Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And I'm still Wood.
On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of
the church, and we'll talk about the definition, the form, and the
scope of the church and what we mean when we use that
in different contexts.
Before we get into the subject, just a brief bit of housekeeping.
Uh this is the end of the calendar year, almost the end
of twenty twenty three as we're recording this.
So Christmas is in a couple of weeks.
The church calendar just began a couple weeks ago with the advent
of Advent, because that's what that word means.
So we decide that next week we're going to be doing the
church calendar.
And this week we thought that before getting into the details of
the blessing of the calendar that the church has given us throughout
history, we should probably define what church means first.
So we are going to do that now and then next week
we'll have the calendar.
These will probably both be shorter episodes, kind of give you guys
a little bit of a break as we get into the Christmas
season. And we're going to be taking two weeks off uh because
the following week is going to be Kwanzaa where we would normally
record and I don't wrong Kwanzaa.
No, we're we we didn't want to uh we didn't want to
record during Christmas week and because when we record we pretty much
immediately began worrying about the following recording.
We're gonna take the next week off just so I can actually
we can both have a break kind of the week of Christmas.
So after next week, the following recording that we release will be
on the tenth of January.
So just give you a heads up, there'll be a a two
week break.
You can go back and listen to previous episodes if you feel
like there's good stuff back there.
Today as we're discussing church, I want to give you just a
very brief example in three
sentences that probably apply to virtually everyone listening.
You were baptized into the church, you joined a church, you attended
a church.
Now, for virtually everyone, all three of those senses are true.
All three of those senses, the direct object is the noun church.
And yet in each of those, church means something slightly different.
They're all fundamentally related, but they're all essentially different forms or different
levels or layers of forms of the same thing.
And so today we're going to be talking about the particular forms
of the church.
I want to say up front that this is not intended to
be a fiddly philosophical episode.
This isn't, we're trying not trying to make some sort of big-brained,
needless taxonomy of things.
The specific reason for tackling the different forms of church is that
when there are discussions among Christians
functionally you can only ever really talk about one of those at
a time.
So we'll talk about those distinctions in this episode.
But when you're talking about them, like when you're talking about the
big C church, you're not talking about it in the same context
as you're talking about you your local congregation or by your denomination,
which are kind of the the first, you know, the first is
the big C church, the second is a denomination or church body,
and then the third is your local congregation.
And we'll refer to those throughout this in places as first, second,
and third, just for the sake of clarity.
It's only really possible when you're in discussion to talk about one
of those or maybe two of them at once, but it's never
possible really to functionally talk about all three because there's there's not
a context where all three of those apply.
So we'll get into that.
And so I just the reason that this is important is that
a lot of people will try to set them against each other.
You know, particularly there's long in particularly in the American context been
a movement against organized church or organized religion, which is a new
term. It's something that's I think probably fundamentally American.
It certainly sounds American to sort of reject any form of joining
or partnership with others.
Yeah, it's it's interesting.
If you ever see videos of uh public events in Europe, you
know, maybe like a a concert or something, some sort of performance,
when crowds start clapping, European crowds in particular will very frequently rapidly
start clapping in unison, where they're they're claps will all con will
will all end up on the same beat.
So they're all clapping as one.
Americans never ever ever do that.
That's not that's fundamentally different than us.
We will d go different volumes, different rotations of the hands, different
loudness. Like it's we're gonna do our own thing when we're Americans.
It's very much a part of our spirit.
And it's it's different than most of Europe.
I don't know that that's necessarily always bad, but that spirit in
the context of church in general is not good.
We'll get into why that is.
So it's a lot of times when someone says one version of
the church, they're going to be doing it in rejection to the
other. And you're gonna say, I I don't want, you know, deeds,
not creeds.
I don't want anything that's come from an organized church.
I'm a non-denominational, independent, whatever church.
It's there's just one of us.
There's Pastor Jim in his King James Bible, and we believe what
it says, and we're all by ourselves doing our own thing, and
we're being faithful.
We're gonna make the case for why that causes problems and it's
not good for anyone.
But first we have to understand kind of what the broader context
is. So this is again is not, we're not trying to be
fiddly and philosophical.
We're trying to help make everyone able to understand and to communicate
clearly when we're talking about these things because if I say church
and I mean one thing and you're thinking of church in another
context, we're automatically going to talk past one another.
And that's it's needless.
it's frustrating and causes miscommunication and a a lot of times, you
know, arguments and hurt feelings when there's no need.
It's important to understand where we disagree and there's plenty of disagreement
among Christians for good reason, but when we not even using the
same words in the same way, we create a mess.
So the first one we're going to talk about is the capital
C church.
And fundamentally, what is meant by that in all times and all
places is all believers, the the bride of Christ, the body of
Christ. We are members of one body with Christ as our head.
That is the capital C church.
That is all saints living and dead.
We are all unified, all Christians who have the Holy Spirit are
members of that church.
And this is the reason, for example, that we as Lutherans in
particular, and I think most Protestants, Flatly refuse to acknowledge Rome's claims,
for example, in the West, that Rome is the Catholic Church, capital
C meaning universal or according to the whole.
When Rome says Catholic, it is It is saying we're the whole
thing. We're the capital C church.
And if you're outside of Rome, you are outside of the church.
And that was what the Reformation was fundamentally about.
Can you still be Christian without the Pope?
That was a lot of young ink was spilled and blood was
shed over that question, because
the argument was made, I obviously we believe correctly, that it is
possible to be Christian without being Roman Catholic.
They're not mutually exclusive.
We certainly recognize that there were many Christians in Rome before that
day and since that day, including today.
Even in the state that Rome is in today, we still gladly
and thankfully acknowledge that there are many Christians among them.
The only way that that works, as we talked in the Reformation
episode, is if there's something larger than the denominations, which is the
second sort of church that we're now talking about, where Rome is
one example the second, Lutheran is another, and you know, the the
Catholic answers boilerplate snark is that after the Reformation, there were 30,000
dominations, which is complete nonsense.
It's a lie.
But we do agree that it was bad for that fracture to
exist. The reason for the fracture would be was because of disagreement
over theology, over what scripture says.
And that is the reason at the second split.
And then at the third, you have the basic unit of Christian
life, which is the local congregation, which in some ways
to us as individuals matters the most because it's the one it's
the one that's immediate.
You know, the Capital C Church, the Eternal Church, the Bride of
Christ, you can't see it, you can't touch it, it doesn't have
a mailing address.
Denominations have mailing addresses.
They're men with names and addresses who are responsible for whatever those
denominations do.
So that's something that's concrete, but it's generally distant.
What is local is your actual congregation.
It's your family, it's your friends and your neighbors all gathering together
in one physical place around hopefully the Word and Sacrament of God.
That is where God comes among us in a particular way, akin
to, not identical to, but akin to what was found in temple
worship. Now, things have changed with with the advent of a new
covenant. I'm not making a that sort of claim, but the gathering
of the faithful Has always existed.
You know, wherever, throughout the Old Testament, whenever something special happened, they
built an altar.
They worshiped God right there and named the place.
And from then on, that place was considered holy and special and
had a name oriented around something godly.
When Christians gather together, that is the local gathering of the faithful.
And where that happens, it's participation in the first, it's participation in
the Capital C church.
Usually it's also a participation in the second.
So as we talk about this today, we're kind of trying to
figure out where the boundaries are between those and where one slides
into the other and what happens when you confuse them and sometimes
when they're frankly at odds with each other.
You know, one of the fundamental reasons for doing this episode is
not only to eliminate confusion, but frankly not to bury the lead,
but we are in a position, all of us today where many
of the second type of church, the other dominations, are departing the
faith in small ways and in big ways.
And as this happens, our local congregations are faced with a dire
and unprecedented question: what do we do?
If you're part of something bigger, and the bigger thing separates itself
by its false confession from the biggest thing, from the first church,
what do you as is the third form of the church?
what do you do?
