The church is his chosen instrument for showing the cosmic powers, good and evil, “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33). The reality and existence of the church—this seemingly unimpressive, lowly, ignoble, unwise, unwealthy, unaccomplished body of local Christians, covenanted to each other—his ragtag church, this otherwise unremarkable church shows Satan and his minions that their time is short.

The word priority refers to “precedence in time or rank.” A priority is the “thing regarded as more important than another or others.”
Interestingly, according to the Google Books Ngram, the use of the word priority in English spiked in use around 1940 (leading up to and during WWII), then plateaued in the fifties. Then usage rose again sharply in the sixties and seventies, and priority enjoyed its heyday in the eighties and nineties. Since around 2000, usage has declined precipitously and returned about to where it was in the 1960s. And I can’t help but wonder if our ability to prioritize well, or the energy and attention we give to prioritizing well, may have declined with the use of the word. (And how it relates to the advent of the Internet in the same twenty-five-year period!)
Priority can be a tricky concept. To prioritize one entity over another clearly means something, but it services a range of applications. And in this session of talking about the priority of the church, however theological we take it, this inevitably relates to our priorities, both as Christians, and in particular as pastors—since this is a pastors conference. It would be one thing to speak to the priority of the church in a local-church congregation—or imagine this, to a gathering of Christian lawyers or athletes. And we could. I hope we will.
But brothers, this is a pastors conference. This is a message for lead officers in local churches (variously called pastors, elders, overseers—three names for one lead office in the New Testament). And the applications here of “the priority of the church” are especially significant for those whose breadwinning vocation is leading and teaching the local church. I know there are nonvocational pastors in the room with other breadwinning jobs. But for the vocational guys, the full-time pastors, there is no vocational disconnect between Christ’s priority of his church and ours. If Christ’s priority is echoed practically and substantiated anywhere, where will that be if not first and foremost in the lead officers who are the church’s preachers and teachers?
Paul’s Pastoral Priority
And so, we come to Ephesians 3, and especially verse 10, which is not a complete sentence:
…so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.
In chapter 2, the first half (verses 1–10) has celebrated our salvation in Christ by grace through faith, and then the second half has marveled at the stunning (horizontal) development of Gentile inclusion. For centuries, God focused publicly on the Jews. He prioritized Israel. By and large, Gentiles were separated from the true God, “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (2:12). They were “far off” (2:13, 17).
But now, amazingly, in Christ, even Gentiles “have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (2:13). Jesus “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility [between Jews and Gentiles] by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two” (2:14–15).
This reality, this “one new man,” made up of believing Jews and Gentiles, Paul has already called “the church” in 1:22, and that’s the term he uses again in 3:10 (and then 3:21 and then six times in 5:23–32).
In 3:1, Paul starts moving toward a prayer. He writes, “For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles . . .” Then he breaks off and gives us the glorious aside of verses 2–13. He’ll come back to his prayer in verse 14, but first he wants to make sure we understand his special calling, and then the church’s. Paul’s is “the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you” (3:2). He then speaks about “the mystery of Christ”—which is not an unsolved mystery but one that now has been made known. Previously it was hidden, until Jesus came. Now, it’s revealed. What is this mystery, once unsolved, now made known? Verses 6–11:
This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I take it that our focus in this session is this: What is the priority of the church for Christians? And in particular, for pastors: What’s the priority of the church for us? That’s where we’re headed: “The Church Prioritized” in the hearts and habits of her members and her ministers.
But might we first get our bearings, and spend our best focus, on a far more important prioritizer? Ephesians 3 is not concerned with our prioritizing. Not yet. Rather, here we marvel at God’s prioritizing of the church. And not just God as one, but also God as three.
So, before we get to us, as Christians and as pastors, let’s look at the priority of the church for God the Father, for God the Son, and for God the Spirit. (And hopefully this will be an exercise in proper prioritizing!) So, four truths about the priority of the church, with our hearts and habits coming last.
1. The Father prioritizes the church in his plan and purpose.
Verse 9 mentions his “plan”; verse 11, his “eternal purpose.” Let’s pick it up at verse 9:
[Paul’s calling is] to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things….This was according to the eternal purpose that [the Father] has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord. (verses 9, 11)
Verse 11 mentions God’s “eternal purpose” (prothesin), and verse 9, “the plan [oikonomia] of the mystery hidden for ages [and now revealed] in God, who created all things.” It’s the same language Paul has already used in Ephesians 1:9–11. In the gospel, he says,
[God has made] known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan [oikonomian] for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose [prothesin] of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.
