Sanam Doctrinam

Contextualization = becoming all things to all men, so that I never compromise God’s Word and do the least to offend cultural sensitivities.

Contextualization = becoming all things to all men, while I do the most to offend God’s Word and make myself like that culture (or subculture) in order to let them think I am hip, and then maybe they’ll think the Gospel is cool and accept it.

Listen to this:

This is, obviously, Memorial Day weekend.  Many will be packing up the family and heading to not-so-far-off destinations, as I did with mine.  Others will betaking part in picnics and meeting up with family or fellow believers to memorialize the fact that we do this every year.  OK, I know it is to remember our fallen war heroes and those who fought bravely for the freedom of our country.  Honestly, how many of us actually remember that on Memorial Day?  I am not saying this to discount it’s importance, but to simply make a point.  I believe we should make mention of this fact on a day, when most people just see it as a day off for celebrating, well a day off.

This anticlimactic response to the day’s supposed meaning is a parallel to the way in which we treat the memorial known as Communion or the Lord’s Table in the Evangelical Church. (For those who want to start in on the Calvinistic vs. the Zwinglian  meaning, you know where I stand by my use of the word memorial, let’s please leave it at that and get to the point.)  Many unknowing people treat this ordinance with the same disinterest as remembering the fallen War Heroes on Memorial Day.

For many Communion or the Lord’s Table was known as Mass for most of their lives.  Others may simply see it as wrote religious practice that must be done every Sunday, once a month or once a quarter.  Does it have significance in the life of the Christian today?  I would say yes and it all depends on two questions…

“What is Communion?” and “Who Instituted It and Why?” (I guess you might categorize that as 3 questions, but I’ve never been that good at math!)

I guess we might have to answer the second (& third, oh never mind you get what I mean) in order to answer the first.  In Matthew 26:26-30 (as well as the accounts in the other Gospels) Jesus inserts new meaning into the tradition of passover.  He takes the bread (the Afikoman), breaks and distributes it to the men and tells them to take it and eat it, and Luke adds, in remembrance of Him.  He took the after dinner wine (the fourth cup Hallel) and in the same manner told them that it was an emblem of His blood and that they should drink in remembrance of Him.  Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 that we are to do this as often as we do in remembrance of Christ, until He returns.  So, there is the Who and the why.  In this we get the answer to the “why” question.

It is not as the Roman Catholics put it, that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ.  In that they eat and drink condemnation unto themselves, supposing that they earn favor with God in the re-sacrificing of Christ (in which the priest commands Christ to come down and be sacrificed again for sin.)  No, we are remembering what Christ did, in the fashion in which He asked us to.

Understanding this remembrance is of utmost importance!  We cannot let it go the way of other ceremony, somehow only giving a nod to it’s intent and purpose, while religiously adhering to its practice.  It is one of the activities that God has called us to and one in which we must obey with not only doing, but thinking as well.

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to finish up this three part series, unless it was providential so I could find this quote from a Time article on tweeting in the worship service, “It’s a huge responsibility of a church to leverage whatever’s going on in the broader culture, to connect people to God and to each other,”  Wait for it…..Wait for it….WHAT IS THIS GUY TALKING ABOUT?!

This is exactly where assimilation/ contamination thinking takes us.  It is our “responsibility to leverage!”  Where is that in the Scriptures?  We have taken this mentality so far that we believe it is our “responsibility to leverage” (the power to influence a person or situation to achieve a particular outcome) the “broader culture to connect people to God and others.”

First of all; How exactly is tweeting during a worship service going to connect me to God?  Really, how is it going to connect me to others?  Isn’t the fact that I am there with the body going to connect me to others?

This is just further evidence that we have abandoned the essentials of community and have made church an event rather than who we are.

I’m not saying that tweeting is evil or that we have no clue what is going on in the culture, but we are becoming contaminated by the culture, rather than being holy!  It’s just that plain and simple.  We have no regard for the sanctity of worship, we have no desire to be in fellowship with God and other believers in the Biblical way, if we allow culture to mandate the terms of worship.  Worship and the Christian lifestyle is not me focused.  It is, indeed, God focused.

