To briefly summarize, T. D. Jakes has been accused of modalism for his alleged rejection of the term “persons” as descriptive of the Trinity in favor of the term “manifestations,” and MacDonald and Driscoll appear to be willing to give him a pass on this. Carson and Keller do a good job of addressing this from a number of important perspectives, including debunking the sufficiency of “manifestations” in describing God, but they also make an important point that I believe needs further emphasis.

In their response, Carson and Keller say this:

Neither the terminology of “manifestations” preferred by Oneness Pentecostals and other modalists nor the terminology of “persons” supported by historic creeds is directly used in Scripture. Where does it come from? It comes from thinkers two or three centuries after the New Testament was written who were doing their best to summarize large tracks of biblical themes and texts in faithful, accurate summaries, even if the terminology was not directly dependent on the terminology of a specific verse or two. History has shown, for the reasons briefly set forth in our first pairing, that the terminology of “manifestations” was soundly trounced and declared heretical: it simply could not be squared with what the Bible says. The “persons” terminology prevailed (along with words like “subsistence”) not because it derived directly from usage in the biblical documents themselves, but because it could be shown that this terminology did a great job of summarizing what the Bible actually says.

This is a very important point that deserves careful consideration. Carson and Keller rightly note that certain ways of articulating orthodox theology (in this case the use of “persons” rather than “manifestations”) comes not directly fromt he text of Scripture itself, but rather from “thinkers two or three centuries after the New Testament was written who were doing their best to summarize large tracks of biblical themes and texts in faithful, accurate summaries,” i.e. what we call “historic church tradition.”

This is important for us to acknowledge. Christian Tradition is simply “the core teaching and preaching of the early church which has bequeathed to us the fundamentals of what it is to think and believe Christianly.” Tradition “sits in indispensable relation—historically and theologically—to the Christian use of Scripture and to the development of doctrine and spirituality. This was true in the early church; it is still true today.”¹

Yet it appears that this dependence on the church’s tradition is under attack. This is where a shallow view of Sola Scriptura is leading many evangelicals: if the Bible doesn’t explicitly say something, then we are apparently free to go a different direction, even if the testimony of church tradition says otherwise. This is not new, of course, especially from those (like Baptists, for example, of which I am proudly one) of the so-called “free church.” But as Stephen R. Harmon helpfully explains, from the perspective of a common Baptist aversion to tradition, even those of such “free traditions” are dependent on tradition for their doctrinal affirmations:

Many Baptists, though perhaps not consciously dependent on Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan trinitarian or Chalcedonian christological formulations, would nevertheless oppose theological proposals that seem not to regard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as consubstantial, coequal, and coeternal, or that appear not to affirm the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus Christ—but only on the basis of what they believe to be self-evident in Scripture. Although the raw material for the later doctrine of the Trinity is present in Scripture, the fully developed doctrine would hardly have been self-evident to the earliest interpreters of the New Testament. Many Baptists would also regard paedobaptism, for example, as an erroneous doctrine not on the basis of a conscious appeal to a Baptist doctrinal tradition but rather because they believe it to be an unbiblical practice, even though it is the Baptist doctrinal tradition in which they are steeped that has influenced them toward this reading of Scripture.²

Furthermore, the canonization of Scripture itself was the result of a healthy dependence upon tradition in the providence of God. Again, Harmon explains:

Unless one expands the concept of biblical inspiration to include not only the production of the biblical documents but also their canonization in late fourth-century episcopal synods, it must be conceded that the canon of Scripture is the product of the same sort of consensual development of tradition in the post-New Testament period that also produced the regula fidei (“rule of faith”) reflected in the conciliar creeds.³

This becomes no more important than when we attempt to preserve the absolute, transcendent values of God’s character and nature. We have been given a truth deposit to protect, we are the pillar and support of that truth (1 Tim 3:15), and it is our responsibility to pass those values and ideas to future generations (Acts 20:27). The way in which we accomplish this goal is by cultivating Christian tradition. This is certainly true with regard to doctrine. With the difficult doctrines that are not necessarily systematically explained in Scripture, we do not attempt to “reinvent the wheel” in our explanation of those doctrines to each new generation or ethnic group. Nor do we try to “repackage” those doctrines using contemporary idioms or categories developed in pop culture. We have always and will likely always explain the Trinity in terms of God being one in essence and three in persons. We have always and will likely always explain Christ as one person with two natures. We do not get these categories (essence, person, or nature) from Scripture itself; these categories have been nurtured within the Christian tradition in order to explain Christian doctrine.

