What I believe, more or less...

The journey I am now on with Christ began when I was 14, but to identify the ‘beginning’ of that journey merely with my taking note of and assenting to the reality of God and His rightful place in my life would be to make too much of the story mine to tell. At 9 or 10 years old, I was very strongly convinced of the existence of an Other that was personal, beyond me, and to which I owed something. So I prayed to a God I didn’t know, the only prayer that I did, “Now I lay me down to sleep…” Except for some nights when I was too tired, too distracted by some movie or family event, or just plain forgot, I would pray. This situation did not improve much over the course of the next couple years until I became friends with the son of the Pastor of the local Assembly of God congregation. I doubt his intentions were fully missionary, regardless though, it was through him that I came to church and eventually confessed Christ, and that I belonged to Him. My teenage years were an alloyed collection of advances and retreats. Eschatologically speaking, there is a sense in which that evening in the Spring of 1994 when I was face down on the carpet, staining it with my tears was Christ’s D-Day on the enemy shores of my heart, but as Hoekema has said, we live between D-Day and V-Day in the grand corporate sense, and so do I personally as well. To be moved from the Kingdom of Darkness into the Kingdom of Light is a great thing. However, one can very easily remain in the provinces, never making their way to seat of the Empire, the figurative Rome. And so it was with me until I went to College: I remained in the spiritual hinterlands of God’s kingdom, wandering the provinces of His empire throughout High School. During College I went through a time of cynicism and rejection of much of my Pentecostal/Charismatic training and upbringing. I certainly was serious about the reality of God and Christ, and the reality of the Christian existence and life. It was the many negative cultural accoutrements and additions that I saw manifesting themselves in my tradition that enraged me. These elements were not just a matter of ‘putting culture to good use’ in my view, but a replacement, a warping of the truth of God inasmuch as these cultural elements were shaping the Gospel rather being shaped by it. In my fervor to purify my thinking and theology of these elements, I rejected much of my past Pentecostalism, relegating myself to a sort of milquetoast Charismatic idealism that permitted me to fellowship with other people of my ilk, but never participating fully in their life. What began to pull me back into the Charismatic life of the church I participated in was at once theoretical and experiential. It was to a Foursquare Church that Providence and circumstance lead me, and it was there that I found a relationally functional and healthy community in which I thrived. As I began to share life with genuine Pentecostal and Charismatics, people possessed of sound minds and authentic faith, I could no longer deny the reality of the Charismatic experience as I had so arrogantly done in the intervening time between the height of my Pentecostalism and the watery Charismatic theology I held to at that point. However, I had yet to separate the genuine activity of God in the lives of those around me from the genuine theological difficulties I had with the way in which people manifested the power of God, as well as the problem of the Charismatic culture and its interactions with the world and other Christian traditions. Eventually, I was able to see that while the gifts/empowerments of the Spirit as Charismatics express them are at their core affected by contemporary culture, they are not merely cultural. It is very possible to be charismatic in and to fundamentally distinguish oneself from the culture at large while fully expressing the gifts as they have been given. Having come upon this realization, I have been able cautiously re-appropriate much of my own Charismatic tradition. The challenge of late is creating a meaningful charismatic ecclesiology and approach to culture that makes headway without falling into the mistakes of my forbears and their ‘over-indulgence’ in pop culture. And so this is the point of departure, my theology has been forged as much by cool reflection as white-hot experience. Coming from an anti-intellectual tradition, the fires of that crucible have burnt me in their own unique ways. Nonetheless, abandoning ship, no matter how much water she is taking on is not my way, least of all in terms of my Charismatic brothers and sisters.