How do we as in the third position remain faithful to the
first when the second's getting in the way?
So there's been a lot of ink spilled over the years, over
the centuries, about dealing with this stuff.
And thankfully as Lutherans, we have some of the best written theology
from past centuries addressing this.
But it's important to understand why these things emerge, why they're important,
and how we can preserve them faithfully.
On
the note of Lutheran theology written in the past on this particular
topic, I I will again take the opportunity to point out that
CPH needs to release many of their materials into the public domain
because these are resources that belong to the church and should be
available for any Christian to read.
These are not things that should be copyright encumbered, particularly given some
of them are written many years ago and really should not be
in copyright at all, but that is a separate issue we've covered
in another topic.
We will link to some of those in the show notes, so
unfortunately, you will have to purchase them because they are generally not
available publicly.
You may be able to find a PDF.
I don't know if those are available.
At any rate, I want to start by reading a couple of
paragraphs from Peeper, one of the dogmaticians of the LCMS, who does
a great job on this and basically every other issue that he
addresses in his three volume work on dogmatics.
The first is just a general
definition of what the Christian Church is.
The Christian Church consists of all those and only those who believe
in Christ.
Since, however, an anti-scriptural meaning is today given the words believe in
Christ. We must make our definition more specific and say The Christian
Church is composed of all those and only those in whom the
Holy Spirit has worked the faith that for the sake of Christ's
vicarious satisfaction their sins are forgiven.
And so that's the definition of that first level of church, capital
C church, it is composed of all believers throughout all time.
Those who lived before Christ's life on earth, death and resurrection, believed
in the Messiah who was to come.
Those of us living after that believe in the Messiah who has
come. It's always belief in Christ that makes one a member of
the church, and that faith is always a gift of the Holy
Spirit. It's not a work of man.
And then, second, a more extended definition of the Christian Church and
commentary on a couple other matters from Pieper.
In short, according to Lutheran teaching, it is faith in the gospel
which in every case establishes membership in the Christian Church both C
their uppercase.
To him who believes the gospel, membership in the Christian Church may
not be denied.
Of him who rejects the gospel, membership in the Christian Church may
not be asserted.
Excommunication pronounced against true believers does not deprive them of membership in
the church.
Also, those who in their ignorance believe false doctrines are members of
the church, whether they belong to an orthodox or heterodox church body,
if only they cling sincerely to God's grace in Christ.
Also, lack of baptism, if there was no opportunity to receive baptism,
does not deprive believers of membership in the Christian Church, because baptism
is not absolutely necessary, as was shown in the Locus di Baptismo,
the title or section on baptism.
And so here we have a more extended version of what it
means to be a member of that capital C church.
Again, you enter the church through faith.
It is belief in the gospel, which is to say Christ's vicarious
satisfaction for sin.
That is what makes one a member of Christ Church.
And you are a member of Christ Church by virtue of that
faith, not by virtue of membership in a synod or an overarching
church body, lowercase c or even a local congregation.
Now, it is good to be a member of those insofar as
they are teaching rightly.
But to be a member of Christ Church is to have faith.
That is a matter of God, that is not a matter of
men. Men do not get to declare whether you are a member
of the church or not a member of the church.
They can declare whether you are a member of a corporation or
not, but that is a different matter.
That is typically the form that the second level of church takes,
so you have a synod or you have Rome or you have
whatever the body happens to be in various traditions.
That is a different thing from the uppercase capital C Church.
Now, those second level bodies should be faithful, and insofar as they
are faithful, they are in fact parts of the uppercase C church.
But you, as an individual Christian, ultimately your membership in the church
is a membership in that uppercase C church.
Now, as we've mentioned already and will undoubtedly say a number of
additional times in this episode, you should still be a member of
a local congregation, and if possible, that local congregation should be a
member of a larger community of churches.
That's what it means to have that life together as Christians.
We are not to forsake the gathering together of the saints.
As a first order matter, that means don't forsake your local congregation
Now we have to add the caveat, and this is unfortunate, but
we have to do it today.
If you do not have any faithful local bodies, we are absolutely
not saying that you have to attend an unfaithful or a faithless
supposed church.
It may be that for a certain amount of time you will
have to have basically what is a home church.
Now is it fully a church in the sense of a traditional
congregation constituted of local believers.
Over time perhaps it could become that, but to start off no,
it's more of a Bible study.
Now, that is still fellowship with the saints, that is still important,
you can still study God's Word, but it is not that full
communion that you should have with a local congregation.
Because of the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves,
that sort of thing may be necessary if not today than maybe
in the not so distant future.
And that is again better than the alternative of simply being isolated
and not having that fellowship with other Christians.
It's not ideal, that's the point.
But sometimes the ideal is not an option.
Sometimes we must do the best that we can with what we
have been given in the era, in the time in which we
live. And house churches are not inappropriate.
Those were what we had in the early days of Christendom.
That is how things started in many of the Greek and Roman
areas. They started with house churches.
Over time they became more organized and became proper congregations, joined together
and formed synods, larger groups, larger church bodies, all still part of
that first sense of uppercase C church.
We may be in a similar situation today in having to rebuild
in the same way that they built originally.
There are two specific examples in the New Testament that come That
comes up frequently, usually in the context of baptism, but as we
made the case in the baptism episode, which is functionally a part
of this, is that the thief on the cross became a member
of the Capital C Church with his confession of his sins and
with his confession of Jesus Christ as his savior.
He was also on the cross, he was about to die, he
confessed. He became a Christian.
He was saved.
He was with all the saints of that day as Christ promised.
He never joined a denomination or a congregation.
He was never baptized.
The crucial element there as we made the case in the baptism
episode is that if by some miracle he had come down off
that cross, he would have done those things.
He would have gone and been baptized.
He would have joined with other local believers every Sabbath, you know,
every Sunday as things evolved.
He would have lived the Christian life that every Christian was also
leading. So it's an example that the second and third are not
absolutely necessary for the first.
However, despising the third, despising the local gathering of the saints is
condemned by scriptures, Corey just mentioned.
And the Ethiopian eunuch is another example.
He wasn't facing a death sentence, but he was from Ethiopia.
He was from a place that had
Jews, they had had the gospel, you know, for the from the
pre-incarnate Christ for a while.
But when he was convinced by the gospel and said, Why should
I not be baptized here?
He desired baptism, he received baptism, but then he went home to
Ethiopia, where probably not a lot of churches, at least not yet,
they grew.
And so he was in a position where
he was He was going to a place that did not have
a lot of believers.
He probably went back as an evangelist in part, you know, he
he didn't leave his vocation, but he now as a believer in
Jesus Christ had something new to share with people to explain to
them the scriptures that we already had have been fulfilled in this
man. And here's this wonderful, incredible news that all those prophecies were
fulfilled. And so And so
he would have certainly desired to gather with other believers by virtue
of making others around him Christian.
And I think this is a good example for us today that
he was going to a place where maybe there there weren't a
lot of believers.
Maybe in order for him to have a congregation locally, he might
have had to make it.
You know, again, there were Jews there.
There were some who had certainly had faith to that point, but
with the birth of Christ it became an inflection point for the
Jews. Were they going to recognize the Messiah who was promised, or
were they going to rebel against God, as they had done their
entire history.
Most continued to rebel.
Some became Christians.
Some continued in their belief in the Messiah and were known by
a new name as Christians, but it was the same faith.
They didn't switch faiths.
Their faith was fulfilled in the moment of that being delivered in
the body of Christ.
So he was blessed that that information was transmitted to him by
witnesses. But then he was going to a place where you know
the gathering of the of the faithful might have been, you know,
a long road to hoe.
It might have taken a while for there to be others.
And yet as we face similar circumstances, certainly in a day where
more and more the second order church bodies have gotten weaker and
weaker and more and more have apostatized, some of us are living
in the wilderness now.