God the Father has an eternal purpose, before creation, and he has a plan that he works out, in his perfect timing, in history—as Lord of creation and Lord of history.
What is this eternal purpose and plan? Now we need chapter 3, verse 10. Paul says he preaches to bright to light God’s plan,
that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.
We have three parts here to verse 10 (working backward): (1) the rulers and authorities, (2) the manifold wisdom of God, and (3) how all that relates to the church.
Rulers and Authorities
In Ephesians 6:12, Paul will write—and this might be a helpful reminder in times when algorithms condition us for digital “culture war”—“We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” And we have “in the heavenly places” here in Ephesians 3:10 as well.
“The rulers and authorities” are minimally, or mainly, “spiritual forces of evil,” the devil and demons, “the cosmic powers over this present darkness.” They are not earthly creatures, but heavenly ones, in the upper register or another dimension (however it works). And we might assume that good angels are looking on as well, as Peter says of the good news of Jesus—of his sufferings and subsequent glories, of his grace and our salvation—these are “things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12).
So, Ephesians 3:10 expands the audience. Previously, Paul has talked of (potentially) preaching “for everyone” (3:9) on earth, Jews and Gentiles, but now he says that also in view (presently) are “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”
Manifold Wisdom of God
God’s wisdom is what lies behind and is revealed alongside this mystery long hidden and now revealed in Christ. Remember what we saw in verse 6: “This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”
God’s wisdom becomes evident in the great unveiling that is the preaching of Christ. And God’s wisdom is said to be manifold, many-sided, varied. The gospel may be a simple message, and yet the divine wisdom it reveals is no simple, basic, one-dimensional wisdom.
The gospel of Christ overturns and surpasses and puts to shame the wisdom of man, and does so over and over again. That God would become man, with an ignoble birth and childhood in a backwater; that he would live in obscurity for three decades, and be despised and rejected by his own people at the height of his influence, and be crucified (of all deaths!) as a slave; then, after rising from the dead, that he would ascend and be enthroned in heaven (not in Rome), and pour out his Spirit, and bring the far-off Gentiles near with believing Jews into his new-covenant church—this is stunning, multifaceted, many-sided wisdom!
In the simple gospel of Christ, the manifold wisdom of God is on display in turning upside down the world’s wisdom and strength and nobility. Christ crucified is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23–24).
And that phrase “both Jews and Greeks”—in one body, one new man from the two—is at the heart of what makes the wisdom of God so horrifying to “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (As Paul preached in Athens, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent,” Acts 17:30.)
Which leads us to the last key phrase in verse 10: “through the church.”
Through the Church
How does God’s making known his manifold wisdom, to the hosts of angels and demons, relate to the church?
My prayer here, for us as pastors, is that God might be pleased to lift our eyes up from the ordinariness and the smallness and the annoyances and the frustrations of everyday practical church life—that we might see the church more like our God sees his church. In the immeasurable riches of his divine and Trinitarian fullness—infinitely happy, and overflowing in joy and creative energy and redeeming grace—our God, in the gospel of his Son, is making known his manifold wisdom to the spiritual forces of evil.
And how does he do it? Verse 10 says “through the church”—not armies, not technology, not sports, not entertainment, not political maneuvering—but “through the church the manifold wisdom of God [is] now be[ing] made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”
The church is his chosen instrument for showing the cosmic powers, good and evil, “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33). The reality and existence of the church—this seemingly unimpressive, lowly, ignoble, unwise, unwealthy, unaccomplished body of local Christians, covenanted to each other—his ragtag church, this otherwise unremarkable church shows Satan and his minions that their time is short. In effect: “You see the church, believing Gentiles joining with the Jews as one body? Checkmate.”
How does that work? God the Son takes human flesh and lives a lowly life in obscurity for thirty years. Then, just when he really begins to turn heads, Jews and Gentiles conspire to cut him down and end the story. The crucifixion looks like utter folly, not manifold wisdom. Then he rises again! But forty days later, he ascends to heaven and is gone. Now what? From heaven’s throne, the risen Christ pours out his Spirit, his gospel spreads through faith and repentance, and the church begins to grow and increase and multiply, and not only among Jews, but also Gentiles.
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Fear is your situation.  Faith is your solution.  That is, trusting or believing God.  This is a volitional act. So David proclaims to himself before God, “I will”.  Faith relies on the Lord by choosing to pray, sing, and study instead of worrying, fretting, and fleeing. Notice especially how much God’s Word is spoken of frequently in this Psalm to conquer fear and foes. 

