Ecclesiology

When my wife and I returned home from Together for the Gospel we brought with us a very large stack of books. In fact, since we were both registered for and attended the conference, we had two identical stacks. I’ve given a few of the duplicates away, some of them to our pastor. One of those was The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline by Jonathan Leeman of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and 9Marks. A few Sundays ago, Pastor reported to me that he had begun reading the book, was enjoying it and finding it very interesting, and had I read it? No, I had not yet. I was told that I should, and so now I am.

I have thus far only read the introduction, and I am hooked. Rather than a compartmentalized manual on biblical church membership and discipline, Leeman’s thesis begins with Theology Proper, or the doctrine of God. Our doctrine of the church is only as good as our doctrine of God. He writes:

What we need, I believe, is a truly systematic theology of church membership and discipline. We need to consider how the practices of local church membership and discipline fit into the larger matters of God’s love, God’s judgment, God’s authority, and the gospel. when thinking or writing about the church, it’s easy to err in one direction by sidelining questions of polity. it’s also easy to err in the other direction by quickly jumping to our favorite proof-texts about elders and deacons, the Lord’s Supper, or church discipline, but doing so in a way that doesn’t carefully consider the larger theological context.
   A proper doctrine of the church should be informed by everything else we know about God, his love, and his plan of salvation. It should reflect everything we know about God’s love and holiness; about humanity as created in God’s image but fallen into guilt and corruption; about Christ’s sinless life, sacrificial death, victorious resurrection, and the imputation of his own righteousness to sinners; and about life beneath his inaugurated rule through repentance and faith.
   . . .
   Theologian John Webster captures the spirit of what I’m getting at when he says, “A doctrine of the church is only as good as the doctrine of God which underlies it.” You will understand what or who the church is if you understand who God is. The same relationship abides between our doctrine of the gospel and our doctrine of the church. Webster also writes, “It is . . . an especial concern for evangelical ecclesiology to demonstrate not only that the church is a necessary implicate of the gospel but also that the gospel and church exist in a strict and irreversible order, one in which the gospel precedes and the church follows.” In other words, you will only understand what or who the church is if you first understand what God’s gospel is.

—Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love, (Crossway, 2010), 17–18.

The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love by Jonathan Leeman has so far proven to be a challenge. Not that it is difficult reading — it definitely is not. It is challenging in that it forces thought, and not just passive “that’s interesting” thought, but thought that necessarily draws conclusions — conclusions with which the reader may or may not be comfortable; conclusions that will incite passion in one way or another. This is a book not to just read, but to study and meditate upon. Read this book; put copies in the hands of your pastors (which I did, and am now reading it myself at his recommendation).

I’ve decided to take a different approach to blogging this book than I have with others. The chapters are long and dense, and deserve more attention than just a few comments on a pithy excerpt. So I’ve taken notes on Chapter One and present them here, under Leeman’s own headings, as my summary. The headings are as you would find them in the book; the body text is my summary. Anything in quotation marks is, as you might guess, a direct quote. The length is ridiculous for a blog post, I know, but I think I did well to condense thirty-five pages into about 2,000 words.

Chapter One
The Idolatry of Love

Main Question: How do our common cultural conceptions of love today hinder our acceptance of church membership and discipline?
Main Answer: We have made love into an idol that serves us and so have redefined love into something that never imposes judgments, conditions, or binding attachments.

The Risky Business of Ecclesiology
Leeman explains why building an ecclesiology for the church is more hazardous than codifying other doctrines. Discussions of ecclesiology, more than any other, can bring to the surface our personal ambitions and vain conceit. Ecclesiology involves such volatile decisions as who will receive baptism and be allowed at the Lord’s Table. Ecclesiology is especially vulnerable to attachment to our cultural baggage. We are prone to applying our civic politics and business ethics to our view of the church.

A Culturally Counterintuitive Proposal
Our ideas about love are more idolatrous than we realize. Western culture instinctively resists structures, boundaries, and exclusivism. Romantic notions of love tell us that conditions and borders are unloving. Leeman writes, “The one boundary most people agree upon these days is the boundary keeping boundary makers out!”