And one of the points we want to make today is that
that is no excuse for despising the gathering of the faithful.
As Cory said, it may not be immediately possible for you.
But insofar as it depends on you, as much as you're able,
it is important to gather with others.
I want to go into a little more detail, just briefly, on
the issue of what it means to be in schism or to
be a schismatic, because this obviously is at least tangentially related to
the topic we are discussing.
It was already mentioned.
A short paragraph from Pieper on specifically this issue.
He's actually only he has only two paragraphs in his section in
his dogmatics on schism in this context of the church.
I'm just going to read the second one.
Such, however, as separate from a church body because it tenaciously clings
to false doctrine are unjustly called schismatics, separatists, etc.
This separation is commanded in Scripture Romans sixteen seventeen, and is the
only means of restoring and maintaining the true unity in the Christian
church. And so the reason this is important, this is something that
is vital to understand in this context, particularly for us today, but
throughout the entire history of the Church, Capital C
it is not those who dissent from false doctrine, or said another
way, it is not those who insist on right doctrine who are
schismatics? It is always those who insist on false doctrine or reject
right doctrine.
It doesn't matter if you are the only one speaking God's truth,
everyone else would then be schismatics.
You would be the only person not in schism, because when it
comes down to the issue of schism, it is with regard to
the uppercase C church, with regard to that first sense, the grand
umbrella over all things.
It is Christ Church, with which you agree or with which you
disagree, and that makes you a member or not a member.
If you disagree with the teachings of Christ Church, you are in
schism. It doesn't matter if you agree with every other person who
calls himself a Christian on earth, if all of you are wrong
and disagree with Scripture, you are in schism, and it can be
one man who stands up and speaks the truth.
That man is not in schism because he is speaking the truth
of Christ Church.
And so today, when we face all of these second level bodies
that are becoming apostate, or in many cases have been apostate for
years
recognize that if you dissent from the false teachings of those churches,
you are not in schism.
Because your duty as a Christian is to hear the voice of
the shepherd and listen to what he says, your duty is to
listen to God's word, to listen to Christ's word.
It does not matter what that second level church body says if
it is in conflict with Scripture.
Now, insofar as there are issues of adiaphora, something that is not
in fact binding on the Christian, because it is not in fact
something that is stated in God's Word.
in those we should bear with these second level bodies.
And so if you don't like the color of the candles that
are used in Advent, deal with it.
Ignore it.
They can be blue or purple or whatever they happen to be.
It should be one of those colors, but If you disagree with
something like that, let it slide.
That is something where you bear with others in Christian patience.
That is not something where you leave and say, Well, I'm going
to form my own church because I want the paramets to be
this color or I don't like this design of the stained glass.
That is not what it means.
That is not the matter here.
Those sorts of issues, those are atiaphora.
They're important in many cases, because it does matter how you decorate
the church.
We will get into a little bit more of that in next
week's episode on the church calendar, because some of these things are
for teaching, a preview of that episode.
But they're not things over which you split from the church.
The things over which you split from the church you must split
from a false church, because Scripture commands it, are false doctrine, false
teaching. First First and foremost, if they do not teach rightly on
the gospel.
Because to stay in a church that teaches falsely with regard to
the core matters of the truth of Christ, to God's matters, to
God's things, is to violate your own conscience.
And that is the problem here.
And so if you split because of that, you are not a
schismatic. You need to be comfortable with that.
Because we live in a time where again these church bodies are
teaching falsely, are becoming apostate, and it may be that you will
be forced out or have to leave.
That does not make you a schismatic.
That does not separate you from Christ or from his church.
It just separates you from a corporation And that hardly matters to
a Christian.
I
won't read the entire thing here, but I commend all of uh
1 Corinthians 12 to everyone.
Go read it.
I'm just going to read a couple verses, uh, disconnect a little
bit. For just as the body is one and has many members,
and all the members, and all the members of the body, though
many are one body, so it is with Christ, for in one
spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves
or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
This is clearly one of the many passages that deals with the
Capital C Church and with us being direct members
of it.
And crucially, this is a sort of spiritual connection that it doesn't
bypass the local congregation, but the local congregation is where It is
visible because the rest of that passage talks about the different gifts
that God gives to us
being practiced in our local congregation, in our lives with our neighbors.
That's crucial because Well because
this is where God has placed us and these the gifts that
were given as members of Christ's body, the church, are for the
benefit of our brothers in Christ and our neighbors.
And as Corey was saying, there's there come times where there's error
and sometimes it's small and sometimes it's great.
It if if if you live in a wasteland of Christianity, which
is increasingly much of the world, it may be that your local
congregation you can no longer say amen to many of the things
that are there.
Nevertheless, if that's still the closest to a faithful congregation in your
area, maybe you know that again, as Corey said, these are matters
of conscience.
There's no there's no script for how to deal with
with an environment where we see churches dying, the second and third
type of churches, where they are where their hearts are growing cold,
where men are becoming evil, even as they proclaim that they are
acting in the name of God the beginning of uh John sixteen
is something I quoted online earlier today.
Jesus after giving some end times prophecies says I have said all
these things to you to keep you from falling away.
They will put you out of the synagogues, indeed the hours coming
when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God,
and they will do these things because they have not known the
Father nor me.
But I've said these things to you, that when your hour comes
you may remember that I told them to you.
I think there are two crucial things going on there that don't
are necessarily the two that stand out.
The first is that whoever kills you will think he's serving God.
the men who will persecute believers in the church will do it
in the name of God in many times and places.
And we've seen that in the past, and we will continue to
see it in the future just as we see it right now.
Often the persecution of the church comes from within what calls itself
the church, which again is the distinction between the second, the first
and the third.
We believe as Lutherans that the persecution of the faithful that occurred
during the Reformation came from the second falsely embodying the first.
We believe that there were acts of that pope in that time
that were evil and it was necessary for Christians to separate themselves.
You know, initially, as we said in the Reformation episode, Luther didn't
want to separate, he just wanted them to behave.
It's like, hey, the Bible says this, and you're doing the other
thing. Let's do the thing the Bible says.
And when the response was, We're gonna kill you, you know, this
was John 16 being fulfilled, they threw him out and they tried
to have him murdered.
Well, okay.
The other thing that Jesus mentions here that I think we all
need to hear is that he says when their hour comes you
may remember that I told them to you.
He said these things so that when they're fulfilled we would remember.
He didn't say, I'm telling you these things and I'm gonna spare
you. Some of us will be sacrificed as an example for others.
Is that a good thing?
I mean it it might not feel like it at the time,
but
crucially this is within the context of the church.
This is the second church persecuting those who are members of the
first in the context of the third.
I hope this numbering scheme isn't confusing you.
All believers, capital C, when denominations and local congregations go after individual
members in ways that are ungodly, that is a fulfillment of Christ's
prophecy, of in particular of an end times prophecy.
This was certainly true in Jesus' day.
It was something that came to the believers in those synagogues as
they realized that being a faithful Jew meant ceasing to be a
Jew and being a Christian and living a Christian life.
You know, when you look at the extant populations in the territory
of Palestine, they are the oldest genetic links back to this day.
They are the people who have always lived there.
They ceased to be Jews in many cases.
They're still related by blood, if you go back far enough, but
not one of them would say I'm Jewish, because they're just they
became Christian and then they just stayed where they lived.
That's why we had so many Palestinian and Syrian Christians until fairly
recently, when they were rounded up and murdered by the evil people
in that part of the world.
This is something that's continuously happening in the church.
And that's part of why I think it's always important for Christians
to read those end times prophecies and to understand that there's always
an immediacy to them as well.
It's not simply judgment day is going to be next week.
It's that we should always be prepared to have an answer for
our faith because
if you are a part of the first, if you are a
member of Christ Body, the Capital C Church, there may well come
a day when you face isolation or persecution.
You know, there are many in history who have not, who have
had godly princes, they've had godly kingdoms.
