Again, I thank the organizers of this conference for the gracious invitation. It's a real blessing to be able to be here and to speak to you, and I thank you for your kindness and indulgence in listening to a lot of talk about American church history and American Presbyterianism. And I feel a little awkward doing it, frankly, but I'm doing what I've been asked to do. I am, as you heard in the previous hour, submitting to my brethren, and happily so. But I think actually sometimes there's advantages of looking... Someone was talking last night, you know, well, you got at the end to talk about a little bit of what's happened in the last couple of years here. but the talk was about something rather remote. Yes, it was. Just to recall what we talked about last night, we were thinking in terms of 19th century American Presbyterianism, and we talked about some conflicts. We talked about ways of understanding the church and its organization, and we saw that over against Stuart Robinson and James Henley Thornwell, for example, Charles Hodge took a position that the Bible, while containing the principles of Presbyterianism and telling us the essential elements thereof, did not prescribe the details as did those men thought, both in terms of spirituality and in terms of the basic structure of the church. They didn't so describe the church that Hodge's concern here frankly was, as he looked at it, that this very tight kind of Presbyterianism, he said this about Thornwell's approach, tended to unchurch everyone who was not Presbyterian. And Hodge saw that as sectarian, to unchurch everyone who was not Presbyterian. And he said, the polity of the church does not pertain to the being of the church, it pertains to its well-being. And that has been historically a reformed conviction, to distinguish between the essence of the church and the well-being of the church. If you don't distinguish these things, you fall into narrow sectarianism. And that was one of Hodge's concerns. On the other hand, He who was concerned that the spirituality of the church in their construction forbade them from saying anything about slavery. And Hodge thought slavery had some real problems that could biblically and should biblically be addressed and challenged. And slavery should in many of its respects as practiced on the American shores be condemned. also came to see at the same time there was a proper spirituality of the Church. And he particularly saw that and we spent a bit of time looking at the so-called Gardner Spring Resolution brought to the 1861 General Assembly where the American where the American conflict, the Civil War, was rife and the state, the civil magistrate was very split on this matter, right? And so there was a hyper-politicization of everything and Hodge didn't want that hyper-politicization to come into the church, he didn't want to say, as the Gardner Spring Resolution was saying, that to be a good Presbyterian, you had to support the Lincoln administration. Hodge said, let me make it clear. I voted for him. I support him. But it doesn't then become an article of faith. We have our articles of faith. We have our confession. And we don't add things to them in this way so that if you want to really be a Presbyterian, you also have to be supporting the federal government. There are those here, he said, at the 1861 assembly, for example, from the Senate of Mississippi. And he said, they have a different allegiance, but can we not stay together? And of course, they didn't stay together. They split. You say, well, that was inevitable. The Baptists and the Methodists split in 1843-44. They would all split. Well, actually, the Episcopalians did not split in the war. They never split. They tried to keep a view of the church that was sort of above that, and they kept together. So that's an interesting little feature. So what we saw there was a Hodge resisting an overweening spirituality of the church that, as he put it, muzzled the prophetic voice of the church. and at the same time said we have to have a proper spirituality of the church that understands what the church's business and calling is so that we're simply not overwhelmed by political concerns, by whatever's going on in the state just overwhelms us and we really cease, we're just like another agency, another social or political agency and we cease to have the kind of prophetic witness to the society we're in. So this is all part of what we were talking about last night, and I thank you for letting me talk about that, and I'm gonna talk some more about that, the doctrine of the spirituality of the church in the theology of Charles Hodge. I do wanna read a scripture, as we did last night, and we'll do a little bit more with this later. I wanted to be sensitive to good Reverend Swell's church here. I understand you use the NKGV, so I borrowed. I don't have versions of that, but they're kind of clunky, so I didn't bring it with me traveling. And so I asked him, could I read the Pew Bible? And it's rather small. 20 years ago, it'd have been fine, but I don't want to read this whole, because I'm going to read to you now a book of the Bible, Philemon. Some of you are getting really nervous, I can say, you know. I'm going to read you a book, but it's Philemon. So, you know, it's just a chapter. But let me read that to you. Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus, and Timothy, our brother, to Philemon. our beloved fellow worker, and Aphia, our sister in Archippus, our fellow soldier, and the church in your house. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God always, I should say this is ESV, I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints. And I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. For I've derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you. Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, Yet for love's sake, I prefer to appeal to you. I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus, I appeal to you for my child Inesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me. I'm sending him back to you, sending my very heart. I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel. But I prefer to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion, but of your own accord. For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant, but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he's wronged you at all or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, write this with my own hand. I will repay it to say nothing of your owing me, even your own self. Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you and the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ. Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you'll do even more than I say. At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I'm hoping that through your prayers, I'll be graciously given to you. And we'll end it there. Charles Hodge crafted a doctrine of the spirituality of the church that allowed him to properly distinguish the church from the world while also integrating the church into the world. It's necessary to understand, I think, both the distinction and integration of things. Another way of saying the one in the many. My students will appreciate that. If one fails to understand the distinction of the persons of the blessed holy undivided trinity, modalism looms. If one fails to understand the integration of the persons of the trinity, some form of tritheism, some sort of social trinitarianism perhaps, threatens. Similarly, deny the distinction of the two natures of Christ God and man, deny that distinction and one ends in eudaicheanism. Or if one denies the integration of the two natures, Nestorianism stalks. The point is, is that we must distinguish things. We must think in a reformational context. Maybe that one's a little closer at hand for some. We must distinguish justification and sanctification or we reject the