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Category Archive: Theology - Ecclesiology

Church as public assembly - October 29, 2007
In his sociological history of Christian worship, Martin Stringer examines the process of "Christianization" in the early church as a process of Christian colonization of space. Among other things, he notes that "Christian architecture differed in a number of significant...

Irenaeus and Apostolic Succession - September 20, 2007
Irenaeus is cited as one of the early proponents of apostolic succession through episcopal ordination. Only bishops who could reconstruct a line back to the apostles could claim apostolic authority: "With the succession of the episcopate they received the assured...

Bible and Episcopacy - September 20, 2007
H. W. Montefiore, one-time vice-principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, and a priest in the church of England, argues that the episcopacy is of the plene esse of the church. Of those who claim it is if the esse, he writes,...

Hugeness - August 29, 2007
Jason Zengerle has an interesting piece in the TNR on evangelical conversions to Orthodoxy. At the end of the article, he quotes Jordan DeRenzo, who converted to Orthodoxy when her Baptist pastor, Wilbur Ellsworth, converted. She says: "Coming to the...

Enjoyment in God - June 25, 2007
Wilken summarizes Augustine's social vision of perfection this way: "This peace for which the city of God yearns is a 'perfectly ordered and harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God,' a peace of 'enjoying one another in God.' Notice that...

Ecclesiology of perfection - June 25, 2007
When Plato thought about politics, he thought about an ideal city (at least in the Republic). Not Augustine. Augustine recognized that Plato had portrayed "what kind of city ought there to be." But Augustine was after something different. He presented...

Exhortation, Fourth Sunday of Trinity - June 24, 2007
Over the next couple of years, Trinity will go through a significant transition, as I phase out of some responsibilities at Trinity to take on new responsibilities with the NSA graduate program. I will not be leaving Trinity, but over...

Church as New Creation - February 14, 2007
In Ephesians 4, Paul describes the sevenfold unity of the church. The numerical connection with Genesis 1-2 already indicates that the church is the new creation, formed by the word of God and the "seven Spirits" into a united cosmos....

Spouse and Kingdom, revisited - January 26, 2007
In response to my earlier post on "Spouse and Kingdom," Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio writes, "it strikes me that the WCF's dualism in describing the Church reflects the typical Western dualism that was congealing during the 17th century....

Spouse and Kingdom - January 24, 2007
The rhetorical and metaphorical shift between Westminster Confession 25.1 and 25.2 is dramatic. The invisible church is described in terms of their intimacy with Christ and with one another: They are gathered "into one" under "Christ the Head; the invisible...

Plebs in the church - December 22, 2006
Thanks to Tim Enloe for getting me a copy of David Rankin's 2004 article, "Class Distinction as a Way of Doing Church: The Early Fathers and the Christian Plebs" (Vigiliae Christianae 58). He examines the way the terminology and orders...

Ouch! - August 16, 2006
In his "Hortatory Address to the Greeks," Justin Martyr argued that the disagreements among Greek philosophers undermined their reliability, while the unity of the apostolic witness, and the witness of their successors, was evidence that Christianity came from God. "Since...

Exhortation, Commissioning - May 14, 2006
John 12:24: Jesus said, Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. We are not ordaining you today....

Ark and Church - April 14, 2006
DG Hart gives this summary of Nevin's views on the church as ark: "In Nevin's scheme Christian salvation played out really and concretely in history, in the form of the church, and ways not simply an abstract covenant transacted in...

Exhortation, First Sunday after Epiphany - January 08, 2006
God's people are a missionary people, and this is not true only of the New Testament church. God called Abraham to bless the Gentiles through him, and one of Israel's recurring sins was her failure to carry out this mission....

Quenching Spirit - January 06, 2006
Reflecting further on the pastoral applications of Solomon's phrase "shepherding wind": Every believer is born of the Spirit, and blows where he wills, and a pastor is in the business of shepherding wind. In this context, "quenching the Spirit" might...

Remnant and reunion - December 30, 2005
Some additional thoughts about the role of the "remnant" in Israel's history, which supercede earlier posts on the subject. 1) The word "remnant" in the OT normally refers to the whole of Israel that survives a judgment, rather than to...

The Church, our Mother - December 10, 2005
In his book on the Motherhood of the church, Henri de Lubac notes that "Calvin attached such importance [to the notion of the church as mother] that some reproached him for setting up in that way a divine 'quaternity.'" Yet,...

Exhortation, November 13 - November 13, 2005
Churches have a life-cycle just as individuals do. Both individuals and churches begin life in helpless dependence, slowly learn to do things for ourselves, and eventually take responsibility not only for ourselves but for others. Trinity Reformed church was born...

Division and reunion - November 10, 2005
Some notes for a disputatio talk on church unity. Thanks to Rusty Reno for clarification at several points. It is evident in the text, and it is evident in church history, that there is good and bad union and good...

Nevin's limitations - October 28, 2005
Much as I like the Nevin that's emerging from Hart's biography, he seems to be stuck in modern dualisms that need to be overcome. Hart quotes him as saying that if the Supper were only a sign it would "carry...

Nevin on the church - October 28, 2005
A couple of quotations from Hart's biography of Nevin: "The force of the question in the end is nothing less than this, whether the original catholic doctrine concerning the Church, as it stood in universal authority through all ages before...

