beings, a gardener, and a woman.”[32] Mary is right, Jesus is the gardener![33] He is the new man in the new garden, of the new world. The resurrection happens, after all, on the “eighth day of creation” (John 20:1).[34] History has run its full cycle insofar as “[t]he resurrection is the first event of God’s promised resolution to the rebellion of the Garden.”[35]
32. Morales, Exodus, 171.
33. See Jeannine K. Brown, “Creation’s Renewal in the Gospel of John,” CBQ 72.2 (2010): 279–81.
34. Brown, “Creation’s Renewal,” 283–84.
35. Michael D. Williams, Far as the Curse is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2005), 11–16, quote from 13. See as well Morales, Exodus, 169–72.
It is critical to point out that all this is accomplished by the one who is the great Son of David (Matt. 1:1, 17; 12:23; 20:30–31; 21:9; Luke 1:27, 32–33, 68–69). In the exile that House was cut off, but the prophets held out hope for its reemergence (Isa 9:5–7; Jer 23:1–8; 30:8–9; 33:14–26; Ezek 34:1–24; 37:15–28; Hos 3:4–5; Amos 9:9–15; Mic. 5:1–4; Zech. 12–13). This is vital because it was the expectation of the Davidic Messiah to build the house of God, the temple. It is an awesome moment, therefore, that in the resurrection and ascension Jesus is seated on David’s throne to rule the nations forever (Acts 2:29–36; 13:30–37; Rom. 1:4–5). After his resurrection, therefore, Jesus as the Son of David, commences to build the great end-times temple that will fill the globe—that temple being the church (see as well 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:19–22; 1 Pet. 2:4–5).[36] As Ed Clowney puts it, “Precisely because Christ builds the temple in himself he can build it in his disciples.”[37]
36. G. K. Beale, “The Descent of the Eschatological Temple in the Form of the Spirit at Pentecost: Part 1: The Clearest Evidence,” Tyndale Bulletin 56.1 (2005): 73–102.
37. Edmund P. Clowney, “The Final Temple,” Westminster Theological Journal 35.2 (1973): 173.
Again, we can glance forward to the epistles on this point. Ephesians 1:20 tells us that when God “raised [Jesus] from the dead” he also “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.” This could mean the resurrection itself, or more likely Jesus’s ascension 40 days later. Either way, one man has permanently reentered God’s sacred dwelling. One man has fully returned from exile!
And equally shocking, only a few verses later Eph 2:6 says that God also “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places.” Consider the meaning of this! One man has returned to the presence of God through resurrection and ascension. This is described as being “raised” and “seated . . . in the heavenly places” in Ephesians 1:20. And then Paul describes the Christian life in the same language in Ephesians 2:6! Once dead in our sins (Eph. 2:1, 5) Christians are now “made … alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:5). As Christians are “in Christ Jesus” and “raised up with him” (Eph. 2:6) there is a very real (though not yet physical) sense that we too are back in heaven with Christ (cf. also Col. 3:1–3)! Though not yet personally present in heaven, Christians “enter into the heavenly Holy of Holies … through their representative high priest, Jesus Christ.”[38] We still wait to have a literal bodily resurrection like Jesus’s, but all the same Paul exhorts us to understand our genuine presence in God’s heavenly abode through our union with Christ. Such “presence” does not need to be physical to be real all the same. Indeed, union with Christ is most certainly real. And Paul would have Christians think deeply on that reality. One man has returned from exile and entered the true abode of God, and we are united to him!
38. Beale and Kim, God Dwells, 130–31; quote from 130.
The Book of Hebrews helps us understand this too. Jesus did not go into an earthly tabernacle to present his sacrifice. For the tabernacle was a shadow and copy of the true sanctuary (Heb. 8:3–5). Instead, Jesus “is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man” (Heb. 8:1–2). Thus, Jesus “entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12). Again, “Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24). He represents us and advocates for us in God’s very heavenly abode! And so now Christians “have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever” (Heb. 6:19–20; cf. also 10:20). Through such representation Christians have
come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb. 12:22–24)
Just as Israel’s high priest bore them typologically back into God’s presence in the tabernacle on the Day of Atonement, Christ truly brings us before God in the heavenly realms!