Their entire lives were surrounded by other Christians being relatively faithful, you
know, certainly not perfect by any stretch, but compared to today, a
wonderland. What we face today, I think, is in many ways unprecedented,
where the second order churches, the denominations, are crumbling in almost all
cases. We see things happening today in the church where people who
are mostly mounting good defenses are still doing things like letting in
the Trojan horse.
They are receiving gifts from those who bear them ill will and
saying, Ah yes, I want to take this.
I'm gonna put this under the Christmas tree.
It's a nice present.
I wonder what's inside.
These traps that are being invited in, I'm thinking in particular guys
like Doug Wilson, who whatever else they've gotten correct, when they their
new big effort is to do some of the things that are
openly hostile to Christian belief, to historic belief, they're leaving themselves
open. they're creating a vulnerability, even among places that are trying to
be faithful.
And this is something that's very tricky for us in the in
the congregational and in the denominational context to figure out where do
you draw the line.
And I think one of the hardest things for all of us
is that
most men are not equipped to weigh these matters.
We're simply not equipped by ourselves to figure this stuff out.
And frankly, it's one of the reasons that the historic church has
given us things like creeds.
You know, the the apostles in the Nicene and also the Athanasian
creeds exist
specifically so that all preaching and teaching could be measured against them,
because every word of those creeds was designed to repudiate specific heresies
in those days.
Now the heresies were old, you know, maybe they came roaring back
in some cases, but the lies that Satan tells to believers are
uh they're not eternal, they're as old as Satan, but he's always
telling the same lies over and over because they keep working.
And so the beauty of the creeds is that brilliant and faithful
men put together something very simple that a child can memorize that
can be used as a benchmark to evaluate everything around it.
It's one of the reasons that for well, you know, almost 2,000
years, the vast majority of Christian churches have confessed at least one
of the creeds every Sunday.
It's crucial to say those words out loud in the collective context
of the third order congregation of the church as a benchmark.
Because whatever the pastor said during his sermon, if
the creed contradicts something that he said, even the Christian man in
the pews, who's not that engaged, he's not a theologian by any
stretch, if Pastor Jim said something that you hear and you're like,
that's this creed says the opposite of what that guy just said.
What's going on?
He may not be the man to articulate a defense for why
the pastor did something false, but he can ask the question, and
it's a question that's crucial in all times and all places.
Like these
because Satan's not creative, he's he's gonna keep doing stuff that keeps
working. These old forms that the church has given us, you know,
this is one of the debates that some modern, especially in the
American context Christians, say things like deeds, not creeds.
We've talked in past episodes about why the creeds are so important
The creeds are quotations from Scripture.
They're a distillation of the words of God Himself.
And they're put together in a way that is entirely consistent with
Scripture. And again, they were done specifically because men are gonna come
along and say things that are contrary to scripture.
When you can have something that's a condensed version of the entire
Christian faith that a child can memorize.
I know because I did it.
and even like kids, you know, average kids by ten years old
can all have easily learned both of the creeds.
When that is the case, when it's on your lips and it's
in your heart and it's in your mind, when you hear something
that sounds contrary to it, God is going to help you realize
it. And that is something that is missing when you try to
go off by yourself.
When you say, I don't want any denominational affiliation, I don't want
any of this other stuff, I'm just gonna do it by myself
and figure it out, and I got my Bible and I'm gonna
be okay.
Well, in some ways that's where Satan wants you, because you've been
separated from not only the other believers who can help to strengthen
your faith, but you've been separated historically from all the different ways
that the church has established protections for us.
And church in that context, it's almost splitting the s difference between
the first and second.
It kind of goes to some of the arguments that Rome made,
saying, no, we are the universal church.
I think that
Personally, I think that the appropriate Protestant view of the councils is
that the ones that produced faithful doctrine were Christian men with the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit and with sound reason who were gifted.
I don't think that those men needed any new special revelation to
come up with the specific things like the creeds that they issued
on behalf of the church because they were making arguments from scripture.
Any man can make an argument from scripture, and it may well
be true.
You don't have to be a genius, but it's important that scripture
and reason in that order are what is producing the thing.
Now you don't just go around making arguments for for the sake
of making arguments, but when there's a controversy, as as Corey was
saying, or when there's a clear error that must be repudiated.
Somebody's got to do it.
And thankfully, when you look at church history, almost all the errors
have already been made.
There's very rarely some new error.
We've talked in past episodes that there are a few new errors
prayers that are creeping in, the things that are assaulting creation itself,
assaulting the body, that are assaulting how we are made.
Are we made male and female?
Are we made a particular race?
Is there anything different about different types of people and did God
want to do that?
That's what Satan's attacking today on egalitarian grounds.
So it's not that there's never any opportunity for new discussion of
the assaults, but all Almost everything can be predicated on past arguments
because again, they the old lies work.
People keep gobbling and them up.
And so when we separate ourselves from the historic views of the
church, it's you're in uncharted waters.
you're literally off the map when you're like, I'm gonna go do
this by myself.
Because there is a map of that place, but if you say
I'm not gonna look at it, you're gonna be blind and you're
gonna fall into the traps that wiser, more faithful men were successfully
able to navigate.
And in the local congregation, w whatever your denomination, whatever your church
polity, it's important for you to recognize that you, as a member
of the Capital C church, as a member of the body of
Christ, you are a part of all of that, whether you like
it or not, whether you agree or disagree with Christians of the
past, if you're gonna reject the arguments that they made, you should
have a good reason for it.
Yeah, they weren't necessarily infallible, but if they said something like I
don't care about any of that, if It's you're separating yourself from
something that in all likelihood God put there for your protection.
You mentioned deeds, not creeds, and really that is at the opposite
end of the spectrum from some of the new heresies we see
arising in the church today because in reality that's just a new
catchphrase for an ancient heresy.
It's just works righteousness.
That's all deeds not creeds ultimately is, and that ties into the
episode that we did last week really.
It's in part this is one of the arguments to which Pieper
is responding, and that was referenced in one of the quotations I
read from Pieper earlier, implicitly and not explicitly, but
there are those who argue that Christ came to give us an
example, and that it is following his example that will bring us
back into communion with God and ultimately save us.
That's works righteousness, that is a heresy.
That is not Christian.
Believing that puts you outside the church.
And that is exactly what Deeds, not Creeds is.
Because saying deeds not creeds ultimately is saying I am saved by
the things I do, not by the things I believe.
And that's false.
You are saved by faith.
Faith is belief.
Again, to give the three levels of this, because this is an
important thing to understand, so it bears repeating.
There is notitia, which is to take notice of the fact that
is to recognize that it is said that Christ died and that
he died for these reasons.
There is a sensus, which is to assent to the fact that
Christ died and he died for these reasons, and then there is
fiducia, which is belief, that is trust.
That is what saves you.
That is salvific faith.
Again, that is the belief that Christ died for sinners, and that
you were a sinner, and that he in that death vicariously atoned
for your sins.
Yes, the fullness, of course, of his sacrifice is the incarnation life
and death.
But to speak in the shorthand, it is Christ crucified for sinners.
That is the gospel.
That is a belief.
That is not a deed, except on the part of Christ.
It's not one of your deeds.
Your deeds will not save you.
And so in fact it is
creeds and deeds because again a living faith will produce good works
and I do want to turn to the creeds briefly to make
another argument with regard to the uppercase C church for those who
are concerned about really the second level of these things.
What is it that we confess with regard to the church in
the creeds?
Well, in the apostles' creed, it's I believe in the holy Catholic
or Christian Church, depending on which term you use in your version,
and then there is I believe in the Nicene Creed, I believe
in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
If I were to hand you a coin and you look at
that coin, you're holding it in your hands, do you believe in
that coin?
The answer is no, because you don't believe in something you're holding
and can see.
You know the coin exists because you're holding it.
