Probably the deeper reason, though, is simply that my life has become much too busy to keep up a regular blog like this. And I haven’t gained any more time since finishing my degree; there are still twenty–four hours in the day, and I still seem to require all of them. So after more than three years I’ve decided to stop blogging on Creed or Chaos.

This site started with two fellow seminarians and great friends at Westminster Seminary California, JK and Phil. Life has since called them in different directions, along with several others — like Matt and Josh — who helped out around here.

I’ve enjoyed this experience and still do enjoy sharing things I’ve learned with others, learning more myself in the process. But I’m finished with school now (finally!), and I feel I need to spend this time in a different way.

Although I won’t be posting here anymore, I am going to leave the site online. Three years worth of posts adds up to quite a lot of material, and relatively little of it was written to be a flash in the pan, relevant only to the moment it was written. If the Lord is pleased to use any of this for good, I’m pleased to leave the site’s content available as a resource for ‘confessional Reformed perspectives on things human and divine.’

I never imagined God would call me to take my family to Southern California, and certainly not to Scotland! But he is even more faithful than he is surprising. He knows the plans he has for all of us: to bless and not to curse (Jer 29:11). May the Lord richly bless you, and thanks from me to all C or C’s readers, past and present, regular or occasional.

Yours,

~B

Having the vision of the City on a Hill, the Puritans were much more concerned with the legal and cultural issues of their societies than with the psychological and philosophical issues of man’s existence, as it is with the “new Reformed.” Justice and righteousness was their priority, not over spiritualization and mystic experiences. They developed law codes, economic theory and practice, social organization, education, and science. They did not worry about the minutest irrelevant details of the personal spiritual life of a Christian. They saw value in incarnating the truths of God in their culture, not in internalizing theology. Their view of the world was one whole, under the Law of God, spiritual and material, church, family, and state, mind and matter, law and grace. They wouldn’t be able to grasp the dualism of the modern “new Reformed” churches. “Covenant” was for them not a religious term. It was the building block of all relationships, spiritual and temporal, and all covenants – in the civil realm, the marketplace, church, family, or school – were to imitate that supreme covenant between God and mankind in Jesus Christ.

Does anyone else feel like this is six of one and half a dozen of the other?

At any rate, I’m skeptical that either contemporary American evangelical piety or historic American Puritan society should be considered representative for what Reformed theology and practice might mean. How about giving the Reformed confessions a glance, for starters?

The Bible says He was made in “the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom.8:3), which means that He was there as an effigy of us. But if the moment He became that effigy, He had to cry, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46), what must God see us to be? It is plain that God was not forsaking the Son as the Son. He was forsaking the Son as us, whose likeness He was wearing. What is done to an effigy is always regarded as done to the one it represents. That derelict figure suffering under the wrath of God is ourselves, at our best as well as at our worst. There for all to see is the naked truth about the whole lot of us, Christian and non Christian alike. If I cannot read God’s estimate of man anywhere else, I can read it there. In very deed, truth, painful and humbling, has come by Jesus Christ, enough to shatter all our vain illusions about ourselves.

However, not only has the truth about ourselves come by Jesus Christ but also the truth about God and His love towards us. Left to ourselves, our guilty consciences only tell us that God is against us, that He is the God with the big stick. We see Him only as the One who sets the moral standards for us, most of them impossibly high, and therefore who cannot but censure us when we fail. There is nothing to draw us to a God like that. But the Cross of the Lord Jesus gives the lie to all this and shows us God as He really is. We see Him, not charging us with our sins, as we would
have thought, but charging them to His Son for our sakes. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them” (2 Cor. 5:19). What we thought was the big stick was really His outstretched arm of love beckoning us back to Himself. In the face of Jesus Christ, marred for us, we see that God is not against the sinner, but for him; that He is not his enemy, but His Friend; that in Christ He has not set new and unattainable standards, but has come to offer forgiveness, peace, and new life to those who have fallen down on every standard there is. “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” !is is what one writer has called “the surprising generosity of the Cross.” It not only surprises our guilty consciences but also melts and draws us, impelling us to return to Him in honesty and repentance, knowing that nothing but mercy is waiting for us.

