Maybe it’s me, but I don’t understand the point of an organization that is not a church whose purpose is to gather pastors, who are in churches that already promote the gospel, for an undertaking called Gospel Coalition. What were the members of GC doing before when they were merely pastors preaching week-in and week-out, sometimes in independent congregations, sometimes in denominations? Were they Gospel Cobelligerents? Or by not being co-aligned were they not as much for the gospel as when belonging to GC? Is the import of GC that it is a cooperative endeavor or that it is promoting the gospel? But are people who don’t join GC guilty of being uncooperative or of not being sufficiently committed to the gospel?  Maybe both?
These were questions that came to mind when reading D. A. Carson’s attempt to clarify GC for the editors of Christianity Today. For instance, when Carson explained, “In some ways we’re almost a coalition of coalitions. Tim represents a whole network. John Piper represents a whole network. And because we share a common vision of what the gospel is and common aims and so on, it’s not, in some sense, just individual churches. It’s all the networks that are linked with that,” I wondered if the real entree into GC was being a fan of Carson, Keller, or Piper. In which case, should it be called, “Coalition of Readers of Evangelical Popular Authors”?
Then when asked if GC purposefully shared the characteristics of a denomination, Carson responded:
It does, but it purposely disallows others. Sociologically, there is a lot less loyalty to denominations today than 20 years ago. In one sense we’re growing because of that. We are meeting a sense of dislocation. On the other hand, in a denomination there will also be, for example, means of ordering who is ordained and who is not. There are going to be agreed standards on who becomes a member or not. Whereas we’re a center-bounded set. We’re not a boundary-bounded set.
Tim Keller is a deeply committed PCA man. He’s a paedobaptist. My ordination is Baptist. And we’re not going to agree on everything. We’re happy to talk about anything, but we’re not going to make one standard or the other the touchstone for the organization.
That left me wondering if GC is really “Baptists and Presbyterian Coaligned for Parts But Not All of the Great Commission.” That’s a mouthful — BPCPBNAGC —  but the leaders of GC may be up to it since in addition to their day jobs as Baptists and Presbyterians they are leading a super-coalition.
One does wonder if church matters to coalition.
Old Life 
Dear DGH,
Perhaps you’re mystified because your own understanding of “church” might be a little skewed. A quick study of the word “church” in the NT and it’s underlying theology will show that unlike your definition, the church is not a denomination. It is used of the eschatological gathering (Heb. 12:22-24), the local community (1 Cor. 1:2), all Christians (1 Cor. 15:9; Gal. 3:13), or an actual gathering (1 Cor. 14 passim). If all believers are the church (1 Cor. 15:9; Gal. 1:13) then it’s important they express this by helping each other beyond our own local communities and networks. The GC has been a great blessing to us in Australia, the OPC hasn’t. I wonder why that is?
Every blessing,
Marty.
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That’s where “a quick study of the word ‘church'” will get you… into deep, non-denominational waters! 🙂
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Marty,
The church may not be a denomination, but I am unclear as to how that makes it a coalition.
DGH, sounds to me like that book on “celebrity” you mentioned once is in order.
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Sebastian, read what I said, not just a quick word study, but “it’s underlying theology”; “quick”, because it’s not rocket science; “all Christians” because God’s people are rent asunder by small denominations who point the finger at everyone else. (An association beyond one’s denomination will help knock the rough edges off us).
Zrim, if the church is not a denomination, then our desire should be to help as many Christians as we can: this is precisely why the GC formed a coalition: to be an large influence for strengthening the visible universal church.
If God chooses who is in the church, and I don’t, and they are united to Christ and me, then I have an obligation to edify them in love. I don’t have the luxury just to hang around believers who think almost identically to me. That’s the Jew / Gentile problem all over again; when Peter hung with a select group in the church, Paul accused him of “not acting line with the gospel”.
Blessings.
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Marty, I’m having trouble squaring your views with the Reformation — but maybe you are meaning to say that the Reformation’s ecclesiology was skewed as well. I guess that would mean tne Protestant-Roman Catholic division is simply the Jew-Gentile thing all over again.
Or it could be that your view is skewed without greater clarification by you.
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Dear DGH,
Yes, I’m happy to clarify. The reformation had to occur because Rome had lost the gospel. Luther and Calvin believed the church officially fell under Hildebrand’s papal revolutions and the rise of satisfactory works in penance. In short, Rome was officially no longer a church. Hence, the split.