Conclusion
Jesus’s death and resurrection are clearly the climax of all four Gospels. It turns out that Jesus’s death and resurrection are also the climax of all redemptive history. For the Old Testament begs for the ultimate sin-atoning sacrifice and life-giving return to the place of God’s dwelling. It begs for a return from exile. From the very beginning of each Gospel, return-from-exile themes are vividly brought forward and applied to Jesus, and quintessentially in his death and resurrection. On the cross Jesus himself serves the role of Isaiah’s end-of-exile new Passover lamb. In his resurrection and ascension Jesus has reentered the presence of God, the House of David is raised up and reenthroned, and a new temple is built that fills the world—all of which marks the dawn of the prophetically forecasted end-of-exile new creation. Now, “those who have entered into Christ and have participated in his death and resurrection have entered into the inaugural phase of the ultimate restoration of Israel and creation.”[39] In Jesus’s death his people are released from exile, and in his resurrection they representatively return to God’s sacred abode.
39. Roy E. Ciampa, “History of Redemption,” 308.
Thus, Jesus both enters into the human experience of exile and also leads the way out of it—for Israel, for the nations, for the entire creation. “Jesus as a new Adam has reentered the garden of paradise.”[40] He has returned to the presence of God and, in his people, he has reunited heaven and earth! Indeed, this was God’s “will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9–10)! |
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 18, 2024 11:47:54 GMT -5
By
JOHN KIMBELL
Editor’s note: For the month of April 2024, Crossway Books has graciously allowed our readers to download for free The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived by Andreas Köstenberger and Justin Taylor. This book chronicles the events of holy week, culminating in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.
********
When it comes to communicating the meaning of Christ’s death as a substitutionary sacrifice for sinners, the biblical authors use different approaches. Some declare this truth with wonderful clarity and directness. As the apostle Peter states it, Christ “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). Similarly, the apostle Paul declares that “God put [Jesus] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:25). In his narrative account of Jesus’s suffering and death, Luke presents the same truth by showing it to his readers. In doing so, the truth is communicated less directly, but in an equally powerful and compelling way. As he leads us through the key historical scenes of Christ’s passion, the details of the narrative consistently point us to this theological understanding of Christ’s death. This interpretation becomes especially potent when one considers the Old Testament themes that Luke’s narrative evokes. This is what I hope to unpack in this article: the Old Testament themes that course through Luke’s passion and lead Luke’s reader to see Christ’s death as a substitutionary sacrifice.
The Passover Lamb
At Jesus’s final meal with his disciples before his death, Jesus declares to his disciples that his “body” is being given “for you,” and his “blood” is being “poured out for you” to establish the new covenant (Luke 22:19-20). The meal is a Passover meal (Luke 22:8), and the parallels between the original Passover (Exodus 12) and Jesus’s reinterpretation of the elements of the meal point Luke’s readers to the Old Testament idea of substitution. Just as God’s people celebrated the Passover the night before their deliverance in which a sacrificial lamb took the place of Israel’s firstborn sons and averted God’s judgment against them, so Jesus celebrates the Last Supper with his disciples on the night before pouring out his own blood for them.
The Suffering Servant
At the close of the meal, Jesus utilizes another key Old Testament figure that points to a substitutionary understanding of his death. Having declared that his disciples need to be prepared to face hostility, Jesus provides the reason for this. He states that the prophecy from Isaiah 53:12 regarding God’s suffering servant, a quote unique to Luke’s Gospel, was about to be fulfilled in him: “And he was numbered with transgressors” (Luke 22:37). The language from the quotation is crucial. Jesus would be “numbered” (or “counted”) with transgressors. And yet, the following narrative will go on to show what Isaiah 53 so clearly declares, namely, this servant was innocent of wrongdoing. He was not suffering for his own sins, but rather for the sins of others.