There are no illustrations of spiritual truth like Old Testament ones; its ritual and history abound in them. Indeed, much of the ritual was instituted only to be an illustration of later New Testament truth. And we must not be thought fanciful in taking up such illustrations and using them, for the New Testament itself does so in a number of instances.
One such Old Testament illustration which the New Testament uses to show us the Lord Jesus is that contained in the Epistle to the Hebrews 13:11-13. “The bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp. Wherefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered without the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach.”
What would the picture of “without the camp” mean to the Hebrew Christians to whom the apostle Paul was writing? They would be taken back in imagination to the days when their nation was in the wilderness. They would visualize that great, orderly encampment, with the sacred tabernacle in the centre of it. Around the well defined encampment they would visualise a no man’s land, known to all as “outside the camp,” and that place would be associated in their minds
with certain classes of people.

Outside the camp was where the foreigners had to live; those who were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise” (Eph. 2:12). Such were not permitted normally to live within the camp. Outside the camp, too, were the lepers. Because of the contagious nature of that terrible disease, they were banished from the camp, uncared for and excluded from all the delights open to others. It was also the dread place of execution for law breakers and criminals. According to the law of Moses, the death penalty was to be imposed on
adulterers, sabbath breakers, idolaters and murderers by stoning, and outside the camp was where that took place.

In this passage, however, the apostle tells us what is perhaps the most gruesome detail of the place. It was the place where the bodies of those beasts whose blood had been sprinkled in the Holy Place for sin were burnt on the refuse heap. The body which had had symbolically placed upon it the sins of the offerer was burnt as so much sin cursed refuse, utterly abhorrent to both God and man. Day after day without the camp the smoke was going up, and the place was pervaded by the stench of it.

In all, that region outside the camp was not a pleasant place. It was the place of foreigners, lepers, criminals, and sin cursed refuse — a place to be avoided. Yet the Scripture tells us that it was the spiritual counterpart of that place outside the camp that the Lord Jesus went forth, bearing His Cross, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood. The actual place where He was crucified has a name as gaunt and grim as the associations connected with outside the camp of old — “a place of a skull” (Matt. 27:33). But the Gospel tells us that the place He went to was our place, and how glibly we often say, “He took my place!” But when we consider the place He actually had to take for us we get a shock, for it is then we see, as perhaps we can in no other way, what our true Place is, and what our true character is before God.

First of all, then, He went for us to the place where He was a stranger, even to His Father, the place of God-forsakenness. Hanging there on the Cross, He cried, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” Sin in its beginnings is the sinner forsaking God, but in its ultimate penalty it is God forsaking the sinner, and that is hell. That was the place to which Jesus went on the Cross, the place where God forsook Him. And He did so because that was our place. Ours was the curse He bore. Ours was the God-forsakenness which He endured. The logic of it all is inescapable; if the moment He took our place God forsook Him, what must our true place be before God? What truth shines from Calvary as to our dreadful condition before God!

Then, He went forth and took the place for us of a moral leper, as if He were one Himself. Indeed, that is inferred in the Scripture, “We did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted” (Isa. 53:4). Hebrew scholars suggest that the word “stricken” has the meaning of being stricken with the plague of leprosy. All through the Bible leprosy is an illustration of sin. It is a subtle disease. Beginning in a small way with only mild symptoms, it ends up as a ravaging monster, rendering the sufferer loathsome to the eye and bringing him to death. Sin, in its inception in our lives, may appear small, but in its culmination it is something utterly loathsome to both God and man, bringing the sinner to eternal separation from God. What contempt there is in the phrase “moral leper” when we refer it to another man! That was just the place the Lord Jesus was willing to take for us, that of a moral leper, loathsome to the eye of God. You ask, Why did He take so low a place? The answer is, He did so because He saw us to be just that, and He had to take that place if He was to save us. Therefore, Jesus hanging on the Cross outside the camp as a moral leper, is a declaration of my condition. If I did not know I was one in any other way I would know it by contemplating the place that Jesus had to take for me. What impurities, immoralities, and perversions stain so many lives today, yet are so carefully hidden away! But there, it is openly declared on the Cross before all men by the very place that Jesus took for us! And although we may think that these things may not have come to fruition in us as they have in others, Calvary declares that they are in us in essence and in embryo none the less.