reformation. If you don't distinguish those, you reject the Reformation. If we fail to integrate them, we risk making Christ our Savior only from the penalty of sin, not its power, and we fall into antinomianism. We must always seek in all of our theology properly to distinguish and to integrate. Much of the burden of The conference, and this is referring then, what you've been hearing are things about the conference that we had in 2016. This is from the 2014 conference. Much of the burden of that conference was to integrate the role that Christ exercises as ruler of the world with his role as king and head of the church. He's the ruler of all. and he's head and king of the church. So we must properly integrate his dual reign lest we have a Nestorian Christ. We must distinguish, however, Christ's universal kingship from his reign over the church. There is a distinction between the church, to which believers in their seed belong, and civil society, the state, to which all persons belong. Christ is especially, in other words, the head over that spiritual body, the church, that the Holy Spirit gathers and perfects throughout the world and that constitutes his mystical body. This reality that there's a proper distinction between Christ's kingdom, which is not of this world, John 18, 36, and the kingdoms of this world is often expressed by what we call the spirituality of the church. And I could add, particularly as we consider the church as institute, to use Kuyper's language, over against the church as organism, which is the totality of the church in its work in the world. The phrase, the spirituality of the church, may strike many of you as curious, and I've been using that, and you may be wanting a greater definition. Well, I'm gonna attempt that. Contrary-wise, the term Christian spirituality or spiritual theology may be familiar to you, and you might think of that more commonly. Such might have some idea what spirituality in broader terms mean, but maybe they've never heard that nomenclature, the spirituality of the church. Might leave you scratching your heads a bit. I hope to show that these concepts, Christian spirituality and the spirituality of the church are not wholly unrelated. It's the case, however, that something rather distinctive is being addressed by what we mean when we say the spirituality of the church. The doctrine specifically addressed in terms of the spirituality of the church, though of ancient origins, did not appear in that form until the 1850s in the old school Presbyterian Church in America, which, as we noted last night, came into being in 1837 and reunited with the new school in 1869. Much of the focus of the work I've done on this subject is on that context, the 1840s through the late 1860s, in which I've shown, and I do this in the dissertation, that the question of the province of the church and the nature and limits of the power of the church. Specifically, that's what we're dealing with when we talk about the spirituality of the church. And when we say that, we mean we're focusing on a kingdom not of its world, one that is spiritual and not civil or political. Though old school Presbyterians rather widely held convictions about the spirituality of the church, at least as to the principle that the church is a spiritual kingdom, the application of the principle engendered enormous controversy. That's hardly surprising. This is true throughout the whole history of the church. We may even agree on principles, but we can differ on applications, and you certainly see that in history. Just a short reflection here on the nexus between Christian spirituality and the spirituality of the church may be helpful. Many have employed the term Christian spirituality in recent years particularly, to distinguish the theology of the Christian church from the lived experience of the Christian faith. The spirituality of the church highlights that the church as the mystical body of Christ filled with the Holy Spirit is a spiritual, not a civil entity. The broader notion of Christian spirituality has to do with the specific ways in which the Christian life is lived, particularly with respect to something like Christian devotional practices, the spiritual disciplines that mark the Christian life, whether public or private. Here, one may think, for example, of the prayer life of the Christian. That's often treated under what's called Christian spirituality, the prayer life of the Christian. This would be a part of that and could be set over against the devotional practices of a Muslim or a Buddhist. In other words, scholars speak commonly and broadly of spirituality in this way. You can speak of Islamic spirituality, Buddhist spirituality, and if they're saying Buddhist spirituality, just take that as an example, What they generally mean are the meditative practices of Buddhists, perhaps particularly Buddhist monks, the kind of texts that they use to inculcate their own piety and so forth. So that's that language of spirituality. There's a set that Crossroads has begun publishing and may still add volumes to it. It's an 18-volume set called World Spirituality, An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest. So you get the idea there. They're talking about spirituality and all these religions. So here's the question, though, for us. How exactly is the broader concept of spirituality connected with the narrower concept of the spirituality of the church? Because I think it is. Spirituality broadly has to do with the spiritual aspects of the Christian life, as we've said. These spiritual aspects in Christian theology are authored, in Christian theology, are authored by the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Paul addresses the spiritual man as one in whom the Holy Spirit has worked. A really key text for this is 1 Corinthians 2, 1-16. 1 Corinthians 2, 1-16, Paul, in a sense, sets before us how it is that, to use the language of Calvin in Book 3, how the Holy Spirit brings Christ to us and us to Christ. Calvin there said, as long as Christ, who has done everything for our salvation, Christ has kept the law for us, he's paid for our lawlessness. But Calvin ends there with book two saying, as long as Christ remains outside of us, he does us no good. And it's then the Spirit who brings us to Christ and Christ to us. The spiritual man, as Paul speaks of then in 1 Corinthians 2, is one who enjoys union with Christ. And who even has, what does he say at the very end of that chapter? He has the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ. In and by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit authors and fosters Christian spirituality. If you have a prayer life, a devotional life, a life of communion, to put it as Owen does, communion with the three persons of the Godhead, and communion with your fellow believers, with your fellow office bearers, your fellow Christians, all of that is a work of the Holy Spirit, right? Well, I believe the spirituality of the church ties in with this because the church is a spiritual entity. It's the corporate body of those in whom the Spirit has worked. And it's the spiritual aspect of the life of the church that determines the nature and limits of its power, of true church power. You say, what do you mean by church power? Well, all the institutions have a power proper to them. The family has a power proper to it, and the exercise of the power, the sign of the exercise of the power is the rod. The state has a power that's proper to it. It has coercive powers. And the sign of its authority is the sword. The church, the authority of the church over against the Roman church is not magisterial and legislative, it's ministerial and declarative. Over against the state, which is legal and coercive, it's moral and suasive. Its power is the power of the key. You're saying, wait a minute, you mean the church has no coercive power? None whatsoever. You say, well, isn't