A friend of mine recently asked if I think church attendance is necessary for Christians. Below is my response. I’m sure more could be said, but this isn’t meant to be a theological treatise.

 

I think the Christian life can be looked at in two inter-related ways: 1) Glorifying and enjoying God 2) Becoming more like God. One of the primary ways we glorify and enjoy God is by becoming more like Him (sanctification) and in order to become more like Him we must seek His glory and enjoy His goodness and beauty.

 

Within the context of these aims, the fellowship of the body of Christ is a necessity. It is not just commanded, but also explained in Hebrews 10- “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.” The whole passage is about our assurance of faith, and encouragement between the saints is seen as a vital part of that. Elsewhere we see that church provides for the use of spiritual gifts (1 Cor 12, 1 Pet 4:10), accountability (1 Peter 5, Hebrews 13:17), and general love between believers (John 10:34, 17:20-21). These commands are meant to be followed within the body of Christ, and are typically neglected by those who cut themselves off.

 

There’s no such thing in the Bible as a “Lone Christian.” The letters in the New Testament are either to whole churches, or to leaders about churches. The expectation is that Christians will be meeting together regularly, and thus there is no instruction for those who do not.

 

I don’t think God has a checklist wherein He marks every Sunday we fail to attend. His concern, I believe, is about our heart in the matter. Why is it some have broken fellowship with others He has redeemed? The only explanation for someone who regularly excludes themselves from the gathering of the saints is sin- be it pride, selfishness, or whatever. Ironically, those are heart issues that are often confronted when people live in genuine community with other believers.

 

Dallas Willard makes a related point in the forthcoming book God & Governing, “People sometimes ask me why, since I’m such a “profound thinker,” I’m still involved in church. I sometimes reply, “Well, the Bible says you’re supposed to love your enemies and you’ll find a few there.” I mean to be humorous, of course, but I sensed some recognition out there as I say that. Actually, however, that’s what the church is. It’s a place where you can get really mad at people and not run off and leave them. It’s a place where anger and contempt can be unlearned. It’s a place to learn the deep things of a fellowship in Christ that lovingly endures disagreement, anger and injury. “Churchmanship” in that sense is important. It’s vital. It’s in God’s plan and nothing is going to take the place of it. The church is intended to be a school of love.”

The bottom line is that if we’re genuinely seeking after God and seeking to become more like Him, we will desire to be in community with His people, even when it’s difficult. If we lack that desire, then it’s likely that we are no longer seeking after God.

Allen Yeh, a Professor at Biola Univeristy and tutor in the Torrey Honors Institute, has written an article in which he argues that missions is the central theme of Christianity.  The Bible, he says, is a means to an end, and that end is missions.

He offers many reasons for his choice of missions, such as the fact that all of the Apostles were missionaries, Jesus' lasts words on Earth were a call to missions, there is a whole book (Acts) devoted to chronicling missionary activites (and on top of that, most of Paul's letters are written in a missionary context), etc. 

Now, I agree with nearly everything that Dr. Yeh says.  Missions is an extremely important biblical theme, and it's one that can tend to be denegrated among academic theologian types (like myself).  At one point, Yeh comments, "The center of gravity of Christianity has shifted away from the Western world, and most of the Christians in this world are now in Asia, Africa, and Latin America."  This is no small matter.  Christianity is incurably multi-cultural and this is a direct result of its missional nature.  But is "missions" in and of itself really the "central theme" of Christianity?  If the Bible is a means to missions, might we ask if missions isn't a means to something else?

Yeh does stop to mention a few other candidates:

scholars have proposed various possibilities for what might be the main theme of the Bible. Some people say it’s the Kingdom of God. Some say it’s God’s sovereignty. Others say it’s God’s love. Still others say it’s worship (one of the most famous proponents of the last is John Piper, as he says in his book Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t”). Other possibilities include: the two Greatest Commandments (love God and love neighbor); the Great Commission (there are actually five Great Commissions, one in each Gospel and one in Acts); the Covenant; the Promise; and the glory of God. While I think all of these are valid, again I would argue that it is only mission that adequately encompasses all of these.

Later on, referring back to the reference to John Piper above, Yeh says:

Now it is here that I beleive Dr. Yeh falls into a common error that has plauged evangelicalism for a long time.  He places the proclaimation of the gospel exclusively in the realm of missions.  It is easy to see, then, why missions itself would become the central theme of the Bible.  A few paragraphs later, he says, "In most Protestant churches, the central part of the worship service is the sermon. The original function of the sermon was evangelism, as seen in the Greek word kerygma which means “proclamation” (of the Good News)."  Again, proclaimation of the good news is used here as a synonym for evangelism.  But this not how the Biblical authors treated the gospel.  Paul, in his letter to the Romans, begins (in chapter 1, verse 8) by thanking God for the church in Rome, because their "faith is proclaimed in all the world."  They are Christians (and apparently Christians of amazing faith) not pagans in need of evangelism.  And what does Paul go on to do?  In verse 15 he says, "So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome."  The first thing Paul does is proclaim the good news, to those who are already Christians.  This is how the gospel is treated in Scripture.  It is not a one-time bit of useful information that, once responded to, is no longer necessary.  It is the heart and soul of all Christian teaching and worship.  This is something that the Reformers recognized, which is why the sermon did become so central to Protestant Christianity.  Thus it would probably be better to view Missions and the local church worship service as two seperate but equal "pillars" that are the foundation of Christianity.  Both are important, both are commanded by Christ, and both are acts of worship that encompass all the myriad themes found in the Bible.  Theologians may have a tendency to forget about the unreached (except as an abstract theological concept in their systems), but missiologists can also have a tendency to forget about the reached! 