If I tell you that tomorrow I will give you a coin,
you can believe me or not believe me.
And so belief is not in something that you have and hold
necessarily. There's a distinction there between having and holding that coin and
having the promise of the coin, the belief that I will give
it to you.
Now in the case of Christ, it is the difference between those
in paradise no longer have belief that they will one day see
paradise because they're there.
We'll ignore for now the issue of how time works for an
eternal God and paradise and those things.
Set that aside for the moment.
But the distinction is between those who are still living here on
earth in time and those who are already in paradise, or if
you want to think of it that way, will be in paradise.
For those of us living here, it is a matter of belief
that We have belief in the promises of God.
We have belief in the things of Christ.
And that is the same thing we see here in the creeds.
When it says, I believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,
you are saying you believe in something that you cannot grasp with
your hands.
You cannot go and find a building and say this is the
building that contains the church.
Just as there is no throne currently on earth where you can
go and say, This is the throne of Christ, this is where
he sits, this is the exact physical location from which he reigns.
And so when you say in the creeds, when we confess as
Christians in the creeds that we believe in one holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church, what we are saying is we believe in this first
order uppercase C church.
We are not confessing belief in any second order synod or church
body, tradition or denomination.
Because those are things we can say, there it is, that's a
physical thing, I can see that.
And there are those are going to say, Well a corporation is
an abstraction.
No. Because a corporation you can go and physically grasp the documents
that constitute the thing.
You can go and look at the corporate headquarters.
You can go and shake hands with the corporate officers.
These are things that physically exist.
You don't believe in a synod.
You believe in the holy, Christian, and Apostolic Church.
You believe in the upper KC church.
That is what we confess in the creeds.
When we confess this in the creeds, we are not confessing that
we believe in any one earthly institution.
Rather, we are confessing that we believe in the Church of Christ.
We believe in the Christian Church.
We believe in the congregation of all saints throughout all time, and
we, by faith, are members of that very church, and that is
why we confess belief in it, because that is our church, because
that is Christ's church.
The reason that things like denominational organizations are so important for the
Christian life is not that by themselves they are
a particular body of faith, but that the collect collective wisdom and
strength of believers gathered together in greater numbers than you can amass
in a congregation is what is necessary for the perpetuation of the
faith. We see this going back to the very beginning.
The church rapidly expanded.
And as local congregations got bigger and bigger, more and more of
them spread and they banded together.
And from the earliest days in the New Testament, we see councils
forming
where the men and the bishops of the various churches in various
places came together to hammer out issues.
That is a clear acknowledgement that some form of organization beyond the
local congregation is fundamentally Christian.
Now, it's fundamentally Christian in the sense that it serves a Christian
end and not that it is by itself a mark of the
Christian church, as Corey was just saying.
So the reason that it's so important to have some form of
church body is that if you are a solo congregation, you're on
your own, you have a great pastor, you have great elders, when
the leadership ages out, dies, moves away, whatever happens, you want to
assume, you want to guarantee, you don't want to assume, you want
to be able to guarantee as best as possible that those beliefs
and that faithfulness will be perpetuated.
And it is very often the case that the local congregation simply
can't do that by itself.
You know, if you have say you have a congregation of a
hundred men, maybe once every twenty generations there would be a true
theologian that would emerge emerge in such a small place.
Even that, frankly, is is preposterous.
I there may be thirty theologians alive today.
They just in terms of being able to actually do solid faithful
work and not make a hash of things, it it's an incredibly
rare gift.
The benefit of having someone who understands the stakes is that pastors
shouldn't be doing anything new.
Pastors don't need to be doing new theology.
They need to know enough theology that they don't reinvent old heresies
because they didn't know any better.
Because it's really easy.
Like the old heresies make sense.
They didn't catch on because they were tricky, wacky, crazy lies, they
seemed plausible.
The heretics were generally smart guys who made seemingly good arguments.
They were false, they were falsifiable from scripture, but a naive listener
is usually going to gobble it up, some of them will.
And so, in the local context, like you're just congreg- your congregation
by itself cannot assume that it's going to be able to continue
generation after generation, to keep raising up faithful men who have the
gift and the ability to receive a call from God to preach
and teach and shepherd that flock.
You can assure that sort of thing by gathering together with other
similar believers.
And that's the reason for, you know, in the in the very
first century way why we had the church councils.
And on to this day, there are denominations.
Christians have always gathered together
more broadly than the local congregational context because you need the best
men from each congregation to come together and hammer things out.
You know, maybe the best guy in your congregation is gonna get
something wrong wrong when it comes up.
But when that guy is put in a room with 20 other
guys from the other congregations who are the best in theirs, when
the right arguments are made, you're your best guy, even if he
didn't get it by himself, when someone else articulates it, well, he's
like he's gonna say, Yeah, that's it.
That is what I believe.
And then he will be able to bring that back to your
congregation. If you lack the benefit of the more broad wisdom of
the gifts that God has given, again, you know, back to the
first Corinthians 12 passage, when you go read that, it talks about
the disparate gifts that God gives men.
You may be in a situation where there's no one who happens
to have the specific gift that your congregation needs to perpetuate itself
indefinitely? And that's okay.
Because those gifts are elsewhere.
God will send men from somewhere else to come to you if
that's what's needed.
When When we eschew the notion of any sort of joining together,
for one thing, we're not we're departing from all of Christian history.
It's simply not what Christians have done again until fairly recently.
it's not exclusively in Americanism, but it's pretty close to it.
The idea that you just have these crazy little solo groups that
don't listen to anybody else, it's bad, it's abnormal, and it's novel.
When we gather together, it's for the sake of helping each other.
You know, if and I think this is one of the it's
both a strength and a weakness of these earthly gatherings, these these
earthly denominations or synods or whatever they are, when you concentrate any
form of authority, even if it's only perceived authority, that yeah, I'm
gonna listen to that guy because he's good at it, it's going
to tend to naturally attract the sort of men who pursue that
kind of authority.
And that's exactly the wrong kind of man to be in those
positions. You don't want men who want glory.
You don't want men who want to be in charge.
You want men who understand the burden of leading others in Christ.
It's a tremendous burden to have someone listen to you because it's
one thing if you get something wrong and it's just your own
it's inside your head and it's your soul on the line.
When you speak to others and get them to listen to what
you say, you are now accountable to God for all those souls
too. That is why teachers face the stricter judgment, because they are
endangering with false teaching everyone who will listen to him, everyone within
nearshot, anyone who would be influenced by a teacher who teaches something
false, he's going to have to give an account for why he
lied to those people in God's name, which is incidentally prohibited by
the Ten Commandments.
Cursing in God's name, lying in God's name is telling lies about
what God says.
It's far worse than using foul language.
That's bad, but to lie about what God said is far more
damaging. Because it's not it's not as offensive to the ears if
the ears are not practiced to hear false teaching.
When you can pick up on false teaching, it becomes much more
offensive than someone who's just using very foul and blasphemous language against
God. The true blasphemy, the greatest blasphemy, is that which masquerades as
being Christian and leads people away from Christ because it just happens
and no one notices.
that's the most terrifying form of this thing, which is why every
congregation needs to focus on having men who are good to the
best of their ability at judging these things, but also banding together
with others and monitoring up and down the chain, making sure that
whatever sort of alliance or grouping that you have, the other men
in other places are being faithful and committed to scripture as you
are because heirs will always creep in.
It's constant.
In numerous places in scripture, and throughout all of history, we witness
this. Men will creep in and try to mislead people because that's
how Satan works.
He's not he doesn't care about the pagans.
He's like he's already destroying them.
What he despises is when there are Christians gathered together who are
speaking and teaching and living faithfully, that is the greater threat to
him. Because if you have true Christians who are going to be
the salt and light of the earth around them, they're going to
pollute his pagans.
They're going to turn his pagans into Christians by spreading the gospel.
