Why I Can't (Quite) Support the Belhar Confession

I want to support the Belhar Confession. Like everyone else in the RCA, or virtually everyone, I think apartheid was evil, racism is wrong, and church unity is good. I like the idea of adopting a confession that comes from the Global South and may speak to non-whites in a way that our present confessions do not. I agree with most of the Belhar Confession, much of it simply a restatement of Scripture. I want to support Belhar—others I respect do. But in the end, I cannot.

First, there are a few lines that cannot be supported by Scripture. Here’s just one example: We believe that God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged. To be sure, the Bible is full of examples of God’s heart for the poor and the oppressed. But it goes too far to say he is in a special way a God to them. The covenant promise—I will be your God and you will be my people (language Belhar echoes here)—is for those who put their faith in God, not simply those who are poor or oppressed. In fact, Abraham, the man of faith and the model for all covenantal blessing (Gal. 3:5-9), was especially rich (Gen. 13:5-6). Is God less of God to him than to the poor man who rejects Christ? Was God a God to Job, Zacchaeus, Mary and Martha in a less special way because they were well-to-do? There are plenty of verses to support the contention that God cares for the poor and oppressed, but are there any verses to suggest that he is their covenantal God apart from faith? Or any verses to suggest that God looks on the believing poor with more favor than the believing non-poor? God does not show partiality to the poor, nor does he defer to the great (Lev. 19:15).

Second, I am concerned about what it will mean to confess the Belhar Confession as a denomination. I understand that possible abuses of the confession should not be a knock against the confession itself, but adopting the Belhar Confession only makes sense if we are actually going to confess it together. Thus, it becomes important to listen to how others are already “confessing” the Belhar.

Those advocating the adoption of Belhar do not simply want us to affirm an anti-apartheid document. They are passionate about Belhar because of its many perceived implications. The Commission on Christian Action in 2007 lauded Belhar because it spoke to so many issues before them, including the farm bill, Sudanese refugees, the Iraq War, socially screening RCA retirement funds, immigration policy, minimum wage increases, and America’s embargo of Cuba. Others in the RCA have suggested that Belhar applies to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, global economics, green house gas emissions, abortion, social welfare, and taxation policies. For many in the RCA, Belhar’s talk of justice lends support for almost any cause that can be put in the broad category of “social justice.”

And for some, “social justice” includes the affirmation of the homosexual lifestyle. This concern cannot be dismissed as fear-mongering. Allen Boesak, under whose leadership Belhar was first drafted, recently made headlines when he “dramatically insisted that the church’s Belhar Confession demands the defense of the full rights of gay members. When the synod rejected this, he announced his intention to resign from all church offices and left the synod floor with his wife” (The Banner, January, 16). If the man responsible for overseeing the first draft of the Belhar Confession asserts that support for homosexual unions and homosexual ordination is demanded by the Confession, why should we think that this document will not be used in the RCA to a similar end.

I’m not opposed in principle to a new confession. But a new confession should clarify some issue that is begging for clarification. While there may be pockets of insensitivity regarding race in our denomination, I don’t see where we are facing anything remotely close to the situation that prompted Belhar in South Africa in the 1980s. We do not honor the anti-apartheid cause by equating our situation to theirs.

Instead of clarifying, Belhar confuses. We are told it will apply to social justice issues, but how? It will speak to our need for unity, but in what way? It will urge reconciliation, but with whom? At this point in the life of our denomination, Belhar looks to me like a wax nose, which is exactly what confessions ought not to be. The right confessional statement settles issues; it doesn’t raise them.

I want to support the Belhar Confession. Its main thesis—God’s people should not be separated by race or ethnicity—is courageous and correct. But the Confession goes beyond Scripture in a few important places. And further, those who are most eager to confess Belhar in our denomination are often confessing a very different document than the anti-racism confession many of us read it to be.