Then, too, He went to the spiritual counterpart of that place where the criminals were stoned. “If He were not a malefactor,” said the Jews to Pilate, “we would not have delivered Him up unto thee” ( John 18:30). Jesus did not die on a bed, about which there is nothing disgraceful; He died on a Cross, and a Cross was a punishment about which there was a peculiar disgrace, for it was reserved only for criminals. Indeed, there was a criminal on either side of Him, and everybody thought that He must be one, too. They “did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted,” because of something that He must have done, and they “hid as it were their faces from Him.” And the astonishing thing is that He never disabused them. He did not say, as we would have done, “Please, oh please, do not think that I am here for anything I have done –I am here for other people’s sins.” Instead, He kept silent. He was willing to let them think He really was a criminal. He was willing to be “numbered with the transgressors” (Isa. 53:12) and to die as such, just
because He saw that that was our place, and He was willing to take it for us. The Bible certainly tells us that in essence we are all criminals in God’s sight. “Whosoever hateth his brother,” it says, “is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). Anything that is not true love for my brother is hate, and hate is murder. Again we read, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matt. 5:28). God says that the lustful thought is the same in His sight as the actual deed. But even if the Bible did not say any of these things about us, we would still know they are true, and our guilt would be evident to the world, for at Calvary that fact is openly declared by Jesus dying for us.

Supremely, however, Jesus was led forth without the camp in the same way that the bodies of the sacrificial beasts were taken to be burnt, as so much sin cursed refuse. No words can describe the moral depths which Jesus plumbed for us on the Cross. It is not too much to say that He was dying there as so much sin-cursed refuse, and only because sin-cursed refuse is what we are seen to be in God’s sight. There the smoke and stench of our sin went up from His blessed body. You and I may give one another the impression of being earnest, godly Christians, but before the Cross we have to admit that we are not that sort of person at all. At Calvary the naked truth is staring down at us
all the time from the Cross, challenging us to drop the pose and own the truth. This, then, is what Calvary shows us to be.

These are not just pictures of what we were, but of what we still are, apart from Him. No matter how long we have been Christians, nor how mature we think we have become, Calvary has something fresh to show us of sin today. For sin is like an octopus. Its tentacles are everywhere. It has a thousand lives and a thousand shapes, and by perpetually changing its shape it eludes capture. If we are to see sin in all its subtle shapes and forms, and prove the power of Jesus to save us from it, we need to pray daily:

Keep me broken, keep me watching at the Cross where thou hast died.

For only there do we know our need as sinners, and therefore of Jesus.

From We Would See Jesus, ch. 4.

Your stories give us the perspective we haven’t yet gained with experience. We don’t yet understand how much we don’t know. Our youthful bluster masks insecurity. We stand tall against withering attacks from our peers, but we’ve hardly been tested. We fear that when harder times come our faith will prove ephemeral. But your stories gird us against these doubts. So look underneath our confident exterior. You’ll find that younger Christians actually want to hear from older believers about how God demonstrated His faithfulness in their generation.

He has some good things to say about the unhappy effects of generational separation in the church as well. Check it out.

Or click on the Featured Audio widget below, or in the sidebar.

Click for Thielicke wikipedia entry

“This [Christian] life may be described from two angles.

The longer we are in the presence of Jesus, the more deeply we know our sin and the sharper our conscience. This being so, we plunge ever deeper into debt with God. Those who know the Christian life only from outside find it hard to understand that the longer a Christian is with Christ the deeper his indebtedness, so that he can never leave the school of Christ as a completed and accomplished graduate free from all faults or omissions. But because this is so, and we increasingly realize our guilt in the light of Jesus, we have an increasing love for the One who wills to be the Savior of our life. He who is forgiven much, loves much. Theologians have constantly debated whether there is development or progress in the Christian life. Does not fellowship with Jesus necessarily bring growth? Or is the Christian state complete from the very first? Is sin forgiven once for all? is there no progress beyond it? Well, there is surely a kind of divine school in which we move up from class to class. There is surely development and growth in the Christian life. Yet we must not think of this progress in terms of our always becoming more holy and blameless. If we fall into this error, serious reverses will bring us back to soberness and a salutary anxiety.

We may, however, come to love Him more and more—and this is perhaps the true progress of the Christian life. Indeed, it undoubtedly is. And this progress in love does not mean that our soul acquires an increasing ability to love. It rests on the fact that we are increasingly forgiven. The more Jesus Christ humbles us, the greater our joy and the more jubilant our thanks. We do not increase before God. His goodness increases, and it is for this reason that we love Him more. “I must decrease, but he must increase.” This can be said only by great sinners, by those at the frontier. The last words of Luther after his great Christian life were not: “Look, Lord, how much I have progressed in love for you. For your sake I have known the greatest distress of conscience, the deepest loneliness and supreme achievement. Now you must open heaven to me.” Luther did not speak in such terms. His last words were simply: “We are beggars, that is true.”

But do you not think that God heard rather more in this dying confession than merely that we are beggars? Do you not think that in heaven He heard the unspoken accompanying statement: “Therefore you know, O God, how greatly I must love you”?

