Theology for the Church and City – Christ the King Presbyterian Church – Session 1

Prayer: Psalm 121

A Song of Ascents.

I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.

Introduction

What does it mean to say we live in a secular age?

So begins philosopher Charles Taylor’s monumental diagnosis of modernity, A Secular Age. Secularity, as Taylor understands it, is not so much a condition of total unbelief as one in which all belief – and disbelief – is constantly subject to doubt and revision. Challenges to values and worldviews can come from the media or the market, the church or the state, the academy, artists, family, friends and colleagues, and of course from deep within, as we reflect on our personal experiences of joy and suffering alike. To live in a secular age is to live in a world in which questions that are commonly held to be of great significance are met with little or no common consensus. They are questions with which we are all familiar:

• What is the nature of the person? Does a person have a purpose, or any inherent value? Are these objectively given, or to be freely determined, and by whom? • What is justice? How can it be achieved? What is to be done about the seemingly endless cycle of violence between races, religions, social classes, and the sexes? • Why do our relationships seem increasingly broken, and loneliness more ubiquitous, even as our technology provides us with endless opportunities to be connected? • What is the role of beauty in a world that has grown cynical and suspicious of aesthetics as simply one more exercise of the will to power? • How do science, politics, religion, artistic expression, sex, and economics relate to one another in their competing claims to authority? • What is the nature and purpose of our work, and our leisure?

The gospel of Jesus Christ provides coherent and life-giving answers to these questions. But it does not merely provide answers; it announces salvation. In this first session of Theology for the Church and City, we will spend some time considering what the gospel is and how it defines the mission of the Church. This mission is not elective, but constitutive, for as Mike Horton has said in People and Place, mission is not something the Church chooses to do; rather, the Church is mission.

I. Core Values of CTK (2006) a. Gospel-driven b. Community-based c. Contextualized

II. Core Values of CTK Cambridge (Update 2017)

• The Gospel. We are committed to the historically orthodox story laid out in the Word of God, extending from Creation to Restoration, with the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ at the center of all human history. We believe that all the problems of world are resolved in the gospel, and are committed to leading our people deeper into God’s word and enabling them to read their own lives, including pressing and confusing ethical questions, through the lens of scripture. • Community. We are committed to a vibrant and essential life together in which we bear one another’s burdens, share in one another’s joys and sufferings, and exhort one another to good works and greater spiritual maturity. This requires sacrifice amidst the busy life of the city, and depends on an understanding of the church as dependent on all its members and their diverse gifts. • Love for the City. We neither fear nor idolize the city, but learn the questions the city asks to the end that we might respond with the gospel. Though we live as exiles, we seek ways that our work, relationships, and civic engagement might cause the city to rejoice and praise God. This also depends on an understanding of the church as gifted corporately through diverse gifts and callings, across its members and across denominations.

III. Church Planting a. Why Church Planting?

“We work and pray for a transformed community where God is glorified through the advance of his kingdom through the proliferation of churches committed to justice, mercy and faithfulness. … We believe that mercy and evangelism are inseparable. If the Church is defined as the worshipping community of the people of God who order their lives, relationships, vocations, etc., in light of the values of his kingdom, which drive us to live for the city in a way that no other worshipping community can, then it becomes obvious why we aim at church planting.” - CTK Vision Statement, 2006

b. Why Multisite, Multicongregational? i. Contextualization ii. Boston is a city of neighborhoods iii. Jane Jacobs’ three levels of city governance iv. A little history 1. Cambridge (1996) a. Multi-congregational, multi-ethnic from the start i. Terry Gyger and Osni Ferreira merged CTK with a four year-old PCUSA Brazilian congregation ii. The nature of the relationship between the two congregations has been very complex – influenced by trends in immigration and economy in addition to leadership 2. Church plants in East Boston, Framingham, Marlborough, Downtown Boston 3. Dorchester (2007; Dan Rogers arrives 2008) 4. Harbor San Diego (2008-2009) 5. The CTK Church Planting Center 6. Other congregations a. Newton (2010) b. Grace South Shore (2011) c. Roslindale/West Roxbury (2013) d. Jamaica Plain (2013) e. Somerville (2013) f. Northern suburbs (2018) g. Quincy (not yet launched) h. South Boston? East Boston? Charlestown? c. Benefits and challenges i. Think big, think small ii. Being Presbyterian 1. Diaconate works locally, but elders have church-wide duties 2. The importance of functional trust and love iii. Finances

IV. The Gospel a. What is the Gospel? i. It is good news, not good advice.

“What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?” - J. Gresham Machen

ii. The centerpiece of Paul’s ministry:

I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.