P.S. A few weeks ago Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Theological Seminary, blogged about the unfortunate trajectory of his old friend, Allan Boesak (HT: Stephen Ley).  Here's part of what Mouw said:

Boesak was also instrumental in drafting the 1986 Belhar Confession, which I welcomed at the time as an important confessional statement about race relationships. He now appeals to that document in support of his advocacy for gay-lesbian ordination. In a recent insightful blog posting, “The Belhar Confession & God’s Final Revelation, Violet Larson argues that this is a good reason to question the theological adequacy of the Belhar Confession, precisely because of the use to which it is being put these days by proponents of full inclusion on same-sex topics. I agree with her. While that document spoke forthrightly against the injustices of apartheid, it did not explicitly appeal to biblical authority. That it can now be seen by some of its drafters as capable of being extended to the full inclusion of active gays and lesbians in ministry says something about the weaknesses of Belhar—not as an important prophetic declaration in its original context, but as a statement that can stand on its own as a normative confession (emphasis mine).

An Open Letter to Pastor Van Doren

Dear Pastor Van Doren,

I read with great interest your article on church membership in the latest issue of The Church Herald (May 2009, 7-8). As a pastor, I know the tension between wanting people to join your church, but not wanting to sell-out to make everyone happy. I understand, as you mention, that small churches could really use the financial support that new members might bring. I can sense too that you are aware of the danger of secularization in the church. In other words, I feel the tug you feel.

But, brother, I urge you to scrap the plan for two sets of membership vows, one set for Christians who confess Christ and one set for unconverted non-Christians who don't believe the gospel but are still interested in the church. You state, “There’s no wrong reason to belong to a church.” But surely there are lots of plenty of wrong reasons. Joining the church to be seen is wrong. Joining the church to make business connections is wrong. Joining the church to please your parents is wrong. Joining the church because you think Christianity is a plan for moral self-improvement is damnably wrong. You point out yourself that many people join the church because it is politically expedient, or they want good ethical instruction for their kids, or because they want to be a part of benevolent organization, but they do not believe in the in the uniqueness, Lordship, or divinity of Christ. There’s no nice way to put this: people who do not believe in the unique divinity of Christ and will not call him Lord are not Christians (1 John 5:10-13; John 8:24). To make such a judgment is not uncharitable, it’s simply Christianity. A Christian believes certain things and lives a certain way. Welcome non-Christians in the door, and invite them to stay, but we should not call them members of the church, for the simple reason that they are not members of the body of Christ.

You argue that we are “commanded by our Lord to treat saint and sinner alike, to banish all manners of exclusivity” but this is not the teaching of Scripture. Instead, the Bible commands us to judge those inside the church (1 Cor. 5:12). Contrary to popular opinion, God does not love everyone in the same way. If he did, what would be the point of the cross, justification, reconciliation, and adoption. We can be kind and generous to everyone, but in the end God only dwells with his people, while the rest will face the second death (Rev. 21:3-8). If Jesus told his would-be-followers to carry the cross, count the cost, and let dead bury their own dead, surely it is not too much that we expect church members to articulate the gospel and profess Jesus as Lord (and mean it).

Moreover, our confessional standards tell us that hypocrites and the unrepentant are not to come to the Lord’s table (H.C. Q/A 81) and that we are given the keys of the kingdom–gospel preaching and discipline–to “open the kingdom of heaven to believers and close it to unbelievers” (H.C. Q/A 83). The officers of the church, according to our doctrinal standards, ought to “exclude from the Christian fellowship” those who “profess unchristian teachings or live unchristian lives” (H.C. Q/A 85).

I admit that I don’t know the pressures you are facing or how dire things may look for the future of your church without some half-way covenant of church membership. But better to be on God’s side with a small church, than against him in a bigger one. You’re right that many people might “leave our churches if we required them to defend their faith publicly, through a written credo or in-depth interview before the board of elders” but let God deal with that. It’s not unheard of to have meaty membership classes, basic doctrinal requirements, and elder interviews. Many churches still do all three. Trust God to honor those who honor him. The Lord’s mercies are new every morning and he will reward you for doing the right thing. As you even note, “it is a statistical fact that the fastest growing churches make greater spiritual demands on their members, not relaxed ones.”

Most of all, as under-shepherds we need to think of our grave responsibility before God. “Obey your leaders and submit to them,” Hebrews 13:7 says, “for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.” The church, like Old Testament Israel, is meant to reflect the character of God. That’s why the unclean in Israel had to be washed or put outside the camp. God is holy and we must be holy as he is holy. Which is why the members in our churches must be cleansed by the blood of Christ through faith and repentance or face expulsion outside the church.