However, Protestants have been splitting ever since over issues that shouldn’t divide us. My problem is that you’re not following Calvin’s ecclesiology closely enough, there was one “denomination” in Geneva and believers were not free to start up their own. The big issue here concerns what we are free to split over. I’m no advocate of modern confessionless US evangelicalism (though not historic evangelicalism beginning with the reformation).
However, I’m still stumped by your remarks about the GC folks–who are fellow believers and partners in the gospel. They may have their weaknesses, but they are trying to help both local churches and the church universal visible. I now many of them personally and they LOVE the church (rightly understood). Again, if the denomination is not a church we have an obligation to both local churches and Christians everywhere. They are our family, not simply those who agree with us.
One embarrassing fact about the reformed tradition (a tradition I love) is the many denominations who almost have identical beliefs but remain separate. Just look, for example, at Korea. We have 100s of Presbyterian denominations, all claiming to uphold the WCF faithfully. What a shemozzle.
God bless,
Marty.
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Marty, thanks. But do you really think Calvin would have countenanced the Gospel Coalition in Geneva? I don’t believe Piper or Carson would have been ordained. JC may have actually thought they were Anabaptists. Doh! there goes Geneva.
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I find it ironic that non-denominational churches often try to form networks.
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To paraphrase Ned Flanders, indiddliodeedy.
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Marty,
…if the church is not a denomination, then our desire should be to help as many Christians as we can: this is precisely why the GC formed a coalition: to be an large influence for strengthening the visible universal church.
Isn’t that why denominations exists, to “help as many Christians as possible, to be an influence fro strengthening the visible universal church”? I realize denominations have their problems, but what does a “coalition” have that a “denomination” lacks? I mean, my biological and extended families have lots of problems, but does that mean I form a coalition of Zrimec’s and my wife a coalition of Zick’s to strengthen our visible families? A denomination is not a church but a way to “do church.” I guess I don’t understand why 1) that’s not good enough and 2) what makes anyone think a coalition won’t succomb to the same foibles a denomination will (it’s got sinners in it, right?).
And I have sympathy for your point about the hundreds of divisions. One has to admit that Rome had a point about there being “as many formulas as formulaters” if this Protestant thing ever took hold. But I am yet unclear as to why a coalition doesn’t just add to the cacophony (good intentions about people you actually, personally know is really beside the point). Wouldn’t we be better served by staying put for as long as possible? Whatever happened to the things of endurance, patience, loyalty and commitment? If a radical, wild-eyed 2K confessionalist like me can yet abide the CRC, surely the celebrities on GC staff can go back home and behave in a more churchly manner.
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As a commited Reformed christian I feel liberated in that I do not have to do all the work myself and try to defend each and everyone of my beliefs by considering myself having a tabula rasa theological mind when I am converted and make up my theology as I read my Bible. Rather I have the confessions to guide me and show me their scriptural references to help guide me. The Belglic confession (article 29) tells us:
The marks by which the true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if it maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in chastening of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Head of the Church. Hereby the true Church may certainly be known, from which no man has a right to separate himself.
Anyone who would make the argument that the Gospel Coallition is a church (Which I hope some of you are not making) clearly needs to stop reading online blogs and just read the Pauline epistles over and over. And let me just rebuke you Marty for your complete and utter rudeness torwards the OPC. The OPC was formed by confessional presbyterians when the main Presbyterian church in the states gave into liberalism and it was forged on the backs of those willing to take a stand for the Gospel and not abbandon the historic reformed faith contained in their Confessions. And given their smaller size they feel a need to use their rescourses to support missionaries in places that need it more than Australia? The OPC funds missionaries in:hina, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Haiti, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Quebec, Suriname, and Uganda. All places that don’t have the same advantages as Australia. I love many of the persons involved in the Gospel coallition. But I do think it is somewhat of a joke at what they are trying to acheive (and noone seems to know exactly what that is). At its best it is a conference that takes place between T4G that has a good website that offers tons of free sermons, a free theological journal and a sorta facebook/twitter social networking thing.
