I have been spending a ton of time lately thinking about the contours of spiritual reformation in the 21st century.  Let me suggest that there are four main areas of human life in which the church in every age (family by family, and also as a communal whole) is called to work out reformation.

(1) Contemplation: This is the sphere of human thinking, of homo sapiens. As individuals, as households, and as a whole church, we need to be engaged in deep reflection/meditation on our scriptures, on our theological and ecclesiastical traditions, and on contemporary theological and ideological trajectories, as well as on the works of our God in nature and history.

(2) Consecration: This is the sphere of human worshipping, of homo adorans. As individuals and households daily, and as a whole church weekly, we need to be engaged in worship that is both vibrant and “formed” (liturgical).

(3) Cultivation: This is the sphere of human building, of homo faber. As individuals, as households, and as a whole church, we need in everyday life to fully embody and enact the gospel (the metanarrative of redemptive history). The rule (kingdom) of God takes shape in every sphere of human living; it is always worked out, manifested, instantiated. This involves both constructive elements (culture building, dominion taking) and defensive elements (vigilance against defilements).

(4) Confrontation: This is the sphere of engagement with the “world” (human life in rebellion against God). Here our work is both missional and militant; it involves robust interaction with ideas and cultures, both for purpose of bringing others into the sphere of God’s kingdom (here we must learn how to communicate the gospel in an idiom accessible to the unbeliever), and for the purpose of throwing down high places of evil and deception.

I must admit that The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer is a surprising book.  It’s not I was unaware of Schaeffer’s reputation as a great apologist (a description he would be uncomfortable with; he thought of himself as an evangelist first), it’s just that the first half of the book does not prepare you for what’s to come in the second half.  I plan on writing a review of the book in the next week that will elaborate on this idea, but until then, I wanted to cite this paragraph where Schaeffer introduces a phrase that will stick with me for the rest of my life: the “final apologetic”.

The world has a right to look upon us and make a judgment.  We are told by Jesus that as we love one another the world will judge, not only whether we are his disciples, but whether the Father sent the Son.  The final apologetic, along with the rational, logical presentation, is what the world sees in the individual Christian and in our corporate relationships together.  The command that we should love one another surely means something much richer than merely organizational relationship.  Not that we should minimize proper organizational relationship. But one may look at those bound together in an organized group called a church and see nothing of a substantial healing of the division between people in the present life.

It is all too easy to read a passage like this and think of how it applies to that favorite of Reformed straw-men: the one who reads theology all day, can quote Scripture at length, and can wax poetic on the finer points of systematic theology, yet shows little of the fruits of the Spirit, especially love.  But don’t do that.  Instead take a look at yourself.  Have you become so wrapped up in the academic side of learning and defending the faith that you have neglected Christ’s command that we love one another?

I believe Schaeffer is spot on here: the most powerful testimony we can have to a watching world is that we love one another, and put on display in our own lives and relationships the outworking of the healing that Christ made possible in our relationship with the Father.

One thing is immediately obvious. In the mind of our Lord, the kingdom of God and the announcement of that kingdom are not mere information. This is no infomercial: “We interrupt the normal broadcasting of your life to announce that the kingdom of God has come near. Thank you. We now resume our normal broadcasting.” That is not what is going on. This is an announcement of divine activity, of kingdom-building activity that embraces the whole of creation within its scope (think back to the prophecies of the Old Testament); and in the face of this announcement, no passive neutrality is possible. Jesus says, “Turn and believe, for God is acting! God is building a kingdom. In fact, he has already acted and the kingdom is here. So you must act. You must turn and believe.” Passive neutrality is impossible in response to this message.