excommunication that? Well, if you think that, that's another talk, and no, it isn't. No, it's not. It's not the power of the sword, it's the power of the keys. And if you really understand it, it's actually, it's a more significant power than the power of the sword. Because a person can be condemned to death by the sword, but if they repent or they're in true fellowship with God, they'll go to be with him when executed by the state if they know Christ. They'll go to be with him, whereas an excommunicant, as far as the church, as far as we can see outwardly, that person is out of fellowship and is not to be regarded as a true child of God. But these things all have their proper place. For example, the church power doesn't extend to discretion in the same way the power of the family does. The family may say to Junior, you might have ice cream. You didn't finish your dinner, you may not have ice cream. The church does not have a proper power to say you may not have ice cream. The church has to speak in accordance with the word of God, thus saith the Lord. It does not have that kind of power. You say, well, can elders, can a consistory tell somebody they may not marry another person if that person is not in the Lord, if that person is not a member of the visible church? Yes, they may say, this is not a Christian you're marrying. May they say, we don't think you're well-suited for this person. You may not marry that person. They may give whatever counsel or advice they choose to give. They may say, it's our counsel or advice. For these reasons, we don't think. And what if they marry the person who is in the church? Can you say, you went against our advice. We're gonna discipline you. No, you can't. No, you can't. Because they don't have to, you say, well, they're unwise. That's very foolish to not listen to the elders. It may be. It may be, but these things, you see, this is ABC stuff about what's the power of the church, what's the power of the state, what's the power of the family. That's all a part of the spirituality discussion. And these things have really got to be understood. They've really got to be understood. So, I'm arguing that all sorts of organic connections exist between spirituality broadly conceived and the spirituality of the church properly. The doctrine of the spirituality of the church, particularly relevant in the 1860s, as we were talking about it last night, is something that's received revived attention in recent years. I quote a couple of men from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and they say this, unlike some Reformed theologians who have posited a basic harmony between church and state in the execution of God's sovereignty, American Presbyterianism has also nurtured an understanding of society that stresses fundamental differences between the aims and tasks of the church and the purpose of the state, affirming a doctrine sometimes called the doctrine of the spirituality of the church. Now, this is Daryl Hart and John Meather. who tend to define that a little more narrowly than I do in following after Hodge. They can tend to follow more after Thornwell. This is the kind of division we have within our church broadly. In other words, I say division, but this differences of opinion, just like you have differences of opinion about various things within confessional, Bounds. You have differences of approach. We talked about this last night. Everything is not minutely decided. I know that's distressing to some people who want everything in writing minutely decided, or just at least everything minutely decided in terms of whatever I think. You know, this is what I think, so that's what everybody should think. Hmm, doesn't quite work that way. We need to be able to distinguish here and live with each other in the church properly. Paul, we had a good example here. You know, if Paul can live with people who are preaching the gospel, basically, like you say, these are not Judaizers in the Philippians context. Paul would take on Judaizers. Judaizers are compromising the gospel. Everybody here, I hope, understands that. But those in Philippi were not, and though they caused discomfort to Paul, he was able to live with it. Well, if Paul could live with it, let me suggest you and I can live with some things. And that's really a huge part of this, is discretion, knowing where you should take a stand. And again, there are some men that never get brought into the office of elder, for example, because they just don't have discretion. Every issue is life or death for them. Well, not only is every issue not life or death, and not only is that very tiresome to people who think that way, frankly, but it's poor judgment. And it's going to end up wasting the church's time. We have to know what to focus on. We have to know... What's important? Remember I talked about majoring on the minors, and if you do that, you'll end up minoring on the majors. And you say, well, where's the list of all of this? Well, as somebody asked me, how do we know what the majors are? I said, well, that's what we define confessionally. Our confessions are what we think to be the essential doctrine of the faith. Your minute particular interpretation of any given passage We can differ on that. We can do our exegetical work, and we can say, well, I take a bit of a difference on that passage. That doesn't mean I have a doctrinal difference with you. Some people just don't know how to slice these things, and we have to know how to slice these things. But at any rate, the revival of this doctrine, the spirituality of the church, has played into the work of several Reformed scholars who are arguing that doctrines pertaining to natural law and to kingdoms, you may be familiar with that, need reviving among the reform, most notably David Van Drunen, I just picked him, Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster, California. As part of his commitment to argue for the use of natural law and the understanding that there's a common kingdom and a redemptive kingdom, he believes there's a common and a redemptive kingdom that are separate. Van Drunen has also claimed over against neo-Calvinist transformationalism, Kuyperians, that recapturing the doctrine of the spirituality of the church is an important part of the project. You might say, well, so is this spirituality of the church? Is that contrary to Kuyper's approach? No, actually, I write in other places, it's quite consistent with his view of the church's institute and its organism, and his view that there are spheres, and that the church, Kuyper was very insistent that the church not be understood to be over every other sphere, that it has its proper place under God, as does the family, as does the state. Now, in the older world, where you had been in the medieval church, especially, was the Roman Catholic Church believed that the church was over the state. They believed the church was over the state. And in the East, in Constantinople, they believed so-called Caesaropapism, the opposite. The state is over the church. And among the Reformed, there was some who believed the state is over the church. That came to be called Erastianism. But all the thinking reformers, that means, what does that mean? The ones you agreed with? Yeah, partly. No, but all the reformers that we know and honor, all the magisterial reformers rejected that business about, they didn't want to, they certainly didn't, they didn't think the church was over the state, nor did they think the state was over the church. They thought each was in their proper place under God and answerable to God. The magistrate had duties and responsibilities. He's never going to answer to God for how he carries them out. And the ministers and elders and deacons and all God's people under him. him have answerability, just like the family has answerability. And it doesn't mean that there's no kind of communication with these