Are they my brothers in Christ? yes. Would I ever go to their Churches to hear them preach? sure. But at the end of the day they each are loyal to their confessional beliefs. In the 21st century we say we don’t like denominations rather we say ”We’re together for the Gospel” but many of the fans of Piper, Duncan, Driscoll, Carson, Keller, ect… just don’t get that non-essential doctrines are important and should divide our churches sometimes. I believe a parent to not baptize their child in to the body of christ is living in serious sin, dishonoring the job God has given them to do and is going against what the people of God have always thought and done. Baptists think that when I baptize my future children I am giving them a false sense of security, it’s a sin, and it is not even real Christian baptism. You cannot reconsile these two. I can have friends who disagree and we can sing together at Campus for Christ and watch movies together, share the Gospel together (Which I have done), but on Sunday morning I will refsue to eat at restaurants, sing both psalms and hymns and contemporary songs and watch little children get sprinkled with water because I believe the French Reformed persuasion is right and their baptist tradition is wrong. We both believe in the same Gospel, both claim to have been baptized (an integral aspect of our Christian identity) but we cannot worship together on a sunday morning and neither of us would want too. My friend would rather dance and speak in tongues. I want to actually encounter God by the exposition of his Word.
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I am unclear on the point of your criticism of GC. Could you clarify –
1) What is fundamentally wrong with GC?
2) What parts of the great commission are the GC members not aligned on?
3) Are the members of GC in some way harming the advance of the gospel?
4) What positive effects would come about with the disbanding of GC?
5) Are you suggesting that there should be no broad-based eccumenical (evangelical/reformed) cooperation between ministries?
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@Jed
I suppose the gist of the problem is that these men are ordained in their churches, and yet are stepping apart from those respective churches in an attempt to accomplish that which Christ says will be accomplished in the Church; and not the Church as an invisible entity primarily, but the Church as a visible body. If the gospel is the center, and the visible church is the instrument by which God has taught us He will communicate this gospel, then their attempt to essentially accomplish this in a para-church organization, while perhaps well-intentioned, is flawed. Are they trying to tell the world that despite our differences we really love each other? Fine. Do they expect the GC to do the work of the Church? If so, why? Why not do that work in the Church? DGH’s post title points this up as the problem. Outside of the Church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.
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Dr. Hart,
Thank you for discussing these issues. Once I was exposed to the facts of revivalism (which as a newbie Reformed believer was taught to me as pure calvinism on earth, at least that was the impression) it was not long until I began to wonder if all these conferences, whether they are for pastor’s only (which seems to smack of clericalism to me) or for lay-people too, are just another form of itinerant preaching. I choose not to think that there is some drive to be a celebrity or a person of great importance, but it so often comes across that way and as just another gathering of like-minds slapping eachother on the back. My question is: are these conference gatherings just another form of itinerant preaching?
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Matt,
Thanks for helping to clarify. I think you bring up some valid points. However, I don’t think that GC pastors would assert that they are trying to supplant the ministry of the local church, whether they are doing this or not by their associations with GC is certainly up for discussion. I think it might be helpful if GC gave better clarification of what it is and is not, and gave a more pointed reason for being. With that said, I see the greatest value of GC is not as an organization but as an aggregate for information and a reference tool. The information, sermons, and campus ministry resources have been very useful for me personally. I use the GC site along with Monergism in similar fashions. Both have been instrumental in my growth in the understanding of the Reformed faith, as well as my move to a Reformed denomination (PCA). I just think that DGH’s post didn’t help me understand what exactly his issue was with GC or how his criticism was at all pointing toward a better way forward.
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GC functions as a church in the episcopal sense. I speak as a former member of the Southern California See. Each personality serves as a de facto bishop, as Carson stated, “In some ways we’re almost a coalition of coalitions. Tim represents a whole network. John Piper represents a whole network.”
In my experience, due to a lack of strong confessional commitment, each bishop essentially sets the standard of orthodoxy. Pastor X’s position on a given issue becomes the biblical one. This is why they can only reach agreement on the most basic doctrines. The GC movement reminds me of “The Fundamentals,” published by R. A. Torrey. This is lowest common denominator Christianity confronting a common foe. I’ll take a detailed confession over a brief doctrinal statement any day.
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Some readers may not realise it, but the “GC” is actually the “Global Community” in Left Behind – that’s right, folks, the empire of the Antichrist. Join the dots.
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At the risk of being kicked out of Geneva, I thought some of the messages were good.
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Dear DGH,
I love your posts and your rhetoric! It never ceases to make me chuckle.