Nothing of myself I bring, You, O God, are everything.

Do you think that He heard this statement too?”

In Gen 1, humanity’s commission to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion” is a glorious calling, and comes as a result of our creation in the image of God—the image and dominion language is repeated twice:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:26–28)

This is key, because it means our commission to dominion is part and parcel of what it means to bear God’s image, and so understanding the character of our dominion flows from understanding the character of our image–bearing.

There are many things to say about what being created in the image and likeness of God means, but it’s interesting to look particularly at the characteristics of God on display in this particular passage: God creates and commissions humanity (vv. 26, 28), blesses us (v. 28), orders all things (vv. 26, 28, 29), and gives all things to us to do with likewise (vv. 26, 28).

When we think about the dominion God has given us over the earth, then, we need to keep in mind the character of the God whose image we bear. If we think that blessing or causing to be fruitful are odd ways of thinking about subduing and having dominion over the earth, then we’re not thinking in terms of the character of God’s good rule.

This dominion, exercised in ordering and blessing, gets to the relationship between our commission as described in very different ways in Gen 1 and 2. Unlike Gen 1, humanity’s origin and calling in Gen 2 doesn’t at first glance seem so glorious: rather than speak of the image of God, Gen 2 says that humanity has been created out of dirt just like the rest of the “living creatures” (2:7, 19). Instead of the language of subduing and dominion, we get the language of working and keeping, the language of service rather than rule (2:15). In light of God’s character and his commission for us, however, these accounts show themselves to be complimentary rather than contradictory.

God’s commission for humanity is precisely a dominion of service and blessing, under God; it’s a rule that brings about fruitfulness for us and the rest of creation rather than tyranny or abuse, because we exercise dominion under someone else’s authority. Though we are created in the image and likeness of God, it’s no less true that we’re made of the same “dust” that other creatures are. Human image–bearing is a gift and a calling, not an intrinsic superiority:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet…. (Ps 8:3–6)

As in Gen 1, in Gen 2 Adam is called to exercise subordinate headship and bring meaningful and productive order, in naming the animals (vv. 19, 20) as well as cultivating his garden sanctuary. And as in Gen 1, in Gen 2 God calls Adam to fulfill his commission on behalf of humanity as his created image. Adam is to display the character of God, and accomplish his charge in faithful obedience (2:16). And finally, just as God created, ordered and then rested, so too humanity was created with a commission to productive labor which had as its end to join in God’s own blessed rest (cf. Heb 2:6–8).

None of this is seen as it should be in Adam, or in humanity’s twisting of God’s image and our commission to subdue and exercise dominion. How prone to tyranny is our rule, and how susceptible to abuse is our dominion! We curse more than we bless. But in Jesus we get a window into how total dominion and complete fruitfulness come together—how being “subdued” and being “blessed” can be true at the same time. He is the true image of God, after all, and the true and perfect man. As he has borne our image in becoming man, we are being transformed into his image, the image of Christ (1 Cor 15:49; Rom 8:29).

Jesus’ image–bearing and exercising dominion are not like ours in every way; it’s crucial to understand that his work of redemption comes in light of and in response to sin, not as an integral part of creation or Adam’s creaturely commission. This shouldn’t be overlooked, as so often nowadays creation care or the cultural mandate, in response to what has too often been Christian neglect or disinterestedness in fruitful dominion, are overplayed, as a part of the message of the gospel. These things are part of the image of God and humanity’s creaturely commission, yes; but the fact that they are is rather testimony to our failure and rebellion, not good news.

Servant leadership and responsible stewardship are good things, and we could even say that Christians who know their Creator truly, who are “being renewed in knowledge after the image of [our] creator” (Col 3:10), are those who should truly understand and exercise dominion—as long as we recognize this commission as law, not gospel. Our human calling is fulfilled as it should be by Christ, not by us; as sinners, our image–bearing and pursuit of dominion are always compromised and ambivalent. This should keep us from either abdicating or abusing our creaturely dominion, or making it into an idol or an addition to Christ.

At the same time, what is created is what is redeemed: humanity, and ultimately as a result, our curse and death’s effects on the rest of creation. The heart of the similarity between Adam’s image–bearing and commission and Jesus the Second Adam’s work, is faithful obedience before God unto blessing and fruitfulness for all he is responsible for. Where Adam failed, Christ succeeded, and the fruits of his labors are nothing less than a new heavens and new earth, the “Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Heb 4:9). In our attitudes and actions in response to humanity’s call to exercise godly dominion, we should reflect his image, as he has borne ours.