I believe that ‘in the grand sense’ Scripture is the Statement of God about Himself and His activity in History. God has revealed not just information about God, but He has revealed Himself to us, with the ultimate revelation of God taking place in the Person of Christ. From these encounters with the Person of God both before, during, and after the Incarnation, God has inspired and divinely authored a collection of writings about Himself through human authors. These writings are firmly placed in history, and require careful study by the reader, but in their message and what they communicate about the Character of God, they remain authoritative. While Scripture does not touch on all questions we have directly, we can extrapolate the character and nature of God sufficiently but not exhaustively from it, and from there answer many of our questions effectively. To speak of sufficiency sets up that which we know with surety about Him, and what He requires of us, to reject exhaustiveness takes the power away from Man to turn Yahweh into another idol by removing his (mans) ability to say in a minimizing fashion that ‘this is all that God is and requires.’ That being said, He (God) will not violate or deviate from what He has demonstrated about Himself in the Bible. I believe that the writing of both the Old and New Testaments were inspired in their autographs and that with much historical study the text as received has been shown to be reliable and faithful to the message and intent of both the human and Divine authorial intention. The Canon as we have it now is authoritative for teaching and rebuke as St. Paul has said, as well as for the formation of Christian believer into the image of Christ. Ultimately the Story of God in the Bible is ‘the story which swallows up all other stories’ or the ‘meta-narrative.’
God is quite simply the Ultimate Being in the Universe. He created it, sustains it, and is intimately involved and knowledgeable concerning it. He has unlimited power and knowledge over all things, and He is everywhere at once and anywhere He wants to be. His attributes, mind, and Person are not constrained my time, distance, or our human lack of conceptual categories capable of grasping Him.
God exists as Three Persons who are at such fundamental and substantive unity that their diversity simultaneously exists as one Person. This is the basis of the Divine Community into which Humanity is called for fellowship and worship. This model of otherness-in-unity is less something for us to try to understand that for us to imitate. For obvious reasons, as fallen, incarnate beings we can only approximate this Trinitarian life. The Bible, while tantalizing with its insights into the workings of the Godhead, seems to call us more to acceptance, contemplation, and imitation rather than a comprehensive understanding. The Trinity contains, relativizes, and gives boundaries to us, rather than vice versa. The God of the universe will not be made an Object of Study. Nonetheless, with godly and God-given curiosity we press in…
God’s purpose in Creation was to bring glory to Himself, and to have creatures to fellowship with Him. We do not know why He seems to value the latter, because there can be glorification of God without creaturely consent or desire, but the former is explained simply by this: God is ultimately the most worthy being in the Universe. He is not an omnipotent megalomaniac, but the Being who is worthy of praise above all other beings. God’s desire for worship of Himself is rooted in His self-awareness of His own glory, purity, beauty, holiness, and uniqueness. He knows that He is good, and that it is good for His creatures to worship Him. To return to the concept of fellowship however, it seems that while God in no way harbors a ‘need’ for our company and conversation, He takes some sort of delight in being with us. To poke and prod at the mind of God intrusively where He has remained mysterious yet graceful in regard to us seems a bit unwise to me. I suffice it to say that what He wants He gets, and if its me He wants, I am not going to say ‘No.’ All things that have been made are either immediately or ultimately dependent upon God for their creation, sustenance, continued being, and completion. All things exist at His behest, and for His pleasure. God is involved with, but not the same as His creation, God created all the beings in the Universe, and is above them all.
Of the beings God has created, Man has a special place in Creation. Mankind was created for fellowship with one another and with God. We are made male and female to model ‘other-ness’ to each other and to call us out of ourselves to those who are different from us, as God calls us away from ourselves to Him. The man and woman were made to care for one another and to exercise dominion over and care for Creation. The Man and Woman were placed in the Garden to serve as the Image of God, to represent Him to Creation.
The Fall of Mankind originated in a fully irrational and nonsensical action by Adam to rebel against God, under the deceptive influences of the Serpent. The Fall has affected the entire human race since, and we have inherited the sin as a fundamental aspect of who we are from our original representative, Adam. Adam was our representative before God, and failed in his duty to represent us to God. Because of his failure, we have lost the moral ability to conform to God’s will. Whether one interprets this narrative of the Edenic rebellion literally or figuratively in relation to the Fall of Mankind, it speaks the same truth about us: we are separated from God by our willful rejection of Him, and His rightful place in our lives.
Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man. In the mystery of His power, God limited Himself in humanity but in no way reduced His essential God-hood. The same affirmation goes for the human aspect of Jesus. Whatever makes God God and whatever makes man man is successfully combined in Jesus. There is no other way Jesus could have been Who He was and successfully completed His mission, having borne what He must, and having done so, been resurrected as the God-Man to sit down at the right hand of the Father, symbolizing the completed work of His life and mission on earth. That Mission was to show us who God truly was and to bring us back into fellowship with Him. Jesus revealed unto us God in His Person, and through His death in our place on the Cross for our sins restored friendship between God and Man.