You say, “But do you really think Calvin would have countenanced the Gospel Coalition in Geneva?”
I say: there would’ve been no need to form one. Life now is very different from then.
You say, “I don’t believe Piper or Carson would have been ordained. JC may have actually thought they were Anabaptists.”
I say: that’s a huge assumption, Piper and Carson believe in justification by faith alone, the doctrines of grace, orthodox Christology, that the church existed after Constantine etc. They perhaps would’ve done in Calvin’s head, because here are people who know their Bible well, know their theology well, and display the fruits of the Spirit. Calvin wasn’t working with a category to fit them into …
Geneva still stands, but its difficult to use it entirely as the model for church today given such a different context.
Blessings,
Marty.
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Darryl,
While I agree with most of what you have said in this post, I do have to take issue with the fact that you say Calvin would have had a problem with Carson and Piper being ordained. These men are not “confessionally Reformed” as we think they ought to be, but they are solid men on so many levels, and better teachers and preachers than a whole lot of men in the PCA and OPC. I mean this with the greatest humility. They are more committed to boldly proclaiming the doctrines of grace than a lot of pastors I have heard in our own denominations. Also, would the Puritan’s have called the Baptistic representatives at the Assembly anabaptists. Furthermore, how is the Westmister Assembly different from the Gospel Coalition (Besides the fact that no unified doctrinal standards are being written). The Assembly wasn’t a church. It was a Reformed ecumenical council, right? Would you also take issue with our Reformed Presyterian seminaries? They are not tied to any one denomination, and yet we get ministers for our churches from these parachurch groups who are training men to fulfill the Great Commission.
Again, I actually do agree with a lot of the things you have said in your post. Thank you for giving us important things to think through.
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1) What is fundamentally wrong with GC?
It is an organization that makes it seem as if the church and her ordinances do not matter in the gospel ministry, as if there is a higher unity (a kernel) and that local differences (the husk) are not consequential to the gospel.
2) What parts of the great commission are the GC members not aligned on?
Baptism and the authority of Christ (as in how that authority is delegated and administered — presbytery or congregation).
3) Are the members of GC in some way harming the advance of the gospel?
If you think, as Stuart Robinson did, that the church is an essential element of the gospel, then you could argue that they are not advancing the gospel.
4) What positive effects would come about with the disbanding of GC?
Pastors would put their energies into their own communions.
5) Are you suggesting that there should be no broad-based eccumenical (evangelical/reformed) cooperation between ministries?
All Reformed denominations I know have committees on ecumenicity. For some reason, those committee meetings don’t seem to count as ecumenical or cooperative.
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Crawford, brilliant (and nice to hear from you)!
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But Marty, they re-baptize (or at least Piper has).
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Nick, I don’t know what the Puritans would have thought of Baptists. A lot was in flux in the state of religious and civil war. But seeing how the title of this post comes from the words of the Westminster Assembly — outside of which no ordinary possibility of salvation — and seeing they were talking about the visible church at that point, not the invisible church, I do think the ecclesiology of the divines would have been higher than that in GC. (Since Baptists have historically insisted on believer’s baptism, and do not think infant baptism is valid, Baptists — some of whom I love dearly, including my parents — are closer to Anabaptist than to Reformed.)
I do not disagree that much of the teaching GC leaders is valuable — though I am less enamored of Keller than many in the conservative Reformed world — the problem in an argument like yours is the age old distinction between form and content. So as long as GC’s content is okay, the form doesn’t matter. That is really the point of Whitefield’d revivals. It makes hay of any jure divino Presbyterianism. And it is actually a move comparable to liberalism, which may explain why so many evangelicals in the Presbyterian church did not oppose liberalism — the ability to separate the kernel from the husk was a tactic that Rauschenbusch learned from Whitefield.
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Outstanding thoughts! Thanks. I am starting to have more and more of the concerns you have, but I really like Ryken, Carson and other GC men. Thank you for important thoughts for the church.
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DGH, I love these GC guys, Carson in particular. It’s not easy to hear them criticized but you’re making a strong case. Out of interest, what’s your beef with Keller? I download his sermons regularly and he’s really been a great help to me on justification. Don’t know much else about him though.
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Nick,
It’s true that there are plenty of good things can and do come from the evangelical-Reformed (like Carson and Keller). But what you get from them you can also get from the confessional-Reformed, then some, not least ecclesiology and a sacramental theology. Why settle for Old Milwaukee in a can when you can get Guinness in a glass?