Exhortation, October 23 - October 23, 2005
Unlike our Bibles, which follow the order of the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible ends with 2 Chronicles. The last word of the Hebrew Bible is the decree of Cyrus to the exiles of Jerusalem: "Let him go up." The gospel...

Exhortation, October 2 - October 02, 2005
The church is the body and bride of Christ, the people of God and the new Israel, the temple of the Spirit and the house of prayer for all nations. In our sermon text (Eph 6), we learn that the...

What Is The Church? - September 22, 2005
"The Bible," writes Avery Cardinal Dulles, "when it seeks to illuminate the nature of the Church, speaks almost entirely through images, most of them . . . evidently metaphorical." Citing Pope Paul VI, Dulles lists the following images: "the building...

Exhortation, August 14 - August 14, 2005
Almost from the beginning of the university in the late Middle Ages, students have formed a community of their own, set off from the surrounding community. Sometimes this division of town and gown erupted in literal battles. As recently as...

Ecclesial "denotation" - July 04, 2005
In his books, Ephraim Radner offers numerous profound insights into the complications and implications of a divided Christianity. Near the beginning of Hope Among the Fragments, he points to some of the dangers of post-Reformation efforts to "denote" the church...

The Body - March 29, 2005
Paul's description of the church as the body of Christ parallels in both its basic conception and in its details the social theory of ancient moralists. Seneca, for instance, wrote, "What if the hands should desire to harm the feet,...

Church Fights - February 02, 2005
In an unsentimental discussion of the promise and difficulties of Christian community (in Freedom for Ministry), Richard Neuhaus has these sage words about church fights: "Not infrequently, life together is mainly strife together. This commonly comes as a shock to...

Exhortation, January 9 - January 09, 2005
The book of Kings is important because it sheds on our situation in the contemporary church, in which the church is divided into myriads and myriads of denominations and sects. Our sermon text, which describes the division of the kingdom...

Church's Kingly Ministry - December 28, 2004
The Blackwell Companion to Ethics (edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells) looks to be a stimulating collection of essays. The contributors examine ethics through the lens of liturgy, on the assumption that what God seeks are worshipers, companions who...

Exhortation, December 26 - December 26, 2004
As Pastor Wilson will explain more fully in the sermon this morning, division is an essential part of creation. God creates by dividing light and darkness, by separating waters above and waters below, by drawing a boundary between sea and...

Exhortation, August 8 - August 08, 2004
Roman Catholics and Protestants have both appealed to Kings to explore the significance of their divisions, and to defend their claims over against each other. For Roman Catholics, Rome is Jerusalem, maintaining the true worship of the temple while Protestants...

You're Being Watched - July 12, 2004
Perhaps we could call it a sanctified form of paranoia. In his Introduction to the Science of Missions, J. H. Bavinck calls attention to Israel's striking awareness of being watched by the nations around them. If Israel perishes at Sinai,...

Broken Windows Pastoral Practice - July 04, 2004
One of James Q. Wilson's well-known contributions to public policy discussions is his "broken windows" policing policy (outlined in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic). He argued that allowing minor infractions �Epublic pissing, jay-walking �Eand minor public defacements of...

Another City - June 14, 2004
The following is a review I wrote and had posted on a now-defunct web site. The review was written before Against Christianity, which is the hypothetical book referred to in the review. Barry A. Harvey, Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer...

A Cheer for Denominations - June 01, 2004
Here is an article that was published elsewhere, but is offered here for those who don't have access to the original publication. Denominationalism gets much bad press these days, for a variety of very good reasons. John Frame, professor at...

Exhortation, April 25 - April 25, 2004
Trinity Reformed Church is large enough that it is difficult to know everyone in the church. And now we have been around long enough that it is awkward and embarrassing for us to meet each other. When you introduce yourself...

Schaff on Protestantism - April 17, 2004
Obsession with sacraments and liturgy seems �catholic�Eto many in our day, but it will not be news to anyone who has read and absorbed Schaff�s Principle of Protestantism that these concerns were near the heart of the Reformation. Over a...

Church as Culture - March 29, 2004
Robert Louis Wilken has a brief article in the April issue of First Things on the church as culture. He illustrates the internal culture of the church by examining early Christian art, the development of the Christian calendar, and the...

Christ as Culture - January 04, 2004
Also in the Nov 2003 IJST is the first installment of Robert Jenson's Maurice Lectures (University of London), entitled "Christ as Culture." Among other things, Jenson criticizes HR Niebuhr's framing of the issue as "Christ and culture" by noting that...

Augustine on "Visible-Invisible Church" - November 23, 2003
In another talk at the Augustine seminar, a Princeton grad student provocatively claims that Augustine never used the "visible-invisible church" distinction. Admittedly, Augustine has some elements of that distinction, and he was read by the Reformers as supporting the Protestant...

Barth's Ecclesiology - November 12, 2003
In an essay on Barth's sacramental theology (in the Cambridge Companion to Barth), James J. Buckley summarizes Barth's early views on ecclesiology in the modern age as follows: "Modern man "'nationalizes' the Church and the Church allows this nationalization,' elevating...

More Notes on The Stranger - September 17, 2003
Here are the rest of the notes from that upcoming lecture: 2. p 2: "Over the past century, however, the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Already today, the...

The Stranger - September 16, 2003
Below are some notes for a talk I'm giving at the University of Idaho campus tomorrow evening (September 17). Apologies for the formatting. There's some material here that is relevant only to the local situation, but the general thrust would...

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