The work of Jesus at the Cross is applied to the believer by the Holy Spirit upon their acceptance of Christ as their Savior in the form of Salvation from enslavement to sin and the punishment of eternal separation from God. They are re-created/regenerated in God’s image. The prominent Biblical imagery in this topic is the resurrection from the dead of the new believer. God has called the person forth, and called them back to life for the purpose of fellowship with Him. In a temporal sense I am a Wesleyan through and through at this point. For sin, worship, fellowship, and all the other sorts of relational terminology that surround regeneration and its benefits to make sense, humans must have a real choice. That being said, our wills are bound and broken by sin-totally incapable of moving towards God- and it takes grace from God to sufficiently free and resurrect the will to enable a real choice for or against Christ. However, it seems rather silly that from eternity past to eternity future God would not be able to see who will accept Him and who will not. This leads me to posit that while God does enable actual choice in the believer, any activity of His Spirit in the life of the individual is efficacious inasmuch as God is aware of who will believe in Him to start with and either (a) doesn’t bother with thoroughly rebellious humans, or (b) simply exercises His power in a meaningful futility that ensure a creatures separation from Him is of its own accord. In a slightly modified sense, one could say I am ‘from an eternal perspective’ a Calvinist.
Temporally speaking then, justification is applied at the ‘time of salvation’ but from eternity past that act has been foreknown and planned upon by God in relationship to the believer. Justification is both a legal and a relational term biblically speaking. In the legal sense, we have been declared righteous by God inasmuch as He sees Christ in our stead, and we are justified inasmuch as we are unified with Christ. It is this unity with Christ that allows our sins to be dealt with in the eyes of God by His Son.
Sanctification is the gracious gift of God through His Spirit and His Church to the believer and the Covenant Community. God in His righteous hatred of sin recognizes that evil behavior and ways of life are not only self-destructive for the sinner and corrosive to the flourishing life of the community of believers, but also an affront to Himself. For all these reasons His Spirit partners with the believer, and the Church to impart righteous character and habits of living both individually and corporately to the Church. These are most basically understood as the Fruit of the Spirit, which will be covered in a moment. As for perseverance I will take a position similar to the one I formulated in my account of Salvation. I think that it is largely a matter of perspective. We cannot predict who will ‘fall away’ and who will ‘persevere.’ For God, these questions are easy to understand and answer from eternity. The text in Hebrews 6 seems to presuppose a real salvation that can be really be fallen away from, but if one presupposes that God is fully capable of causing a saint to persevere, than they were never truly saved anyway, or are experiencing some sort of temporary rebellion or ‘hiccup’ in their (from the eternal perspective) saving relationship with God. So, from God’s perspective such issues are already decided, but in our linear and temporal experience of reality, we cannot help but think in terms of ‘choices’ and ‘turning points.’ Hence why I call such issues a matter of perspective.
The Holy Spirit is indicated in several texts to be a person, or at the very least to have personal attributes. He is referred to the parakletos or Advocate/Family Lawyer. In the Johanine Epistles we see the Trinitarian formulations using ‘water’ as a moniker for the Spirit. There is use of personal pronouns in reference to the Spirit in both the New and Old Testaments. It is obvious that the Father and Son are clearly delineated Persons in Scripture, and when encountering germane baptismal, doxological, and creedal formulas in the New Testament and early Church nothing less seems to be logical in reference to the Holy Spirit. Having established the personhood of the Spirit, we move on to His work in the believer…
The Spirit imparts the Fruit of the Spirit in the form of character traits that exemplify Christ in the life of the believer and enable a more complete and thriving community life. This impartation takes place in a partnership with the Church Community and the individual believer. This Spirit-empowered dialectic between individuals and communities is the environment in which vices are exposed, dealt with, and eventually replaced with their opposing virtues.
The Spirit also imparts gifts that are for the edification and building up of the Church. These gifts are miraculous and powerful in nature, but are expressed throughout an entire range of personalities that shape that expression. The ‘gift lists’ in Corinthians and other Pauline epistles are not exhaustive in my opinion, but merely set up a context and give parameters/delimiters to help the Church understand and correctly express/use the gifts as they (the gifts) operate from the will of God through the believer. The Spirit is still working miraculously, powerfully, and visibly in our current era, and is evidenced in a multitude of ways.
