Church: The Place Where People Have It All Together?

I stumbled across this post over at "The Christian Curmudgeon" and it struck me as a pretty poignant observation, especially since I wrote in the same vein just recently.

TCC observes:

"While the church requires honesty, it may show it does not know quite what to do when there is transparent honesty.

Honesty is particularly dangerous when Christians admit to two struggles – struggles with doubt and struggles with sin."

It is a sad irony that awkwardness should characterize the church in its two chief mandates: orthodoxy and orthopraxy. But I believe the concession lies in one key realization that must occur both on the part of the church leadership and the church members, i.e., the realization that both parties still struggle with sin and that though biblical ideals are in place, the substantial fulfillment of them is reserved for the future age.

In other words, the church leadership should extend more grace to the members, and the members should extend more grace to the former when they fail to extend more grace to them.

The overarching unity in all of this is that we have been saved by grace, through faith, in Christ. As John Owen alludes to in his work on temptation, it is the patience of Christ (Rev. 3:10) that keeps us all together:

A soul acquainted with the gospel knows that there is no property of Christ rendered more glorious therein than that of his patience. (Overcoming Sin & Temptation, eds. Kelly Kapic & Justin Taylor [Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2006], 204)

D.A. Carson on a Species of Perfectionism

D.A. Carson recognizes a strain of perfectionism "that owes no connection to Keswick or Wesley," but yet often rears its ugly head in the lives of more orthodox Christians. He appears to appeal to a misappropriation of two ages theology in describing a plausible explanation for this predicament, which he describes as "a species of over-realized eschatology," not intending to lump it alongside the hubris that Paul lambasts in 1 Cor. 4 nor the inanity of the prosperity gospel.

What he describes, it seems to me, is the classic struggle with assurance of salvation, borne out of the failure to make the biblical distinction between justification and sanctification and a low view of the nature of sin, that leaves the believer in despair over what he knows he must do based on what he also knows he already is—but does not do!

Carson offers two considerations:

1.) The narrative testimony of Scriptue to the Romans 7 reality of the sanctified life in the lives of some "heroes of the faith":

"First, the Bible itself speaks to this issue in various ways, and some of those ways are cast as stark antitheses. In apocalyptic literature, for example, there are faithful followers of Christ, and there are diabolical opponents. People wear either the mark of the beast or the sign of Christ; there is nothing in between. Similarly in wisdom literature: one follows Dame Folly or Lady Wisdom, but not both. That is why a wisdom psalm like Ps 1 casts the choice in absolute antithesis: either one does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, stand in the path of sinners, and sit in the seat of mockers, while delighting in the law of the Lord day and night and meditating on it, finding one's life before God is like a wellwatered fruit-bearing tree, or the wicked are simply 'not so.' The Lord recognizes and owns one path, while the other perishes. There is nothing in between. The Lord Jesus can preach in many different styles, but included among them is wisdom polarity: reflect on the antitheses at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. On the other hand, over against such antithetical presentations of holiness and sin, of faithfulness and unbelief, are the many narrative portions of the Bible where God's people are depicted with all their inconsistencies, their times of spectacular faithfulness and their ugliest warts. Abraham the friend of God repeatedly tells half truths; Moses the meekest man loses his temper and consequently does not get into the promised land; David the man after God's own heart commits adultery and murder; Peter the primus inter pares, the confessor of Caesarea Philippi and the preacher of Pentecost, acts and speaks with such little understanding that he earns a rebuke from Jesus and another from Paul. In such narratives there is no trace of the moral polarities of apocalyptic and of wisdom. There is instead an utterly frank depiction of the moral compromises that make up the lives of even the 'heroes' of Scripture. In short, the Bible itself includes genres and passages that foster absolutist thinking and others that warn us to recognize how flawed and inconsistent are even those we recognize as the fathers of the faithful. Certainly we need both species of biblical literature, and most Christians see a sign of God's kindness in the Bible that provides us with both. The narratives without the absolutes might seem to sanction moral indifference: 'If even a man after God's own heart like David can fall so disastrously, it cannot be too surprising if we lesser mortals tumble from time to time.' The absolutes without the narratives might either generate despair ('Who can live up to the impossibly high standards of Ps 1?') or produce self-righteous fools ('It's a good thing the Bible has standards, and I have to say I thank God I am not as other people are.'). We need the unflinching standards of the absolute polarities to keep us from moral flabbiness, and in this broken world, we need the candid realism of the narratives to keep us from both arrogance and despair. Most of us, I suspect, muddle along with a merely intuitive sense of how these twin biblical heritages ought to shape our lives."