Insofar as he represents the evangelical-Reformed, Keller is squarely, openly and unapologetically in the transformationalist camp. Transformationalism depends on a low ecclesiology and kingdom confusion. Amongst so many other things, it’s cultural relevance for the raised pinky. If straight evangelicals can get (rightly) blamed for meeting the felt needs of the low- to middle-brow why do Reformed get a pass for being culturally relevant to the high brow?
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Zrim, as always informative while employing beer based metaphors. Mmmm Guiness…
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Zrim,
You said: “good intentions about people you actually, personally know is really beside the point”.
Now there’s a point worth highlighting. How come everyone always wants to defend everything by saying, well, I know them personally, and this is what REALLY makes them tick… I am very sick and tired of that kind of thing. Not everything is so personal!
E
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DGH,
Isn’t there more to Anabaptists than simply rebaptizing? I was asked on a recent seminary exam why the Anabaptists were not Protestants, and my answer included their rejection of justification sola fide as definitive for the question, though that’s not all I said, and received full credit.
If their baptism practices were presented to Calvin, he undoubtedly would have thought they were Anabaptists. But if their soteriology were presented to Calvin, he would have undoubtedly have had to admit that they were Protestants at least, even if he could not have had ecclesiastical fellowship with them.
I just don’t think it’s fair to lump John Piper and DA Carson in with the events that took place in Munster.
E
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Echo,
Yes, my father and I are very close. I like to think I’ll be half the man he is one day (but I’m not holding my breath). But just yesterday I told him his Calvinism needs a lot of work, suggesting he pick up his mother’s Episcopalian “Book of Common Prayer.” That thing is brutally Reformed. But it’s nothing personal.
During a recent interview to fill our pulpit I suggested criticism to a candidate of another local CRC minister who openly employs the Willow Creek method for the upper-crust. This candidate is the only one I know who so rabidly defies the proposed revisions to the FOS. Yet, he chided me with the “you don’t know Stan Mast the way I know Stan Mast” line. I still don’t know when we started employing Pentecostal methods of criticism instead of Reformed ones. Aren’t we supposed to go by what is written and said instead of divining the inner workings of a man’s soul? And even if we can discern “innocent intentions” (ahem) what gives with what he said?
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Nick,
I would second Zrim’s beef with Keller, but I would add more.
I wish I could be more specific, but this is a blog, and I don’t have to use footnotes. That said, I can recall an interview I read on some popular Christian website a year or so ago, right around the time his book came out. In that interview, Keller said that he doesn’t want to defend the PCA or any PARTICULAR church (denomination), but he wants to defend the Apostle’s Creed. He says he is part of the PCA, but defended that by saying that he cannot avoid being part of a particular communion. He has to argue for the Apostle’s Creed from within some particularity.
I don’t remember the title of his book and I don’t remember the website, but I am absolutely sure that I have the substance of his argument correct.
Oh. I found this quote on the Puritanboard. This is exactly what I was talking about:
“This puts me in a position where I don’t want to defend just one kind of Christianity. I think I want to defend the Apostles Creed. And I want you, as a nonbeliever, to buy the Apostles’ Creed, and then after that figure out where you want to go. I really think I can do that. But, at the same time, I don’t believe I can possibly speak to a lot of these things without [doing so from] within my particularity. So I actually say that there are certain chapters in which I’m going to be speaking as a Protestant because there’s no way not to speak as a Protestant or a Catholic.”
http://www.puritanboard.com/f24/tim-keller-god-seems-use-all-these-kinds-churches-29949/
The problem with this might not be immediately obvious for some, but it really coincides with the substance of DGH’s critique of the Gospel Coalition. It’s reductionistic and simplistic. There’s more to the Christian faith than the Apostle’s Creed. But because of this stance, Keller’s church supports Roman Catholic missionary efforts as well as Pentecostals. His church offers training to workers of these “churches”. Why? Because all he cares about is the Apostle’s Creed.
Rome can still confess the Apostle’s Creed. Yet to be Protestant is to admit that Rome is no longer a church but a synagogue of Satan. If Rome is a true church because it is supporting the Apostle’s Creed, then we are schismatics and should return to Rome. But if Rome is a true church simply because it can say the Apostle’s Creed, then how could it have declared the Protestant (Pauline!) doctrine of justification to be anathema in the Council of Trent at the time of the Reformation (1545 I think)? How is that even possible?