And the same is true for our Christian worship. Those who want to preserve God’s truth will build upon the tradition of the historic Church; they will learn the essence of that tradition and then seek to preserve and continue to cultivate that tradition. Williams explains how the tradition of the Church has cultivated biblical worship forms:

In the final analysis . . . Tradition denotes the acceptance and the handing over of God’s Word, Jesus Christ (tradere Christum), and how this took concrete forms in the apostles’ preaching (kerygma), in the Christ-centered reading of the Old Testament, in the celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and in the doxological, doctrinal, hymnological and credal forms by which the declaration of the mystery of God Incarnate was revealed for our salvation. In both act and substance, the Tradition represents a living history which, throughout the earliest centuries, was constituted by the church and also constituted what was the true church.⁴

This perspective is biblical. For example, Paul appeals to the “customs” of the churches as an actual basis of argument in his discussion of head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11:16. As Paul commands others to imitate him (Phil 3:17), so we are to imitate the traditions and practices of those who have come before us. Even the observance of the Lord’s Supper is based not only upon direct revelation given to Paul, but also apostolic tradition (1 Cor 11:2-34).⁵ The biblical command to honor parents and elders is more than simply an attitude, but a direction and disposition. This principle is even implied in Matthew 18:15-20. Jesus clearly states that two or three believers gathered in an official capacity to make a decision for the full assembly possess a certain amount of derivative authority because God is “among them.” Certainly this authority applies most directly to discipline situations contextually, yet the principle applies more broadly. This authority is not infallible and equal with Scripture, as the Romanist view of Church tradition argues, but it is real authority nonetheless. These biblical principles should make us very cautious about quickly rejecting the customs, practices, and traditions of those within the Christian heritage.

I am not arguing for a view of tradition that places its authority on the same level of Scripture, but rather a perspective that sees Christian tradition as the most faithful propagation of biblical truth and worship. This was exactly the position of the Reformers. They did not reject tradition outright, but rather put it in its proper place. Daniel B. Clendenin explains:

It is clear that [the Reformers] even saw themselves as restoring the church to fidelity to the patristic consensus [i.e. tradition]. A reading of Calvin’s Institutes, for example, shows his indebtedness to the church fathers. Neither were they unaware of the dangers of individualistic and private interpretation of Scripture, and of the importance of the church context for the life of faith. What they objected to was the church’s elevation of tradition to the status of Scripture, and its arrogation to place itself above the Scriptures as its mediator.⁶

Nor am I arguing that these traditions, customs, and forms will never change. One of the valid responses to tradition is continued cultivation of the tradition. But the change will not be one of an entirely different form but one of further nurturing. Nor does this mean that we will never reject a particular part of the tradition that has been handed to us. Tradition is fallible because the humans who have cultivated it are fallible. Tradition, just like anything else, must be evaluated based on what values it carries. We may sometimes see the need to reject a particular part of the established tradition because we find that it does not express the transcendent absolutes that we are trying to preserve and pass on.

But what we must never do if we intend to preserve the truth is completely reject the tradition we have been given in favor of other non-Christian traditions. We must not throw away the customs, expressions, and forms that have been nurtured for thousands of years in order to express transcendent values in favor of customs, expressions, and forms that were, in the words of Pastor Mark Minnick, created by pagans to express pagan values to other pagans. We must never favor novelty for novelty’s sake; we must not reject our tradition merely because it is tradition.

© 2012, Scott Aniol. All rights reserved.

Endnotes:

1. Daniel H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999), 9.
2. S. R. Harmon, “The Authority of the Community (of All the Saints): Toward a Postmodern Baptist Hermeneutic of Tradition,” Review and expositor. 100, (2003): 591-592.
3. Ibid.,  591.
4. Williams, 36.
5. For a helpful exploration into the traditional basis for the observance of the Lord’s Supper, see Donald Farner, “The Lord’s Supper until He Comes,” Grace Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (1985): 399-401.
6. Daniel B. Clendenin, “Orthodoxy on Scripture and Tradition: A Comparison with Reformed and Catholic Perspectives,” Westminster Theological Journal 57, no. 2 (1995): 389.