Membership standards, like church discipline, are not puritanical inventions, but necessary guardrails motivated by a passion for the glory of God and love for our flock. When we purposefully allow unregenerate persons into the membership of the church we do three very bad things: we tarnish the holy character of Christ, we allow unchecked sin and unbelief to act like leaven in the congregation, and we deceive our people.

Please, brother Van Doren, rethink your acquiescence to the secularized spirit of the age. It’s not an exaggeration to say heaven and hell are at stake. We must not say “peace, peace” to our people where there is no peace (even if they do tithe). Obviously we can’t manipulate God’s ways, but my strong hunch is that if you required more of your members you would find in 2-3 years that you would have more of them and the ones you had would be more fruitful

It takes love to welcome non-Christians in our midst. But I dare say that in our hyper-tolerant world, it takes even greater love to call them to faith and repentance and share with them the good news that through Jesus Christ, and him alone, can they be forgiven and live forever with God. Church membership is for those who get this. And if we get it, we’ll make sure they’ve gotten it before making them members of the church.

Another cracked clay pot,
Kevin

The Way, the Truth, and Phillip Jenkins

Phillip Jenkins is a good scholar and important Christian intellectual. His book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, on the rise of Christianity in the South and East, has already become a missiological standard. But while praising him for this work, Alan Jacobs, a professor at Wheaton College, still takes Jenkins to task, in a recent First Things article, for Jenkins' latest book, The Lost History of Christianity.

Here's the gist:

Jenkins presents, for our edification and (I think) admiration, the story of “Peter Phan, a Jesuit theologian whose main sin, in official eyes, has been to treat the Buddhism of his Vietnamese homeland as a parallel path to salvation.” And then he writes: “Following the ideas of Benedict XVI, though, the Church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ.”

Now here is where I pause in wonderment. Does Jenkins really and truly believe that “belief in the unique role of Christ” is an “idea” distinctive to the current pope? Can he be unaware that he would have come nearer to the truth by writing “Following the ideas of Benedict XVI, of every previous occupant of the throne of St. Peter, of the apostles, of the Church Fathers, of the leaders of the great Reformation traditions, and of most influential leaders of Christianity throughout the world, the Church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ”?

At one point in the article, Jacobs shows some well-deserved exasperation at Jenkins propensity to invoke ambiguous slogans instead of actual arguments.

It turns out that Jenkins’ claims and commitments are rather difficult to lay hold of, owing to his tendency to invoke anodyne nostrums in place of straightforward arguments. Consider this example: In our world, Jenkins writes, “teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another’s claims, to live peaceably together side by side, stops being a matter of good manners and becomes a prerequisite for human survival.” But what does acknowledge mean here?

“Over the past thirty years,” he adds, “the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated battles over this question of Christ’s uniqueness, and has cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions.” But what does accommodate mean here?

Or “if these Nazarenes could find meaning in the lotus-cross, then why can’t modern Catholics, or other inheritors of the faith Jesus inspired?” But what does find meaning in mean here?

Or “some day, future historians might look at the last few hundred years of Euro-American dominance within Christianity and regard it as an unnatural interlude in a much longer story of fruitful interchange between the great religions.” But what does fruitful interchange mean here?

Or “we could do a lot worse than to learn from what we sometimes call the Dark Ages.” But what does learn from mean here?

The difficulty should be evident. Only the coldest of hearts and the most tightly shut of minds could repudiate acknowledgment of one another and finding meaning in one another’s views and learning from one another and having lots of fruitful interchanges. Certainly I am eager to embrace all of those values, insofar as I understand them. But must I give up my belief that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life in order so to embrace them?

One more paragraph, which serves well as a summary of Jacob's irenic polemic against Jenkins:

Jenkins continues, “For long centuries, Asian Christians kept up neighborly relations with other faiths, which they saw not as deadly rivals but as fellow travelers on the road to enlightenment.” But the quest of the Christian is not enlightenment; rather, it is love of God and neighbor and reconciliation with God, as God reconciles the world to himself. Yes, if you choose to voyage along “the road to enlightenment,” you can get along swimmingly with your Buddhist neighbors. But you will have ceased to practice Christianity and begun to practice Buddhism or something very like it.

Alan Jacobs is one of the best essayists around. So as they say, read the whole thing.

Why Johnny Can't Preach

I doubt many people reading this blog, read my personal blog at www.revkevindeyoung.com.  So I'm taking the liberty to post something here that got a lot of response over there.

