The Pathetic Pastoral Counsel of the Neo-Reformed

Christ Blessing the Little Children, William Blake

The Pathetic Pastoral Counsel of the Neo-Reformed

Do unborn babies and young children go to heaven?

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” –Matthew 19:14

This is one of the questions the Bible does not answer for us. The best biblical response is this: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” We can trust the God who died so that His enemies could be saved to do what is right in the case of infants who die.

Some appeal to David’s statement after his son died: “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.” The argument is that David knew he was going to heaven, so the baby must be there. However, the point of David’s statement is that the baby is in the grave. David will visit the grave, but the baby will not come back to life no matter how much he agonizes in fasting and prayer.

Many agree with Millard Erickson that the universal atonement pays the penalty for all Adamic guilt and condemnation, so babies who do not commit personal sin will be in heaven by application of the atonement. Others argue that death in infancy is a sign of special election. Some believe that children spend eternity with their parents. But none of these theories have clear biblical warrant.

Grace and I enjoy five children. We would have enjoyed six but, like many couples, we suffered a miscarriage. Because we love children, it was very difficult for us, and I often tear up when I talk about that loss. Our children and friends have asked me what I think happened to the baby and whether or not I believe the baby is in heaven. My simple answer is that I do not have a clear biblical answer as much as I have God who is a loving and gracious Father whom I trust. The fact that John the Baptizer was known and named by God in the womb and filled with the Holy Spirit before his birth gives me much comfort.

• Mark Driscoll

• • •

Having witnessed the baptismal service of a beautiful baby boy Sunday, this bit of theological nonsense rubbed me exactly the wrong way when I read it this week on Driscoll’s daily devotion site. I think he ends up coming to an acceptable conclusion, but the way he gets there betrays the out-of-touch, too God-centered, I-need-the-Bible-to-spell-things-out-for-me, Bible as an answer book mentality of the neo-reformed that not only drives me crazy, but makes them miserable counselors to real human beings in pain.

Who in their right mind needs “clear biblical warrant” to believe that God takes care of infants and young children who die?

Who with any sense whatsoever could trust God while entertaining even the slightest suspicion that this God just might possibly damn a little one to eternal hell fire because there’s not “a clear biblical answer” regarding his/her destiny?

Can a woman forget her nursing-child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.

• Isaiah 49:15

Now I’m going to give Pastor Mark a little credit here. Even though he doesn’t find it in the Bible, he seems to say that he finds comfort in a loving God. But…but. There’s a crack in the door, isn’t there? There’s an admission that he really can’t speak with certainty because the Bible doesn’t spell it out. I’m glad Pastor Mark takes some comfort in his reading of the character of God and the example of John the Baptist. But to not be sure? To reserve the possibility that God could torture his miscarried child forever — and be just in doing so?

Is this the kind of wimpy, waffling reassurance a pastor should give a grieving couple?

The whole soterian gospel, heaven and hell thing is bad enough, but when Driscoll starts opining about “original sin” and how an infant’s sin needs to be “atoned for,” I really start getting nauseous.

Even worse is an earlier blog article he links to: “My Baby Brother Died,” in which he outlines the following theological positions through which we might answer the question:

The eternal fate of unborn children and infants is a mystery that has always haunted the church. There are three choices available as answers:

  1. All babies are elect and thus immediately translated into heaven, awaiting Jesus’ return and the finishing of his work of cosmic redemption.
  2. God chooses some babies for heaven and the rest are left to spend eternity in hell.
  3. All babies are reprobate and thus immediately translated into hell upon death, awaiting the final eternal judgment for their sin nature inherited from Adam.

I’ve never encountered a Christian theologian who holds to answer #3, which leaves answer #1 (universal infant salvation) and answer #2 (infant salvation). These are the two options that have been debated throughout Christian history.

Seriously, those are the choices? Seriously, we talk about infants using the terms “elect” and “reprobate”? I know people have debated these things throughout Christian history. Need we be reminded how flawed and foolish the church has been for much of that time? Just because it’s written in a book doesn’t mean it carries meaningful weight.

Thankfully, in the article Driscoll does mention some Christian thinkers who understand that infants are incapable of being moral agents and therefore not subject to the judgment that scripture indicates will be based on “deeds done in the body.” In my opinion, could anything be more commonsensical than that? Why does it even need to be debated?

The older I get, the more I question the legitimacy of even having debates like this. Driscoll quotes Wayne Grudem, who opines, “Where Scripture is silent, it is unwise for us to make definitive pronouncements.” In the context, Grudem is saying he believes some infants are elect but he can’t be sure that all are.

Are you kidding me? Talk about having your head in a theological box!