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Probably one of the first analogies the child’s imagination receives is the analogy of his parents’ faith. This provides him with a picture of what it is like to be in a relationship with God.

Before a child knows anything about justification, penal substitution, or the nature of God, he knows what a relationship with God is like. Or at least, he knows what his believing parents express it to be like. The moral imagination of child is shaped by being exposed to his parents’ piety, and it is their example that gives him his first introduction to how God is to be loved, and if God ought to be loved.

This is probably why right after telling Israel that they are to love Him with all the heart, soul and might, God tells them that these words about loving God ultimately “which I command you today shall be in your heart.” That is, these words are to be internalized and understood and practiced by the parents themselves first. Following that, verse 7 kicks in.

“You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

Certainly, this teaching will take the form of direct instruction. However, our concern in this series is how the non-discursive, non-cognitive faculty of knowing is shaped. Certainly then, part of the teaching is the fleshed-out example of love for God seen in the parents.

Loving God ultimately can be thought of as ultimate dependence, ultimate devotion and ultimate delight. When we love God ultimately, we regard Him as ultimately reliable, ultimately valuable, and ultimately desirable. We do not trust, commit to, or rejoice in anything besides God as an end. All else are means: He alone is the end.

In a family, this kind of love for God is seen in very tangible ways. When in the middle of a health or financial or emotional crisis, Dad says to the family, “We can be very thankful for what God has given us. Let’s turn to Him now in prayer, and ask Him for grace”, that lesson speaks to little hearts in powerful ways. Gratitude and contentment say more than 100 sermons. When Dad says, “We’ve barely got gas in the tank, but we know God wants us to worship Him. We’ll trust that God will enable what He commands.” And do you know what God loves to do when those little eyes are watching that act of ultimate dependence? Provide. Supply. Protect.

When the child is groaning about a sore throat on Monday morning, and Dad says, “Get out of that bed, and get ready, you are going to school!”, he is teaching the importance of education. But when the child has the same groans about a sore throat on Sunday morning, and Dad says, “Well, just take it easy and rest this morning”, he has taught something else. He has taught that education takes priority over worship. He has taught that our devotion to education ought to exceed our devotion to God.

When Mom will drive from this side of the city for swimming to that side of the city for tennis or ballet, to the other side for extra maths, and back again for soccer, and finally home, racking up a good 70 miles in the process, the child might learn that Mom and Dad like him to have activities. But when they say, “We can’t go to the Wednesday Evening service, it’s too much driving, and gas is getting more expensive”, he learns about priorities. Gas costs and driving time aren’t an issue if it is extra-murals or education, but very high hurdles if it is church. He has just learnt how committed one should be to God, and it is not an ultimate commitment.

Children know what we love. They see it when our eyes sparkle when we talk about what delights us. They see how we anticipate the things we really love. They see how we reminisce over the things we love. And they see how we connect those things to God, if we do. They see what our attitude is towards the things of God.

If Dad’s sighing heavily as everyone gets in the car on Sunday, but he’s cheerfully buoyant before the start of a football game on TV, he communicates which brings more joy. If Mom is humming away while she copies photos to Facebook and makes scrap-book albums, but looks like she’s eaten lemons during the singing of hymns, she communicates what brings her joy.

And make no mistake, those little eyes are on you in corporate worship – do you enjoy and understand those hymns, or do you just mouth them? Do you love God’s Word and read it with hunger? Do you communicate your relish for the Word before and after? They notice when you’re soaking in the Word, and they notice when you’re looking at your watch. And later on, they might remember that you don’t do that during a movie.

Before we tell them so, we show our children what we think is reliable, valuable and desirable. God says there is only One who deserves that kind of love. That should be the day-in, day-out message of our homes.

© 2012, David de Bruyn. All rights reserved.

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The message of this book does not grow out of these times but it is appropriate to them. It is called forth by a condition which has existed in the Church for some years and is steadily growing worse. I refer to the loss of the concept of majesty from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has done not deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.

© 2012, David Oestreich. All rights reserved.