Think with me further about how Jesus’ summons flows out of his announcement of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is divine activity. It is God’s active response of saving grace toward those who have rejected his rule (think back to Genesis 3:15). It is the aggressive outworking of his great master plan to restore his creation – to restore individual lives, families, communities, even structures of civilization. It is the active outworking of his purpose to overturn the curse and ruin brought upon humankind by Adam’s rebellion. This is a message saturated with astonishing grace. And to ignore this message – to have no response, or an apathetic response – is active rebellion against the purpose and working of the King. If you and I don’t turn and believe this good news, we are simply at war with God. Jesus in these glad tidings issues a clarion summons, and he will not be ignored. What does he mean by the word “repent”? He means that we are to turn.

Ben Miller – The Kingdom Has Drawn Near: Studies in the Gospel Jesus Preached

All this and much more lies back of Jesus’ proclamation as we return finally to Mark 1 and listen again to him say, “The time has been fulfilled.” He is saying quite simply that the decisive threshold of fulfillment of everything spoken by the law and the prophets has already been crossed. That is the force of the verb he uses here. The sense is not, “The time is about to be fulfilled.” It is not even, “The time is presently being fulfilled.” It is rather, “The time has been fulfilled.”

The decisive threshold of the fulfillment of all the Old Covenant promises has already been crossed. It is now already God’s appointed time to visit mankind, to set up a kingdom of righteousness and peace that will never end and indeed will fill the earth, replacing universal cursing with universal blessing. It is now already God’s appointed time to enthrone the anointed son of David, who is both the Son of God and the Son of Man as the law and the prophets told us, who is Jesus himself, the God-Man. It is now already God’s appointed time to restore human dominion over the earth and human communion with God. It is already here, that is what Jesus is saying. We must try to imagine how this would have thrilled the heart of a Jew who really knew the Old Covenant Scriptures – if he or she could even have taken it all in!

Then there is this curious language, “The kingdom of God has come near.” This is probably a better rendering than “is at hand,” because “is at hand” could still leave a sense that the thing is about to happen, about to arrive. No, the kingdom of God has drawn near; the verb Jesus chooses means that the thing of which he speaks is already definitively here. The preceding phrase established this: the time has been fulfilled; and in that fulfillment the kingdom of God has come near. But this is still an interesting verb to choose, “has come near,” because it leaves open the possibility that the kingdom of God may have come near in less-than-full form. Let me try to explain.

To come near is not necessarily, as of yet, to fill and dominate the scene. A thing may already have come near without yet having taken the whole of the stage. The possibility is left open in the word Jesus chooses that the kingdom, though definitively present, may not be manifested in its fullness all at once. And this is fairly obvious, when you think about it: clearly not every enemy of the God-Man, the Son of David, is already visibly under his feet when Jesus makes this announcement. As of the moment Jesus speaks, the kingdom has already come near, but it is not yet in its full expression as it will be in time to come.

Ben Miller – The Kingdom Has Drawn Near: Studies in the Gospel Jesus Preached

In the diner, for perhaps the millionth time, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) in the movie Groundhog Day says, “Well maybe the real God uses tricks, or maybe he’s not omnipotent, he’s just been around so long he knows everything.” This assertion leads to an intriguing question. Are God’s thoughts not our thoughts only because God knows more than us? Imagine a simple blade of grass. We can know certain things about that blade of grass; God knows everything about that blade of grass. But does that sum up the difference between God’s thought and ours?

Let us consider the human activity of learning. Man learns. Man is a learner. Man habitually relies on what he knows while working to know more. For man, it is impossible to learn apart from thinking, considering, reflecting, concentrating, evaluating, comparing, categorizing, qualifying, analogizing, and summarizing. Man’s activity as learner is unique to man. Man can learn because man is made in God’s image, but man is limited by learning because man is not God. God cannot learn; He is unchangeable, eternal, infinite, and omniscient. God knows all and always has known all. From all and to all eternity God has known everything about everything, and he never had to learn any of it. This is incomprehensible to man. God’s thought is qualitatively and quantitatively different from man’s thought because God never learned a thing and yet he knows it all!

