Category Archive: Theology – Liturgical

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Frederick on Baptism

Last week, someone on a mailing list asked about The Confession of Elector Frederick III of the Palatinate (1577).  Schaff mentions it in The Creeds of Christendom as one of the minor German Reformed confessions.  It was the last will and testament of Elector Frederick III, the man who was responsible for having Ursinus and Olevianus write the Heidelberg Catechism, and Schaff says that “It may be regarded as an explanatory appendix to the Heidelberg Catechism” (I.563).

The only English edition is from 1577 and, of course, is not in print.  Nor is it available online yet.  Joel Garver tracked a copy down for me.  Here’s part of the section on the sacraments, including the whole section on baptism.  I’ve modernized the spelling and some of the punctuation, but for the most part I’ve left the capitalization (or lack thereof) the way it is in the original.

But to speak of the use of the Sacraments, we believe and confess that the holy Sacraments of the new Testament, as the holy Baptism and Supper of the Lord, were ordained of Christ himself to that end, that Christians should use them, hold them in great reverence, and not despise them, for that they are not only marks whereby we are known to be Christians, and of the open profession before God and man of the covenant and grace of God, but also especially & principally are true and assured tokens and witnesses of God’s grace towards us: for which cause when we shall have young children borne into this world we should not as some do suffer them to be 8, 9, or 10 years old, till they be of some reasonable discretion, and then first baptize them: But rather much more comfort ourselves with that which our Lord Christ said to his disciples, Mark 10, Let little children come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.  If then the kingdom of heaven belong unto young children (as it is undoubtedly true) why should we then doubt that they are also comprehended and concluded in the covenant which God made with Abraham and the believing fathers heretofore?  And for that cause we ought not by any means seclude or forclose them from the holy baptism.

Of the efficacy and working of the holy Baptism, we believe, that our children, seeing (as is before declared) that they be comprehended in the covenant, when they shall be baptized according to the article of our true, old and universal faith, and also afterwards be brought up in the same, they are also made partakers in the bloody death of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and all his benefits which he hath purchased unto us by his said death, in such sort that they not only receive the outward seal of the holy Sacrament, which is the elemental water upon their outward bodies, but likewise inwardly are baptized in their souls by Christ himself with his blood which was shed, and also through the working of the holy Ghost regenerated and born again to be new creatures.  For as the elemental water of the holy Sacrament in baptism is not Christ’s blood, nor the holy Ghost itself, so also the holy Ghost or blood of Christ is not in the sacrament of the elemental water.  And although the elemental water according to his property and nature can do no more than outwardly cleanse the body, and reacheth not so far as unto the soul, yet the blood of Christ cleanseth the soul inwardly to everlasting life.  And as the minister doth the one, so doth Christ the other, as Saint John the Baptist witnesseth in the third chapter of Saint Matthew’s Gospel: I baptize you with water to repentance or amendment of life, but he that cometh after me is stronger than I am, whose shoes I am not worthy to carry, he shall baptize you with the holy Ghost and with fire.  And like unto this is the saying of Saint Paul in the tenth Chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, that after the same sort the Israelites were baptized with the clouds and sea, as also they were fed with manna, and drank the water which proceeded out of the rock, etc.

And then, toward the end of the section on the Lord’s Supper:

And lastly if the communion of CHRIST and of all his gifts and benefits[,] righteousness and life everlasting, was not purchased unto us, than by his death on the cross, and otherwise cannot be obtained of us, but through true faith which the holy ghost worketh in our hearts, then it is certain that neither the use of the holy Sacraments nor yet any other inward or outward work ex opere operato, that is, by virtue of a work done: can make us partakers of Christ and his benefits.  But the holy Sacraments are godly tokens and seals, by which our faith is strengthened.  And they do direct and lead us to the only offering of Christ which hath been once made upon the cross for us.  And there cannot come unto us any such communion and fellowship with Christ when we only hear outwardly the visible word or promise of the Sacraments, as when inwardly we believe the word of the Gospel, which shall be heard and preached unto us.  And therefore although the visible signs may be abused by the ungodly and wicked to their condemnation, yet the invisible heavenly gifts and benefits which we apprehend only by our faith, must only be and remain proper to the faithful.