Listen folks, the Bible is not an answer book. Repeat after me: the Bible is not answer book. I, for one, don’t need the Bible to spell it out for me that an infant who dies is safe in God’s care. The faith tells me I see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, the One who welcomes children without hesitation or reserve. I don’t need to have a theology of original sin and universal atonement, election, or any other doctrine to know what love is and to understand how horrific any thought of God condemning the helpless would be.

I get the idea that these people doubt whether or not they should use deodorant each day because the Bible doesn’t spell it out for them. Well, let me tell you, stink is self-evident and not recommended.

Tonight I’m going to be sitting down with several couples who have suffered perinatal losses. It will be our first support group meeting together. They will tell their stories and I will listen, and I will probably cry with them. For the next six weeks, we’ll be together, and it will never get any easier. I’ll have trouble sleeping, imagining their inconceivable pain.

Just to think that some of them might go into a church and get a pastor like one of these neo-reformed biblicists, who cannot, with absolute confidence, assure them of the certain love of a God who welcomes, without exception, all the little ones, who lifts up the helpless, who carries the weak, and takes care of all who cannot care for themselves, makes me want to scream.

This way of approaching life and its challenges is biblicist idiocy.

The Bible was given to help us gain wisdom, not to turn us into fools and miserable counselors who cannot be sure what love looks like because it isn’t spelled out for us in every instance.

♥︎

For more, see The Font and the Tiny Casket

A Scientist Talks about Human Destiny Beyond Death

A Scientist Talks about Human Destiny Beyond Death

John Polkinghorne, respected scientist and ordained Anglican priest, is a man, his bio says, “who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about God’s action in His creation. How can God act in a world governed by scientific law?”

In this brief interview, appropriate for Eastertide, Polkinghorne discusses human destiny after death, the nature of the “soul,” and humans as naturally embodied creatures.

• • •

Recommended Listening: Walter Brueggemann with Pete Enns

Pete Enns has a marvelous interview with Walter Brueggemann on his Bible for Normal People podcast. So good I knew right away I wanted to share it with you.

It clearly reveals what I have come to love most about Brueggemann: his way of reading the Bible challenges both evangelicals and the mainline churches. Here, in my view, is a transcript of the money passage from the interview:

Enns: Talk to us a little bit about the struggles of the Bible in the trajectory of the mainline church — where it’s been — and I know a lot of your life’s work is in leading it to a certain place.

Brueggemann: Well, I think the mainline churches probably have been excessively captured by historical-critical study, and the effect of historical-critical study is to distance the Bible from us and to eliminate the hard questions that make faith scandalous. So my uphill battle in mainline churches has been to try to show the spectacular ways in which the Bible is contemporary, in which the Bible does not fit any of our reasonable categories, in which the Bible invites us to scandalous kinds of imagination and scandalous kinds of obedience.

I think that the counterpoint in more evangelical churches is that the Bible has been reduced to a package of truths without much dynamism, and that also makes the Bible equally uninteresting.

So I sort of have taken it upon myself to be working on both those fronts, because I get invited to a lot of evangelical settings as I do to a lot of mainline settings, and I think those are the twin temptations — either to reduce the Bible to a rational package or to reduce it to a doctrinal package, and I don’t think either one of them serves the Bible very well.

Enns: Well, do you think — that’s very helpful — do you think, Walter, that historical criticism might be an effective challenge, a positive challenge to evangelicalism in its reduction of the Bible to a doctrinal package?

Brueggemann: I think that’s exactly right. And I think historical criticism emerged two hundred years ago because of the kind of reductionist orthodoxy in Germany. So historical criticism is hugely important. The problem is that mainline churches tended to stop there instead of going on to become post-critical, to say, “Now I understand all these critical maneuvers that you have to make in the Bible — how do I move beyond that to take this as a script for faith?

So it’s a kind of a two-step deal, and I think that mainlines have made the first step but not the second, and my perception is that many more evangelical traditions have not made that first step into critical study.

In my opinion, that analysis is spot on.

In essence, what we are talking about here is the same debate, different arena, as we hear in the creation/evolution conflict. How can Christians read the Bible as God’s Word now that we have come to understand it as a book that developed and was put together in the course of a very human history by a very human community?

From my own experience in the evangelical world, their answer is to do what the creationists do in response to the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence. They ignore it and develop apologetics to defend pre-critical readings and interpretations, refusing to accept legitimate discoveries and reasonable conclusions, and failing to recognize the actual nature of the book that is before them. Worst of all, this is usually done for political reasons — to conserve familiar traditions and control the thinking of those within them.