The Cup of God’s Wrath
Immediately after the last supper, Jesus goes with his disciples to the Mount of Olives to pray. Here he pleads with the Father to remove the “cup” that he is about to drink (Luke 22:42). What is this cup Jesus dreads? Throughout the Old Testament, the “cup” is a widespread metaphor for God’s wrath being poured out on the one who drinks it (Ps. 11:6; Isa. 51:17, 22; Jer. 25:15, 17, 28; Ezek. 23:29-33; cf. Job. 21:17-20; Isa. 63:6; Jer. 51:55-57; Obad. 16-17). In each case, God’s punishment against human sin and wickedness is in view. However, in the case of Jesus, he is submitting himself to endure the cup of God’s wrath in obedience to God’s own will, and not because of his own sin.
The Guilty Go Free
Through the subsequent arrest and trial scenes, Jesus’s innocence is repeatedly emphasized and declared (Luke 22:52-53; 23:4, 13-15, 22). However, the Jewish crowds prevail upon Pilate to release the criminal Barabbas and condemn Jesus instead. The text brings Jesus’s innocence into sharp contrast with the repeated emphasis on Barabbas’s guilt (Luke 23:19, 25). Indeed, Luke’s narrative indicates that Jesus has been charged with one of the very same crimes as Barabbas—political insurrection (23:2, 5, 14). As the story unfolds, Barabbas’s fate is dramatically intertwined with whether Pilate will agree to condemn the innocent Jesus. In the end, Jesus is “handed over” unto death (Luke 23:25; cf. Isa. 53:12 LXX), and Barabbas goes free at the expense of Jesus’s condemnation—just like the sinners that Jesus will die for.
Salvation
Jesus is now crucified, and as he hangs on the cross, he is mocked by the Jewish rulers (Luke 23:35), the Roman soldiers (Luke 23:36-37), and finally a criminal being crucified alongside him (Luke 23:39). In each case, they mock him regarding his inability to “save” himself or others—thereby fulfilling Psalm 22:7–8 (21:8–9 LXX). The irony in the narrative is thick. It was precisely through remaining on the cross, in submission to the Father’s will, that Jesus would save others.
Luke then moves from this ironic mocking to a positive demonstration that Jesus does in fact bring salvation through death. In a scene unique to Luke’s Gospel, a second criminal being crucified next to Jesus acknowledges that he is facing the just judgment of God for his deeds (Luke 23:40-41a). However, he confesses that Jesus, although “under the same sentence of condemnation” (Luke 23:40), has done nothing wrong (Luke 23:41b). The criminal appeals to Jesus for mercy (Luke 23:42), and as he hangs on the cross, Jesus promises the criminal eschatological life after death (Luke 23:43).
Darkness and a Torn Temple Curtain
Finally, in conjunction with Jesus’s death, Luke brings together two additional signs that indicate Jesus was dying as a substitutionary sacrifice. The first sign is the darkness over the whole land from noon to 3 p.m. (Luke 23:44-45a). Whenever the Old Testament authors speak of darkness occurring at “noon,” “midday,” or while it is still “day,” times when the sun should be shining brightly, the purpose is always to communicate a time of God’s judgment (Deut. 28:29; Job 5:14; Isa. 59:10; Jer. 15:9; Ezek. 30:19; Amos 8:9). In this case, divine judgment is falling upon Jesus at the cross. The second sign is the tearing of the temple curtain in two (Luke 23:45b). Aside from the Gospel accounts of this event, the only other New Testament uses of this term occur in Hebrews (Heb. 6:19, 9:3, 10:20), where Jesus is described as high priest of the new covenant who has provided forgiveness and access to God through the sacrifice of himself (Heb. 9:26). The implication is clear: Jesus’s death has opened up a new way of access to God.
Conclusion
As you follow Luke’s passion narrative scene by scene, do you “see” the meaning of Christ’s death? Careful readers who know the Old Testament will discern a compelling picture of Christ’s death as a substitutionary sacrifice for sinners. Jesus dies to bear God’s wrath upon himself so that sinners might be forgiven, reconciled to God, and receive the promise of eternal life.
†
|
|