*****

I’m always a sucker for a good jeremiad. So I couldn’t resist ordering T. David Gordon’s new book Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers. Like every good book-long complaint there are parts here and there they I don’t agree with. But on the whole, I found Gordon’s butt-kicking to be well-deserved and well-stated. This is a very good book and I recommend it highly.

What makes the book compelling is Gordon’s passion for preaching. If you don’t know, Gordon is a professor at Grove City College (and formerly at Gordon-Conwell, though not when I was there). So his passion for preaching is not as a preacher, but as a listener. Also noteworthy is that Gordon wrote most of this book in 2004 while undergoing cancer treatments. At the time, Gordon didn’t know if he would live. This book was the last thing he wanted to say to the world if he only had one last thing to say. That's how passionate he is about sounding the alarm on the woes of contemporary preaching. Thankfully, his cancer is in remission now. But he remains unapologetic in his critique.

The substance of Gordon’s complaint is pretty simple: the overwhelming majority of those ordained to Christian ministry cannot preach even a mediocre sermon. And lest we think he’s railing on some seeker-sensitive strawman, Gordon makes clear that he is speaking from his own experience running in conservative evangelical and conservative Reformed circles. This is not their problem, he argues, this is our problem (at least for those of you reading who consider yourselves evangelicals). Sure, we may have some great preachers with large followings. But does the average Christian family in the average pew in the average church on the average Sunday get a decent sermon? Gordon thinks not.

Gordon gives several pieces of evidence for his negative conclusion.

1) Anecdotally, he estimates that only 15% of the sermons he’s heard in the past 25 years had a discernible point. And of those 15%, less than 10% had a point based on the text of Scripture.

2) Most churchgoers wants shorter sermons, not because they have short attention spans, but because their preacher, God bless him, can’t preach very well.

3) Gordon looks at Robert Dabney’s Lectures on Rhetoric from the 19th century and concludes that Dabney's “seven cardinal requisites of preaching” are missing from most of our pulpits: textual fidelity, unity, evangelical tone (is the minister eager to bless the congregation or scold them?), instructiveness, movement, point, and order. These are not subjective measures, mind you. These are basic fundamentals. No one in the history of homiletics has encouraged disunity in the sermon. These are things we can all agree on. And yet, they aren't there.

Why are these qualities missing? Gordon says it’s not mainly from laziness on the part of the preacher (though that can be part of it). It’s not the fault of our seminaries either. The two reasons Johnny can’t preach are because Johnny can’t read and Johnny can’t write.

We have been trained by a image-based, sound bite, attention span deficient culture to skim books and fly past arguments. In other words, we don’t read carefully. We don’t read literature. And we surely don’t read poetry. We aren’t used to thinking deliberately, meditatively about texts. So preachers come to the text each week with general ideas about what the Bible says and then once they find those same ideas again, they preach on the same thing again. We are not learning, growing, or being changed by the text. Preachers are simply coming to have their banal assumptions and cliche-level understanding confirmed for yet another week.

And preachers can’t write. We don’t write letters anymore. We talk on the cell. We IM. We write a quick note on somebody’s Facebook wall (about something really important, like the kind of oatmeal we just ate or our favorite Smurf). And when we write at all, it's in an email, where we ignore punctuation and rely on emoticons to do the hard work of telling people how we feel.

All of this makes preachers and preaching disorganized, sloppy, and trivial.

Ministers [in our culture] are not at home with what is significant; ministers whose attention span is less than that of a four-year-old in the 1940s, who race around like the rest of us, constantly distracted by sounds and images of inconsequential trivialities, and out of touch with what is weighty. It is not surprising that their sermons, and the alleged worship that surrounds them, are often trifling, thoughtless, uninspiring, and mundane...The great seriousness of the reality of being human, the dreadful seriousness of the coming judgment of God, the sheer insignificance of the present in light of eternity–realities that once were the subtext of virtually every sermon–have now disappeared, and have been replaced by one triviality after another (58-59).

Ouch.