I also think Piper's comment is worth returning to, because I think Yeh may have misunderstood it.  When Piper says, "Missions exists because worship doesn’t", I doubt that he's trying to say that worship per se is the central theme of Christianity.  Once again, worship is a means to an end, and that end is to glorify God.  It seems to me that missionary activity is also a means to an end.  It is a means to bringing people to Christ, allowing them to come into his presence and worship Him, and ultimately spend eternity with him.  And as Yeh pointed out, missions can itself be an act of worship, which would in turn be an act of glorifying God.  Thus missions is not only an act of glorifying God in itself, but a means to the end of furthering God's glory throughout the world.  This is probably what Piper is getting at, and it seems to me to be the best understanding of the true central theme of Christianity.  Yeh is right to stress how important missions is, but we must always remember WHY it is so imporant (for the glory of God).  

Over the next year or so I will be exploring the concept of the "energies" of God.  This is an ancient Christian doctrine that goes back to the Early Church Fathers.  While it remains an integral part of the doctrine of God in the Eastern Orthodox churches, it never truly took hold in the Latin West and seems to have been almost entirely forgotten until the Reformers.  Both John Calvin and the Reformed Scholastics (such as Francis Turretin) made frequent use of the essence-energies (E-E) distinction in their theology.  Sadly, this began to fall out of practice even in Reformed circles, so that today virtually no Western Protestant has even heard of the energies of God. 

So, what are the energies?  Crudely speaking, they are the "activites" of God.  Because God's essence is wholly other, outside of the realm of space and time, incomprehensible, we cannot come into direct contact with it.  And yet God is a God who intervenes in his creation and enters into relationship with his creatures.  It is the energies of God that we come into contact with.  God's glory and love and goodness are all energies.  According to Mike Horton:


But we must also keep in mind that the energies are not ontologically separate from God's essence, nor are they parts or pieces of God.  They are God. 

This may seem a bit confusing, and I have not even begun to do the topic justice.  This is merely an introductory post that, I hope, will show that such a distinction is desperately needed in Western Protestantism today.  All that is important at this point is that idea that there is a distinction between God as He is in Himself (His essence) and God as He manifests Himself to His creation (His energies). 

Now then, three reasons Evangelicals need to start thinking about this distinction:

1) Pantheism (or Panentheism)

There has long been a tendancy in the West toward a kind of Pantheism.  Medieval mysticism and its quest for the Beatific Vision was an extreme form of this.  If God is absolutely simple and "only" an essence, how do we come into contact with Him without in a sense become a part of Him?  What does the Apostle Peter mean when he says that we will "partake" of the divine nature?  Do we partake directly of God as He is in Himself?  At the very least, this seems to imply some sort of Panentheism, which is the belief that God is contianed within and permeates all of the natural world, as if He were the "world soul."  By positing the doctrine of the energies of God, we can explain how it is that we come into direct contact with God and even partake of Him without falling into this dangerous tendency of Western theology.

2) Stoicism

This is not as dangerous of a problem for Protestants today, but it is always a potential.  If God is, as traditional Christian theology has always maintained, unchanging and impassible, not affected by his creation (as He says in Samuel, He is not a man that he should repent), one could easily come to the conclusion that God is like the great Stoic philosopher in the sky.  After all, impassible could mean "cold" and "unfeeling."  Perhaps God is just an impersonal being from which all reality flows, a being who doesn't care about us or love us (certainly not enough to save us from our sin).  Again, the E-E distinction saves us from such extremes.  God in His essence is simple, unchanging and impassible.  But his energies are manifold.  Through His energies He comes into contact and enters into relationships with his creatures, and in an analogous way He feels with them, responds to their pleas, etc. 

3) Open Theism

I saved the best for last!  Of the three reasons I've given, this one is obviously the biggest potential danger for contemporary Protestantism.  After considering Stoicism, it should be easy to see how the E-E distinction will help here, since Open Theism is simply the opposite problem.  Open Theists want a God who can feel our pain, react to our cries for help, and genuinely respond to our prayers.  Ignoring for the moment that the incarnation of Christ solves many of these problems (Hebrews specifically addresses how Christ can empathize with our struggles with sin, for example), the E-E distinction does as well.  God's essence can remain unchanging while  His energies remain manifold.  His essence is simple while His activities in creation are varied.

So, are you interested yet?  At any rate, I hope you can see how potentially important this distinction can be for the problems facing modern Protestantism.  As I said, I will continue to explore this theme in greater detail over the next year.  This is only the tip of the iceberg.  If I've managed to whet your appetite, you can hear more on the E-E distinction in Mike Horton's systematic theology lectures (click here), specifically the most recent lectures on the incommunicable attributes of God.  For a slightly more detailed introduction to the topic and its relation to the early Reformers' theology, check out the last section of Dr. Horton's book Covenant And Salvation.

Dr. Mike Horton is teaching a class on systematic theology at Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California (where he serves as Associate Pastor).  The audio of the class is available online for free.  Dr. Horton will be coming out with a new, one-volume Systematic Theology for Zondervan next year, and this class is a sneak preview.  He's just finished the first section, "Prolegomena", and is now a few weeks into section two, "The Incommunicable Attributes of God."

To have a listen, click here. 


(Dr. Horton is also host of The White Horse Inn, a weekly radio show about theology and culture).