Individualism
Western heroes, historical and fictional (e.g., Benjamin Franklin, Indiana Jones), all fit the individualist mold.

Every Attachment Is Negotiable
“We are all free agents, and every relationship and life station is a contract that can be renegotiated or canceled, [including our relationship to] the local church.” Choices are predominantly subject to the obligation to self, personal happiness and advantage. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to dissolve the bands which have connected me to others, I dissolve them.”

Individualism and Love
The growth of individualism has caused a shift in our definition of love. Whereas love was once thought of primarily as compassion, individualism has emphasized romantic love, or simple passion.

Romantic Love Versus Biblical Love
Romantic love is not entirely unbiblical (see Song of Songs). But the romance of the Bible differs from that which grew out of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in that the modern romantic lover’s “absolute moral reference was an exclusive fidelity to the love relationship and its maximization. . . . the romantic lover finds his or her souls completion in the other. In love!” This finding what can only be found in God is what makes love idolatrous. And when love is all about self-fulfillment, it must also become undiscerning and nonjudgmental. “So Americans tend to describe churches as ‘loving’ when those churches make us feel relaxed and comfortable, not judged.”

Self-Expressive Love in Churches
With this individualistic, self-fulfilling view of love comes an individualistic, self-expressive view of worship. So “song lyrics do not so much present an opportunity to meditate on God’s love for sinners . . . but on repeated expressions of the sinner’s love for God. Sunday school classes and other church groups will divide into homogeneous units with shared life experience, rather than the old seeking to disciple the young, and the young valuing and desiring discipleship from the old. Preaching becomes group counseling on the felt needs of the congregation. The gospel becomes therapy.

Consumerism
This section examines “three aspects of individualism: consumerism, a fear of commitment, and a skepticism toward all dogma.” Consumerism assumes exchange. That, in itself is not a problem; salvation is an exchange: our sin for Christ’s righteousness. The problem with consumerism is that it secularizes the exchange. “It’s about exchanging something in this world for something else in this world. We seek our peace and rest and shalom and joy in this world or in this age.” In a secularized, consumeristic exchange, what is lost is the knowledge that the heart is the first thing that must be exchanged — a heart of stone for a heart of flesh. A consumeristic mindset does not examine whether appetites are directed toward right desires.

Consumerism and Love
When we make material, financial exchanges, we can hardly claim to be motivated by love for the buyer/seller with whom we are dealing. We simply try to make the most advantageous exchange we can for ourselves. When consumerism steps into the territory of love, the focus shifts from love itself to the object of love, and the value of the exchange in the love relationship. “We are more concerned about who loves us than we are about loving.” It is all about getting, not giving.

Consumeristic Love in Churches
“When pastors fail to teach Christians that the problem of love begins with the faculty to love rather than with the various objects of love, the critical faculties that Christians develop in the shopping mall transfer to their church lives.” They judge the music, the preaching, the people around them, etc., according to how well they are served by them. “They judge the church rather than letting God’s word judge them. In all this they utterly fail to recognize that they are not loving their neighbor as themselves.” Rather than correct such sinful attitudes, savvy church leaders learn to exploit them to yield the desired statistics. “Virtues like holiness, self-sacrifice, and faith can’t be counted, so never mind. As Mark Dever has said, statistical figures are worshipped more than carved ones.”

Commitment Phobia
“The drive to pursue happiness in the negotiations and renegotiations of our various contracts means making sure that no contract is too binding.” Americans no longer join clubs, associations, and civic groups as they have in the past. Rather than join organizations that ask for hand-on involvement, they prefer to support groups that require nothing more than payment of a membership fee. Marriage is down, cohabitation and divorce are up.

Commitment Phobia and Love
Lack of commitment turns love relationships into present-only exchanges. As long as the benefits and advantages measure up to expectations, the relationship continues. The future remains to be seen.