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There is a general assumption that culture is neutral, and either independent of or essentially in harmony with God: just as man retains the image of God in microcosm, so culture retains the image of God in macrocosm. As such, culture possesses aspects and attributes that escape, to a large extent, the effects of depravity. The Christian response to culture is merely to bridle various aspects of culture and employ them for their divinely intended end—glory of God.⁸

Most importantly, like cultural anthropologists, missional advocates understand religion as but one component of culture rather than the other way around. For example, Hirsch lists “religious views” as one element of culture.⁹ This is also clear by how missional authors discuss the relationship between culture and evangelism. According to missional authors, the gospel must be “contextualized” in a given culture so that the recipients will accept the message and change their religion, but the culture itself must not change. John Stott insists that conversion will not mean a change of culture: “True, conversion involves repentance, and repentance is renunciation. Yet this does not require the convert to step right out of his former culture into a Christian sub-culture which is totally distinctive.”¹⁰ Additionally, Mark Driscoll explains that the gospel is something that “must be fitted to” culture.¹¹ Subsequent believers are then encouraged to worship using the cultural forms most natural to them. For example, Guder argues that “our changing cultural context also requires that we change our worship forms so that Christians shaped by late modernity can express their faith authentically and honestly,”¹² which follows the same line of reasoning as Hirsch when he claims that “it is from within their own cultural expressions that the nations will worship.”¹³ Kimball also reflects this idea when he says, “Since worship is about our expressing love and adoration to God and leaders teaching people about God, then of course the culture will shape our expressions of worship.”¹⁴ Religion changes while culture remains unchanged, implying the understanding that religion is only one element within the larger idea of culture.

This idea of culture is an essential component of the missional approach to all aspects of church ministry, including evangelism and worship. The modern definition of culture developed out of relatively recent ideas about anthropology. Prior to the Enlightenment, people were differentiated primarily by their religion; later, the way to account for differences was “culture.” Neither NT authors nor pre-Enlightenment Christian authors discuss “culture” per se.

However, the fact that the contemporary idea of culture emerged from twentieth-century cultural anthropology does not necessarily imply that it is an invalid or unbiblical idea. Many complex ideas take on contemporary articulations. The important question for a biblical evaluation of the common missional understanding of culture is which ideas in Scripture parallel the contemporary notion of culture. Join me next week for this discussion.

© 2012, Scott Aniol. All rights reserved.

Endnotes:

1. Charles H. Kraft, “Interpreting in Cultural Context,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21, no. 4 (December 1978): 358.
2. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1.
3. Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, 5.
4. Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), 267.
5. Elmer Towns and Edward Stetzer, Perimeters of Light: Biblical Boundaries for the Emerging Church (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2004), 43.
6. Driscoll, Radical Reformission, 80.
7. Stanley Glenn Parris, “Instituting a Missional Worship Style in a Local Church Developed from an Analysis of the Culture” (PhD diss., Asbury Theological Seminary, 2008), 2.
8. Mark A. Snoeberger, “Noetic Sin, Neutrality, and Contextualization: How Culture Receives the Gospel,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 9 (2004): 357.
9. Hirsch and Hirsch, Untamed, 25.
10. John R. W. Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 181.
11. Driscoll, Radical Reformission, 20.
12. Darrell Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000), 157.
13. Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 138.
14. Dan Kimball, Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 298.

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We have been offering reasons why public worship is better than private. Public worship is the gathered, corporate worship of a local church. Private worship includes times of informal worship apart from the church: small groups, private Bible study and prayer, and family worship. Sometimes Christians today offer a lopsided, over-individualized view of the Christian life, hinging the whole matter on private worship and devotions. And while we agree that the discipline of private worship is an essential part of our religion, I am nevertheless arguing that public worship is better. Between parts one and two, I’ve already offered three reasons for this.¹

The fourth reason public worship is better than private worship is that the preaching in public worship is better suited to help you see deficiencies in your Christian life. When your pastor preaches the Word of God to you, he is more likely than you to observe ways the Scriptures push you to follow Christ in ways you are not already.

Even when your pastor generally applies the Word of God across the whole congregation, he is usually better at applying the Word to you for your spiritual correction than you are when you sit and read the word for yourself. There are a couple reasons for this. Your pastor has the calling and time to study the Word to a much greater extent than you are able, and thus normally spends more time meditating upon the Word of God and its doctrine and application than you do.

In addition, we’re often (lamentably) lazy with our personal Bible study. We don’t take the time to think over points of conviction. And even if we were doing this in our personal Bible study like we ought, we are very sympathetic to ourselves. We tend to gloss over our sins (and especially our habitual sins) and not consider them like we ought. Christ Jesus, in his grace, has given to his church pastors and teachers to help us see those matters in clearer light.