On the other hand, those on the more progressive end of the spectrum get enamored with the thrill of rational discovery and end up spending all their time focusing on theories of the Bible’s historical background and development, and then ignoring the Bible as a living word that speaks to the church and world today, preferring to baptize their own progressive agenda as God’s will. And they can be just as politically motivated in advancing their causes and defending their ways.

I hope you’ll enjoy listening to someone who has honest and hard things to say to both sides.

• • •

Resurrection Sunday 2017

Resurrection Sunday 2017

Resurrection, Pontormo

This holy and blessed day is the first day of the week, the king and master of all days, the feast of feasts and the season of seasons. On this day we bless Christ forever and ever.

O faithful, come on this day of the glorious resurrection; let us drink the wine of the new vine-yard, of the divine joy, of the kingdom of Christ! Let us praise him as our God for ever and ever.

• Orthodox Liturgy

✛

Good Friday 2017

Good Friday 2017

Crucifixion, Altdorfer

• • •

It is immensely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to suffer in the freedom of one’s own responsible deed. It is immensely easier to suffer with others than to suffer alone. It is immensely easier to suffer openly and honorably than apart and in shame. It is immensely easier to suffer through commitment of physical life than in the spirit.

Christ suffered in freedom, alone, apart and in shame, in body and spirit, and since then many Christians have so suffered with him.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Maundy Thursday 2017: Feeding on Death We Live

Photo by aidisley

Maundy Thursday 2017

For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed.

• 1 Corinthians 5:7

• • •

“To know Christ sacramentally only in terms of bread and wine is to know him only partially, in the dining room as host and guest. It is a valid enough knowledge, but its ultimate weakness when isolated is that it is perhaps too civil. . . . However elegant the knowledge of the dining room may be, it begins in the soil, in the barnyard, in the slaughterhouse; amid the quiet violence of the garden, strangled cries, and fat spitting in the pan. Table manners depend on something’s having been grabbed by the throat. A knowledge that ignores these dark and murderous human gestes is losing its grip on the human condition.”

• Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism

• • •

Photo by aidisley at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Holy Wednesday 2017: The Day Before

Misty Morning. Photo by Susanne Nilsson

Holy Wednesday 2017

NOTE: On Wednesday of Holy Week, this classic Michael Spencer post from November, 2009 reminds us that tomorrow may find us taking a journey into the unknown. Tomorrow is Thursday, and we have plans for supper and a walk in the garden.

• • •

The news story is strange and tragic. Three college softball players go for a night time drive in the country. On an unfamiliar road, they take a wrong turn and drive into a pond…and drown.

There was a day before. A day with no thought of drowning. A day with family and friends. Perhaps with no thought of eternity, God or heaven. There was a day when every assumption was that tomorrow would be like today.

My friend Gary has been the night dean at our school for more than 20 years. His wife has been in poor health, but he has been a workhorse of health. He’s walked miles every day, eaten a vegetarian diet and always kept the rest of us lifted up with his smile and constant focus on the joy he took in his salvation.

Two weeks ago, the doctor turned to him and said leukemia. Today he stands on the crumbling edge of this earthly shadow, looking at the next world, fighting for his life with all that medicine and prayer can offer. Our prayers for him as a school community have been continuous, because we never thought there would be such a day.

There was a day before he heard “leukemia.” A day of work, chores, bills, hopes of seeing a grandchild, prayers for students, love for Suzi. Not a thought that the journey of life contained such a surprising turn for him.

And on that day, Gary was full of faith, full of a servant’s heart, ready for many more days or ready for this to be last one before whatever was around the corner.

We all live the days before. We are living them now.

There was a day before 9-11.

There was a day before your child told you she was pregnant.

There was a day before your wife said she’d had enough.

There was a day before your employer said “lay offs.”

We are living our days before. We are living them now.

Some of us are doing, for the last time, what we think we will be doing twenty years from now.

Some of us are on the verge of a much shorter life, or a very different life, or a life turned upside down.

Some of us are preaching our last sermon, making love for the last time, saying “I love you” to our children for the last time in our own home. Some of us are spending our last day without the knowledge of eternal judgment and the reality of God. We are promising tomorrow will be different and tomorrow is not going to give us the chance, because God has a different tomorrow entirely on our schedule. We just don’t know it today.

Who am I on this day before I am compelled to be someone else? What am I living for? How am I living out the deepest expression of who I am and what I believe?

My life is an accumulation of days lived out of what I believe is true every day.

Gary lived every day with the story of Jesus nearby and the joy of the Lord a ready word to share.