Why do we need a five year moratorium on what we believe about homosexuality?  Can’t we clearly read what the Scriptures say?  Why do we need to believe there is a hole in our Gospel, doesn’t 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 clearly state what the Gospel is?  Do we really need to use sexual euphemism  to make our point?  You see, it’s not even assimilation anymore, it is clearly contamination.  Is this legalism?  No.  It is what we threw out, when we threw out legalism.  It’s what the Bible calls, sanctification and it is what the Bible calls us to! (1 Thes 4:3a)

If you read my last post you know that I am expanding on a theme that our Pastor Teacher spoke on a few weeks ago in his introduction to 1 Corinthians.  He stated that the church has tried Isolation, Assimilation and Contamination instead of being truly sanctified as the Lord intends.

I spoke in my last post about the idea of isolation and how out of it grew (in most recent years) the legalism of some branches of the Fundamentalist movement.  In this post I would like to address the idea of assimilation.

The most recent iteration of this attempt of dealing with the World is seen in that of the so called “seeker sensitive” movement.  If isolation is the abandonment of the world, that is not doing as God says and living among the world, yet being not of it, assimilation and it’s modern variety “seeker sensitivity” tries to find “balance” in letting the world see that they can come join our little group and they don’t have to change that much.  It tries to be attractive, but not too worldly, making it easy for sinners to feel comfortable by not letting them know they are sinners.  That way they can be saved from what, again?

The problem lies in seeing the Worship service as a means of evangelism.  We are called in Scripture to gather to worship (read the Pastoral Epistles) and scatter to evangelize (Matt 28:18-20).  It is not that when we gather the Gospel is not to be preached, but our efforts for evangelism no matter the setting is not to woo the world by methods, but to share the Gospel as it is written, recognizing that it is an foolishness to the unbeliever (1 Cor. 1:18).  There is a fundamental misunderstanding of who (Who) does the saving when it comes to this methodology and this is where the church tries to assimilate the world into itself.

Therefore in this assimilation, sanctification (being set apart) is lost, and with it any distinction of what makes being a Christian any different that what the rest of the World is.

Our Pastor-Teacher began his exposition of 1 Corinthians yesterday with an overview of the state of the church when Paul was writing this letter to them.  He used the three phrases in my title to describe what the church does instead of being sanctified.

You see according to 1 Thessalonians 4:3 God’s will is our sanctification.  Our Pastor pointed out that sometimes instead of sanctification, we go for isolation, complete and utter separation from the world without any interaction.  This is of course not what God has called us to.  How will we then accomplish the Great Commission? (Matt 28:18-20)  He also pointed out that in separating from the world to some degree we end up trying to assimilate the world into our context and eventually become contaminated by the world.

As he was preaching this, I was started to categorize, in my own mind, the contemporary shape of these different areas in the church today:

Isolation:  With it’s strict adherence to Pharisaical law keeping, the legalistic movement that grew out of the 1950s certainly has heralded the isolationist mentality.  From this has sprouted some of the most ridiculous un-biblical catastrophes ever heaped upon so called fundamentalism.  You’ve got your out-of-context, “abstain from all appearance of evil” which of course means going to the movies is a sin, but not molesting children behind closed doors, a la Bob Grey (Caution: I don’t know the entire content of this website, but they seem to have their facts straight on Gray) and your King James 1611 Only camp. (Don’t you know it’s the Bible that Paul used?)  Except you aren’t using the 1611 are you, because you wouldn’t even be able to read it well because it’s in old English, so read the translation notes at the beginning of your Bible sometime and find out that the translators knew that other better translations would come! (”Hey, why did they us “f” instead of “s”?!)

From this of course flourishes all sorts of hypocrisy as has been noted above and as has been well documented by Phil Johnson. (Audio)

I grew up in this sort of stuff and know of it well.  God’s design is not this.  As our Pastor pointed out yesterday, 1 Corinthians 5:9-13 states that we are to reject the man inside the church that is immoral, yet reach the ones outside the church with the Gospel.  Isolation does not keep in step with God’s command to reach the world.  In fact it legalism has done much more to cover up the sins within the church (per the article above about Bob Gray.)

We need Biblically balanced sanctification that keeps us pure, but keeps us engaged with the world we are to reach.

I will deal with this plus the  other two issues (Assimilation and Contamination) in future posts.  It’ll get messy before it’s all over…