There is a fifth reason. Public worship is better than private worship because Christians sing more in public worship. Even if you sing in your times of private worship, you don’t likely sing as much as you do at your church’s gatherings for worship. And, even if you did, you can’t, when you’re sitting at home singing, “sing to one another” in all the fullness of what Paul commanded us to do in Colossians and Ephesians (Eph 5:19; Col 3:16). We can only obey the command to sing to each other and together sing to God by gathering with those other believers with whom we’ve covenanted together. So the very command of Paul to “address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” can only be fulfilled in the setting of corporate worship.

© 2012, Ryan Martin. All rights reserved.

Endnotes:

1. The first reason is that the New Testament emphasizes corporate worship. The second reason is that the praise of the congregation is better. The third reason is that public worship is better planned and organized.

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Modernism likes to see itself as interested in only ‘objective facts’. For modernism, the keys to understanding the world are a good microscope, telescope or any other instrument that can record objective facts about the world. If we collect enough of these objective facts from the sciences of physics, chemistry, geoscience, astronomy, genetics and the like, we will understand reality, it reasons. None of those subjective values and personal judgments about morality, ethics, beauty or truth are to be considered. Those are not testable, verifiable or measurable in a laboratory, therefore they are simply statements of human preference or desire, but do not represent reality. If we want to know reality and understand ultimate questions such as who we are, how we got here, where we are going, what we are here for, we must turn to the ‘objective’ sciences. Knowing reality then, becomes an exercise in fact-collecting. Supposedly, collect enough of these autonomous, scientific facts, and you will know reality.

Most modern school curriculi reflect this modernist thinking. Reality is a collection of raw, uninterpreted facts, and therefore a child must collect as many of these as possible, as unrelated or eclectic as these facts might be. Math facts, history facts, geography facts, chemistry facts, biology facts, language facts, and social sciences facts (the most laughable of all) – if a child completes a good twelve years of this kind of fact-collecting, then he is ‘educated’.

The problem with this whole endeavor is that is incredibly conceited, and blind to its own arrogance. The idea that facts exist by themselves was never believed before the advent of modernism, and is now being abandoned again in post-modernism. It was a conceit of the Enlightenment – that we are capable of perfect objectivity, even though we are perceiving subjects. In truth, all ‘facts’ are known by subjects – us. We understand those facts only by relating them to other facts. We understand one thing by placing it in context of other things. A microscope might record objective data, but it is a subject who looks into the scope and interprets the data. We understand the significance of the facts under consideration, the value of the facts we’re seeing, only by connecting them with a much bigger grid of understanding. That grid is the imagination.

In other words, though objective reality exists outside of us, we only know that reality as perceiving subjects. We perceive that reality through a pre-existing grid which interprets the facts. The grid, or the imagination, determines how we will understand the raw data of the world that is given to us. If the grid is wrong, it will misconstrue what it sees 100% of the time. The telescope might be flawless, but that’s not the point. Humans use those telescopes and decide what the data means.

Romans 1 makes this idea this fairly clear. Once the grid of ultimate devotion to God was abandoned and replaced with a grid of idolatry, mankind became increasingly deceived in his perceptions of the world.

 because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools (Ro 1:21-22).

Man’s fact-collecting mission would now always arrive at the wrong conclusions, because his grid was now idolatrous.

Why all this discussion of knowledge and objectivity in a conversation about child evangelism? Because many Christian parents have embraced the modernist idea of collecting objective facts, when it comes to educating their children. Theirs is identical to a secularist’s approach, except that to the list of algebra facts, economics facts and art facts, they add Bible facts. They believe that their children must be exposed to as many good, objective Bible facts as possible, and all will turn out well. Years later, their children, now young adults, announce that they no longer believe what they were taught in Sunday School. What happened? Did the Bible facts change in their content? Did the child discover that those facts were not objective?

What happened is that the child’s interpretation of those Bible facts changed. His feeling towards the biblical data changed, which in turn, changed the meaning, the interpretation of those Bible facts. And it changed because of what was going on behind the facts – in his imagination.