Zrim’s right. At the heart of the matter lays something sinister that Zrim is calling transformationalism. Something is more important to Keller than the distinction between Protestant and Catholic, than justification sola fide, the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls. Even though all Protestants are heretics by Rome’s standards, by ecclesiastically sanctioned declaration that remains in effect, Keller still thinks Rome represents a valid expression of Christianity.
And don’t get me started on his aiding and abetting Pentecostals. That’s just as bad as aiding Rome.
But there is yet more to say. Immanuel Kant was a very important philosopher once upon a time. You might call him the father of modern liberalism if you were to dare to be so bold. He wrote a book called “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone”. It’s a fascinating book. I had to read it as an undergrad philosophy major. In fact I studied Kant every semester as a philosophy major from one vantage point or another.
Anyway, he argued that there is a universal religion of reason. However he also said that there is no ecclesiastical representation of this religion in its purity. Rather, all ecclesiastical faiths were trying to express this universal religion of reason, and for Kant, Christianity does the most to express it, but other faiths are also seeking this universal, inexpressible religion of pure reason. So for Kant, in order to subscribe to this universal rational religion, you have to subscribe to some PARTICULAR ecclesiastical faith. Which PARTICULAR faith you choose is of little consequence, but in order to express the universal, you have to become particularized, because that is the nature of universals.
Now, just to put a bit more philosophy on this, think of Plato and his Platonic Forms. For Plato, there is a universal Horse. It is the cookie-cutter Horse, the perfect form of horse-ness. Insofar as an animal on earth conforms to the image of the great Form Horse, therefore it is a horse, a particular horse. The cookie-cutter Horse exists up in Platonic heaven, transcending space and time. Particular things here within space and time, however, are what they are because they exhibit qualities of those universals in the transcendent realm. Universals are not in this space-time universe; they transcend the universe. Particulars, however, are manifestations of the universals within space-time. There is a universal of the color Red, and all red things in space-time participate in it, which is what makes them red.
So for Kant, the universal religion of reason is a universal. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, on the other hand, are particulars; they are imperfect representations of the universal.
For Keller, the Apostle’s Creed is the universal. Roman Catholicism, the PCA, the OPC, Pentecostals, Baptists, Methodists, etc, are all particulars; they are imperfect representations of the universal.
This is not to be taken lightly. This is important. Keller almost quotes Kant in what he says. That’s no small matter. Kant’s ideas did not lead to anything good for the church. They led to Deism, higher criticism, a denial of the resurrection, Jesus’ miracles, etc. It would not be too much to lay the Enlightenment and all of modern liberalism at Kant’s feet as his fruit. For Keller to be expressing almost exactly the same ideas is very troubling indeed. And yet it is largely unnoticed and ignored.
Keller has simply replaced Kant’s universal religion of reason with the Apostle’s Creed. I admit this is a step up from Kant, but it’s less significant than it appears. This line of reasoning allows Keller to essentially treat Rome and Pentecostals as valid forms of Christianity.
E
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Echo,
If their baptism practices were presented to Calvin, he undoubtedly would have thought they were Anabaptists. But if their soteriology were presented to Calvin, he would have undoubtedly have had to admit that they were Protestants at least, even if he could not have had ecclesiastical fellowship with them.
Thomas Aquinas was soteriologically a Calvinist, wasn’t he? Isn’t there more to being Protestant than not being Catholic?
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Nick, Zrim has transformationalism covered, Echo has the weak ecclesiology. And then there is those two litle words — regulative principle. Keller took Frame and made it magic.
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Echo, I appreciate the time you’ve taken over this. Thanks.
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Isn’t Frame the dude who believes the RPW sanctions drama skits instead of a sermon?
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Zrim,
No, Thomas Aquinas was not Calvinist in his soteriology. I don’t think you can stretch the definitions of any of those words suitably in order to make that statement.
E
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Echo,
Actually, with regard to election and reprobation, Aquinas was quite Augustinian. Calvin would differ with him on the application of redemption with regard to the place of the sacramental system. But divine election is nevertheless the ultimate determining factor for Thomas. So, while calling Thomas a “Calvinist” would be anachronistic, Zrim is not too far from the mark. The connection between the two is close enough that no less a Roman Catholic scholar than John Patrick Donnelly (SJ) has called Calvinism the perfecting of Thomism.