institutions. I mean, indeed, we church visitations. We rightly ask and engage our families, how are you doing? And we have a proper place to do that. But we don't minutely go into the families then and decide, you know, they say, well, we can't agree on bedtimes. Well, we'll tell you that. Here are the bedtimes. Sometimes church leaders get confused and in the name of wanting to help, they get outside of their proper sphere or use of church power. It can do that. On the other hand, you want to properly engage and not be indifferent. You see what I'm talking about? A proper engagement and a proper separation. You're like, well, it's much easier if you just do the two kingdom thing and everything's one kingdom or the other. Throw it into this one, throw it into this one, throw it into this one, throw it. All kinds of schemes come that make it easy. Hang on to your wallet when somebody's telling you, here's the Christian life made easy. It ain't no such thing. It ain't no such thing. It's like you're sitting there, Charles Stanley, there are five, listen to me, five steps to sanctification. Honey, you just made me the step three. I'm not going to be sanctified. I mean, really? I can understand if Baptists are doing that or others. Reform people shouldn't act that way. We have a far richer heritage than this. I mean, we recognize sometimes, you know, we recognize this in the OPC. Our committee on Christian Ed, which I've been on for many years, we had a track wrote for us, written for us many years ago, and it came to us, and it was a good track. And it was called, though, Evangelism Made Easy. And you don't know how much That got debate. We liked the substance, but we said in the Christian Ed Committee, we can't put out something that says evangelism made easy. It was called evangelism made less difficult. I mean, we couldn't live with made easy, because evangelism isn't easy. Is it? No. Not if you know what you're doing. I mean, you do it depending on God. You do it depending on God, but there are not like four steps. Do this and success is guaranteed. I hate to tell you that reformed people, there's a part of us even as reformed people that want that. We all have a kind of behaviorism. Just give me the rules. What do you mean by that? Just tell you precisely what to do? Yeah. Yeah, there's that. I mean, you'll get this. One of the criticisms that comes against our preaching as we're holding forth Christ, I mean, we should have good redemptive historical preaching. We should have good heart, open hearts to open hearts application. But it's never going to be enough for a certain type in the pew who wants you in detail to tell them how to live the Christian life. You understand what I mean? And they're critical. Sometimes when people say not enough application, what they mean is, I want you to tell me exactly how this all fleshes out and works out. Well, live the Christian life. It's yours to live. It's not mine to live for you. I mean, if I could live it for anybody, I would live it, you sort of see this when you have children, grandchildren. If I could live it for anybody, I'd live it for my children. I've often, when my children are going through something, my wife and I talk about this. We've prayed, Lord, if there was some way you could take that from them and just put it on us, give us the whole burden of it. But that isn't, they have to come to Christ, relate to Christ, walk with Christ. We can't save people from living the Christian life and we shouldn't be trying to do so. We should be helping and equipping them to live the Christian life. But they have to live it. They have to live it. Office bearers don't live it for them. It's enough for you to live it for yourself. I find it thoroughly challenging. It makes you pray for them. Well, So Hart, Van Drunen, and others claim that their invocation of the doctrine of the spirituality of the church is in keeping with its 19th century usage, particularly that made by Princeton theologian Charles Hodge's fellow old school Presbyterians, the border state champions of spirituality, Stuart Robinson, and the dean of Southern Presbyterianism, James Henley Thornwell. So we were dealing with some of that last night. But it's Hodge, as we saw, who comes to articulate this. this doctrine of the spirituality of the church that I think is really a helpful way of coming about it. We can think of it this way. Robinson, Thornwell, and others that we've mentioned were on one end of the spectrum. We could call it the radical spirituality of the church wing. Others in the old school church, especially as the US Civil War intensified, that was from 1861 to 65, were on the other end of the spectrum. not heedful at all of the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, only too ready to have the church make political pronouncements nonstop. I mean, you get the office of the General Assembly and the office of the stated clerk, and he has a whole office. This exists today, the stated clerk of the PCUSA and some other churches that have this very developed bureaucracy with these offices. And you say, well, I mean, the church doesn't even meet as a General Assembly, but once a year, the Presbyterians meet yearly. in that respect, and presbyteries meet as they choose, and of course, generally, sessions meet at least monthly, the local bodies. But you say, well, it just meets yearly. How can you have, well, you have this office of the stated clerk that just makes pronouncements. Right now, you could go onto the PCUSA site, website, And you could look at the office of the state of clerk, which is a big office, and he's making, or she, or it, I don't know, some entity, some person, whatever they were assigned at birth. Oh, I hate that. Whatever they are now are making pronouncements about all kinds of American political actions and everything. Putin, you know, whatever. They're saying, they're giving in the name of the church. So sometimes people ask me, what does the OPC say about X? And I say, we as a church, as an institute, have no opinion on that. We don't express anything about it. Well, don't we believe stuff? Oh yeah, we believe stuff. It's very clear. We state it in our confessions. I mean, it's a pretty full statement of faith. What do you want? We want detailed reviews of all political policies. That's what a lot of people want. But I can tell you what, when you do that, you always, you really want it from a conservative point of view, because normally, what happened to the American church as it increasingly became politicized, especially after its reunion in 1869, as it became increasingly politicized, it increasingly liberalized. Because what was important was politics and what was going on in society, not the gospel. Not the gospel. And if the church loses the gospel and doesn't have the gospel, who has it? We're the agency appointed in the world, to the world, for the world, to bring them the gospel. Nobody else is going to do that. Nobody else is called to do that. It's the church that's called to do that. Hodge rejected both of these extremes, the Thornwell on the one end and those who were just going with everything goes. And he developed a doctrine of spirituality of the church that I call supple and nuanced. I realized in a time where there's a cacophony of shouted political slogans, nuance and subtlety is like nobody has time for it on the left or on the right. Let us not fall prey to this in the church. Let us not be such in the church that we cannot have mature, sober discussions about doctrines, about how this impacts the culture in which we are. Let us keep our heads about us. Let us keep our wits. I mean, it's so obvious from the public record that irrationality rules the day. Irrationality, and that's always a mark of sin. Let us not be irrational, which is either being chicken little, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. I always love it in church courts. I