The imagination is the faculty which God gives humans to make sense of reality by analogy. We learn of one thing by comparing it, or contrasting it, or connecting it, to another. This is like that. Without these comparisons and analogies, nothing in the world would make sense, not the watch on your wrist, not the colour red, not the face of your spouse. Nothing would be recognized, because nothing could be related to anything else. In truth, there are no brute facts. Everything is understood as the imagination relates it, weighs it, and understands it in light of the whole.

For Christians, the shaping of the imagination becomes particularly crucial, because not only do we want our children to interpret the raw sensory data of the world according to God’s view of reality, we need them to understand many things that cannot be seen – God’s attributes, grace, justice, nobility, holiness, judgement, to name just a few. They will only understand these ultimate unseen realities through the imagination – through the analogies that explain the unseen with the seen. If their imaginations are filled with incorrect analogies, they will misconstrue and misunderstand unseen realities that are critical to the gospel and the Christian life. Worse, they will respond to those realities wrongly, treating them differently to what they are.

A parent’s role is far more than entering facts into the child’s CPU. A parent has twenty years or so to build up a storehouse of analogous knowledge. He or she is a crucial part of putting together a child’s internal mental map, using all kinds of analogies: “This is how we understand that as we relate it to this.” As we build these analogies, we are not only shaping a child’s grid, we are teaching him how he ought to feel about the facts he will encounter. Before the child’s vocabulary has even filled out, we are providing him with a sense of proportion: this is like that, and deserves this kind of response. I say again, many parents think the goal of training is the imparting of cognitive knowledge. However, if you would like your child to rightly interpret the knowledge he encounters, you must shape his imagination through analogous knowledge.

How do we build analogous knowledge? There are several ways that emerge from Scriptural example and from the world that God has created. We will begin to examine these next week.

© 2012, David de Bruyn. All rights reserved.

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Darwinian evolutionism influenced all aspects of human inquiry in the mid-nineteenth century, including explanation of cultural differences. For example, Edward Tylor, founding father of British anthropology, developed a theory of cultural evolution that describes stages of human history from primitivism to advancement. Tylor was attempting to explain differences among various people groups, leading to the formation of the discipline of cultural anthropology. This new discipline involved “the description, interpretation, and analysis of similarities and differences in human cultures.”³ Tylor’s ideas reflect Herder’s, but his understanding of culture was much more broad. Instead of defining culture as the more advanced achievements of a society, Tylor defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”⁴ Important to this definition is that everything in human society is a subset of the broader idea of culture, even religion; the subtitle to Tylor’s monumental book reveals different aspects of what he understood as culture: “Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom.” Schusky explains how this all-encompassing definition of culture developed to form the field of anthropology:

Scholars recast the history of marriage, religion, politics, the family, mythology, and other social forms, speculating on their origin and stage of evolution. Because such a wide variety of forms were examined, some intellectuals concluded that all aspects of human behavior were valid fields for study. Organization of the study should fall to anthropology, and its concept of culture should be such as to allow investigation of all these facets of human activity.⁵

Tylor was also an early advocate of cultural relativism, “the judgment of a practice only in relation to its cultural setting.”⁶

The anthropological notion of culture took a third step in America with Franz Boas, who Jerry Moore calls “the most important single force in shaping American anthropology.”⁷ Boas shifted cultural anthropology from an evolutionist position to what is called Historicism, which argues that cultures are not progressive advancements of one continuous evolutionary development, but rather that each distinct culture is a product of very specific historical contexts and thus can be understood only in light of those contexts. He was among the first to speak of plural cultures that share no direct connections; similarities that exist between cultures, Boas argued, are purely arbitrary or at most due to similar historical situations, an idea called Particularism. This further enforced the notion of cultural relativism, denying any universal laws of culture and advancing the idea to insist that cultures with different historical backgrounds may not be compared at all. Every cultural expression is learned within a particular historical setting; nothing is innate. This view of human culture became established, especially in American anthropology, becoming the de facto explanation for differences among civilizations.

© 2012, Scott Aniol. All rights reserved.