When the day came that “leukemia” was the word he had to hear, he was already living a day resting in the victory of Jesus. That word, above all earthly powers, cannot be taken away. It speaks louder and more certainly the more the surprising words of providence and tragedy shout their unexpected turns into our ears.

Live each day as the day that all of the Gospel is true. Live this day and be glad in it. Live this day as the day of laying down sin and taking up the glad and good forgiveness of Jesus. Live this day determined to be useful and joyful in Jesus. Live this day in a way that, should all things change tomorrow, you will know that the Lord is your God and this is the day to be satisfied in him.

• • •

Photo by Susanne Nilsson at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Holy Tuesday 2017 – Looking for the End

Almost Home in the Spring. Photo by David Cornwell

Holy Tuesday 2017

These three days, which the Church calls Great and Holy have within the liturgical development of the Holy Week a very definite purpose. They place all its celebrations in the perspective of End ; they remind us of the eschatological meaning of Pascha. …“Now is the Judgment of this world” (John 12:31). The Pascha of Jesus signified its end to “this world” and it has been at its end since then. This end can last for hundreds of centuries this does not alter the nature of time in which we live as the “last time.” “The fashion of this world passeth away…” (I Cor. 7:31).

• Orthodox Church in America

• • •

Of all the weeks in the year, Holy Week moves me to think about “ultimate” matters. Life. Death. Life after death. Things to come — the world to come, the age to come. The “end,” the goal, the consummation. Indeed, as the quote above says, this is an intended emphasis of in the Church’s observance of Holy Week, especially on Monday through Wednesday.

The signal events of Christianity involve Jesus dying, being buried, rising from the dead, and ascending into heaven. All these events have some measure of meaning for our daily lives, but their true significance is transcendent. They are events indeed that, by the testimony of scripture, have “cosmic” import — for Israel, for all nations, for all people, for all creation.

Jesus announced that God’s long-awaited kingdom was dawning, and the Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension are presented to us as divine actions that bring God’s reign to light. At Pentecost Peter proclaimed that the last days had arrived. The age to come has invaded the present. A sense of something new causes us to lift up our eyes and look expectantly toward the horizon.

As far as I can tell, Christian faith has always been practiced in the context of eschatological expectation. My early adult days in the context of the Jesus movement was rife with dispensational-style “Jesus is coming” fervor. Discussions, debates, arguments, hard lines of conviction, and even schisms throughout the days of my ministry within evangelicalism often revolved around positions one took regarding the details of various prophetic schemes.

Some of that fervor has abated within evangelicalism over the years, as pragmatism and an emphasis on church growth led many in the movement farther and farther away from doctrinaire fundamentalism.

In the more recent past, scholars such as N.T. Wright, building upon a more narrative-historical approach to scripture, have placed more and more of Jesus’ teachings about “the end” in the context of historical judgments such as the Fall of Jerusalem rather than as matters of “eternal destiny.”

I’ve come to appreciate the hard work of Andrew Perriman at P.OST, who has tried to apply a consistent narrative-historical hermeneutic in his studies of the New Testament.

Perriman builds upon a simple yet far-reaching presupposition: prophecies about God’s judgments and future cataclysms are always about events within history, not harbingers of the end of the world. Both OT and NT share a “geopolitical realism.” No matter how poetic, metaphorical, or apocalyptic the language, the seers and prophets were envisioning things that would take place in the course of ongoing national and international circumstances.

That leads him to conclude that  the destruction of Jerusalem is the primary focus of Jesus’ “end time” teachings. And he also holds that the subsequent prophetic outlook of the NT is targeted toward relatively near events within history, to be specific, the ultimate triumph of Christ and the church over the pagan nations, Rome in particular.

I think the focus has to be on the challenge that this vindicated Jesus movement presented to the oikoumenē or ‘world’ or empire or culture of Greek-Roman paganism. This was the ‘defunct world order’ that the creator God, who had been the God of Israel, would eventually pull down and over which he would reign through the one who had been appointed Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. (Perriman)

To be sure, Perriman does have a futurist eschatology as well, and he sees it particularly in the final chapters of Revelation, where, after God triumphs over “Babylon” (Rome) there is more to come — namely a thousand year period when Christ reigns with the martyrs, followed by a final judgment of all the dead, and the appearance of a new heaven and new earth.

If I read his timeline correctly, we find ourselves in that “thousand years” following the victory of God and his King over the Roman empire. “Christendom” is the formal name for the public vindication and triumph of Christianity over the pagan empires. We now live in “post-Christendom,” a time which Perriman suggests is “off the radar of the New Testament”

With a wink of the eye and a chuckle, Perriman calls his scheme, “Double Post-tribulational Pre-Amillennialism.” (I’d so love to throw that line at one of my old professors!) And, like all good prophetic teachers, Andrew has a chart:

Whatever you might think about Andrew Perriman’s interpretation, there is one thing I really like about it. It puts you and me squarely in no-man’s land. We — living when we do — have no idea what’s to come, except in the broadest of terms, expressed in apocalyptic language at the end of the book of Revelation.