To borrow a phrase from Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, given to us in the Scriptures, is truth unchanged, unchanging.  Yet while this truth is unchanging, the cultural and philosophical climate each Christian finds himself in changes, sometimes dramatically, from generation to generation.  Each of us has to wrestle with how best to approach the apologetical task, given the philosophical mindset of our age.

I have read apologetics books that provide the best answers to common objections to Christianity, and proofs of God’s existence.  While I do not deny the importance of material like this, there must be a better way to expose the unbeliever to the root problems of his worldview.  Francis Schaeffer, in The God Who Is There, provides some helpful instruction toward that end:

Let us think of it in a slightly different way.  Every man has built a roof over his head to shield himself at the point of tension.

At the point of tension the person is not in a place of consistency in his system, and the roof is built as a protection against the blows of the real world, both internal and external.  It is like the great shelters built upon some mountain passes to protect vehicles from the avalanches of rock and stone which periodically tumble down the mountain.  The avalanche, in the case of the non-Christian, is the real but abnormal, fallen world which surrounds him.  The Christian, lovingly, must remove the shelter and allow the truth of the external world and of what man is to beat upon him.  When the roof is off, each man must stand naked and wounded before the truth of what is.

The truth that we let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures, but the truth of the external world and and the truth of what man himself is. This is what shows him his need.  The Scriptures then show him the real nature of his lostness and the answer to it.  This, I am convinced, is the true order for our apologetics in the second half of the twentieth century for people living under the line of despair.

This is certainly a more nuanced and technical approach to apologetics than perhaps we are used to.  But that should not deter us from educating ourselves and going forth with boldness.  If God is for us, who can be against us?

Picking up where we left off yesterday, Ben Miller lays out the foundational idea at the center of the Scriptures.  Taken from the Introduction to The Kindgom Has Drawn Near: Studies In The Gospel Jesus Preached.

What I want to explore with you in this and the following three studies is an idea and a reality that lies at the very center of the Scriptures. Suppose someone were to say to you, “You Christians are always talking about the Bible, the ideas of God in the Bible. What is the central idea of the Bible? What are the central ideas of the Bible?” I wonder how you might answer that question. I wonder how many of us would immediately think of the answer that will be proposed in these four studies.

I want to suggest and try to persuade you as best I can by the help of the Holy Spirit that at the very center of the thought-world of God himself is an idea (and a reality!) called the kingdom of God. No less a luminary than Herman Bavinck, the great theologian of the last century, said this: “The essence of the Christian religion . . . .” Let us pause a moment. Suppose you were asked, “What is the essence of the Christian religion? What are you Christians all about? What distinguishes you?” What would you say? “The essence of the Christian religion,” says Bavinck, “consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.”  This is a glorious definition. The sheer trinitarianism of it is glorious – that all three Persons of the Godhead are at work here. And notice that the end and goal of all their working is a kingdom, the kingdom of God.

In the Introduction of The Kingdom Has Drawn Near: Studies In The Gospel Jesus Preached, Ben Miller begins by telling us of his fascination with the “shaping power of ideas”.  But the ideas of humans are nothing compared to the ideas of their Creator:

The Bible is a book that overflows with great ideas, and that is actually a nearly irreverent statement. These are not great ideas. These are the greatest ideas, because they are the ideas of God himself. The Bible is not, over against so much popular thinking today, a book for religious “kooks” who have forgotten how to think. The Bible is the book that opens up to us the unbounded, inexhaustible thought-world of God himself. The Bible opens up to us the ideas, the plans, the purposes – what the Bible calls the very wisdom – of God. To live in this universe, to feed on these ideas of God himself, is to find the Tree of Life. The father writing to his son in Proverbs 3 says, “My son . . . blessed is the one who finds wisdom . . . . She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed” (Proverbs 3:13, 18). He who finds the wisdom of God finds the Tree of Life.

Seeing the Bible from this perspective will serve to emphasize the necessity of regular Scripture reading.  Since we are living in God’s created world, it behooves us to know what His thoughts about this world, and how to live in it, are.