About one year ago while lying in bed I whispered to God in desperation: “I am so afraid.”  It was the most heightened sense of dread I had ever experienced (and I and my household had already made it through some pretty horrific times over the last half decade).
Then the voices of children from a Psalm CD we often listen to came to me: “When I am afraid, I will trust in you God.”  Singing these words lifted me out of bed to do what had to be done.
So may you in any trial recite Psalm 56:3 for your resolve: What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.  It teaches us that when Christians are scared of what people will do to them they must strengthen themselves in God.
There are times when you will feel terrified by what’s happening to you.  What should you do?  When You’re Afraid Trust in God.[1]
There are many times you will be very afraid of people and problems pressing in on you.
Imagine that everyone around you is coming to kill you.  You would not likely sleep soundly unless you know your rescue is raising dust smoke on the horizon.
David’s situation in this Psalm is imminently dangerous and terrifying.  The Geneva Bible Study Notes of Reformation times explain, He shows that if God will help him, it must be now or never for all the world is against him and ready to devour him.[2]  This context is clear from the title: … Michtam of David, when the Philistines took him in Gath.[3]  Thus he cries out in verses 1-2 and 5-6 for God’s speedy deliverance because his daily experience is being surrounded by enemies gathering together to “swallow him up” in a fight.
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In surveying their eschatological vision of culture and the resulting imperative for Christians to be diligent in the cultural labors out of a sense of calling in light of God’s future work of recreation, Kuyper and Schilder impel Christians towards similar ends. Further, their respective differences, owing to divergences in their understanding of God’s purposes in creation, can help strengthen the others’ view by adding a counter-stress against where they each descend into problematic conclusions.

Abstract
Abraham Kuyper’s theology of culture is gaining interest in the English-speaking world, especially among those outside the Dutch Reformed tradition. Historic debates in the Dutch Reformed tradition over Kuyper’s hallmark doctrine of common grace often seem parochial or irrelevant to contemporary engagement with his thought. Revisiting one figure in those debates, this essay argues that Klaas Schilder, one of Kuyper’s most vocal critics, offers an important counterbalance to problematic features of Kuyper’s theology. While the divide between Kuyper and Schilder has historically been severe, consideration of their similarities regarding their eschatological vision of Christian cultural creation offers a way to harmonize their differences.

“Kuyperians were pluralists before pluralism was cool,” writes James K. A. Smith.1 Indeed, neo-Calvinists in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) display a marked fondness for stressing the possibility and imperative of shared cultural labor between Christians and non-Christians in society.2 Christians can work alongside non-Christians to create God-glorifying artifacts of culture, such as art or music, as well as less tangible elements of culture, such as share values, language, philosophic systems, or social and political institutions. While Smith certainly appreciates such contributions of the Kuyperian tradition, his critique aims at correcting what he perceives to be far too great an interest in the commonness which Christians share with the rest of society, at the expense of neglecting their distinctiveness. Neo-Calvinists have lost a sense of Christianity’s prophetic cultural witness, he argues. Or, to put it in more Kuyperian terms: neo-Calvinists have neglected the ecclesial contours of the antithesis between Christ’s work of redemption and humanity’s rebellion in sin. More specifically, they have failed to live out the active ministry of the institutional church of shaping communities in the distinctiveness of Christian liturgical life, which in turn is to serve as a leavening force in society for civic virtue.3
To rekindle the force of the Kuyperian antithesis, Smith has shown interest in the lesser known influence of Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder (1890–1952). Schilder, a strident critic of Kuyper and his legacy, provides what Smith sees as an element lacking in many contemporary neo-Calvinist theologies of social and cultural life. This is namely a “dispositional deflection” away from public life steeped in non-Christian principles, while at the same time providing a call to remain faithfully present within society, for its good and for Christ’s glory.4 Smith is not alone in recognizing the value of the greater emphasis Schilder puts on what neo-Calvinists call the antithesis, the epistemic and existential divide between regenerate Christians and the unregenerate, especially concerning social and cultural cooperation. A growing group of Kuyperians have begun to look to Schilder in an effort to strengthen their Kuyperian heritage.5
This willingness of those sympathetic to Kuyper’s theology of culture and common life to reach across what has been a bitter divide in the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition represents a promising new chapter in the conversation. Schilder rejected Kuyper’s foundational doctrine of common grace with great skepticism, and any effort to harmonize their thoughts must begin elsewhere. This essay proposes to put Kuyper and Schilder in conversation yet again, seeking to find some constructive unity in their varied understandings of culture, the antithesis, and common life shared between Christians and non-Christians. Whereas much of this discussion has historically focused on areas of disagreement, little serious effort has been given to those areas where Schilder and Kuyper’s theology bear similarities and can in fact work well together. The way to do this, this study proposes, is to begin where these similarities are the strongest.