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So is your position that there is no duty towards the invisible church, but only to your particular expression of the visible church?
Extending your logic, presumably these won’t count if they comprise churches that differ on paedo communion (administration of the sacraments).
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It’s equally ironic that denominations that agree on the same sets of confessions prove to be so fissiparous.
We all live in glass houses this side of the eschaton.
p.s The CtC podcast would also fail the purity test – there was a reformed baptist on there the other day. 🙂
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Oh, come on! You have got to be kidding me! Adhering to the Apostle’s creed is just “one step up” from a “universal religion of reason”!?! And Jesus is just “one step up” from Buddah, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I suppose. A clear distillation of some of Scripture’s most important truths, versus a philosopher’s hypothesizing. No comparison.
Also, I’d like to not a rather fantastic leap in logic: “If Rome is a true church because it is supporting the Apostle’s Creed, then we are schismatics and should return to Rome.” The plain fact is, that if the Pope declared tomorrow that he would step down, disband the college of Cardinals, and place the entire Roman Catholic church under the PCA, the OPC would not feel obligated to join as well. We do not believe that denominations are schismatic. Thus, to see the Roman Catholic church as an expression of the true church is not to believe it is right on all points, or to obligate onesself to rejoin it.
None of this is to say I believe the RCC is a “true church”, or exhonorate Keller, about whom I know virtually nothing. I just think any criticism should be in the form of sound arguments, rather than acrobatic logical leaps.
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DGH,
Thank you for your succinct and clarifying response to my questions. I am new (brand new, as in the last six months) Presbyterian. This change has come after prayerful and rigorous grappling with the Westminster Standards. I am certain that you are far more versed in the Presbyterian ecclesiology than I am. I find it hard to disagree with your response, especially to my fourth question. I believe that the local church is the Christ ordained instrument of the ministry of the gospel. However, due to my newness as a Presbyterian, and my background in an unafilliated mainline evangelical church, I am not familiar with the eccumenical functions of the respective Presbyterian denominations.
What I do not understand though is the tongue-in-cheek rhetoric that many long-time Presbyterians have in these kind of issues. I am ready to admit my ignorance to much of this tradition. My first reading of this, and some of the responses is that those who don’t “get it” are treated with scornful disdain. To me this muddies the issues because those of us who don’t get it are immedeatly subject to an emotional response that makes it hard to receive what might actually be helpful and necessary criticism of GC. Maybe if a more conciliatory, and explanatory tone had been taken from the get-go, it would be much easier for those of us who are eager to seek out answers to these vastly important issues to come to an understanding of what you and others of similar convictions have to offer those of us who are new to the Reformed faith.
I certainly am not seeking to jump from one club to another and malign those brothers who aren’t a part of my own club. Presbyterians have so much to offer the body of Christ, but that can all be impaired if the truth isn’t spoken clearly and in love. I would urge you to stop preaching to the choir and engage young men such as myself who seek to honor Christ and take up the cause of the gospel in our generation, and must wade through so many conflicting voices to understand and act upon the truth.
Respectfully,
Jed Paschall
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Jed, I think the nature of blogging is different from writing encyclopedia articles. It seems like the medium that comes closest for me to engaging young people like yourself, which this seemed to do. I’m not doing Facebook.
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Chris E., maybe we are working with different conceptions of the invisible church. My impression is that I commune with the invisible church — which is the elect, living and dead, every Sunday morning when I enter the assembly and meet with my and their Lord (Heb. 12). You seem to be equating the invisible church with interdenominational or inter-congregational gatherings. To speak of Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists together is to enter the realm of the visible church.
I sure hope you’re not equating the invisible church with the parachurch. That surely stacks the deck in favor of the Gospel Coalition.
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Watch this act of charity. I’d say Frame does not “believe” in skits. He merely allows for them.
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Andrew, if Rome folded into the PCA, wouldn’t the merged communion be The New York Catholic Church?
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You’ve got a big heart
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Hey, I thought this was anonymous! Enjoying the site.
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Right, crawford.galbraith@gmail.com
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That’s because Jesus is in it.
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LOL!
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This statement by dgh should be a blurb on Frame’s upcoming festschrift.
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