don't love it, I'm being sarcastic. I always love it when people say, we don't have time to think about this or discuss this. There was a famous speech given years ago at a particular assembly, I won't say of what denomination, but there was a motion on the floor that called for some, considered action and steps and somebody's argument against it was, we don't have time to think, we have to act. I think that's a motto for our current world. Does anybody here think that what's going on seems deeply thought about? Deeply reflected on? No. We're a world of acting, and it's on the right and the left. I mean, the left is what dominates in our public, right is in some of our churches. But we don't want this far right or far left kind of thing. That's what drives us as a church. There are churches right now that are being driven by a social agenda, social concerns. We have them in the states. It's not just the PCUSA. This has come into other churches. It's even come into NAPARC churches. So let's adopt a social justice agenda. Well, people in our circles are like, let's adopt the opposite. What, social injustice? Let's keep our heads about us. Let's not be driven by the outside concerns. I do love the Trinity Psalter Hymnal, but it's not the Bible. So I want to be driven by the Word. Where's my Bible here? But normally I have a Bible in the pulpit. The Church of the Psalterhym was great. And it has a lot of the word in it, because it has, directly, it has psalms in it. But we want to be Scripture-driven. So, for Hodge, his doctrine of the spirituality of the church developed out of his overall doctrine of the church, which he saw as a spiritual institution, a body gathered by the Spirit and given expression in the visible institutional church. So for Hodge, as for Protestants more broadly, historically, the church was in its essence invisible. The visible church being the necessary outward expression of the inward reality of the work of the Spirit. God is invisible. God isn't seen. His work in us is not seen. The Spirit blows, the wind blows where it wills, John 3. But what is outwardly seen and then expressed is the working out of that which has been worked in. For Hodge, the church was a spiritual institution that carried out its task in spiritual, not political or civil ways, was a given that he contended for and developed throughout the whole of his theology. The question then you could raise is how successful was Hodge in developing his doctrine of the spirituality of the church, and how well does such an approach, how might it serve in our day? That's a challenge, particularly in our pluralistic culture. Some might argue that the spirituality of the church is precisely what a pluralistic society needs. Listen, a church that some argue it this way, a church that minds its spiritual business and does not disturb a secularized culture that does not want the church to have a public theology. Others would see the spirituality of the church as failure on the part of a church that is privatized and refuses to call its society to repentance as the old school Presbyterian church arguably failed to call America to repent of and for slavery. If this doctrine of the spirituality of the church, some say, kept the American Presbyterian Church from fully addressing what many would regard as the greatest evil of its day. What good was it? Many other Christians and many other American Christians did not believe that something called the spirituality of the church constrained them from denouncing slavery, and they denounced it in biblical terms. Certainly, you can think in Britain, William Wilberforce, to cite a key non-American, condemned slavery on the basis of Christian principles. We could say, in the broader terms of the kingdom and the church as organism. I mean, he was acting in his legislative capacity. You could see that's the church as organism in action, what Wilberforce was doing. And of course, he condemned slavery and slavery in Britain suffered defeat in no small measure due to explicit Christian opposition. I think many of you are somewhat aware of that story. people, certain people in our society are aware of it because they made a film of it. And of course, nobody knows about anything or it's not worth knowing unless there's a, if there's a movie about it, then oh, okay, yeah, yeah. I'll just let that go. On the other hand, one might argue the spirituality of the church tends to keep the church from being overwhelmed by the world's concern or its agenda. So I've mentioned a concern about the spirituality of the church, but there's a proper place. Let me just quote Machen. Next year is Machen's, is the 100th anniversary of, well, of Machen's Greek grammar, which many have used across the many years, but most importantly of his masterwork, Christianity and Liberalism. I would urge everybody here to read it if you've never read it." And you say, well, isn't he a... It's one of the greatest apologetic books. It's one of the greatest Christian books of the 20th century. I believe, without any caviling. And he's talking about the battle between Christianity, true biblical orthodox Christianity, and liberalism, modernism, which is a denial of that, that existed back in his day. The sad thing is, if you read it, you're like, this sounds very familiar. I mean, his writing is beautiful. It's so accessible. It's so well-written. It's just quite striking. But if you read it, you'll think, this all sounds familiar. And a lot of what he was talking about as applied to liberalism now applies to evangelicalism. It's just that simple. It's where evangelicalism has gone. In America, in the West, in here, Britain, you know, we're not that different. You might be... a little, as we often hear, a little ahead of us, and Europe's a bit ahead of you in some ways. Of course, this ahead is not ahead at all, I'm sorry to say. You know, it's not that at all. It's just, you know, more progressive or more whatever. Progressive's a perfectly good word. Are you really, I hate, progressive means you're moving forward. I like progressive, but we all know how that word gets used these days. This is what Machen says when he's sort of defending the doctrine of the spirituality of the church and why we need it. Think of him in the 1920s and he's just been through, they've just been through World War I. Weary with the conflicts of the world, one goes into the church to seek refreshment for the soul. And what does one find? Alas, too often one finds only the turmoil of the world. The preacher comes forward not out of a secret place of meditation and power, not with the authority of God's Word permeating his message, not with human wisdom pushed far into the background by the glory of the cross, but with human opinions about the social problems of the hour, or easy solutions of the vast problem of sin. And he says, is there no refuge from strife? In other words, we have strife all out in the world. We come into the church. Is there no refuge from strife? Is there no place of refreshment where a man can prepare for the battle of life? Is there no place where two or three can gather together in Jesus' name to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation and race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passions of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife. And he doesn't mean by that not to pray for these things, not to be concerned. He means that that's the subject of the sermon, because that's what was happening in liberalism. The sermons were, I mean, you would get a sermon on the labor problem. And the minister would go on about business and labor and where the solution lay. And Machen is like, really? I don't think the Bible gives us a detailed answer to all of that. And there might be a certain conservative type who would unthinkingly say, yes, business is right. Really? Always? That isn't what the Bible says. The Bible condemns