As everyone should know by now, my very favorite subject is slavery, and I am always itching for opportunities to talk about it . . .
The Baylys have been doing good work in challenging the limitations of the radical two kingdom take on things, and today Tim posted on the Southern Presbyterian doctrine of the spirituality of the church, identifying it as the problematic ancestor of many of these current notions.
In the discussions over there, this quotation from Michael Horton’s Christless Christianity surfaced, and it cries out for a little interaction.
“Both Northern and Southern churches had reduced slavery merely to a political issue when they should have done what only churches can do: proclaim God’s judgment upon the kidnapping and forced labor of fellow humans and excommunicate members who refused to repent of the practice. At the same time, church members could have exercised their moral conscience in deciding for themselves how best to abolish the institution in courts and legislatures.”
There are two things going on here. One is the misreading of the charter that God gave to the church. Once you have excommunicated a man for profiting from “forced labor,” what will you say to the apostle Paul when Philemon goes and tells the apostle what you did to him? Probably a moot point, since the apostle’s status is all tied up in the credentials committee. He has been in jail one too many times, and the presbytery has needed to go through some due diligence.
What possible basis could you have for excommunicating a church member who was obeying the New Testament injunctions to masters, and in order to be obeying them, had to be a slave owner? Assume a Christian master, of Philemon’s character. He is carefully applying Paul’s instructions in Eph. 6:9; Col. 4:1; and 1 Tim. 6:2. Is he to be disciplined? What good does it do for the church to be limited to Word and sacrament only when we refuse to take in what that Word says, doing so in unambiguous prose?
“And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” (Eph. 6:9).
“Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven” (Col. 4:1).
“And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort” (1 Tim. 6:2).
Now I agree with Horton that church discipline should have been applied for kidnapping. I also agree that the slave trade was therefore a monstrous traffic, and that the Church would have been well within her rights and obligations to discipline any members who engaged in it. But good luck doing that, and not having a transformative effect on culture.
My question is this, and it goes right to the inconsistent heart of the R2K theology. Can a minister of the gospel, in a thus-saith-the-Lord mode, tell his parishioners, and the broader Christian public, that they have a moral obligation under Jesus Christ to live as businessmen, educators, citizens, masters, wives, husbands, or slaves in a particular way, as taught and informed by Scripture? I say yes. The R2K position says no.
Or rather, wants to say no, depending on the issue. Now that the shooting is done, and the issue of slavery is over a century old, R2K theology would like a piece of the action. The outside secular world disapproves of slavery now, and so it is safe for the Church to add her amen. But the world is not currently giving us the go-ahead for any opposition to public sodomy, for example.
The problem is that the church cannot “leak” its moral standards on the issue of slavery only. When the Church is being the Church, we will have an impact (in just the way Horton describes) on slavery, cocaine use, poverty, debt levels, abortions, and homosexual marriage. Salt with its savor affects everything. Salt without savor is trampled on by men, and Jesus says that such trampling is fitting. If we are going to have that effect, which Horton wistfully imagines for the 19th century, then why don’t we go ahead and do it on purpose? Can we deliberately seek to have this effect without being accused of purveying a Christless Christianity? Some of us are wishing that the Church would have on our current cultural atrocities the kind of impact that Horton wishes for the Church of one hundred and fifty years ago.
The bottom line issue is this. If the Church is not transforming the culture around her, then the culture around her is transforming the Church. There is no static equilibrium point. That means that the Church will either be prophetically addressing the problem of homo-marriage, or it will be in the process of adopting homo-marriage herself. Either the church will speak about the carnage of abortion, and God’s hatred of it, or the church will be in the process of bringing that hated object into the sanctuary.
God did not send His Son into the world to form and establish the Church, in order that this Church could float through the world like a ghost.