Friday, April 16, 2004 AD
God's Sovereignty and God's Sacraments
Interesting post on Revd Paul McCain's Cyberbrethren blog a couple of weeks ago, entitled "Knocking Everywhere, But Nowhere in Particular", and looking at Gnostic tendencies in contemporary Christianity. McCain quotes from a book by Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, and the bit that really struck me related to the issue of how - given John Calvin's high view of Word, Sacraments and Church - so much of the stream of Christianity flowing out of Geneva could end up, within a few centuries, as an individualistic chasing of one fad after another:
That description of a conceptual distinction between the "outward sign" and the "inward grace" leading to a practical separation in which the outward sign can ultimately be discarded as unnecessary, seems a convincing explanation of the problem. Reason says, "God is not tied to the sacraments, so if people no longer find the sacraments 'helpful', then we can safely abandon or downgrade the sacraments in favour of other means."
Of course, reason says exactly the same thing about preaching, and many evangelicals who have used that line of argument consciously or unconsciously to downgrade the sacraments are now (rightly, but inconsistently) indignant with those charismatics who say that preaching is not necessarily the "best" or most "helpful" way of "speaking to people" today: that praise & worship songs, testimonies and "words of knowledge" are more "effective" today than old-fashioned preaching. (A few years ago, I had a long and fruitless argument with a charismatic friend who used precisely this line of argument - though he conceded that preachers could be given 10 to 15 minutes to say a few words; presumably to give us some practical but timeless truths for daily living).
As so often, it is asking the wrong questions that gives you the wrong answers. The proper question for us to ask is not, "Is God tied to the Word and Sacraments?" - in a way, that's not really any of our business - but rather, "Where can we find forgiveness, life and salvation? Where has God promised to give us these things?". And the answer then comes: in the Word, the water, the body and the blood. God may use other means to save people - that's His prerogative, after all - but why would we want anything other than the means God has graciously given us?
It is difficult to see how American Protestantism, deeply rooted in Calvinistic theology, could have moved in the direction of syncretistic religion. Calvin himself was quite clear about the single focus of faith ... Is it possible that Calvin himself left a loophole for Gnostic misinterpretation and even for Gnostic syncretism?As a "recovering Calvinist", I found this particularly helpful. I've spent years struggling with the "low" view of the Sacraments dominant within evangelicalism today, being convinced (from the Bible, the Anglican Prayer Book and Articles, and from my reading of Reformed writers such as Mike Horton and the Credenda Agenda crowd) that Baptism and the Lord's Supper should be seen as both more central, and more "effectual", than they are in practice by most evangelicals; while at the same time finding that Reformed explanations of the Sacraments sort of made sense when I read them, but then disappeared like the mist the moment I looked away - or compared them with what the Bible said.
Even Wendel, the great student and advocate of Calvin's theology, conceded that there was room for ambiguity in Calvin's doctrine of the sacrament. He understood Calvin as believing that "we may attain to it [union with Christ] by other means, such as preaching, reading the Bible, or prayer," that is, by other means than through the sacraments. This open question was to lead North American followers onto a lonely road and, finally, into a Gnostic way far remove from "the ancient paths, where the good way is."
The Puritan followers of Calvin heard their teacher loud and clear on the matter of the sovereignty of God. Because God is sovereign, He has no obligation to use the sacraments. If God wishes to cleanse us by other means than by baptism, He can. If He chooses to nourish us by other means than Holy Communion, He certain can. They began to infer from this premise that God does not choose such means to save us. And because God is not bound to employ the Church itself to do His work, the Church does not occupy an essential role in redemption ...
... Unfortunately the critique of liberalism has come and continues to come chiefly from an evangelicalism which has an equal disdain for anything concrete in the Christian faith. If possible, the evangelicals were more suspicious of the sacraments than were their liberal opponents ... founded on the logic that because God does not require particular objects to effect His salvation, neither do we require them to receive His salvation.
That description of a conceptual distinction between the "outward sign" and the "inward grace" leading to a practical separation in which the outward sign can ultimately be discarded as unnecessary, seems a convincing explanation of the problem. Reason says, "God is not tied to the sacraments, so if people no longer find the sacraments 'helpful', then we can safely abandon or downgrade the sacraments in favour of other means."
Of course, reason says exactly the same thing about preaching, and many evangelicals who have used that line of argument consciously or unconsciously to downgrade the sacraments are now (rightly, but inconsistently) indignant with those charismatics who say that preaching is not necessarily the "best" or most "helpful" way of "speaking to people" today: that praise & worship songs, testimonies and "words of knowledge" are more "effective" today than old-fashioned preaching. (A few years ago, I had a long and fruitless argument with a charismatic friend who used precisely this line of argument - though he conceded that preachers could be given 10 to 15 minutes to say a few words; presumably to give us some practical but timeless truths for daily living).
As so often, it is asking the wrong questions that gives you the wrong answers. The proper question for us to ask is not, "Is God tied to the Word and Sacraments?" - in a way, that's not really any of our business - but rather, "Where can we find forgiveness, life and salvation? Where has God promised to give us these things?". And the answer then comes: in the Word, the water, the body and the blood. God may use other means to save people - that's His prerogative, after all - but why would we want anything other than the means God has graciously given us?