And so if you destroy the place where the gospel is being
preserved, he can ensure that he can keep everybody.
He can get more souls for his kingdom in hell.
We must work together in in these synthetic groups, in these groups
that do not have a particular they're groups that don't necessarily have
God's sanction in that they were ordained by God, but we were
ordained to be participants in them for the sake of the Christian
church, if that makes sense.
So we we necessarily reject, for example, Rome's claims that it is
a top-down thing.
Nevertheless, that is not the same thing as rejecting hierarchy or authority.
Frankly, I think the Protestantism in general has far too little hierarchy
and far too little authority, which today is actually a blessing because
there are basically no good men who would be in those positions.
The men who are in the positions that should have greater authority
are already wicked.
So if they had more authority, they would be doing even more
damage. So in this moment, I'm thankful that they can't do more
harm than they're doing.
Nevertheless, that sort of creeping decay, sometimes it's from the top down,
and sometimes it's from the middle up, where the institution gets captured,
and then you replace the guy at the top.
And eventually that they're no more good men who can rise to
that level.
So So
the capture of the institution is in some ways, it's it shows
how important they are.
We've talked about this in the past as well.
if these organizations, if these, if the second-tier church in the third
tier, like the local congregation, if these things had no value to
us as Christians, Satan wouldn't care about destroying them.
So even if you know nothing else, if you see that Satan
is going after those things, it's a very good indication that there's
actually something that God was trying to do with that.
That's not the same thing as saying this is exactly what God
wants and is perfect, and you must submit it on under all
circumstances. But is saying that in general the gathering together of those
who have greater gifts of spiritual wisdom and teaching, that is something
that should be preserved and defended.
But it must also be kept in check because those are the
very places where Satan is going to try the very hardest to
sneak in the false doctrines that are going to cause everyone else
to uh to collapse.
And we see it happen over and over again.
So watchfulness is a part of being in a body.
There's no way around it.
And again, some men have these gifts and some men don't.
If you don't, you need as best you can to orient your
life and your and your belief around things that you know you
can trust, which is why you know scripture by itself is is
vital. Creeds are just another example of something that's vital.
We believe as Lutherans that the book of Concord is also something
that is essential for helping to understand a lot of these conversations.
We'll put a link in the show notes to a couple of
different parts of the Augsburg Confession and the Apology to it that
deals specifically with what is the church.
And I think it's a really interesting example of kind of the
three parts that we're talking about here because the fight that they
were having in the 16th century was that Rome was claiming to
be the first and the second church and the third.
They're claiming to be the whole shooting match.
And the Lutherans and the other reformers were necessarily saying, No, we
believe that we're still Christian, we're still part of the first, but
we do reject the second that you're holding up in Rome.
We're saying we don't believe that your authority is coming from God.
Nevertheless, it is important that we maintain continuity with the first, with
the Capital C church.
And so they there's a lot of good scriptural arguments laying out
the case for the
relationship of the first to the second.
What's conspicuous is that in those days the notion of the local
congregation being something radically different from the larger church body was pretty
much unthinkable.
Now there are obviously different denominations that were emerging, particularly things like,
you know, some of the Anabaptists that went completely off the rails,
doing things that were utterly utterly alien to the Christian faith into
all of Christian history.
However, when the Reformers were thinking about church denominations, they understood that
within a body, the individual congregations that made up the larger whole
were gonna be doing the same thing.
And yet today we don't even see that level of continuity.
You know, within even the Missouri Synod, you will have congregations that
are doing things that look for all the world like a concert.
And And you'll have others that look like a 16th century church
service. And they're claiming to be in communion together, and they're clearly
not. You know, one of the things that Lutherans talk about is
altar and pulpit fellowship, because as the Augsburg Confession discusses when talking
about the church, two of the marks of the church are the
proper preaching of the word and the proper administration of the sacrament.
That those are where the church is found, the true church.
Word and sacrament is the same as pulpit and altar, because the
altar is where the communion meal is found.
So today we have churches in in our own church body that
tear out the pulpits and they do away with the altars and
then pretend that they're in communion and unity with churches that are
still doing what Christians have done for a thousand years.
It's preposterous.
Roman Catholics are in the same boat.
You have the Novosordo masses that are just completely abominable in contrast
to the Latin mass congregations, which as Lutherans we would reject them
not doing in the vernacular, but at least they're trying to be
faithful to what they did in the past.
Given the choice between Novo Sordo and TLM, I would take the
Latin. Like you can learn Latin.
You can't you should not learn the evil that's being done in
some of those other parishes.
And so we're all facing similar problems of a disruption of unity
that should exist at the middle level, at the second level.
And so the in the article in the Apology and the Augsburg
Confession, when it discusses the church, it doesn't even talk about the
churches going, the individual churches, congregations, going in wild different directions, because
it was just it was inconceivable to them in that day.
As
another exhortation not to forsake local congregations when and where that is
possible, I want to point out that scripture presupposes the existence of
such local congregations, the existence of that third level of the church
from Matthew 18.
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault,
between you and him alone.
If he listens to you, you have gained your brother, but if
he does not listen, take one or two others along with you,
that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or
three witnesses.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church,
and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him
be to you as a heathen and a tax collector Father.
Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed
in heaven.
Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth
about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my
Father in heaven, for where two or three are gathered in my
name, there am I among them.
And so you can clearly see Scripture here the words of Christ
presuppose the existence of a church
to which you can appeal in the instance of a conflict.
If at all possible you should not forsake that local congregation, even
if there are heterodoxies or problems in that congregation, you should work
to correct those.
But do not go off on your own and just sit with
your Bible under a tree.
Yes, you can do that.
That's good study, but that's not church.
That's not the communion of the saints.
That's not what it means to be a Christian because Christian life
is lived out together with other Christians.
It is not just you, the Bible, and God.
It's you and other Christians.
That local congregation is incredibly important.
And so we do not want to have anyone listen to this
and think, oh, well, there are X, Y, and Z problems in
my local church, so I have to leave and start my own.
If those issues are egregious enough, then you've probably already left that
church quite frankly, but if this is the first episode to which
you're listening, unless those issues are so egregious that you cannot stay
in that body without violating your conscience, stay and try to improve
things. Try to correct your erring brothers.
Try to make that church a better church.
That may be the local congregation where God has placed you to
do some good.
Again, these are matters of wisdom and matters of conscience.
We cannot give you a hard and fast rule because there is
no hard and fast rule that applies to every situation.
Some things are left to human wisdom.
And again, this is one of the reasons that having that second
level is so important and why historically it has been a bulwark
against many problems in the church.
Because you had the ability to appeal to authority, to appeal to
a hierarchy, whether when there were problems in the local church.
To some degree we do not have that today, and certainly many
denominations in the US do not have it at all because you
just don't have that hierarchy in many traditions.
But given the realities of the situation in which we find ourselves,
there are going to be certain demands placed on Christians, particularly Christian
men, heads of households, and it is incumbent on you to do
the best you can with what God has given you, with the
wisdom He has given you, with the resources He has given you.
Because do bear in mind, you're not alone in this.
Even if you are in a situation where your local congregation is
becoming apostate, issues are creeping in, false teachings are creeping in, you're
still not alone.
We have the advantage of living Two thousand years after the birth,
death, and resurrection of Christ, we have a wealth of resources from
faithful Christians of the past.
We have other Christians.
We do have the advantage, it's an advantage and disadvantage, but we
do have the advantage of the internet.
We can communicate with other Christian men.
No your telegram chatroom or please don't use it, but your Discord
chat room, whatever it happens to be, that's not church, that's not
a local congregation, that is not the gathering together of the saints.
It can be edifying, it can be important, it can be Christian
fellowship, but it does not replace your local congregation.
It does not replace that third order of the church.
Do not think that that is an alternative to attending church or
an alternative to having a local congregation, an alternative to having a
local Bible study.