- 1 Corinthians 9:22b-23

iii. “Of first importance”:

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…

- 1 Corinthians 15:1-4

iv. Many more succinct statements:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

- Romans 3:21-25

…[I]n Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them… For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

- 2 Corinthians 5:19, 21

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

- Isaiah 53:5

John 3:16, Acts 10:43, Acts 13:38-39, Romans 4:22-25, 1 Timothy 1:15, Titus 2:14, 1 Peter 2:24, 1 Peter 3:18, 1 John 4:10...

b. “In accordance with the Scriptures”: The Great Story (Chart: “The ‘Bookends’ of Biblical Theology”) i. Creation ii. Fall iii. Redemption iv. Restoration v. …with the cross of Christ as the central event of human history. c. Note: everyone has a gospel story (see Chester and Timmis, Everyday Church, or NT Wright, The New Testament and the People of God) i. Creation: Who am I? Where did my life come from, and what is it for? ii. Fall: What’s the problem? iii. Redemption: What’s the solution? iv. Restoration: What am I hoping for? d. Different frameworks for presenting the gospel (see Chart, last page) – these will tend to resonate with different people in different contexts, and it’s good to understand the nuances of each, how they work together and condition each other, the contexts in which each fits best, and which one naturally resonates with or challenges us. i. Home/Exile ii. Covenant iii. Kingdom

V. Loving the City a. Two ways of getting our relationship to the city wrong i. Idolizing the city 1. Paul Graham, Cities and Ambition

“In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. … What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to. … I'd always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But… Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.”

2. This leads to assimilation ii. Fearing the city – playing defense, hunkering down 1. Culture wars 2. Closing ourselves off to relationship b. How does the talk about our relationship to the city? i. Alien benefactors – exiles who seek the welfare of the city. ii. Three key passages: 1. Proverbs 11:10: “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.” 2. Jeremiah 29 3. 1 Peter 2 a. “1 Peter bursts… Niebuhr’s five neat models of how Christ relates to culture…” – b. Concern for the present welfare of the city was not in spite of, but was motivated by, Christians’ eschatological hope c. This hope means that present or impending suffering cannot be considered an ultimate catastrophe (1 Peter 4:12-3) d. It is thus because and not in spite of the coming reign of Jesus Christ that Christians are free to follow his example and command to love our neighbors and our enemies e. Seeking the welfare of the city includes excellence in the work of building and supporting the institutions upon which it depends, even as those institutions are subject to critique f. “Christians do not come into their social world from outside seeking either to accommodate to their new home (like second generation immigrants would), shape it in the image of the one they have left behind (like colonizers would), or establish a little haven in the strange new world reminiscent of the old (as resident aliens would). They are not outsiders who either seek to become insiders or maintain strenuously the status of outsiders.” – Miroslav Volf

VI. The Mission of the Church

The gospel is the story the Church tells, but it is also the story that constitutes the Church:

“In the history of revelation, the Old Testament people of God become the church of the Messiah, formed as the fellowship of the Spirit. … The coming of the Spirit fulfills the promise to Abraham, and makes the Gentiles Abraham’s seed (Gal. 3:14, 29.” – , The Church

“The church is called to serve God in three ways: to serve him directly in worship; to serve the saints in nurture; and to serve the world in witness.” – Edmund Clowney, The Church

Worship, Nurture, and Witness – all elements of mission:

“To reach this growing post-Christendom society in the West will obviously take more than what we ordinarily call an evangelistic church; it will take a missional church. This church’s worship is missional in that it makes sense to nonbelievers in that culture, even while it challenges and shapes Christians with the gospel. Its people are missional in that they are… outwardly focused… involved in addressing the needs of the local community… know how to contextualize the gospel… Finally… a missional church will always have some outsiders who are drawn into its community to incubate and explore the Christian faith in its midst.” - Tim Keller, Center Church, p. 265

a. Worship i. Human beings are worshippers.

“A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love.”

- Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love

“…[I]f we… say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love.”

