One More in the World

So what are we doing here? What is a Kuyperian Dispensationalist and who cares?

This website, and more specifically the series of posts in the queue, has been brewing for quite a while. The coffee in the pot hasn’t turned into sludge, though, not yet at least. It’s hot and fresh and on the front burner.

There have been a few stages of development, starting with a gnawing discontent with epistolary exclusivity, by which I mean a tendency in some church circles to focus on the New Testament epistles in such a way that causes the rest of the Bible to be functionally neglected. I have more to say later about the eyes—on-earth-opening effect of books such as Ecclesiastes, Genesis, and the Psalms, but there is more to the Old Testament than just historical background to or illustrations for the New Testament. The New Testament is great, inspired even (!), but the whole thing was written in one long generation. Sometimes in the Old Testament you can skip a couple hundred years between chapter breaks. The revelation in the first 39 books of the Bible has a breadth to it, and a breath in it, as it points to Israel’s Messiah, Jesus, the Savior of the Nations. As I started paying more attention to things outside of the apostolic letters I also started longing to answer some questions I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

Then I got asked a question for which there was no good answer. I was meeting for coffee one Saturday morning with one of the men in our church, probably about a year after our church started. He asked me what book he could read that would explain what we were all about. I think I laughed out loud, and am still laughing today, because there isn’t just one (except the Bible, of course, though who doesn’t say that?).

Our church is not a purebred anything. In terms of our theology and philosophy of ministry, we are not just a mix, we are a mutt. Some might actually call us a mess. We love the truth, but we also think that relationships and fellowship in love is the aim of the truth. We love the fundamentals, we even love the Fundamentalists, and we’d hug them if they hadn’t isolated themselves away from everyone. We believe that the greatest commandment is to love God, not be right about Him, but we also think that affections are supposed to be driven and directed by doctrine. We do not fall into the Bible-study-at-all-costs camp, nor would we pitch our tent in the doctrine-divides camp.

We have a high view of the pastoral office, so much so that we invite everyone have a close look at it. We asked all our men to read a book on eldership and talk through it together before we officially affirmed the first board. We are an elder-rule church, and we also expect every shepherd to remember that he is a sheep and to participate alongside—like, you know, even talk with—others in the flock.

We believe in the sovereignty of God, the Solas of the Reformation, and the Five Points of Calvinism so much so that we have a heart hernia; our Reformed organ is so large that it tries to protrude through the muscle wall. We also think that the Reformers didn’t go far enough, perhaps because many of them were just trying to get themselves not dead. We are Reformed and still reforming.

We believe something uniquely supernatural happens when the church assembles for worship, and that the whole assembly is worshipping the whole time we’re together. We believe that good liturgy should be more than singing a couple songs to get ready for the sermon, listening to the sermon, then singing a song to respond to the sermon. We also think that liturgy connects us to previous generations of saints, and yet we don’t parrot their words, we want to define what we mean by “saints,” and we would never include an icon to help us worship.

We usually have verse-by-verse preaching, but we don’t do verse-by-verse-Bible-study small groups. We use air war (public) and ground war (house by house) tactics in the battle of discipleship.

We think the rapture could happen at any moment and also that adultolescent men should get off their mom’s wifi and out of her basement and start families, businesses, and do stuff because of the rapture. We think kids can love the Lord when they are still quite young, yet we won’t baptize them until they can profess it.

We think wine is a gift from God but not because we demand to exercise our Christian liberty. We believe in feasting and fasting. We care about politics because we think Jesus is the King of kings. We believe in the Trinity, in the gospel of forgiveness, and that we really should get along with one another.

So we’re not close to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. We’re not Charismatics or Lutherans. Nor are we Presbyterian or Seeker Sensitive or Emergent or Post-Neo Anything. We are close-ish to being Baptists, and we will re-baptize, but that’s ironic since most Baptists/Anabaptists have been separatists and we’re trying to be engage-ists (without becoming inclusivists). The very first “missionary” we supported is a lawyer. We rent and meet in a Seventh-Day Adventist building. We are hopefully not heretics, but we are a mutt. What we believe can be pinned down, but it takes a lot of pins.

It’s not actually that convenient. What are we supposed to put on the church brochure? How should our members tell others what we’re about? “We’re like every other church except for the ways we’re not.”

Anyway, the book I settled on as a recommendation was The Trellis and the Vine, which I still think is a good choice. We like a lot of what it says about how to use the Word to make faithful men and give away grace-work. It’s good, but it’s not enough.

We are a peculiar people. We are not by any means the only faithful assembly of Christians, but when we read the Bible our hearts burn with a hot cup of joy as we see certain things fit together. In particular, we have started to see more about God’s created world and how He considers it good.

Our Calvinism had to pull up the other pant leg. God’s glad sovereignty works salvation and sustains the cosmos. This could be nicknamed a Kuyperian viewpoint, and more needs to be said about it.

But historically, the kinds of people who have thought in a Kuyperian way, whether or not they used (or even knew) his name, have been our Presby brothers, Covenantalists, Post- or A-mil Christians. They have a heritage of appreciating creation and the work of men on earth. We epistle-dominated-readers don’t have that rich inheritance.

But when we started learning about image-bearing in individual and cultural ways according to the beginning of all things in Genesis 1, not only did we realize that it all still applies, we who pride ourselves on Bible reading realized that we had been reading the Bible wrongly. To help course correct we read through The Things of Earth in our men’s and women’s meetings. Our ladies read The Supper of the Lamb and the men read Lectures on Calvinism and our small group leaders watched and talked about For the Life of the World together. We needed to repent from dualism.

At the same time we also think there is a way of looking at the end of things, a certain eschatology, rooted in good Bible reading. We’re jealous of the cultural heritage among Covanentalists, but we’re possessive about the distinction between Israel and the Church, a distinction that is usually better cared for by Dispensationalists. It’s our Dispy brothers, though, who historically haven’t built much but bookshelves for study Bibles (and rapture fiction) in their bomb shelters. Actually, they are also good at building walls between themselves and others.

Here we are, trusting God and joyfully working in the world, knowing that He says things are going to “go on from bad to worse” (2 Timothy 3:13, see also 1 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 3:1), while we also trust that the power of the gospel is and will continue making things better in other ways. We are thankful for the Christian accomplishments in missions, and in medicine, technology, education, indoor plumbing, free markets, and Internet publishing. Christians have made many things better because they were here on earth rather than plucked to heaven when they said the sinner’s prayer. We are optimistic Pre-millennials. This is how we read the Bible. It’s what makes our hearts burn.

A few summers ago, my friend Jonathan was in Moscow, ID, with some of the teachers from our school, and he was talking with Douglas Wilson about our mutt-ness. Jonathan will be writing for this site as well, and sometime he’ll give a more detailed account of their discussion. But Doug, who is an ebullient Postmillennialist, had no ready category in which to put this juxtaposition. So he told Jonathan, “You know what you ought to do? You ought to start a blog and call it The Kuyperian Dispensationalist.” He, Doug, doesn’t think the two things go together, but he thought it might be fun to watch.

When Jonathan told me about the idea, my heart burned. Even the name: The Kuyperian Dispensationalist, rather than -ism, is so good, because there may only be one other Kuyperian Dispensationalist in the world. We’re on a mission to find that one! Actually, all the elders at our church would consider themselves to be such, while still trying to figure out what it means and what we should do about it. But we hope that there are more, more who think this way but don’t know how to describe it, more who are primed to join in the work. Some will need a lot of time to think about it, and that’s why we’re writing here. Others, of course, won’t agree until we’re raptured together in the air.