2.) The objectivity of Christ and His benefits:

"The second factor is how we attach the cross of Christ to all this. The intensity of the struggle against sin easily generates boundless distortions when we do not return, again and again, to God's love for us manifested in the cross. There alone is the hope we need, the cleansing we need, the grace we need. Any pursuit of perfection that is not awash in the grace of God displayed on a little hill outside Jerusalem is bound to trip us up."

Source: D.A. Carson, Perfectionisms, Themelios 35.1, 1-3

Simul Justus Et Peccator

"We are not either carnal Christians or spiritual Christians; rather, all Christians are simultaneously sinful and spiritual—not because of their 'surrender,' but because of Christ's. We are all in the same category, simply at different points along the way.

The message of the Reformation has been salve in the wounds of many, including this writer. I am not a Christian with great faith or with praiseworthy character, but a Christian who is confident that I share with every regenerate Christian 'every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ' (Eph. 1:3). I am simultaneously sinful and justified, as I am simultaneously at peace with God because of Christ's imputed righteousness, but at war with myself because of Christ's imparted righteousness. I am not a 'successful runner,' but I am 'looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of [my] faith' (Heb. 12:2). I trust and obey Christ (however feebly), and I know that I will continue trusting and obeying until the day I die—not because I have appropriated Christ, but because he has appropriated me."

— Dr. Michael S. Horton, Christ the Lord (The Reformation and Lordship Salvation), 33.

A Brief Reflection on WCF 5.5

"The most wise, righteous, and gracious God does oftentimes leave, for a season, His own children to manifold temptations, and the corruption of their own hearts, to chastise them for their former sins, or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled; and, to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon Himself, and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for sundry other just and holy ends" (WCF 5.5).

Pietism and Wesleyan perfectionism would have you either feeling guilt-ridden all the time, or smug in self-righteous pride through a diminishing of what biblically counts for sin. They argue that sinless perfection is the norm of the Christian life and that something must be terribly wrong if sin is still being committed. In fact, given this scenario, if a Christian dies with at least a single "unconfessed" sin, that's it! It's hell for him, and make no qualms about it.

This view finds no warrant in Scripture and actually robs Christ of the glory due His Name for the utter perfection and sufficiency of His life and death. In fact, as the passage from the WCF above stipulates, sin is sometimes an agent of sanctification in God's wise, loving, and providential hands.

The new birth did not strip off the Adamic nature which every man possesses by virtue of being human. No, we as Christians, enabled by the Spirit, are still left to wrestle with the old man, to continually be putting it to death. But then, this process of mortification is not carried out pietistically as well, as if a set of rigorous "spiritual disciplines" is the key to victory. It is through the Gospel of Jesus Christ that the subjugation of sin is had, and the lingering presence of sin in our lives is cause for us to ever be humbling ourselves before a holy God, in submission to the Hope that He has set before us. We cannot reform ourselves by a gritting of our teeth in willful resolution—the radical depravity of man, the onslaught of the world, and the minions of Satan make that a certainty.

If we attend to the means of grace (Word and Sacrament), God's ordained vehicles of imparting the benefits of the Gospel to us, then we are truly conforming to the nature of Christ that has been wrought by the Spirit, desiring Him above all, and progressing steadily along the pilgrim path.