For various reasons, Kuyper and Schilder disagree about much regarding creation, divine providence, and doctrines which serve to construct a “protology,” that is, a doctrine of the axiomatic beginning of all things. However, their eschatological vision for culture and human life does possess some crucial harmony. This study will therefore begin at the end, so to speak, examining both Kuyper and Schilder’s eschatological visions of culture, in order to discern how Christians in the present ought to understand their cultural task in light of the future. To frame this proposal, this study will survey the nature of the divide between Kuyper and Schilder on culture and common grace, before turning to their respective eschatological visions for culture to begin to work of synthesizing their views.
The Nature of the Divide
Beginning with the end of all things is a fitting endeavor in the study of Schilder’s theology of culture. “All threads of life and revelation,” he says, “lead in the end to heaven.”6 Though his thoughts on the cultural life of the eschaton certainly diverge from Kuyper’s, they do find significant common ground here as well. Schilder’s main conflict with Kuyper concerns instead the beginning of history. Kuyper is famous for his expansion of the doctrine of common grace in Reformed thought as the basis for his theology of cultural life. For Kuyper, God’s design for his creation is for humanity, his vice-regents, to develop the hidden potential sown into the created order as seeds awaiting germination.7 Cultural life, that is, the fruit of human labor as they interact together with God’s created order, is but one element of this latency.8 Humanity is charged with the task of creation’s development in Genesis 1:26–28 as part of God’s command to both fill the earth and to subdue it. The fall and the entrance of sin into the life of humanity, however, raises the question of how such a task and humanity’s capacity to fulfill it is affected by so deep a rift in God’s design for things. For Kuyper, God’s common grace accounts for the existential reality that humanity has indeed been able to develop creation’s latent potentials, sometimes for better though often for worse. Common grace, therefore, serves as Kuyper’s account for how cultural life remains possible, and reveals that God’s design for his creation has not been aborted, but continues to unfold and advance in this life prior to its consummation in the eschaton.9
Schilder, writing a generation after Kuyper, rejected Kuyper’s accounting for human cultural life in common grace, partly because of what he saw as problems inherent in Kuyper’s doctrine of divine providence. While both Kuyper and Schilder adamantly embraced a supralapsarian vision of God’s eternal decrees, the nature of Schilder’s critique highlights the supralapsarian tendency to frame the situation in more absolute terms.10 For Schilder, it cannot be the case that what allows both sinful humanity and the redeemed to both seemingly develop culture can be called grace.11 In reality, what Kuyper calls “grace” is simply the prolonging of judgment that will ultimately result in grace for the elect but condemnation for the reprobate, justified by reprobate humanity’s sinfulness manifest and magnified by their cultural labors.12 What accounts for present cultural life is a common “tempering” of God’s judgment against sin, so that his equal plans of both grace and wrath might come to completion in history.13
Despite such a dire prognosis, Schilder does retain a fundamentally positive view towards human cultural life, going so far as to call cultural abstention on the part of Christians a sin against God’s creational calling.14 For Schilder, cultural life is one area of responsibility for humanity under God’s covenant of works, which God entered into with the whole human race via Adam in paradise. This covenant bears actual expectations for faithfulness, namely to live out the fullness of the imago dei for which God created humanity and to the development of creation’s latencies in cultural life—covenant expectations which remain in force for all humanity even today.15
One Culture or Two?
One can begin to see in the above outline of Schilder’s thought the emergence of his emphasis on the antithesis. For Schilder, to properly speak of culture in its present reality is to speak only in connection with its ultimate telos. The problem of the fall is that it detaches human cultural striving from its proper integration with right orientation of cultural life, which hinges on right worship of God.16 The hope of the work of Christ is that regeneration restores the possibility of properly integrated cultural labor, that is work which sees “every part in its proper place in the whole”—even if this is only provisionally possible this side of the eschaton.17 The recognition this brings is that according to Schilder’s thought the vast majority of cultural development throughout history is debilitated by sin, even if cultural life as such remains inherently good according to God’s designs.
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