Obedience or Empty Quarrel | Regula Fidei-Rule of Faith-Rule of Faith

Obedience or Empty Quarrel

Written by Michael R. Walker

Monday, 17 July 2006 18:00

This morning I read portions of a sermon by Martin Niemoller, reflecting on Matthew 21:23-32. In that passage, Jesus tells a story about two sons, one who says “Yes” he will obey his father but then does not, and the other who says he will not obey, only later to repent and obey. The point Jesus was making?: it is better to truly obey after repenting of open defiance, than to disobey while pretending all along that you have never been in defiance of God’s will.

Niemoller's sermon was preached in Berlin in 1934, amidst the rise of Hitler. His words are no doubt partly autobiographical. He expounds on the danger of saying “yes” to the Lordship of Christ without then obeying him. Niemoller and others were forming the Confessing Church Movement, which rejected Nazism. Yet his sermon struck me not because he places himself and the resistance movement on the side of those who truly obey, but because he puts them in the place of those who have said “Yes” to the Lordship of Christ, those who now are in danger of honoring Christ with their lips but not with their lives.

He is worth quoting at length:

…We call, plead, and cry against the nay-sayers in our concern for the Church and for our people! Do we see the danger? Or do we not notice how increasingly our own will, our own passion, our own stubbornness sneaks into our confession? Do we not notice how our pious self-confidence puts itself in the place of faith? How our need for retaliation displaces love? How our human goals shove aside Christian hope? There is the danger: We confess, we say “Yes” to the Lordship of Christ, but we are rarely conscious of the fact that we only say “Yes” and in reality struggle all the more strongly for our own esteem, for our own thoughts, for our rights, for our program. Suddenly, we are standing where the high priests and elders stood together with those Jesus meant who said, ‘Lord, Yes!,’ and did not go!

It is the great temptation in this hour of darkness that we lose sight of the Lord Christ himself; that our confession sinks into a conflict of the yay-sayers and the nay-sayers while that which is of ultimate importance slips into the background and is forgotten!

…The yay-saying is not accomplished if at the same time it is true that ‘we did not go.’ The entire struggle for the Church then becomes an empty quarrel and a bitter murmuring, unless it is led by a congregation which stands in repentance and therefore acts out of faith and in obedience….In the suffering and struggle of these days, we do not have a truly good conscience until we have humbled ourselves before God with the confession of our own sin and guilt and received from his forgiveness the power of a new obedience which seeks only his will and command.

The struggle does not end there; suffering is not taken from us. Perhaps we must then struggle even harder, and perhaps then we must truly suffer for the first time. To obey the Lord Christ means to struggle and to suffer….Where repentance and faith is, there is the kingdom of heaven, there we have peace with God, there we can joyfully speak, ‘We rejoice in our sufferings’ (Rom. 5:3). So let us ask God for a repentant and obedient heart.

The mainline churches in the U.S., including the PC(USA), have been so captivated with the values and designs of the culture in which we find ourselves that we may be tempted to say the mainline churches have said “No, we will not go,” when called to follow in the way of Christ. And we mainline evangelicals have been quick to call the church back to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But woe to us who say “Yes” to the Lordship of Christ if we do so only with our lips and not with our lives. If so, Jesus said “the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Mt. 21).

We would do well to tremble in the face of this truth. Surely it is right to campaign against those who are campaigning against the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But if we are not ourselves following in the way of Christ – whether the matter be wealth and poverty, power, sex, or following Jesus into suffering – we only make the entire struggle for the Church into “an empty quarrel and a bitter murmuring.”

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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