From the very beginning the Christian faith has had to deal with imposters who gain control of the governmental mechanisms of the church, doing so in order to undermine the entire point of the Church. Think, for example, of Diotrephes, who would put out of the church anybody who had even voted in favor of receiving emissaries of the apostles (3 John 9-10). That man had control of the perks of preeminence, he had control of the minutes and file cabinets, he had control of the office keys. The only thing He didn’t have was control of the Spirit. The Spirit blows where He wills.
The intention, laid out for us in Scripture, is for the institutional Church to receive the apostles, their emissaries, and their letters. When we get their letters, we in the Church are supposed to open them up and do what they say. Unfortunately, Diotrephes has an online discipleship training program, and his imitators are everywhere. Moreover, his imitators and heirs are, just like he was, entrenched in the Church.
But this should not be a surprise. We are also taught in Scripture that the process of getting from our raggety taggety beginnings to the point where the bride walks down the aisle without spot or any other blemish is supposed to be a long and arduous process. That process is called church history, and it is what we might call the mother of all extreme makeovers. It is not a sign that God’s purposes have been successfully thwarted; it is the way He determined to do this. When we grapple with the issues that this creates (and it creates a ton of them), we are simply doing our lessons.
During periods of reformation and revival, the Church really is quickened. She grows and spreads, and flourishes. Now if culture is religion externalized, it is not long before these lively forms of the faith take on an external cultural manifestation. But what happens when the liveliness dies away (as it frequently does), and the forms remain? We have those who love the forms of religion, but who deny the power of it (2 Tim. 3:5). We have heirs of Chrysostom who mutter their way through prayer books; we have heirs of Ursinus who doodle in the margins of their book of discipline, trying to make it into a confessional Book of Kells with their colored sharpies. No gospel sense of righteousness any more, but real pretty.
Another way of thinking about this is that Holy Spirit’s fire is the kind of fire that forms and builds its own altars, those altars it comes to rest upon. But what happens when the fire goes out a generation or two later, and the altar is still there? The natural response is to try to fix things by decorating the altar, bringing in embellishments and bronze geegaws galore. But a decorated altar is still a cold one.
Every form of Christendom thus far has been a visible, civic result of a potent visible church. And a potent visible church has always been the result of a vibrant movement of the Holy Spirit, bring the new birth to countless individuals. This new birth is invisible; you can see its effects, but you cannot watch it directly. The fire in the illustration above is the new birth, and there is no other fire.
When the new birth is there, the valley of dry bones becomes the mustering point for a great army. When the new birth is not there, all the arranging, and planning, and fussing that we might be able to do, will not accomplish anything. Ezekiel was told to preach to the bones, not to line up all the femurs in a tidy confessional row. As Dr. Lloyd-Jones said about some ecumenical endeavor or other, “Putting all the corpses into one ecclesiastical graveyard will not bring about a resurrection.”
Christendom, by definition, has to do with physical, public embodiment. It is public and external. It can be photographed. But if American Christians succeeded in having the Apostles Creed put into our Constitution, we would not then have a new nation in the new Christendom. We would have something like England, a teetery relic nation from the old Christendom. England is a Christian nation on paper. We cannot fix our problems on paper, or with paper. What we need is fire.
And we cannot have fire without preachers of the gospel who know what they are about. We need preachers who have experienced the new birth themselves, and who know what the Bible teaches about the necessity of it. And we need preachers who have experienced the anointing of the Holy Spirit on their pulpit declarations, who know what real power is. Further, we need more than one of them. Two or three thousand should do it.
We should not have to choose between the fire and the altar. We want both. We want a reformation and revival in the Church, and we want a renewed Church that then does not shrink back from its appointed role in establishing an institutional altar to burn hot on. But in wanting both, at this point in history, we want the fire first. Who wants a collection of cold altars? When the fire falls (as it will), we will have altars enough.