Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
If the old institutions are dying or losing their traditional formational functions, why will not any new ones rapidly meet the same fate? Indeed, we are seeing that many evangelical institutions go into decline rapidly. Many of the earlier 1980s vintage megachurches already have “mainline disease” – an aging member base, fewer families with children, a style that seems stodgy or anachronistic, etc. The New Calvinism movement lasted less than a generation before entering major decline. Tim Keller once said that churches younger than five years attract primarily converts while those that are older attract primarily from existing churches. This seems an admission that the half life of missional effectiveness in churches is extremely short.

A few weeks back, the British writer T. M. Suffield wrote an interesting piece on the need to start building counter-institutions. He channels the common lament about the decline of intermediary institutions, and draws on the work of Yuval Levin in thinking about this problem. He writes:
Levin’s thesis can be stated simply enough: America’s social, economic, and political problems are due to the fracturing of its institutions. Specifically, the mediating institutions that unite individuals together. These mediating institutions are weaker than they used to be, with the individual and national institutions ascendant. To make matters worse, these institutions are supposed to be moulds but have become platforms.
His critique of American society in The Fractured Republic revolves around the death of small institutions, with all of their functions being absorbed into the state; he describes the conformity that was required by these mediating institutions fading over the latter half of the twentieth into the radical individualism that’s familiar to us today. This included many of the societal functions that churches performed being absorbed into state welfare systems—in Levin’s view to be run more efficiently—with the consequence that the community-building impact of being involved in churches and working men’s clubs, labour unions and bowling leagues, also faded away.
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If we want to shape Christians to live in a world that is counter-forming them, we will need counter-institutions that are forming them in virtue. We need to ask whether or not our churches are doing this….Levin’s major critique, which he spends most of A Time To Build exploring in different arenas of society, is that the institutions that used to shape us—where they still exist—have become platforms. They no longer see forming people into virtue and helping them to live flourishing lives as their purpose. Instead, they display individuals, giving them prominence and attention without ‘stamping them with a particular character, a distinct set of obligations or responsibilities, or an ethic that comes with constraints.’
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The institutions we do have, primarily our local churches, are being shaped into platforms of affirmation. There are many wonderful exceptions; but, anecdotally, I see increasing numbers of churches who are keen to tell people that they are loved by God, and will confront the need to change because of our personal sin, but have little sense that the church is intended to form people into virtue or to form our minds into Christian modes of thought. Mostly we affirm people that they are loved (which is wonderfully true!) and try to challenge as little as possible.
One logical response to the decline of institutions is to create new institutions. (I would argue this is a variation of “exit” in Albert O. Hirschman’s voice. vs. exit framework).
The problem is, how do you create an organization that can actually operate contrary to the forces of society that are corrosive of, and in many cases even formally hostile to functional intermediary institutions? The state actively desires to weaken institutions like the family, or at least render them subject to the state. It is already far advanced in this project.
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No matter what a Roman Catholic’s verbal profession is, both the Roman communion and the Reformed church charge Roman Catholics not to partake of the Lord’s Supper in a Protestant church. On that, Rome and Westminster concur! (Code of Canon Law, Can. 844 §1) Accordingly, how can one be regarded as having a credible profession of faith in Christ if he is forbidden in the Lord to commune with professing believers at Christ’s Supper? 