Helpful background for understanding the baptismal theology of the early Reformers, and of the Heidelberg Catechism in particular, in its historical context.

Anointing with Oil

Danny Hyde, the pastor of Oceanside United Reformed Church, has a helpful essay on the anointing with oil spoken of in James 5.  Unlike some in the Reformed tradition, he sees it as a continuing blessing for the church.  In this essay, he interacts helpfully with the views that this anointing is simply “medicinal” or that it was restricted to the early church, as well as with the current charismatic and Pentecostal uses of this passage.  Good stuff.

Hauerwas on Liturgy

Fence the Offering

There are those who argue that young children should be “fenced” from coming to the Lord’s Supper, especially because of the Scriptural warnings about judgment for those who eat and drink in an unworthy manner.

But why stop at the Supper? What about the rest of the service? If we’re going to keep kids from the Table because they might somehow incur God’s judgment, why not fence the offering too?

Liturgical Change

Wise words from James Jordan about changes in liturgy:

Truth does not take hold unless people see that the teacher lives sacrificially and lovingly with them. Just so, returning to powerful Scriptural worship is not going to happen as a result of reading essayletters or preaching alone. People will have confidence in making changes when they see that their leaders love them, and that their leaders live sacrificially among them (Theses on Worship, p. 46).

That’s the kind of thing pastors (like me) need to hear often and, all too often, learn slowly and usually by sad experience.

Becoming Bread, Shedding Wine

In 1 Corinthians 10:17, Paul says, “We, though many, are one bread, one body, because we all partake of that one bread.” The bread that we partake of is the body of Christ, and so we are one body. We become what we eat: one loaf of bread.

What about the wine? Jesus says that the cup “is my blood of the covenant which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matt. 26:28; Luke 22:20). The wine is blood which is shed. Wine has other significance as well, but because it is shed blood it has to do with Jesus’ suffering and death and therefore also with our suffering and death. As James Jordan says,

As the book of Revelation shows us, we overcome by being ready to suffer for Jesus’ sake. His blood enables us to be suffering kings, for he would be great in the Kingdom must be least of all” (From Bread to Wine, p. 17).

Thus when we eat the one bread, we become one bread, one body. But when we drink the wine, we are united to Christ as the suffering king, the one who sheds His blood for many, and so we also become kings who share in Christ’s sufferings, who shed our blood for others, and so win the victory with Christ.

Perhaps that’s why Paul speaks of his suffering (Phil. 2:17) and death (2 Tim. 4:6) as a libation, a pouring out of wine as an offering to God. His suffering and death for the sake of the church were part of His fellowship in Christ’s sufferings (Phil. 3:10) and a conformity to Christ’s life as part of the one loaf, the one body of Christ. What kind of body is that? A body which sheds blood as wine for others.

The Breaking of the Bread

In discussing the breaking of the bread in the Lord’s Supper and its relation to Jesus, James Jordan makes the following observations:

Jesus is formed as The Loaf at His baptism, the climax of human development up to this point in history. Then He is broken. Though no bone of His personal body was broken, we see the breaking of the bread in the fact that as Jesus died the veil of the Temple was rent (Matthew 27:50-51). The removal of the veil means that there is now full access to God, but the veil might simply have fallen. Its being ripped in half signifies the first half of the curse of the covenant, which is to be ripped in half and devoured by the birds and beasts (Genesis 15). Ripping bread in half has the same meaning. Both rippings speak of Jesus’ taking the curse on Himself for us — its first part, because He was not left to be eaten by birds. He died, but was not destroyed. His death is like that of believers, not like that of the wicked, who both die and are “destroyed” in hell. 

Perhaps more importantly, Jesus’ “body” was the body-politic of Himself and His disciples, which was build up starting after His baptism. Their abandonment of Him in the garden of Gethsemane was the rending of this body, the breaking of the loaf (From Bread to Wine, p. 17).

From Bread to Wine 2

In the first chapter of From Bread to Wine, James Jordan draws some interesting conclusions from the order in which Jesus administered the Supper. I won’t list them all here, but these ones particularly interested me.

