Paul’s Prayer … and Ours
A great prayer to memorize and pray for your family, friends, church, and everyone you know.… that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:2-3)
Paul did everything by prayer. Not some things or most things. The secret of his power and usefulness was that he was a man of such clear understanding and humility who knew he must pray without ceasing—prayer with no intermission.
He knew the battle was not against flesh and blood but that it was raging on all sides with every kind of demonic power, powers that can only be overcome by a man clothed in God’s armor and strength and praying at all times in the spirit (Ephesians 6:10-20). It was (and is) a battle for the souls of men and women, boys and girls, to take their every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
And so, listen to his prayer this morning. A great prayer to memorize and pray for your family, friends, church, and everyone you know.
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Why the Frankfurt Declaration Is Necessary
The Frankfurt Declaration ends with an expression of gratitude to those civil authorities who respect these Christian beliefs and the rights and liberties of each individual, and with a call to repentance to those civil authorities who have disregarded these freedoms, lest in the abuse of their God-given authority they become liable to God’s wrath.
In the spring of 2021, pastors from different countries came together to draw up a joint declaration in response to the COVID measures enacted by many governments. The result is the Frankfurt Declaration of Christian and Civil Liberties, which was presented to the public on August 28, 2022, near Frankfurt, Germany. The document was initially signed by fifty pastors and theologians from America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and Africa, including men such as Grace Community Church pastor John MacArthur, African Christian University dean Voddie Baucham, and Apologia Church elder James White. In the meantime, more than 5,000 signatories from all over the world have joined the Frankfurt Declaration.
Even though the concrete reason for drafting the Frankfurt Declaration was the totalitarian response to COVID, it is not primarily about these measures, but about the underlying spiritual reasons that led states to infringe so massively on the guaranteed rights of their citizens. The signatories of the Frankfurt Declaration see this unprecedented disregard for liberty as just one symptom of an emerging totalitarianism of the state over all spheres of society, including the church, that has developed for decades.
The Frankfurt Declaration seeks to address these threats with the timeless truths of God’s Word through affirmations and denials derived from biblical principles.
Article 1: God the Creator as Sovereign Lawgiver and Judge
For centuries, the countries of the Western world have been moving further away from the biblical truth that God created the cosmos and everything in it, including man. Most people’s thinking is now strongly influenced by a radical materialism assuming that all processes and phenomena in the world come from impersonal matter and motion rather than a personal and transcendent Creator.
But if there is no Creator God, then there is no divine lawgiver who has revealed His universal, immutable law to man, and there is no divine judge who at the end of time will judge all men according to this law. And if there is no heavenly lawgiver above the earthly state, then the state is the highest lawgiver, and its laws need not measure up to any higher standard. With no divine judge, human legislators need not consider answering to Him for their actions. The state and those who govern it thus assume for themselves the role of God, freely determining what is good and evil conduct without the bounds of a divine moral standard. The result is devastating: unconverted people, corrupt by nature, turn the commandments of God into their opposite, rebelliously calling good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20).
Examples of this tendency during the COVID crisis abound. For example, the state decreed (even for healthy people) that visiting the elderly, the sick, and the dying was evil, although Christ says that such actions are signs by which one knows who is blessed of the Father and inherits the kingdom, and who is cursed and must depart from Christ into everlasting fire (Matthew 25:31-46). But the phenomenon of the state calling things good that have been considered sin for millennia is one we have been observing for years: the state enables divorce and sexual immorality, promotes homosexuality and transgenderism, and allows the killing of children in the womb.
The state both approves of such evils and demands that its citizens do likewise. Even kindergarteners are indoctrinated accordingly. Anyone who disagrees is considered backward, bigoted, hateful, and a threat to society.
The Frankfurt Declaration affirms that God, as supreme lawgiver and judge, is the ultimate source of ethics, and that He has revealed an unchanging morality which is rooted in His own character and which determines for all people at all times what is good and evil conduct. It therefore denies that the state has the right to define morality and to demand unconditional obedience from its citizens when their beliefs contradicts God’s law, invoking the clausula Petri, that one ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).
Article 2: God as the Source of Truth and the Role of Science
With the turning away from the truth of the Creator God, other truths also increasingly falter. As Christians, we know that God has ordered creation by objective truths, which man can discover through scientific observation. This knowledge made scientific endeavors possible in the first place, since men once recognized that all scientific investigation is an inquiry into the works of God and hence cannot feign neutrality.
When science no longer serves to glorify God, then science itself becomes a god. Many today are convinced that science can provide answers to all questions and instructions for the right action in all situations. This scientism overlooks the fact that empirical inquiry may not only lead to erroneous results due to the lack of data and the human propensity for error, but that it can in no way provide answers to moral questions. Science can only say what is, but not what should be. Virology and epidemiology can say which measures might be promising to contain a virus, but they cannot answer whether a lockdown or other infringements on rights and liberties are ethically justified to achieve that goal.
However, this is exactly what happened during COVID: individual experts were considered to represent “science,” and their predictions and recommendations guided the policies of entire governments. As C.S. Lewis once explained: “Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”
Since man has fallen into sin, all his thoughts, deductions and institutions contain degrees of corruption which tend to distort, manipulate, or suppress the truth. In the hands of ideologically driven people, truth becomes subject to change by reinterpretations, while science is quickly perverted into an instrument of indoctrination through fearmongering, propaganda, and the wielding of political power. Dissident voices are ignored, suppressed, or canceled. During COVID, dissenting doctors and scientists, some of whom had been considered luminaries in their field for decades, were silenced, discredited and sometimes dismissed from their jobs. But we see this trend in other areas as well. For example, the state and the “scientific consensus” have been propagating for decades that scientifically untenable theories, such as Darwinism, were settled truth. We are being told science has discovered that it is no longer possible to determine what a man or a woman is.