greed on every one of its pages. And there's, you know, is socialism wrong? Is Marxism? Well, you said something critical about it last night. But so much of our, I grew up hearing about godless communism. And communism is by definition, communism particularly, is by definition godless because it's materialist. It's philosophically materialist. It denies God. It says only matter exists. So it is godless. But what we've seen, I think in recent decades especially, is not men and women running businesses from Christian principles, but we've seen a lot of godless Capitalism. And some people in the States are like, they don't understand, why does Bernie Sanders appeal to the young people? Because they see a lot of capitalism that is really badly and unethically run, and they mistakenly think socialism is the answer to it. This is not a mystery, folks. You say, well, what do you mean capitalism badly run? Are you serious? And now look how this younger generation is running capitalism. All of those who loved business and thought the problem is always the state or labor, now you see with Facebook and Amazon and all that, what certain types of people running it who really are godless and are progressive, what they're doing. You don't like what they're doing, do you? But you shouldn't have liked what big business bosses were doing 50 years ago in mistreating their workers. You shouldn't have liked that either. I carry no brief for sin. So wherever sin occurs, whether it's in capitalism or whatever kind of economic system, yes, I mean, just as a producer of wealth, communism has never produced wealth. It's sort of like Islam. Wherever Islam has gone, things just dry up. Capitalism has, but you can't mistake the fact that a lot of capitalism was carried out in earlier years under Christian auspices. In other words, there was a lot of Christian involvement with it. In case you haven't noticed, not anymore. And so I'm not going to defend something simply, you know, let them make all the money they can. No. No. Look at how wicked it is. I'm not saying it needs to be regulated in some ways. I'm just saying I'm not gonna be an apologist for it. We shouldn't be an apologist for any of this stuff out here. We should be an apologist for Jesus. We should be an apologist for the Bible. Don't hitch your wagon to any star. But Machen was talking about this, and he says, is there no refuge from strife? He says, is there no place where we come, the things that divide nation from nation, race from race, Can we not come to forget human pride, to forget the passions of war, the overwhelming, the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overwhelming gratitude at the foot of the cross? If there be such a place, then that is the house of God, and that the gate of heaven, and from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive the weary world. This world needs to be revived. And you say, well, they don't know that. Well, that doesn't matter. My wife and our personal devotions together, I love the way she comes up with these expressions. As we often say, you know, she did something the other day. She said something that was such a great summary of this thing. And she said, that would have taken you a lot more words, wouldn't it? And I said, oh, yes. Yes. You just very nicely dealt with it. But she often will say in our prayers together, she will pray for the civil magistracy, our governors, mayors, and president in Congress, and she will say, grant them righteousness and wisdom, even though they don't seek it. Because they often, they don't seek it, but that's what they need. That's what they need, and grant it to them. It's a good prayer. And that's what Machen is saying. If the church stops being the church, what do we have to offer the world? Machen's plea is for a church that knows its spiritual calling and properly understands that it's not the world. And then I'll just give you my favorite Martin Lloyd-Jones quote. Dr. Lloyd-Jones said, well, I should not do it just exactly as he did, but now Dr. Lloyd-Jones said, The church does the world the least good when it seeks to be most like it. I think that's summarizing what I'm saying here. The church does the world the least good when it seeks to be most like it. The world does not need an echo of itself. The world does not need the church to be a political or social or economic agency with a little holy water thrown on it that's saying basically the same thing that whatever the world and its mainstream forces is saying. It could be what we see now in progressivism. It could be the church echoing Nazism. In other words, it could be fascist. It could be communist. The church needs to stand for the truth in every place. not giving way to fascism or giving way to communism or giving way to Americanism or giving way to big business. It always used to amaze me. There was a certain talk show host in America. He's gone on now. But he used to, he would say this very definitely. I'm not sure he would agree with, he would agree with me that there's a problem. We see it with Amazon and all the big companies nowadays and their so-called progressivism. But he used to always say, the problem is not big business, it's big government. It's big anything that's not following God's will. Nobody gets a pass. Government is the problem, not business, no. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, I'm here to tell you. There's plenty of wickedness in business. There's plenty of wickedness in the state. There's enough to go around. And we as Christians oughtn't to be singing any of their songs. We must sing our songs. and tell them, this is what you need. Well, they don't believe that. Well, they don't know they need it, as my wife says, but that's what they need. And we have to stand firm. We can't compromise on what we know they need, because what they need is what we need. It's the only thing that's done our poor souls any good. God in his word is the only thing that does us good. And that's what we have to keep saying to the world. That's what we have to stay on point about. And spirituality of the church is an understanding that helps keep the church the church, understanding its mission. The danger is always there that the church ceases to be the distinct spiritual institution that it is and becomes an adjunct to the society about it. But there's also another danger, I hasten to say, that the church becomes a ghetto that shelters its members and renders ineffectual its gospel witness. Can the church concern itself with its own spirituality so much that it fails in its mission to the world? I would say it is, and Hodge strove to steer a course between the scala of the marginalization and irrelevance of the church on the one hand, and the charybdis of its politicization on the other hand, as he developed his doctrine of spirituality of the church. Well, I have some other things to say about this that I'm not going to share with you right now, but I talk about my experience in writing my dissertation and staying with... I did a lot of work at Princeton, both the seminary and the university, and I spent time out there. Thankfully, you can get a lot online, and I was getting a lot online, but I spent some weeks out there, staying with some different friends, and I talked about my ride into Princeton, And you go through Trenton, which is just really blighted neighborhoods after blighted neighborhoods, into the very rich Princeton society. And I say this, that ride brings to mind, that ride from poverty you see before your eyes, to great opulence, brings to mind the responsibility that we bear for each other. None of us owns the world. God does. And we're stewards of His good gifts. Yet we often act as if we do, and that the difference between us The difference between us is because I'm smart, industrious, and so forth, and the homeless man is not. The spirituality of the church, rightly constructed, would