Why the Mission Needs the Marks of the Church
by R. Scott Clark |
(page 5 of 7)
4. The EM’s complaint about the close association of the
church with cultural forms could be taken as a form of Gnosticism.
Our Lord took on a true human nature. As a true man, born of a
virgin, he entered human history, spoke a natural language, and was,
as a man, completely embedded in a particular culture and time. He
commissioned his apostles, also embedded in a particular culture and
time, to preach the gospel that transcends all cultures and times,
to every language, tongue, and tribe. The paradox of the mission is
that the transcendent, triune God entered history to accomplish the
great mission, to redeem his people in the fullness of time, and he
committed the proclamation of the reality of that fulfillment to the
visible church, which shall always remain embedded in time and
history until there is no more time and history.
Let us also remember that it was the Anabaptists, with whom the EM
seems to be so enamored, who overtly and repeatedly denied the true
humanity of Christ and who adopted the docetic doctrine of the
so-called “celestial flesh” of Christ. The Definition of Chalcedon
better serves the biblical and holy catholic faith than the
Christology of the Anabaptists does.
5. Though the EM often write as if they were distinctively
post-modern, there is little evidence that they really are genuinely
post-modern. In many ways it is not a modern movement, beginning
with late modern assumptions. The first “modern” people were the
Anabaptists and then the Pietists. It is they who made the faith
wholly private and personal and who divorced it from history and
made it chiefly about the quest for illegitimate religious
experience.
By “modern” I mean the Anabaptists and Pietists accept the premise
that the subject of the verb is “I.” This is the great difference
between Christian antiquity, where the overwhelming consensus was
exactly opposite that of modernity, and post-modernity. The
pre-modern church assumed universally that God had spoken, that his
revelation is objective and normative for all people, in all times
and places. The great question of Christian antiquity was not
whether God has spoken but what has God said.
The great modern question is, “Has God really said?” Of
course, that question has ancient and diabolical roots, but never
until the modern period did it become the dominant question,
the dominant assumption. It was in reaction to the ascendancy of the
modern question and the accompanying assumption of personal autonomy
that Christians began to regard the faith as being not about
objective, verifiable historical truths such as creation,
redemption, resurrection and return, but about the personal
experience of the divine. Calvin and Luther are one thing, and
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is another. The EM has much
deeper roots in the liberal pietism of Schleiermacher than they do
in the confessional, churchly Protestantism of Calvin and Luther.
6. The EM is much to be faulted for their lack of clarity about what
the gospel is. The Scriptures are unequivocal that the gospel is the
announcement of deliverance from judgment and damnation on the basis
of the righteousness of Christ and received through faith alone in
Christ and his finished work. This is not the clarion call of the EM
movements. In the EM the gospel is more frequently identified with
various social goods that Christians are to bring about than it is
identified with deliverance from sin and damnation, accomplished
once-for-all by God in Christ. Indeed, sin is not a word that seems
to occur very often in the EM vocabulary.
7. The EM leaders fail consistently to distinguish between the two
kingdoms. As Reformed theology understands God’s Word, there are two
kingdoms in this world, one from heaven and the other of this age.
Christians live in both kingdoms simultaneously. The visible,
institutional church, the “true church,” represents the
spiritual/heavenly kingdom, the kingdom of God as we confess in the
Belgic Confession, Article 29. Here, we should credit the
chapter in Missional Church that gets this aspect of the
question right.32 Only the baptized live in this kingdom outwardly and
only believers inhabit this kingdom spiritually. All humans,
however, live in another kingdom, the civil or earthly kingdom,
which God rules as Creator. Much of that to which the EM is calling
the church actually belongs to the civil kingdom. Christians may and
should work to alleviate suffering, but the visible, institutional
church, as such, is called to only three tasks: To preach the
gospel, to administer the sacraments, and to administer discipline.
We confess these as the marks of the true church. We confess:
The true church can be recognized if it has the following
marks: The church engages in the pure preaching of the gospel;
it makes use of the pure administration of the sacraments as
Christ instituted them; it practices church discipline for
correcting faults. In short, it governs itself according to the
pure Word of God, rejecting all things contrary to it and
holding Jesus Christ as the only Head. By these marks one can be
assured of recognizing the true church-- and no one ought to be
separated from it.
Footnotes (on this page)
32 Missional Church, 102–09.
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