Endnotes:

1. This survey is necessarily simplistic and notes only the three most significant stages in the development of the contemporary idea of culture. Historians usually note at least four and as many as seven stages. For a more thorough discussion, see Ernest Lester Schusky, The Study of Cultural Anthropology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975); Merwyn S. Garbarino, Sociocultural Theory in Anthropology: a Short History (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1983); Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: a New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997); Roger M. Keesing and Andrew Strathern, Cultural Anthropology: a Contemporary Perspective (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998); Jerry D. Moore, Visions of Culture: an Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists (Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2009); Jenell Williams Paris and Brian M. Howell, Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010).
2. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: and Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, and Co, 1869), viii.
3. Paris and Howell, Introducing Cultural Anthropology, 4.
4. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. (London: John Murray, 1871), 1.
5. Schusky, The Study of Cultural Anthropology, 10.
6. Ibid., 15.
7. Moore, Visions of Culture, 42.

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Today I want to offer another more reason.¹ The third reason that public worship is better than private worship is public worship is usually better prepared and organized.

Your local church’s worship services are usually much longer and better prepared for your edification than your private times of devotions and other instances of irregular Christian worship. For instance, you probably spend a longer time in worship at your church on the Lord’s Day than you do you in your time of private devotions.

Obviously, this point is not always true. There are some who have the leisure to devote a great amount of time to private worship. Even so, pastors that are careful and thoughtful about corporate worship have planned the hymns and responsive readings and other elements of the service, oftentimes working the elements together based on particular themes or that week’s sermon. The pastor has often taken time to think over his pastoral prayer, carefully considering those requests he will be leading the people to ask God in prayer. The exposition and application of God’s word has been carefully prepared.

Incidentally, I grew up in a church where this kind of planning was considered wrong and a usurpation of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. This denomination argued that any sermon preparation violated Jesus’ words in Luke 12:11-12. Unfortunately, this practice is based on a misreading of Luke 12:11-12. Even so, some Christians today bristle at the thought that one would prepare an order of service or even a prayer. They believe that the Spirit can only work through spontaneity. (This might be where we get the similar notion that “mixing things up” in a worship service is more conducive to seeing the Spirit of God working the midst of the church.) It is true that the Spirit of God is free (Rom 9:18-24; James 4:13-17); God uses means, but there is no guarantee that the particular use of certain means will result in a gracious work of God. (Sometimes we preach and the Spirit of God uses the preached word in a person; sometimes we preach and the Spirit of God freely chooses not to work.) All the same, the freedom and sovereign lordship of God does not in any way demand that we should not plan and prepare our worship and services. We ought to be organized and well-ordered (1 Cor 14:40). I believe this brings glory to God. Sometimes we Americans have an unhealthy desire for things to be ecstatic and disorganized. But God never promised to bless disorganization. On the other hand, Christ Jesus himself (and his apostles) commands his church to do certain things in its public worship. We best plan ahead and include them. And I think it is worth trusting Christ that he will bless those things he told us to do in corporate worship.

Is longer always better? No. (Poor Eutychus! Acts 20:9.) But I would venture to say that we should have a delight in tarrying over the Word of God, of deliberately and thoughtfully taking our time in worshipping God. And public worship offers a sustained, focused, and lengthy time in exalting God. And this is a good thing.

All this is to say that corporate worship is better because it is usually longer and better prepared than private worship.

© 2012, Ryan Martin. All rights reserved.

Endnotes:

1. To review, the first reason is that the New Testament emphasizes corporate worship. The second reason is that the praise of the congregation is better.

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All kinds of reasons have been proposed for this phenomenon: the age-segregation of the church, shallow youth ministry, inconsistency of Christian adults, lack of spiritual leadership in the home, lack of serious discipleship in the local church, and proliferation of unwholesome media. Any or all of these may be contributing factors. However, it seems what is missing in these conversations is how a child’s disposition towards Christianity is shaped long before he or she encounters the truths of the gospel, or the demands of discipleship.

Before the child is able to weigh the propositions that explain the gospel, or consider the validity of biblical teaching, he already has prejudices for or against the claims of Christ. He either has a disposition, a sensibility that Christianity is true and good and beautiful and ought to be embraced, or he does not. As he grows, this sense increases or decreases in either direction, and largely shapes how he interprets the facts of Christianity as they are placed before him.

In other words, a child is no tabula rasa. He arrives with a set of faculties that immediately begin to make sense of the world by interpreting the raw data of the world through an ever-growing ‘grid’ of interpretations, sensibilities and dispositions. No fact he encounters is understood on its own; it is understood through a network of other facts, feelings and desires. This includes ‘facts’ like Jesus is the Son of God, hell actually exists, and Jesus deserves your total allegiance and ultimate love. How the person responds to those statements, both when he is five and twenty-five, are largely a result of this grid.