The Church is a Community called forth in diversity for a purpose. Its commanded and sometimes nearly approximated unity does not demand uniformity. I think that the running disagreements in the Church may actually be a purposeful on the part of God to keep the paradoxicality, ineffability, and incomprehensibility of Who He Is firmly in view. The Church is to be simultaneously salt and light with Abraham Kuyper exercising dominion and authority over all spheres of life in this fallen world and thereby participating in Gods saving work in the world, while also understanding its otherness and ‘over against-ness’ to the world, and its duty to be the Church so the world can be the world, and so that both can know themselves and the other as they are a la Stanley Hauerwas. The Church exists to serve the world, but also to stand prophetically against it, telling it the truth about itself and all of reality, and pointing it always towards God and Christ.
While I believe Church government is given to us by God, it is most often not what we could call ‘inspired...’ I think that three primary forms of Church governments are a rather pragmatic reflection of the needs and desires of the particular times and circumstances in which they are employed. The onus is now not on the exegetes to answer an old and over-argued question, but for the leadership of given communities to exercise prayerful judgment and discernment as to what sort of government of the three primary New Testament varieties is most conducive to a promoting a healthy church. More often than not the question is posed in such a way as to only allow one right answer. I would propose that a certain degree of ‘holy pragmatism’ seems appropriate to these questions, because were all three systems of Church government (episcopal, presbyterian, and congregational) co-existing at the time of the New Testament, hence the reason they are all evidenced in Scripture!
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper…the two things that ought to bring unity to the Church, are often the grounds for their most bitter debates. This should not be, and so I will endeavor to say little about them, lest I add to the fires of disunity. Baptism is the sign of the continuing covenant of God with His covenant people. This sacramental action can take place at either a young age or as an adult. The obedience of being baptized as a symbol of inclusion in the Covenant Community and the impartation of grace is where the emphasis lies in Scripture, not the specific time frame (whether as a child or as a believing adult) With that being said, even if one is obedient in baptism but does not persevere as a believer, whether they were baptized as a baby or adult, it was just another common encounter with water!
The Lord’s Supper is a time in which the personal and spiritual presence of Jesus with His people is celebrated, remembered, and participated in. Ontologically and metaphysically the bread remains the same, but it is still more than just a symbol. Christ’s spiritual presence goes with it in a special way. The precise ontological and metaphysical attributes of pita bread and grape juice seem to me much less important than the liturgical and community-building aspects of participation in the Lord ’s Table. The Church restates its covenantal relationship to God and to one another in taking communion, and takes seriously its commitments to both. In having this peaceful meal with God and one another we are saying ‘We belong to God and one another, and we will show God and our brethren practical hospitality as well as hospitality of the heart, giving away our lives to them both.’
In terms of theological propositions, my Eschatology can be summed up very simply. In terms of the actual ‘system’ I adhere to, I suppose amillenialism would be the closest to what I believe about the nuts and bolts of the chronology of the second coming of Christ. I believe that History finds its terminus, goal, and ultimate meaning in the Kingdom of God which is already present among us in part, but is not yet fully come to pass as it will be at Christ’s return. God’s Kingdom had been inaugurated and set on its course in the first coming of Christ, and it continues to grow to this day, and will find its consummation and completion in the New Heavens and the New Earth. Jesus will come again, all things will be His to rule over, justice, joy and peace will be universal and permanent. All of Christ’s followers throughout history will be in blessed fellowship with God and one another in an ecologically and spiritually renewed Creation. Those that have rejected Him will experience the final results of the trajectory that they have set themselves on: they will experience eternal separation from God. Beyond this, I know that our job as the Church is to simply worship God, persevere through tribulation, and overcome the world; this is the Scriptural admonition to the Church in the Revelation. Ours is not to know comprehensively so that we may have security and a sense of control over our circumstances, ours is to trust in our Bridegroom. Ours is not to manipulate history to try and affect the timing of God’s plan, but to hope and wait faithfully for Him. Ours is not to calculate the day and the hour, but to understand that the signs of the times have been all around us for a long time, which, quite simply, places us in the ‘last days’ whether we realize it or not. This recognition of the precariousness of Our Time in redemption history ought to remind us to be watchful and prayerful in the way we live.