Commitment-less Love in Churches
“When the idea of a binding commitment is removed from the definition of love, churches become places where personal sacrifices are seldom made, so the gospel is seldom pictured.” Christians move from one church to another lightly, with no thoughts about the consequences to others. After all, there is no responsibility involved, is there? Sadly, many of these church-hoppers are only following the examples of many pastors who come, stay a few years, and leave. If the shepherd makes no long-term commitment to the flock, why should individual sheep feel any obligation? This weakens the connection between doctrine and practice. While professing to believe the gospel, commitments made — or rather, not made — do anything but demonstrate the gospel. “Their symbolic burial and resurrection from the waters of baptism indicate that they mean to take up their cross and follow their Lord, but the very ethic of their commitment-less love does not provide them with the opportunity to fulfill these professions with their actions.”

Skepticism
Another outgrowth of individualism is a skepticism toward doctrine, an especially any absolute truth claims. Doctrines are retained or discarded based upon their utilitarian value to the goals of the individual.

Skepticism and Love
When love is separated from truth, love is defined as unconditional acceptance. The opposite of love, then is judgmentalism., intolerance, and exclusivism. Love requires you to “accept me as I am, and tolerate whatever I say or think without condemning it . . . and affirming my lifestyle decisions as legitimate and good.”

Unconditional Acceptance in Churches
The evangelical call today, in the name of love, is to emphasize orthopraxy over orthodoxy. This results in a religion of emotion; intellectual objectivity has been banished. The objective What has God said? is replaced with the subjective What is God saying to you?

The Inevitability of Pragmatism
Pragmatism is the inevitable result when doctrine and boundaries are tossed out. Superficial measurable results become the test practice. The legitimacy of methods is measured by that which can be seen, rather than being faithful to the Word and trusting God to produce true spiritual fruit, which is largely unseen. Ironically, pragmatism may be accompanied by a pseudo-spirituality, an emphasis on the leading of the Spirit. Sadly, following the Spirit as we know he leads through Scripture is not in view. This is all about Experiencing God-style subjectivity.

Connecting the Dots
The connection between all these cultural values and an unwillingness to commit and submit to a local congregation should be obvious. We are self-serving, independent individuals, whose real and fictional heroes are rugged, self-sufficient individuals (e.g., Indiana Jones. In a culture in which love is inseparable from freedom, commitment and submission just don’t compute.

The Root Problem
After all that has been said about individualism, Leeman admits that many opponents of the institutional church are committed communitarians who are “committed not to free agency but to a relational concept of the human being. The believe that human peace, meaningfulness, and joy can be found only in community.”

Communitarianism
“. . . the postmodern and communitarian reaction against modernistic individualism remains derivative of that individualism . . . The postmodern self may be socially constituted and delimited . . . but within his limitations no authority exists to stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’ He can come and go as he pleases, invoking this or that group membership according to whim.”

Anti-Authority-ism
Communitarianism is not the antidote to individualism, because the real problem is not individualism; the real problem is anti-authority-ism. “The solution . . . is to reintroduce the conception of submission to God’s revealed will as it’s located in the local church.”

Authority in Churches
That authority is unpopular in the church is plainly seen in the debates over everything from the role of women in the church and home to the sovereignty of God over history and salvation. “The ideas of love and authority remain almost wholly at odds.” Evidence of this is found in the preponderance of therapeutic preaching rather than expositional preaching, which demonstrates a recognition of “God’s intention to employ authoritative pronouncements through human mediators in our life and growth as Christians [and] that Christ enters the Christian’s life with the authority of a king who commands repentance and obedience. So the church gathers to hear what the king has authoritatively said in his Word.” Rather than expound the Scriptures, and risk running into anything demanding, shepherds scratch the sheep where they itch.

Secularizing the Idea of Disobedience
By “secularizing,” Leeman means replacing sin with inoffensive euphemisms, e.g., insecurity=fear of man, consumerism=greed. “We shouldn’t address insecurity by pointing to its opposite—self-confidence; we should talk about the fear of God.” We should address consumerism by talking “about the things that have supplanted God as an object of worship.” Individualism is the secular euphemism for hatred of authority. It is not, as some say, a failure or fear of relationship. It is, rather, a rejection of a particular kind of relationship, one that requires obedience.