- Augustine of Hippo, City of God, XIX.24

ii. The Church is called to be a counterculture whose supreme value is the glory of God. iii. WSC Q. 1: What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

“Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and of Thy wisdom there is no end. And man, being a part of Thy creation, desires to praise Thee, man, who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness that Thou ‘resistest the proud,’ -- yet man, this part of Thy creation, desires to praise Thee. Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” – Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“…the most obvious fact about praise – whether of God or any thing – strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of complement, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game – praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least…

“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.” – C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

iv. The fall was not a departure from, but a misdirection of, worship: sin primarily as idolatry

Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. – Jeremiah 2:12-13

v. We are called to worship

God is a jealous God, i.e. he has burning zeal for the holiness of his name. He will not share worship with another…God warns his people that when they have settled in the land, they must not enquire about the worship of the heathen gods, saying, “’How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same.’ You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshipping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods. See that you do all I command you; do not add to it or take away from it.” (Dt. 12:30-32) …Israel is to worship God as he has commanded and in no other way… the distinctiveness of the law of God and the worship of God made Israel a light to the nations. – Edmund Clowney, The Church

b. Nurture

i. The gospel requires nurture

“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” - Ephesians 4:11-16

“Paul’s image of the body of Christ offers profound insights for nurture: all the members are needed; gifts are for the body as a whole, and isolation is tragic; and diversity of function produces not division, but unity (Eph. 4:11-16). … The goal of nurture is to grow to maturity in the image of Christ, in whom the divine image in creation is restored.” - Edmund Clowney, The Church

ii. Corporate imagery: body, temple, bride

‘Biblical corporateness must be understood first of all as an essential reality of the covenant. God covenants corporately and not simply individually. The concept of the covenant inherently presupposes a people with whom the covenant is established. The communal aspect of the covenant relationship is forever present.’ – O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. - Galatians 6:2

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. - Hebrews 10:24-25

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. - James 5:16

Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. - Colossians 3:12-14

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. - Matthew 6:14-15

iii. Servant Leadership

But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” - Matthew 20:25-28; cf. also Mark 10:42-45

c. Witness i. Doing Justice and Preaching Grace (Harvie Conn, 1992)

“At the center of evangelism is an answer to the unchurched, downtrodden, oppressed – ‘the kingdom of God embodied in a community of salvation and sharing.’” (30)

“Evangelism announces the restoration of humanity, of full personhood in the image of God.” (32)

“This is the call of the full church – expressed in terms of preaching, service, community, and worship.” (35ff.)

ii. The centrality of witness in word and deed

“Jesus came to gather, and to call gatherers, disciples who would gather with him, seeking the poor and helpless from city streets and country roads. Jesus said, ‘He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.’ (Mt. 12:30, Lk. 11:23) Mission is not an optional activity for Christ’s disciples. If they are not gatherers, they are scatterers… The gospel itself is the story of the seeking Savior who knows the father’s love. If mission is lost, the gospel is lost.” – Edmund Clowney, The Church

“Christians go into the world as witnesses of the kingdom (Acts 1:6-8). To spread the kingdom of God is more than simply winning people to Christ. It is also working for the healing of person, families, relationships, and nations; it is doing deeds of mercy and seeking justice. It is reordering lives and relationships and institutions and communities according to God’s authority to bring in the blessedness of the kingdom.” - Tim Keller, Ministries of Mercy

“I urge my readers to discern the balance I am seeking to strike. If we confuse evangelism and social justice we lose what is the single most unique service that Christians can offer the world. Others, alongside believers, can feed the hungry. But Christians have the gospel of Jesus by which men and women can be born again into the certain hope of eternal live. No one else can make such an invitation.” - Tim Keller, Generous Justice

VII. Creedal Christianity a. Creeds i. Apostles’ Creed ii. Nicene Creed iii. Chalcedonian Definition iv. Athanasian Creed b. Confessions and Catechisms i. Westminster Confession of Faith (doctrinal standards of PCA) ii. Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechism iii. Heidelberg Catechism iv. Belgic Confession, Canons of Dort c. Access to confessions i. Westminster Confession of Faith: http://www.pcaac.org/resources/wcf/ ii. “Christian Creeds and Reformed Confessions” – free app from Westminster Seminary California, available on iTunes or Google Play d. What is a confession? i. A systematic statement of faith summing up what the Scripture says about itself, God, the church and the world ii. Not itself inerrant or normative e. Why a confession? i. Not helpful for the church to just give a believer the Bible without any aid ii. Systematic theology is important in understanding how to react in certain circumstances, how to go about life, how to answer the tough questions that arise in life, etc. iii. The WCF is the doctrinal standard of the PCA – if we are to be a confessional church, consistent and uniform in how we approach and teach doctrine and put it to use in our worship and work, then we need to have a standard which we adhere to

For a brief history of the Westminster Confession of Faith, see http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/warfield/warfield_westminwork.html

For a good history of the PCA, see Sean Michael Lucas’ book For a Continuing Church

For the Westminster Confession of Faith and BCO, see http://www.pcaac.org/what-we- believe/