My favorite chapter is Chapter 4: "A Few Thoughts About Content." After wrestling with the nature of preaching for 25 years, Gordon has concluded that the content of Christian preaching should be the person, character, and work of Christ. Kind of makes sense. Of course, preaching will included moral exhortation, but it is never appropriate, says Gordon, “for one word of moral counsel ever to proceed from a Christian pulpit that is not clearly, in its context, redemptive. That is, even when the faithful exposition of particular texts require some explanation of aspects of our behavior, it is always to be done in a manner that the hearer perceives such commended behavior to be itself a matter of being rescued from the power of sin through the grace of Christ” (70-71). So much for all our “relevant” messages helping us live more fulfilled lives. So much for emergent kingdom rhetoric that fails to mention the mercy of the King. So much for more than a few of my sermons over the years.

Gordon sees four alternatives to this type of gospel preaching: Moralism, How-To, Introspection, and Social Gospel/Culture War. That is, instead of preaching Christ crucified and the grace of God, we end up preaching “be better” or “here are three steps to being better” or “are you really a Christian?” or “we need to do more to fight the bad guys out there.” It’s not that we can’t do any of this as preachers--Gordon says there is a place for three of the four (everything but the how-to)--but “the pulpit is almost never the place to do this” (91). What must predominate in our preaching is the person, character, and work of Christ. And everything else should manifestly flow from these things. Don't leave the congregation wondering where grace come in to play. Don't make them assume you are rooting this application in the person and work of Christ. Connect the glorious dots for them.

Gordon concludes his much-needed rant with some practical advice on how to teach Johnny to preach.

1. Arrange for an annual review. Most pastors don’t know how bad they preach because they’ve never asked anyone and no one has felt bold enough to tell him the truth.

2. Cultivate the sensibility of reading texts closely. Read literature. Try poetry. Read things that are written well and demand careful thought.

3. Cultivate the sensibility of composed communication. Write letters out by hand. Write out your prayers. And I would add, if you blog, don't settle for sloppy or merely serviceable prose. Try to write well, rather than just writing.

Despite the passion of his lamentation, Gordon asserts time after time that all is not lost. Johnny can learn to preach. But he needs to cultivate the sensibilities to do it. And the congregation needs to give him enough time, or make him take enough time, to craft a sermon that actually deserves to be preached.

The rebuke for us preachers is a good jab, because there’s hope in the rebuke. We don’t need to give up on preaching, or ourselves. We simply need God's grace to work harder at preaching better and extra grace to live slower, more reflective lives. God will honor his Word when it is thoughtfully, carefully, and humbly delivered. We can trust the Word to do the work. “My challenge to the comtemporaneists and emergents”, says Gordon, “is this: Show me a church where the preaching is good, and yet the church is still moribund. I’ve never seen such a church. The moribund churches I’ve seen have been malpreached to death” (33).

Alright men–time to preach them back to life. Heaven help us.

Quibbles with the Church Herald

So, last week I write a nice article about the Church Herald and now I need to register a complaint.

In the March issue, the Herald printed a piece I wrote on the wrath of God.  I'm grateful they ran the piece, but I have two complaints.

1. The Church Herald has a habit of putting sidebars and call-outs with the article that don't come from the author, and sometimes even contradict the author.  In my article, there are call-out quotations from A.H. Strong and G.E. Ladd.  They are fine quotes.  I don't disagree with them.  But I didn't use them in my article (even though call-outs give that impression).  I can't help but think that the Herald put them in to emphasize love in a piece that defended God's wrath.

2. Related to my first quibble is a second.  At the end of my article there is greenish box entitled "How the Bible Uses 'Hell'".  The box notes that hell is used "just over a dozen times."  The word love in connection with God is used 147 times.  The effect is none too subtle: hell has a minor place in the Bible, while love is central.  As an author such a box is frustrating.  It allows the Church Herald to have the "last word" on my piece, a last word that tries to mitigate the thrust of the article.

Just as importantly, the box is misleading.  Everyone knows there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.  By comparing the frequency of the word hell with the word love gives the impression that judgment is a minor theme in the Bible.  But the "anger of the Lord" occurs 36 times in the ESV, "wrath of God" 11 times, and "wrath of the Lord" 14 times (to cite just three common phrases).  Besides, all you have to do is read the prophets, many of the Psalms, Jesus' parables, and Revelation to see that God's judgment figures very large in the story of the Bible, whether the word "hell" is used or not. 

Of course, God's love figures prominently too.  I certainly don't want to minimize the love of God.  But I want to preserve the precious truth that we know the love of God chiefly through the propitiatory death of Christ on the cross (1 John 4:10).