Christians may marry only in the Lord. This means that at the very least Christians may not marry faithful Roman Catholics, Muslims or any other unbelieving idolater, all of whom maintain damnable heresies. (1 Corinthians 7:39; WCF 24.3; See also: Exodus 34:16; Deuteronomy 7:3,4; 2 Corinthians 6:14-18)
A question that in more recent times accompanies this clear teaching of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) pertains to true believers within the Roman Catholic communion. Specifically, may Christians marry unfaithful Roman Catholics – those who profess the saving power of the gospel in their lives while remaining formally estranged to the Christian church while comfortably seated in Rome.What is behind such a question is a misunderstanding of (a) the relevance of the visible church, (b) the impropriety of private judgments in such matters and (c) the undue partitioning of faith and practice. Accordingly, before trying to come up with a consistently Reformed view on interfaith marriage, it might be helpful to develop those three confessionally based principles by which our theology of marriage can be better informed.
Marriage and the visible church:
The WCF is clear that (1) there is no ordinary possibility of salvation outside the visible church. In other words, it is normative but not absolutely necessary that God leads believers into identification with congregations of the universal church that profess the true religion. (WCF 25:2) The Reformed church also teaches (2) that (a) the Pope of Rome is a usurper, (b) Roman Catholicism, with the pope as her head, is an apostate church and as such (c) the Roman Catholic communion, according to her theology, is a synagogue of Satan. (WCF 25:5,6) From those two governing principles we may surmise that it is at least possible that a true believer can be a member of the Roman Catholic communion even though Rome is not a true church.
Private judgment must give way to objective ecclesiastical standing:
Although some Roman Catholics profess faith in Christ in accordance with the true religion of the Protestant Reformation, by identifying with the Roman communion through membership and attendance such professing believers objectively remain outside the visible church of Christ, and no private judgment can remedy that reality. The question is how that objective reality relates to Christians marrying Roman Catholics.
Although professing Roman Catholics can live in contradiction to their communion by professing the true gospel of salvation, by the standard of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) they are not “communicants in good standing in any evangelical church” and, therefore, are barred from the Lord’s Supper until their profession coincides with their church affiliation. Or as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) would have it, a member of the Roman communion is not a “professing communicant member in good standing in a church that professes the gospel of God’s free grace in Jesus Christ” and, therefore, is not warmly invited to partake of the body and blood of our Lord.
At the very least, from a Reformed ecclesiastical perspective, fellowship with Rome necessarily keeps one from identifying with the Christian church and receiving the nourishment of Christ with other believers at the Lord’s Supper.
It’s not enough that one merely professes faith in Christ if he also lives in the unrepentant sin of spiritual adultery, which leads us to our third and final principle pertaining to the undue dichotomization of faith and practice.
(As we read on it might be useful to consider whether ecclesiastical precepts drawn from Scripture should override private judgement on one’s salvation, or can private judgements be reconciled with the implications of sound elder-rule ecclesiology.)
Faith and practice:
It’s hardly controversial that a good and faithful Roman Catholic is one who not only trusts in the damning gospel of Rome but also considers the Protestant gospel anathema. (See: The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Sixth session, January 13, 1547: Chapters 7,8,10, and 16, Canons 12,24,30, and 32) Not surprisingly, a good Roman Catholic’s profession of faith is never credible by confessional Protestant standards. But what about the profession of a bad Roman Catholic – one who professes “Christ alone” while remaining in communion with the pope? How should Protestants regard such as these?
Here again we must respect that it is the elders of the church and not individual maverick-Christians that “bind and loose” in the name of Christ. It is the elders on behalf of Christ that open the kingdom to penitent sinners, declare absolution and admit sinners to the Lord’s Supper. (WCF 30.2)
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Calvin repeatedly reminds his hearers that the aspiration of believers is both to fear (for the sake of discipline) and to love (for the sake of emulation) God’s revealed majesty by living out, with the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, his character and actions as demonstrated in the Lord Jesus. By contrast, the grave sin of believers, then, is to know that revelation and not respond by obediently, insistently, and persistently living in accordance with it. That failure Calvin calls ingratitude and declares it worthy of condemnation.

In his introduction to the new translation of John Calvin’s Sermons on Job (Banner of Truth Trust, 2022), Dr. Derek Thomas (author of Calvin’s Teaching on Job: Proclaiming the Incomprehensible God) points out that the then contemporary interest in Calvin’s work on Job was such that two French editions were published, both coinciding with the Civil Wars of Religion in France (1562-1598). There followed translations into German, Latin, and English. Three further editions of the English version appeared subsequently, making the Job sermons more popular than the Reformer’s Institutes of the Christian Religion! Latterly, however, Calvin’s work on Job has become a neglected part of his corpus, with no modern translations of his sermons available. Now, for the first time, Calvin’s 159 sermons on this enigmatic work of wisdom literature are available in modern English for the first time in a new edition published by Banner of Truth.
Dr. Thomas surmises that a study of Job’s trials must have seemed appropriate in the midst of the civil upheavals of the Wars of Religion. Calvin had access to earlier expositions on Job but does not seem to have been influenced by them. He “did not believe that the book of Job contained solutions to the great moral dilemmas of the universe,” but, considering the book as “a lengthy discourse about God… he sought to turn the congregation in Geneva, and his own soul, to the reality of God’s sovereignty and power in the contingencies of a seemingly disordered life. According to Calvin’s Institutes, ‘in The Book of Job is set forth a declaration of such sublimity as to humble our minds.’” Calvin, as Dr. Thomas points out, compares his role as a preacher expounding the Book of Job to medical doctors who “need to be sensitive to the radically different treatments that various diseases require. Likewise, ministers of the gospel need to be aware that trials that befall a Christian require different diagnosis and treatment.”
Dr. Thomas also extends a challenge to those who read these sermons:
“It is not only the content of the sermons that astonishes us today; it is the fact that they were weekday sermons, each one averaging just under an hour’s exposition of Scripture. It is hard to imagine such a thing in our own time. We live in an indifferent age, barely able to cope with one sermon a week. When we pray for revival (and surely we do!), what do we expect by way of an answer? For, should the sovereign Lord grant our request, our appetite for Scripture would change, our thirst for the Word of God would grow. It is earnestly to be hoped that, after reading these sermons, we shall be challenged to pray in such a manner that we might desire such a change to be wrought in us.”
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