First, Jordan notes that there are two rituals here, one with the bread during the supper and one with the cup after supper. This, says Jordan,

implies that all present should eat the bread before all are given the cup, which strikes against the practice of serving both elements, in sequence, to small groups one after another (as is the custom in most Anglican and Lutheran churches, for instance). This is important because part of the meaning of the rite is that the entire congregation is knit together into one loaf by eating the body of Christ, for the “body” is not only Jesus but also the Church (1 Corinthians 10:17; 11:29), and then the congregation as a whole is sacrificed by drinking the blood of Christ (p. 5).

This observation also militates against the practice of the Supper that I’ve seen in the Canadian Reformed Churches, where, say, a fifth of the congregation comes up to the Table at a time, sits around it, partakes of the Supper, and then returns to its place to make room for the next group. Jesus wants the whole congregation to partake the bread first and then the whole congregation to take the cup. The whole congregation is one body, not just the fifth of the congregation that happens to be gathered around the Table. It’s important to think about the ways in which our liturgical practices can obscure the meaning of the Supper.

Second, Jordan writes:

It is clear that Jesus did not identify the bread with His body or the wine with His blood until after He had passed the elements out of His hands into the hands of the disciples…. What this means is that the bread provides Jesus’ body, and the wine His blood, in the act of consumption. There is no hint of “consecrating” bread and wine before they are passed out, and this eliminates any kind of adoration of bread and wine as they sit on table or altar. It also means that any leftover bread and wine are nothing more than bread and wine. They only function to transmit Jesus’ body and blood during the course of their actual consumption. The Bible clearly teaches what is called a “receptionist” view of the Lord’s Supper (p. 5).

Later, he notes that the Supper is a meal which,

following the Lord’s example, should be enjoyed in a posture appropriate for a meal. In our culture, this normally means sitting, in a posture of relaxation. The covenant is a sign of peace between us and god, and the meaning of God’s giving us bread and wine is that we are seated with Him at His table. To receive the elements in a posture of penitence is to obscure its meaning. In Christian worship, the time for kneeling and penitence is at the beginning of the service, when sins are confessed and absolution is received. Then we stand for praise and to hear the word of our King, and are invited to “recline” at a meal (p. 6).

Good stuff.

From Bread to Wine 1

Recently, I started reading James Jordan‘s From Bread to Wine: Toward a More Biblical Liturgical Theology. Many books on liturgical theology focus on the structure and elements of the liturgy, which is great, but Jordan’s project is even broader in scope. He’s interested in seeing the connections between liturgy and the rest of life:

The fundamental thesis that underlies these studies is that Biblical rituals are not something strange or different from the pattern of human life, but that those rituals move through the same steps as human life and thus are designed to key us in to God’s ways, His paths in this world. Sin has distorted the rhythm of human life, but the rituals in the Bible help restore our rhythm by duplicating human life in a small, short, compact, and stylized way. Just as the Tabernacle is a small, or microcosmic, replica of the whole cosmos, so Biblical rituals are short, or microchronic, replicas of (macrochronic) human history and of human biography. Comparing Biblical rituals with Biblical history and Biblical biographies should provide us with a better vision of how we can live our lives under God’s guiding hand (p. 2).

Fascinating.

The thing that interests me most about this thesis is that Jordan doesn’t assume, for instance, that the Old Covenant sacrificial rituals are irrelevant to our lives today or that they were simply arbitrary or as if they were always just something weird, something unlike anything else in life. If anything, we’re the ones who are weird (Romans 1: all of us, by nature, because of sin, are crazy) and the rituals are normal and normalizing.

Even if one doesn’t end up convinced by everything Jordan says in working out this thesis, the thesis itself is worth a lot of meditation.

Sermons with an Address

On a mailing list I’m on, someone cited Charles Bridges on the pastoral ministry:

…so that sermons (like letters put into the post-office without a direction) are addressed to no one. No one owns them. No one feels any personal interest in their contents. Thus a minister under this deteriorating influence chiefly deals in general truths devoid of particular application – more in what is pleasing that what is direct and useful.

and asked for our reflections on this comment. Here are mine:

It seems to me that it’s possible to preach passages of Scripture as if our goal is to explain certain doctrines instead of to administer that passage to the congregation sitting in front of us.

