Old Life

Seeking a Better Country is a readable and lively survey of American Presbyterianism since its founding in 1706. Its aim is not to celebrate but to understand how Presbyterians formed one of the largest and most influential denominations in the United States, and those historical developments that led to their decline.

(From NTJ, 39 Alexander Hall, July 1998)

While the principle is subject to abuse, we would affirm the idea that communities of faith, like individuals, are products of their age. For example, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, founded in 1936, came about immediately following what historian Robert Handy has described as the great religious depression in American history. And in his multivolume twentieth century American religious history, Martin Marty locates the birth of the OPC squarely in the thick of the cacophonous “noise of the conflict.” Without a doubt the context of depression and conflict have markedly shaped the identity of that little denomination in its first sixty years.

This year the Presbyterian Church of America is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, and the occasion has prompted reflections on the state of the culture at its birth in 1973. One minister in the church has described that year in this way: “The PCA came into being as a separate entity at a very crucial time in the history of the church and world. The year 1973 was marked by great cultural transition from modernism to post-modernism, from liberalism and a reaction to it, to a younger generation that was searching for truth, to a time when evangelicals were becoming aware once again that the Gospel of Jesus Christ did have social implications and applications.”

Wow! The editors of the NTJ, like many of their contemporaries, may have been guilty of sleep-walking through most of the 1970s. Even so, we were taken aback by those claims. We do not believe that 1973 witnessed the decline of modernism, and we have argued elsewhere that modernism is alive and well and looking an awful lot like evangelicalism. (And please: the language of postmodernism surely did not come into vogue until fully a decade after the PCA’s birth).

Still, 1973 is a watershed year of sorts, as evidenced by these cultural milestones:
1. McDonald’s unveils the Egg McMuffin.
2. The NIV (New Testament) is published.
3. Construction begins on the Alaska pipeline.
4. Nixon fires special prosecutor Archibald Cox in his “Saturday Night Massacre.”
5. Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees becomes the American League’s first designated hitter.
6. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
7. Supreme Court hands down its Roe v. Wade decision.
8. The IBM Selectric typewriter becomes “self-correcting.”
9. Death claims Pearl Buck, Pablo Picasso, and Bruce Lee (hmm, perhaps modernism died after all).
10. The world’s first video game, “Pong,” debuts.

We leave for others the task of drawing any conclusions about PCA identity. But lest readers complain that we have unfairly listed the more unsavory aspects of a most forgettable year of a most miserable decade, we remind them that we deliberately excluded any reference to the uniforms of a certain Major League Baseball team from western Pennsylvania, a historic bastion of American Presbyterianism.

Some Reformed will concede agreement with Lutherans on justification.  But they draw the line at sanctification.  Supposedly, the Lutheran doctrine of salvation is so justification-centric that Lutheranism neglects the other benefits of salvation.

A piece by David P. Scaer, professor of systematic theology at Concordia, Ft. Wayne, suggests that Lutherans are closer to Reformed than many think.  He wrote:

Lutherans recognize that Christians as sinners are never immune to the Law’s moral demands and its threats against sin, but in the strictest sense these warnings do not belong to Christian sanctification, the life believers live in Christ and in which Christ lives in them. In Roman Catholic and some Protestant systems, the Gospel brings the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, but is replaced by the Law which sets down directives for Christian life and warns and threatens the Christian as Christian. Law, and not the Gospel, becomes God’s last and real word for the believer. So Christianity deteriorates into an implicit and eventually coarse legalism and abject moralism. Jesus faced this understanding of an ethically determined concept of sanctification among the Pharisees. Holiness was defined in terms of fulfilling ritual requirements. Sixteen centuries later for similar reasons, Luther raised his protest against medieval Catholicism. At times, the New Testament uses the words sanctify and sanctification of God’s entire activity of God in bringing about man’s salvation. More specifically it refers to the work of the Holy Spirit to bring people to salvation, to keep them in the true faith and finally to raise them from the dead and give them eternal life (Small Catechism). All these works are also performed by the Father and the Son. Since God is not morally neutral and does not choose to be holy, but He is holy, all His works necessarily share in His holiness. The connection between the Holy Spirit and sanctification is seen in the Latin for the Third Person of the Trinity, Spiritus Sanctus. The Spirit who is holy in Himself makes believers holy, sanctifies them, by working faith in Christ in them and He becomes the sources of all their good works.

Sanctification means that the Spirit permeates everything the Christian thinks, says and does. The Christian’s personal holiness is as much a monergistic activity of the Holy Spirit as is his justification and conversion. The Spirit who alone creates faith is no less active after conversion than He was before.