A Diminished God
The communitarian emphasis on relationship and ambivalence toward authority leaves us with a diminished God. “The wages of sin is death not just because our sin breaks our relationship with God, [but] because it offends against his glorious, beautiful, holy, resplendent majesty! . . . because God’s glory is weighty and infinite, and we have fallen short of it.”

Repentance
“If the root problem in our culture and in our churches is anti-authority-ism and the despising of God’s glory, then the solution is not simply joining community and making relationships; the solution is repentance. It’s a changing of heart and direction. This repentance includes . . . joining a particular kind of community where self is no longer sovereign and where one is called to obedience to others as an expression of obedience to God. It’s the joining of a community where worship of God is supreme in everything. . . . submitting to a local church and becoming a member is an external enactment of what it means to submit to Christ and become a member of his body. It’s keeping the imperative of what Christ has accomplished in the indicative. Submitting to a local church on earth, in the language of Christian ethics, is a becoming of what we are in heaven.”

Conclusion
The spirit of the age rebels against boundaries and limits, so God and his love have been redefined so that there are none. “This idol called love” commands us to live and let live, without expectations, limits, or judgment.

Last week, I posted my summary of the first chapter of The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love by Jonathan Leeman. Today, I offer something of lesser value: my own impressions. And unlike my summary, I’ll keep this short.

Leeman nails American Christians — and any others who share American ideals — right where it hurts: in our independent, self-sufficient, self-serving . . . selves. Dragging our American ideals into the church, we have polluted our faith. If Leeman’s analysis is correct, American churches and Christians have a lot of repenting to do. And we have a lot to learn about who God is, what biblical love is, what the church is, and what it means to be a part of it.

The attitude of many in confessing evangelical churches toward the church indicates that they don’t love the Lord with all their hearts, or their neighbors as themselves. It indicates that there are probably a lot more tares among the wheat than even a cynic like me suspects. Therefore, a correct doctrine and practice of church membership and discipline is far from secondary. It is absolutely essential to the purity of the church and to the gospel itself.

If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

—Matthew 18:15–17

I have been increasingly convinced lately that a church that does not practice discipline — that allows unrepented sin in its midst — is no true church. Consequently, I’ve had to consider what biblical church discipline would look like. The passage above is pretty plain, I think, but some would take the last phrase, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector,” to require complete ostracism on the order of the “shunning” practiced by the sub-Christian Amish sect. But that is going too far. John Piper describes the limits of our separation from excommunicated members (bold type added):

How Jesus Demands That We Handle Sin in the Church

In addition to providing his church with the Spirit and the word (which we saw in the previous chapter), Jesus also provided guidelines for how to handle sin in the flock. In one sense, all of his teachings do this. They are the charter for how his followers are to live in the church and in the world. But he gave more specific guidelines for what has come to be called church discipline in Matthew 18:15–17.

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

The word “church” signals the fact that Jesus is preparing his followers for the ongoing fellowship of his band of followers in his absence. The implication of the teaching is that persistent, unrepented sin—a refusal to take sin seriously and make war against it in our own lives—will mean we are not really followers of Jesus. In other words, even though Jesus knew that the church would always have false believers in it (Matt. 13:30, 48), nevertheless he made provision for a kind of careful, loving, patient discipline that would not tolerate blatant unwillingness to repent. Treating an unrepentant “brother” like a “Gentile and tax collector” did not mean treating him with hostility. Jesus had said plainly that such people are to be loved: “And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?” (Matt. 5:47). What it means to “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” is to no longer share the unique fellowship of Jesus with him—not to relate with him as if there is no barrier in the fellowship. This would include not sharing, for example, in the Lord’s Supper together.

—John Piper, What Jesus Demands from the World (Crossway, 2006), 343–344.

Asked of a recently-relocated family:

“Have you found a church you like?”

When you are looking for a church, don’t look for one that makes you comfortable. (This is not a call to intentionally go “outside your ‘comfort zone,’” or any other trendy pseudo-spiritual cliché.) Look for a body that is biblical in doctrine and practice, and then love that church. If you can’t be comfortable among brothers and sisters who are thinking and doing biblically, the problem is yours.