The Church, The Gospel and V-Day

Written by Michael R. Walker

Tuesday, 14 February 2006 00:00

Becce Bettridge, the Director of the Network of Presbyterian Women in Leadership, a Ministry of PFR, joins me in this post.

Well, we’re at a loss for words. What can you say when you realize that if a person looking for Jesus happened upon the homepage of the website of the Presbyterian Church yesterday (pcusa.org), he or she would have been encouraged instead to host a “Vagina Day” event and celebrate the performance of the “Vagina Monologues”? Such would-be spiritual seekers are directed by our denomination’s site to resources to help them “get involved” in the fight to stop violence against women by purchasing t-shirts that say “Vagina Warrior” and “Value Your Vagina.” You can also sign up for “V-mail” (i.e. Vagina Mail), to be kept up-to-date on events related to the worldwide campaign to spread “V-Day” through the efforts of the always provocative and ever so randy Eve Ensler.

Some evangelicals undoubtedly see the Vagina Monologues as the quintessential embodiment of contemporary paganism. Despite parts of the play where women literally confess to idolatrous worship of the female genitalia and scenes that celebrate lesbian pediastry, this really is just run of the mill paganism we’re dealing with in this case. And it’s paganism that certainly isn’t bereft of signs of God’s grace. Romans 8:19 tells us that all of creation groans for redemption, “waiting in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.” V-Day began as a movement intending to embrace and celebrate all women and girls and determined to end violence against females everywhere. On the first V-Day Eve Ensler insisted that, “Women should not have to spend their lives surviving or fearing violence against them.” Who among the baptized could take issue with this sentiment? It should come as no surprise to brothers and sisters of the Second Adam that wayward children of Eve would yearn for a share in the freedom and glory of the children of God. Neither should it surprise us that such true and honorable desires are mixed with and overwhelmed by the bondage and decay that characterizes all worldly ideologies. None of these insights are particularly newsworthy. In fact, this entire paragraph seems like an exercise in stating the obvious. What is news of the worst kind, we’re afraid, is that some spiritual leaders would call disciples of Christ into an uncritical endorsement and embrace of altogether ordinary worldliness.

That the church cares about the liberation and empowerment of women isn’t particularly laudable. It’s what we ought to expect of the bride of Christ, washed in baptismal waters that relativize the significance of identities like Jew, Greek, slave, free, male or female. We also ought to expect our liberative desires and initiatives to bear witting witness to the whole gospel that is the only hope for the whole world. Instead we find some denominational staffers clinging to and celebrating partial truths found among unwitting witnesses yearning unknowingly for the redemption found in Christ alone.

Why is this? Have we like the cosmopolitan Corinthian Christians forgotten the glorious nature of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Perhaps we need to listen again to some of Paul’s words to that church found in 2^nd Corinthians: “For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!” (2 Cor 3:10-11) Like Esau we seem all too willing to sell our birthright in order to satiate immediate felt needs that have become all consuming. What after all is the glory of the whole Gospel compared to a fleeting moment of transitory relevance?

But it’s unfair to single out the Presbyterian Church or even mainline churches in general. The uncritical embrace of worldliness knows no ecclesial prejudice. It is found in evangelical as well as mainline quarters. Mainline activists celebrate festivals of the secular left while some conservative evangelicals equate American foreign policy with the invisible hand of the living God. A pox on all our houses. We can do better, we must do better. God expects and deserves it and the world desperately needs it.

As we’ve traveled the country and had the privilege to meet and work with some inspiring disciples of Christ, we’ve become more and more convinced that the mission of the church is one that requires both an identity that is profoundly distinct from the world and an uncompromising engagement of the world in all its brokenness. Among those who have made significant impressions on our souls include a friend involved in Evangelicals for Social Action; some who work with Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship and the Outreach Foundation, and others who work with International Justice Mission. What we’ve found inspiring in them is their uncompromising commitment to the Gospel of Christ, which leads to an unswerving desire to faithfully follow Jesus amidst the poor and the marginalized. Anything less than this is old news, not good news.

The Notebook

Calvin quotes

Here are a few quotes from Calvin's Institutes that I selected for inclusion in a church magazine to reflect the basic posture of Calvin's piety, oriented as it is toward magnifying the glory of God and subordinating self-concern. Unfortunately these don't convey the Christological centered-ness of his piety, but they convey where Christ leads us by the Spirit:

"We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory."

"We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God's: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God's: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal."

"We ought to we seek not the things that are ours but those which are of the Lord's will and will serve to advance his glory. This is also evidence of great progress: that, almost forgetful of ourselves, surely subordinating our self-concern, we try faithfully to devote our zeal to God and his commandments. For when Scripture bids us leave off self-concern, it not only erases from our minds the yearning to possess, the desire for power, and the favor of men, but it also uproots ambition and all craving for human glory and other more secret plagues. Accordingly, the Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life. In this way, as he will refer all he has to God's decision and judgment, so will he refer his whole intention of mind scrupulously to Him. For he who has learned to look to God in all things that he must do, at the same time avoids all vain thoughts. This, then, is that denial of self which Christ enjoins with such great earnestness upon his disciples at the outset of their service."

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

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