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Important Contexts for Understanding Reformed Theology
Our twenty-first century historical, philosophical, and theological context is very different from that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we are not aware that there are differences, it can be very easy to read our contemporary context back into the writings of those centuries. If we are aware that there are differences but remain ignorant of the sixteenth and seventeenth century contexts, we can easily miss the true import of some of their teachings.
Most Christians understand the importance of context for properly interpreting Scripture. We realize that the books of Scripture were written thousands of years ago in cultures very different from ours and in languages we do not grow up speaking. Those things that were simply given, everyday realities for the original human authors and their audiences are things we have to study and learn about. We know that if we are studying the Old Testament, we have to learn Hebrew and Aramaic (or trust the translators who learned those languages). We have to learn about ancient Near Eastern history, geography, culture, and practices in order to understand what the biblical authors are talking about. If we are studying the New Testament, we have to learn Greek. We have to learn about the first century world under the Roman Empire. All of this is simply part of the nature of grammatical-historical interpretation.
Context is also important if we are to properly understand Reformed theology. Reformed theology was a fruit of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation, and that Reformation took place in a particular historical and cultural context. The authors writing at that time wrote within a particular philosophical and theological context. Having a grasp of these various contexts is important for understanding Reformed theology. I want to briefly mention three such contexts: the historical, philosophical, and theological contexts.
Historical Context
The Protestant Reformation did not occur one afternoon because a bunch of Roman Catholic monks got bored and decided to throw a party that got out of hand. The Protestant Reformation was the culmination of numerous historical events that reached back over the course of many centuries. Conflicts between the church and various political entities (imperial as well as more local) in addition to various conflicts among the political entities themselves played a role. Conflicts within the church itself resulting from corruption and numerous reforming attempts played a role. Cultural changes, including economic changes and technological changes, played a role.
We can see the direct relevance of the historical context when, for example, we read Martin Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation or his Babylonian Captivity of the Church, two of the most important Protestant writings of the early Reformation. We can see the relevance when we read John Calvin’s “Prefatory Address to King Francis I of France” at the beginning of his Institutes. That preface is important context for understanding the content of the Institutes.
In addition, many of the Reformed confessions address issues that assume specific historical conditions or that are responding to specific historical conditions. The clearest example of the impact of historical context on the content of Reformed theology can be seen in the difference between the original Westminster Confession of Faith and the American revision of the same Confession on the subject of the civil magistrate and the relation between church and state. We have to understand that historical context is important for understanding Reformed theology. If a believer desires to have a better grasp of Reformed theology, he or she should take some time to study the history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—the two hundred years immediately preceding the Reformation—and then study the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries themselves. Theology does not exist in a historical vacuum.
Philosophical Context
In order to understand the importance of the philosophical context of Reformed theology, it is necessary to remember the historical timeframe of the Reformation. The Protestant Reformation began in the early sixteenth century with the work of Martin Luther. The first Latin edition of John Calvin’s Institutes was published in 1536 and the final Latin edition in 1559. The major writings of Reformed theologians such as Zwingli, Musculus, Vermigli, Bullinger, Beza, Zanchius, and Ursinus were published in the sixteenth century. All of the works of the Reformed scholastic theologians in the period of Early Orthodoxy and the majority of the works published in the period of High Orthodoxy were published before the end of the seventeenth century. This includes the works of Reformed theologians such as Polanus, Ames, Wollebius, Maccovius, Witsius, Turretin, and Mastricht.
All the major Reformed confessions and catechisms were also published in these two centuries. For example, the Tetrapolitan Confession (1530), the First Helvetic Confession (1536), the French Confession (1559), the Scots Confession (1560), the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Canons of Dordt (1618–19), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), the Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), and the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647) were written in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century.
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No Mercy Without Rules
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Any Christian leader who manages to separate mercy from rules in such a way as to prioritize the former over the latter would not really be merciful at all. Rather, he would be seriously delinquent in his duty. He might even be merely pandering to the spirit of this age.Announcing the death of Benedict XVI on its Saturday front page, the New York Times drew a contrast between his papacy and that of his successor:
The two men were reportedly on good terms personally, but it was at times an awkward arrangement, and Francis moved decisively to reshape the papacy, firing or demoting many of Benedict’s traditionalist appointees and elevating the virtue of mercy over rules that Benedict had spent decades refining and enforcing.
As a Protestant and (at best) an amateur observer of things Catholic, I cannot comment on the fairness of this analysis. What is interesting, however, is the way the language, in its contrast of mercy with rules, points to deeper issues within society as a whole, Catholic and Protestant, religious and secular. In fact, mercy is incoherent if there are no rules, rules that are rightly believed and applied. Only if there is a rule, and a just rule, can forgiveness for its transgression be seen as an act of mercy.
More pointedly for Christianity, underlying the comment is the notion that rules can neither be motivated by nor embody mercy in themselves. This is a common but dangerous idea that, if true, would prove lethal to the faith. It is also rather selectively applied today. Christianity makes it clear that human beings are designed to be a certain kind of creature. We are free and self-determining in a way that other creatures are not: The swallow instinctively builds a nest but we design houses freely and intentionally. Our freedom, however, operates within certain parameters as set by the limits of human nature. I cannot jump off the Empire State Building and fly, for example, or dive into a cauldron of boiling oil and expect to emerge unscathed.
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