We today, after the triumph of Christendom and before the last judgment, are living in an eschatological wilderness. Perhaps that’s why no detailed prophetic program that purports to describe “history before it happens” has ever appealed to me.

So, in a sense, I’m as much in the dark this Holy Week as the disciples were on the first one. Maybe even more, for they had at least had a historical context that led them to expect some kind of imminent historical upheaval. As Perriman writes, “For the disciples on the mount of Olives what loomed large when Jesus directed their minds towards the future was the war against Rome and the destruction of the temple.”

As for me, if, on Holy Tuesday, I am called to lift up my head and look forward to what’s coming because of the finished work of Jesus Christ, I have to confess my hopes are vague and my expectation beset with riddles.

Commence lament mode: “How long, O Lord?”

• • •

Photo by David Cornwell at Flickr.

Holy Monday 2017: House Cleaning

Brooms. Photo by Ginny

Holy Monday 2017

During the first three days of Holy Week, Easter housecleaning takes place in many Catholic communities. This is more than just another secular custom. Its purpose is to prepare the house for the blessing by the priest on Holy Saturday, and is an outward sign of the inner newness of soul of the family. This meaning should be made clear to the children so that they may help prepare the house for the Church’s blessing. By Wednesday of Holy Week the cleaning should be finished, and the remainder of the week should be considered as semi-holidays.

• From Catholic Culture

• • •

We are planning on making a move in the near future, if God wills. We are not going to leave the town we live in, but it is the right time for us to live in a different kind of house for the next season of our life.

That means we’re busy cleaning, decluttering, getting rid of some possessions and putting others in storage, having necessary repairs made and getting ready for an inspection. It’s house cleaning time at the Mercer’s.

Most of us in the northern climes have some tradition of spring cleaning, when we open the windows to let in the fresh air and put a little extra elbow grease toward getting the dust and dirt out of those corners and cubby holes that we’ve neglected all winter.

In some traditions of keeping the Church Year, however, it’s more than that. It is time to get ready for the Easter celebration! In partnership with our Jewish friends, who traditionally swept the house clean for Passover, we prepare ourselves and our environment to participate in our great day of deliverance.

This year, for us, it also marks the end of a season of life (if we’re fortunate enough to actually sell the house and get moved).

For example, last week I threw away almost forty years worth of files that contained notes from Bible college and seminary, sermons from the churches where I’ve served, articles I’ve copied, and studies I’ve led. I had at least one file on every book of the Bible. I had ministry files, illustration files, mission trip files — all the kinds of files a pastor keeps — at least one like I was that thought it imprudent to ever throw anything away. Who knows when I might need to look back on that? Turns out they have sat in file for the past twelve years and I don’t think I’ve opened one of its drawers more than two or three times during that span.

But there it went — the material evidence of my ministerial life — into the trash can, out to the curb, picked up by the garbage truck and now buried in the landfill.

Well, there is other material evidence of my ministerial life: my books. When I left the church and came home, I brought with me 100 boxes of books. Over the years I’ve weeded out a bunch of them, given many away, and sold some. Of course, I’ve bought some too. (I’m not dead yet, you know!) I reckon I’ve cut down to maybe 50 or 60 boxes.

Guess what. If we move, they come with us. So I’ve been boxing up books lately too. I carried about 20 boxes of books and related things to the storage unit yesterday. And we have lots of stairs, folks. I’m flat out pooped today. Just think, if it wasn’t for Kindle, I’d have another box or two to look forward to.

We have gotten through a lot of the easy stuff, but this is about to get serious very soon. The attic. The big under-the-stairs closet. The basement. If a couple of days go by and you don’t hear from me, I’m buried under a big pile of stuff in one of those three locations.

And all this is just preparation for the move itself. Can’t wait…

The quote above says that Holy Week cleaning is designed to be “an outward sign of the inner newness of soul of the family.” So maybe I’ll get a little holiness out of all this cleaning and downsizing.

I wouldn’t count on it. It’s more likely “an outward sign of the physiological decay of this old man” who doesn’t like carrying books around so much anymore.

We’ll keep you posted. May God give us all a renewed sense of cleansing and renewal during this Holy Week. And if you hear muffled cries coming from the big under-the-stairs closet, send for help.

• • •

Photo by Ginny at Flickr. Creative Commons License