An example: Suppose our text for Sunday includes 2 Thess. 2:13 (“We are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth….”).

It’s tempting to make that sermon a series of mini doctrinal lessons. First, we could talk about the obligation of thanksgiving. Then we could talk about the doctrine of God’s love (“beloved by the Lord”) .Then we could talk about the doctrine of election (“God … chose you”) — possibly making a swipe or two at the Arminians along the way — and the doctrine of sanctification (“through sanctification by the Spirit”) and the doctrine of faith (“belief in the truth”) and so forth.

Now what we might say in those doctrinal lessons might be orthodox and fully biblical. But I submit that in preaching that way we are doing what Brown warns against. More that that, I would say that instead of preaching this text, we’re simply trying to show how this text teaches certain doctrines. And the crucial matter here is that we’ve left out part of the text.

What part? The pronouns and the address. Paul doesn’t say, “Let me tell you now about the ethical duty of gratitude and the doctrines of God’s love, God’s election, sanctification, and faith.” Rather, he addresses a particular congregation and says certain things to them.

And that is our calling as pastors, it seems to me: not simply to work out doctrines and to show how this passage contributes to our theologies (as if our goal in preaching is to help the congregation develop a comprehensive systematic theology) but rather to tell the congregation what Paul tells the Thessalonians.

That means that as pastors we ought to be saying to our congregations (i.e., to the real people sitting in front of us as we preach): “I am bound to thank God for you always, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth….”

We may not simply present doctrinal statements. We must rather tell the congregation that they are “brothers beloved by the Lord.” We need to tell them, “God chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.”

Our goal as pastors must be that every member of the congregation knows that we, as pastors, are thankful for them, that they are brothers, that God loves them, that God chose them for salvation (instead of destruction: see the context of 2 Thess. 2:13), that God has sanctified them by the Spirit, and so forth — and that they therefore live with the kind of confidence and assurance that Paul wants the Thessalonians to have in the face of all the opposition that surrounds them.

I would add that preaching sermons with an address on them (to use Bridges’ metaphor) would also include preaching to the particular congregation we’re addressing in its particular circumstances, so that a particular sermon may not be immediately and directly transferable to another congregation (with its different circumstances) or even to another time. It’s not bad if our sermons, read some years later, sound a bit dated.

Leithart on Worship

Peter Leithart has been leading his Sunday School class through a series of reflections on Christian worship. The outlines are published on his blog and are well worth tracking down. (Well, actually, I think that everything on his blog is well worth reading.)

Here is his most recent offering on worship. Great stuff!

Church & Culture

Christianity is a distinct culture with its own vocabulary, grammar, and practices. Too often, when we try to speak to our culture, we merely adopt the culture of the moment rather than present the gospel to the culture.

Our time as preachers is better spent inculturating modern, late-twentieth-century Americans into that culture called church. When I walk into a class on introductory physics, I expect not to understand immediately most of the vocabulary, terminology, and concepts. Why should it be any different for modern Americans walking into a church?

This is why the concept of “user-friendly churches” often leads to churches getting used. There is no way I can crank the gospel down to the level where any American can walk in off the street and know what it is all about within 15 minutes. One can’t do that even with baseball!

The other day, someone emerged from Duke Chapel after my sermon and said, “I have never heard anything like that before. Where on earth did you get that?”

I replied, “Where on earth would you have heard this before? After all, this is a pagan, uninformed university environment. Where would you hear this? In the philosophy department? Watching Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood? No, to hear this, you’ve got to get dressed and come down here on a Sunday morning.”

It is a strange assumption for Americans to feel they already have the equipment necessary to comprehend the gospel without any modification of lifestyle, without any struggle — in short, without being born again.

The point is not to speak to the culture. The point is to change it. God’s appointed means of producing change is called “church”; and God’s typical way of producing church is called “preaching” — William Willimon, “This Culture Is Overrated,” Christianity Today 41.6 (May 19, 1997): 27, originally published in Leadership.

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