Another term for this grid is the imagination. How a person imagines reality in totality, how he pictures ultimate things that make sense of the raw data of his life, how he places value on things and orders them, is his imagination. This imagination can either be Christian or non-Christian. It can be religious or secular. And it is shaped long before the child can read or answer catechism questions.

J. Gresham Machen put it this way: “…[I]t would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel.” (Christianity and Culture, 7).

It’s my belief that many of the evangelical dropouts we witness today are abandoning the faith because they grew up with a fundamentally secular imagination, with a thin evangelical overlay. Over time, or as a result of some life circumstance, the underlying grid pushes the person to re-evaluate his beliefs and align them more consistently with the grid. Since the grid is essentially one that views God as a weightless, if not non-existent concern, at some point the thoughtful person recognizes that his Christian faith is a wrinkle in his worldview, an error in the program, an extraneous digit that does not belong. Consequently, he announces that he “no longer believes”.

The question for Christian parents becomes, how is that grid shaped? How does one shape the imagination so that the child has a prejudice towards Christianity’s truths, both before and long after he has embraced them?Parents need to think long and hard how to shape those prior conditions of the mind. Our goal over the next several posts will be to consider some ways that the Christian imagination of a child may be shaped.

© 2012, David de Bruyn. All rights reserved.

Endnotes:

1. http://www.barna.org/teens-next-gen-articles/147-most-twentysomethings-put-christianity-on-the-shelf-following-spiritually-active-teen-years

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I think it was during our third visit to this particular store that, as we were evaluating a certain .22 caliber rifle my 12 year old son held in his arms, an employee—an older gentleman who had been standing a few steps away at the end of the aisle—leaned over to us and said, “Young man, you never place your finger inside the trigger guard unless you are going to fire the gun.”

I looked down and, sure enough, my son’s finger had been lying casually on the trigger for a good portion of the time we had been discussing different aspects of the rifle. Joe sheepishly said something along the lines of, “Oh, ok. Sorry,” and then looked at me with a “for real?” expression on his face. I nodded in agreement with the gentleman and thanked him for reminding us. This incident, as you might imagine, sparked a dimension to our family conversations about firearms that, frankly, I should have begun weeks earlier.

Subsequent to Christmas, my boys and I made our first visit in many years to our outdoorsman’s club. When they were much younger, I had taken them there several times to fish, but never to the firing range.

As we arrived, I noted that, although this was my first foray to the range in many years and my boys’ first ever, we fit in quite well with the other members who had arrived before us and had already begun to practice on their targets. In fact, we were all wearing quite similar glasses, and we had all donned some form of ear protection.

Our conformity went beyond mere appearance, however. Indeed, everyone at the range was exhibiting behavior that was strikingly uniform. When one person finished firing their gun and wanted to go downrange to evaluate his performance or change targets, he would place the firearm, almost always chamber open, on the table at his station and patiently watch the other sportsmen. When a lull in the firing came, he would inquire, “Clear?” which query was invariably answered with a chorus of, “Clear!” He would then be free to walk downrange to accomplish his purposes.

I also noticed that, even if they did not join the down range party, most of the other parties at the range also placed their firearms on their tables until everyone had returned to their station.

I had prepped the boys as to how all this worked, and I was pleased to see they caught on quickly. As a result, we had a delightful day together at the range testing their new guns.

But at one point in the excursion I had to chuckle. Here, among a group of people who barely knew each other and, as a class, are frequently regarded in some corner of society as less civilized, was one of the strictest examples of formalism I had ever encountered.

Before I finish, I want to anticipate a likely objection to my point. I am not saying that a lack of formality in worship will result in someone lying bloodied in the aisle, even metaphorically. I do not wish to make a strict analogy at all.

The fact is that, during our third trip to the gun store, my son was in absolutely no immediate danger of harming anyone. The gun was not loaded. The muzzle was pointed at the ceiling. The situation itself was harmless. But the store employee who intervened did so out of the urgent burden that every potential owner of a firearm understand the grave responsibility that accompanies that privilege.

My point is that the group of rituals we know as the firearm safety code is an obvious, extant example of how form has, throughout history, served both to instill and to maintain the sensibilities essential to the proper discharge of a particular function.

© 2012, David Oestreich. All rights reserved.

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