remind us that all that we have is from the ministry of the Spirit, including all that we have due to common grace. That is what is most important. Thus, we need not hoard, but can properly share the material things of this world, as we're called to. The doctrine, however it may be construed, the doctrine of spirituality of the church, should not be taken to mean, as in some hands it appears to, that one is indifferent to suffering all around. The spirituality of the church properly does not mean, and must not mean, either that Christians or the institutional church fails to care for the world about it, In the great tsunami of 2007, you may recall that, Christians, Christian organizations and Christian churches responded with overwhelming aid. Here's a good little case study. Hindus and Muslims, and of course if you recall where this occurred in the eastern part of the world, and there were very few Christians that were hit by this, there were mostly Hindus and Muslims, because of their different theological convictions tended not to step in and help. seeing the destruction on the part of the Muslims as deserving karma on the part of those destroyed. And that was openly said. That's their karma. They got what they deserved. Christians showed compassion. Or the wrath of Allah against bad Muslims on the other side. It's just a striking thing if you study the response to that tsunami. There was an overwhelming compassionate response from Christians of all sorts. and there was a deafening either silence or just lack of any action on the part of Hindus and Muslims. The spirituality of the church must never prompt us to say, be warm, be filled, and go away. It frees us to serve God and each other. It does not make us those who flee the world, but those able to engage each other from the best vantage. And I would really commend to your reading B.B. Warfield's masterful sermon. I think you can just, whatever search engine, I've made the mistake of saying Google and having people come up and tell me why I shouldn't say that. You know, okay. These are the kinds of things that kind of make you think, wow, we're really doing well if we're, I mean, fine, don't you, whatever search engine you want to use. Imitating the incarnation. Imitating the incarnation by B.B. Warfield. And Warfield says, This, he says a lot of things, but I'll just quote this bit. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world. And I'm saying this is a true spirituality. And self-sacrifice will lead us, his followers, not away from but into the midst of men. You remember how I said last night how we can look at a crowd and say, yuck, but how Jesus, Matthew 9, 35 to 38, looked at a crowd and had compassion and was drawn towards them even as he's always drawn towards us. This is what Warfield says. Self-sacrifice will lead us as followers not away from, but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort. Wherever men strive, there will we be to help. Wherever men fail, there will we be to uplift. Wherever men succeed, there will we be to rejoice. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows. It means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. You see how, I'm not here to call you in a spirituality of the church to say, don't be concerned about the things of the world. Let me just get a little personal here. I'm telling you that your reaction is wrong. If you're just mad, that's it. You're mad all the time. That's not Christian. It's not and never has been. But God is angry with the wicked every day. Isn't God angry with an unrighteous society? Yes, He is, and He will bring it to judgment. This is the day of grace, and we're called to bring the gospel to the world. You're not going to bring the gospel to people you hate and are mad at. You're just wanting and praying and wishing that judgment would fall on them. But apart from the grace of God, you'd be just like them. What makes you to differ? It's only His grace. It's only His grace. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows. It means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self and others. It means entering into every man's hopes and fears, longings and despairs. It means many-sidedness of spirit, multiform activity, multiplicity of sympathies. It means richness of development. It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives, binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours. It means really identifying with people, identifying with people in suffering, identifying with people who are struggling. I mean, I've had a lot of people say to me, I don't understand how people can be doing what they're doing in COVID. Really? They have no hope. They don't know God. They don't know Jesus. This world is all they have that they're clinging on to life. You say, but yeah, there's the euthanasia business. They're not clinging on to life. Right, they're inconsistent. This is part of sin. On the one hand, I must cling on to life for all it's worth. On the other hand, if I don't think it's worth living, I'll take my own life or I'll especially take grandma and grandpa's who are really bugging me, you know, having to go visit them and I just wanna play golf or whatever I wanna do. The world isn't consistent in these things, but it's always consistently self-centered. It's the city of man, as Augustine said, is about the love of self to the exclusion of the love of God. So nothing should surprise you. If you say, well, the world is really, it looks like the world lies in wickedness. Well, yeah, the Bible tells you that. It told you that all along. What do you do about it? If you say, well, I just hang on and hate them till Jesus comes again. Well, you mistake the nature of your calling. You mistake what you're supposed to be about. You're supposed to be about your father's business. And what that means is praying that the Lord would send laborers into the harvest and going and telling yourself, doing all within your power, praying, God in heaven, bring about your gracious purposes in this world. You say, yeah, but we deserve judgment. But do you think we just deserve judgment in the last 20 years because of how bizarre it's gotten? We didn't deserve judgment 50 years ago. We didn't deserve it 100 years ago. You say, well, it wasn't like this for grandma and grandpa or great-grandma back in the Netherlands. The bad stuff hadn't come to pass in such obvious ways. I agree with that. But if you really think they didn't deserve judgment, I mean, if you want to talk about what we deserve, what we merit, we merit condemnation. But we receive God's grace and favor because He loves us and because Jesus lived and died for us. We have a perfect righteousness because of all of that. And Warfield ends, he says, it means that all of the experiences of men shall smite our souls and shall beat and batter these stubborn hearts of ours into fitness for their heavenly home. So we can rightly talk about the church. We can rightly talk about this. Let me just say this. Hodges' doctrine of the spirituality of the church served, let me see where I am in terms of my time. I go to 1130, okay. I gotta get going here. We're about to wrap it up. Hodges' doctrine of the spirituality of the church served to distinguish the church as an institution from other institutions, particularly the state, and to highlight that the mission of the church is a spiritual one. Since the church as a formal organization has nothing to do with politics as such, those specific matters of public policy that might divide persons who are otherwise in doctrinal accord, it does not address matters that are purely political. It is part of its proper spirituality and calling as a spiritual body, having spiritual concerns to address all that the Bible addresses, even if such issues have political ramifications as a consequence of the underlying spiritual concerns. And so I think that the principle