Yes, there are many good resources, many good Bible studies that you
can access online or via logos, whatever it happens to be, whatever
platform you're using.
But that is not the same as having that flesh and blood
fellowship with other Christians.
That is vitally important to the Christian life.
You need that.
You need that for accountability, and in the case of the congregation,
you need it for the Word and Sacrament.
Yes, again, you can study the Word by yourself or at a
home Bible study, whatever it happens to be, but part of how
the Word has always been proclaimed, part of the system God has
instituted, is that faithful pastors are to preach the Word publicly in
the assembled congregation of the saints.
That is a vitally important part of the Christian life.
But to give you some encouragement, I'm not going to read the
entire chapter.
In fact, multiple chapters, I recommend you go and read John 9,
10, ten and eleven, but I will read just a little bit
from John ten as an encouragement.
truly I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold
by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is
a thief and a robber, but he who enters by the door
is the shepherd of the sheep.
To him the gatekeeper opens, the sheep hear his voice, and he
calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them,
and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.
A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him,
for they do not know the voice of strangers.
And then again later in the same chapter, my sheep hear my
voice, and I know them, and they follow me, I give them
eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch
them out of my hand.
My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all,
and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's
hand. I and the Father are one.
two. This passage, these passages, give us the definition of a Christian.
A Christian is a sheep, a sheep who hears the voice of
the true shepherd, of the good shepherd, the voice of Christ.
That is the voice we hear in Scripture, because Scripture is the
true testimony about Christ, the true testimony about God and His plan,
the true testimony about God's intentions for us, His children.
And we hear the voice of the good shepherd, that is what
makes us Christians, that is what distinguishes the sheep from the goats,
the believer from the unbeliever.
And you will note, it says that the Good Shepherd calls the
sheep by name.
Christ knows the name of every single Christian.
This is the God who named the stars.
He can most certainly name and number the elect, those who are
Christians, those who believe.
He calls you by name, and you hear his voice because you
are a sheep, because you are a believer.
That is what makes you a Christian.
It's not participation in any particular corporation, any particular overarching
human entity.
You are a member of the church, you are a sheep, because
you hear the voice of the good shepherd.
And that is great news because as it says in the second
passage I read, Christ will lose none out of his hand.
And so you are a sheep, you hear his voice, he will
not lose you.
No matter what happens to the church bodies today, no matter what
happens to these various man made entities, and a lot of them
are indeed in dire straits.
Regardless of all that, the good shepherd remains, and he still knows
your name, he still calls you by name, and he will not
lose you from his hands.
And so that is excellent good news.
That is something always to bear in mind, no matter the conditions
of life and the church, lowercase c as we find it today.
I want to reiterate what Corey just said a minute ago about
doing the best that you can.
I I hope that in this brief time we've made the case
that the best is all three.
The first form of the church, the capital C, you basically get
for free if you're a Christian.
If you have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, if you are
among the among the elect, which if you're a Christian, then you
are. That is that's that's the free square.
The second and third, the the broader forms of the church and
then the immediate congregation are
vital. they're necessary to a properly functioning Christian society, but
they are not necessarily givens
in the Christian lives that some of us are facing.
And so the the best that you can do may be only
hopefully the best you can do as a faithful congregation.
Ideally, the best that you can do is a faithful congregation in
a faithful denomination.
If you are without one or both of those things, the best
that you can do should still be working towards figuring out how
to achieve the other two.
You know, and for most men, this is, you know, maybe it's
a long-term thing.
It's a thing that is above your pay grade.
It's not something you're able to do, you should still be
working with other men to try to figure out how to get
there. Because if everything were working, all these would be givens.
You know, I would I think that, you know, if I lived
in 1580, I would be able to attend, you know, if I
if I'm a German in 1580 at least, I would be able
to attend a church where these doctrines of these men were being
faithfully taught and practiced, and there was support from the prince, from
the community, from a broad swath of society.
That's a luxury that's been lost today.
And so in some cases, the best that we can do isn't
the best that could be.
But if that is where we are, we should still be doing
what we can to work towards it.
You know, if you were if you have a good congregation, if
you have a good congregation that's a part of a bad denomination,
you should be thinking about some sort of exit strategy.
Again, as Corey's talking about schism, it's not that you have introduced
error or you have introduced disagreement.
When a man introduces false doctrine that contradicts scripture, he is the
schismatic. He's the one who is separated from God.
And if the only Christian thing that you as a believer, as
a pastor, as a congregation can do in the third position to
maintain your status as a capital C
church member is to separate from the second party to separate from
your denomination, you should be willing to do that at some point.
Again, this is these things are always matters of wisdom.
There's timing, they're consciences, they're weakly informed consciences.
You're not always going to be able to do exactly what you
want, exactly when you want to do it.
This is never something for impetuous men.
But But
if you can see the writing on the wall, you should still
be thinking about the next steps.
Where do we go from here?
In your congregation, in your context, if you see airs coming down
the pike, if you think that you can tell that something is
going to go wrong, if you just have a bad feeling, start
talking to guys.
Ideally, you'd be able to fix your denomination.
Yeah, that's that is the best case is to say, hey, we're
not being faithful here.
Let's get back on track.
That should always be step one, two, and three.
Separation is never done lightly.
You know, I is I've as much crap as I'll give the
Declaration of Independence, where it talks about long trains of usurpations and
abuses, it's not wrong.
Men should put up with crap if it's better than the alternative.
For a time.
You want to fix the problem, but it's better to put up
with a thing you know than to go off into the wilderness
and face
other things that you know will go horribly wrong without the protections
of organization.
So
it's never desirable to split.
It's sometimes necessary.
And so when those moments come, make sure that you have been
talking to others and that you're in a position that you can
do it without losing track of what it was that that body
was originally formed for in the first place.
You know, every church body w however it was formed, they had
some good intent in their own minds.
You know, obviously we would have doctrinal disagreements, but they thought they
were doing something good when they did it, and then later on,
when it ceases to be faithful to the original intention, even if
perhaps the original intention necessarily painted the trajectory that they ended up
on, if something turns out to have betrayed its roots, if getting
back to its roots is the best way to approach things, you
should be willing to talk to others about doing that.
It should never be done lightly, but it must always be in
view of I'm at the local congregational level.
How can I be faithful to all the saints in time and
all the saints in eternity?
How can I be faithful to God?
How can I be one with them as part of the body
of Christ in preaching and teaching and confessing faithfully.
If it involves splitting from the second, if it involves condemning the
second, maybe condemnation is enough.
You know, we're in such a conflict-averse world today where men are
terrified to tell other men that they're wrong.
It's the worst thing anyone could imagine.
It's pathetic.
It may be that if you point out an error, people will
be so terrified of conflict, maybe they'll capitulate, which isn't ideal.
I mean it's probably not gonna happen.
But you as a matter of conscience are obligated to first condemn
the error that you see before you say, I'm out of here.
That's you can't just get mad and leave.
That's petulant.
It violates Matthew 18.
Where you see error, it must be publicly rebuked for the benefit
of all.
Because again, most people don't don't have the aptitude for this stuff.
And maybe most of you don't have the aptitude, you probably don't
just statistically, that's fine.
We're not saying you must all be individual little popes judging all
this stuff.
You can gather together and you can among yourselves recognize who are
the faithful Christian men who have their heads on straight, who have
faithfulness to God in their hearts and minds, who can, if not
be leaders, at least be voices that will engage elsewhere to figure
out where does your local congregation go from wherever you are to
wherever you think you need to be.
When things go wrong in the world, it's not an excuse for
us to just give up and say I'm done.
I I'm fed up.
I'm I'm not doing this this anymore.
That's not Christian.
that's again, that's what Job's wife said to him.
Why don't you just curse God and die?
No, that's not what believers do.
That's not what Christians do.
You belong to God.
Your congregation, insofar as everyone who is there is a Christian, belongs
to God.
Those are his sheep.
And his sheep deserve to have a shepherd, whom he will send
to guard them.
And you must actively be a participant in that.
It's to whatever extent those things are miraculous.
We don't see the miracle part.
We see the functional part.
We see men in places doing things good or ill, and we
have to judge that based on scripture.
As we work through these things, it's it's just vital not to
give up, not to say, well, I don't think that you know
the second level's work and I'm done.
I'm just gonna be by myself.
You can't do that.
If you can straighten out the second level through the third level,
that's great.
You should always be focused on the first.
You should always be focused on capital C church because that is
your eternal soul, but is not your daily life.
The participation that we have with that is spiritual in a way
that is very different in form than what we have at the
local congregational level.
So as you're interacting with other Christians in your neighborhood, in your
community, with your own family, that is where your actual Christian life
is being led.
And that's what you have to keep straight.
So to the best of your ability, be faithful to God, be
faithful to scripture, be faithful to the creeds, hopefully you can be
faithful to a confession that itself is faithful, and you can use
those things to order all of your activities at the individual level,
at the family level, at the congregational level.
And if that means reforming or rebuilding or forming anew the second
level churches, the denominations, such that they will continue to preserve that
which we know is faithful to God, then that is where we
should be spending our time.
We do the best that we can, and we're always working towards
what God wants because this is none of this is about our
egos or about winning arguments.
It's about making sure that we can pass on the faith to
future generations.
This stuff is not just about us in you know, the inheritance
that we've gotten from past generations isn't shambles because many of them
just didn't care.
They paid lip service to this stuff, easy even as they were
burning down the very institutions that had been erected by prior generations
to them to preserve them.
When they got a hold of them, they've turned them inside out
and turned them into things that are destroying what would have been
our future.
So
either we put out the fire or we move down the road,
we gotta do something.
Because what we're inheriting is a disaster.
And it's not okay to just walk away.
It's not okay to accept it.
We have to fight it.
We have to fix it.
And we have to preserve and keep something, even if it means
building anew.
Because faithfulness to God means making sure that the future generations after
us can have something better than what we have been given.
I think that's a today that is a universal statement.
In past generations, perhaps it wouldn't have.
Typically, you would hope that you wouldn't be messing with anything.
You could just pass on what you would inherited.
When you've inherited something that's in shambles, you gotta fix it up
before you pass it on.
And so, as we're working through that, as in as Christians in
our own local congregations, it's a lot of hard work.
But just remember that when things are going wrong, in in an
ironic way, that's a good sign.
If Satan is messing with your church body or with your congregation,
it means that there's something that Satan fears.
Focus on the thing that was good there and try to get
that back.
Try to do more of what Satan fears.
Don't do the things that he loves.
He tells us that too.
If it's in accord with the world, which is if you go
back and read John 15 before John 16, the passage I read,
it talks about that the world will love you if you do
what Satan wants from you.
When the world is coming after you, it means you're doing the
the things that are actually beneficial to the kingdom of God, to
obeying God, and to
ruining Satan's day.
These edifices that we have inherited that are in bad shape, we
gotta shore them up.
We got to give the future something that will preserve their faith,
even if they're dumb or lazy.
If you build a big enough and strong enough structure, it can
coast for a little while.
I mean that's that's no excuse.
Ideally the best thing is for it to be shoring up future
generations of men to preserve it, so that we would have more
men who are competent than we have today.
That should be the goal.
But when you build up a strong foundation of organization and faithful
confession, even in the very worst case, it would still preserve itself
for a few generations if men just said the words.
That's we know that that will work.
And therefore how much more important is it for us to do
better to say, look, let's do more than just mouth the words,
let's create families and communities and congregations that are gonna build this
stuff up and preserve it.
So that if the world is still around in 100, 200 years,
churches will be in better shape.
On the current trajectory, there won't be any.
Christianity is going to go extinct in 100 years.
On the current trajectory, I don't think it's going to happen.
God won't permit it.
But we today are part of making sure that that doesn't happen.
Not because we can do it by ourselves.
In obedience to God, we are members of the body of Christ,
with him as the head.
And when we obey what the head says and we act as
the hands and the lips and the instruments of God's will in
these places, we're going to be preserving the sort of teaching that
he wants to see.
And that benefits you, your family, your community, and everyone around you.
When we build something good, people are going to see it and
say, I want to be a part of that.
And that is one of the best ways to spread the gospel
simply by being a place that is in opposition to the terrible
world around
you.
As we've been going over this topic and particularly with regard to
that second level, it brought to mind a quote variously attributed Tradition
is Nishtian Betung de Asha Zundivitaba des Foyas
translated into English, tradition is not the worship of ashes, rather it
is the passing on of fire.
And I want to make certain that we were entirely clear in
this episode that while it is true that it is that first
level of the church, the uppercase C church that is most important,
the others are also vitally important.
We've gone over repeatedly very clearly why the third level is important,
and Wo just mentioned why the second level is important, but I
want to emphasize that.
It is vitally important to pass forward to future generations, Christian traditions,
Christian institutions.
Because if you do not do that, the odds that future generations
will be Christian, or at the very least remain Christian, fall off
precipitously. You will wind up with apostate grandchildren if you do not
pass these things forward.
Tradition is by and large good, tradition is something that is passed
forward to future generations
to maintain your culture, to maintain your way of life, to maintain
the faith.
These are things that we pass to our children and then to
our grandchildren, our great grandchildren So that they can build on the
foundation that we inherited and pass forward to them.
Because ideally, that is what each generation is supposed to do.
Pass forward the good that was passed to it by the previous
generations, and also whatever additions, good additions have been built by that
generation, you are supposed to leave a world that is better for
your children than the one that was left to you by your
parents. We live in a time where we are going to have
to rebuild many of these institutions because they have been left to
decay or deliberately torn down by previous generations.
We've gone over that in previous episodes.
That is the unfortunate reality.
But we are not making the point that these are unnecessary or
harmful things.
We are not saying that the organization, the higher level organization, the
hierarchical organization of congregations into larger bodies ultimately all part
of the Capital C Church.
We're not saying that's bad.
That is a good thing.
We need that.
As human beings, we were designed to live in hierarchy.
Everything in the universe is hierarchical.
That is how God designed it.
God, of course, sitting at the apex of it.
But in all things there is hierarchy, in all things there is
order, and we should wish to maintain that, to carry it forward,
to pass it on to future generations.
Yes, we can do only the best that we can with what
we have been given, and that is what God demands of us.
He is not demanding of us the impossible.
We can do only what is possible with what we have been
given in the time in which we are lived.
So don't despair because it looks like the odds are insurmountable.
They've been insurmountable before and God has carried through his church.
Just take every day as it comes.
We've read many times that the trouble is sufficient for the day.
You don't need to look for more trouble.
You don't need to worry about tomorrow.
That's not what Christians do.
You trust in God and you do the work in front of
you. As a father that is instructing your children and your wife,
your servants, if you have them, to use the wording of the
catechisms. It is to be the head of the household, to lead
as you are supposed to.
If you're the wife that is to submit to your husband, and
also to help him work out his faith in fear and trembling,
that is one of the duties of a faithful wife.
Not to usurping the headship of your husband, but helping him be
the head of the household as he should be, and if your
children your duty, of course, is to submit to and honor your
parents. This is all hierarchy, this is all order.
We know how all of these things work.
Our duty as Christians is to do the work that has been
set before us by God as best we can with the gifts
that He has given us.
And we are to do this in joy.
Again, not necessarily happiness at all times, because happiness is a different
thing. Yes, find happiness in the things that God has given you.
But ultimately is a matter of joy.
It is that expectation, the looking forward to the fulfillment of things,
the promises of God.
It is belief in Christ, because his word has never failed and
never will.
And so I'll close out this episode with a brief reading from
the Epistle of James.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various
kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness,
and let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect
and complete, lacking in nothing.