that the church is a spiritual entity bearing spiritual concerns remains a valid concern and consideration. There's a lot I could say here. I have some notes here on theonomy. I don't know if I'm going to have time to talk about these things. You can maybe ask some questions about it. There's tons of things we could talk about here. Let me just say this. Sometimes when you say this, people will say, well, the Bible actually does have a detailed blueprint for how we're to live all of our lives. No, it doesn't. It never did. Please listen before you just get mad and dismiss what I said. Claims that the Bible addresses everything in life in detail misses a couple of things. First of all, it misses that theonomic sorts of claims like that notwithstanding. First of all, many of the regulations of the Old Testament, apart from general equity, and we can talk about what general equity means. In other words, they have some kind of application now because they teach a principle, though the application then was different. Those particulars that you find in the Old Testament that are ceremonial laws, that are civil laws, were for a primitive agricultural society. They were not for every society that would ever exist. They were primarily directed towards that society. But even then, and you say, well, okay, exhaustively, I've had this discussion with people, it exhaustively told them how to live everything in life. No, it didn't. One of the most important considerations of a Mesopotamian society, which is what their society was, a society in the Fertile Crescent, and they were actually in a desert region there, is the question of water rights. The Old Testament says nothing about water rights. So just for people who say, well, the Old Testament exhaustively told them how to live. No, it didn't. It told them how to live in a way directed towards God, in a way directed towards each other. It told them how to live ethically. It gave them many laws, but the notion that it said everything exhaustive about what needed to be said for life, for a trade, for a craft. It didn't tell you how to do your craft. It's never the purpose of the Bible. You know, we don't take a weird biblicism. You come to ask me, well, how do I repair my automobile? And I don't say, well, here's the Bible. I say, maybe here's a Chilton manual. or something like that. I know we've gotten, we're so, everything's online and whatever. The YouTube guy will show you everything you need. Just go look, see what he does and do what he does. But this isn't distinctly and directly in the Bible. You're saying, well, are you doubting the Bible? No, I'm saying we're talking about what the Bible is actually talking about, not making stuff up. It's the same with a Betty Crocker cookbook. You wanna bake a strawberry cake, it's like, here you go. You don't wanna take the Chilton manual in the kitchen to try to bake the strawberry cake. nor the other. And so you want to use the proper tool for the proper job. The Bible isn't meant to speak, it wasn't even in the Old Testament meant to speak exhaustively to them. And it's certainly not in the New Testament where our societies are no longer primitive agricultural societies. Now those things have a general equity oftentimes. You can say, well, they said this, you know, like you would wall the roof because people would be up on the roof. And it's a violation of the sixth commandment to not properly provide for people to be up there and not simply fall off. And you could say a general equity, would that be putting a fence around a swimming pool? Yeah, that's a good application of it. But that all requires some thought and integrity and some common sense, some sanctified common sense, you might say, about how to live life. The people who wanna say everything is there in detail, I've had discussions with people about the tax code, congressional term limits, and you could just go on in that vein, in which we couldn't really have a discussion, kind of a rational discussion, because they were insisting that their view of it was the biblical view. Well, I wasn't at all convinced of that. And you say, well, how did they do that with a lot of contortion? You know, a lot of contortion that this is the biblical view, but people do it. People are amazing contortionists when it comes to biblical interpretation. But you shouldn't be held captive by those people. And by the way, a lot of the people that do that, a lot of the people that are presently doing this kind of thing are not Reformed. The Reformed have historically known better than that. They might be some kind of a Congregationalist or Baptist, and I'm not taking shots at them, I'm just saying they're not coming from our position on these things. There's an integrity to the position. I used to be a Baptist, I can tell you this. I learned how to think properly when I became Covenantal. Biblically, I mean really. You're not thinking properly biblically if you're not coming and understanding that God deals with us by way of covenant and what that involves biblically. You don't have the proper mindset for it. Well, I'm gonna wrap it up here. There's a lot more that could be said, of course. And I will simply say this. We must understand the spirituality of the church in its 19th century context since this is the time when that concept was developed, more fully developed. It was there, but it was sort of fleshed out. We must judge as to both its strengths and weaknesses in this context as we talked about last night and a little bit here today. We need to assess how the church has abused this doctrine in the past. and we've talked about that, as well as how it's beneficially used it, if we're to have any helpful employment of it now and for the future. I think that the reintroduction of this doctrine, because it's kind of faded away, into present theological conversations can have a salubrious effect, but only if we embrace what is at its heart, true spirituality, and reject its bad byproducts, apathy to our world and its needs. We must not allow a simple claim that something violates the spirituality of the church to settle a matter. We must not imagine that a mere citation of the spirituality of the church disposes of problems, reifying the doctrine so that we can conveniently dismiss difficult matters, dispensing with the hard work of looking carefully at all that comes before us. I know we would like to dispense with the hard work of looking carefully at everything that comes before us, but we can't. We have to do the work. We have to do the work. Rather, we should look at every proposal on its own terms and thoughtfully apply the principle of the spirituality of the church. The spirituality of the church then could be recovered, and I state sort of what I stated last night early on, which is one of my phrases for this, could be recovered for the ongoing dialogue of how the church is to relate to the world in which it finds itself, both in how it distinguishes itself from the world and how it gives itself to the world. That's what the church is to do, to understand its proper place, and it's distinguished from the world, but it's to give itself to the world. I don't come here and tell you to distinguish yourself so you can be in a holy huddle while the world goes to hell, so to speak. And I've said this to people, and they've said, let it go. That is not a Reformed sentiment. That's the flesh. Do I understand let it go? Yeah, sure, sure I do. I understand just wanting to dismiss people and be ticked off at the whole lot of them and be done with them. But God doesn't deal with us that way. He's very patient, He's very loving, He's very forbearing, and He's even that way with this sin-benighted world while it is the day of grace. So while it is the day of grace, let the church be the church and bring the message of the gospel to the world that doesn't even know it needs it. but desperately does, thank you.