Holy Spirit and the Means of Grace

This is no easy answer. Paul Tillich once said that Americans are by birth pelagians. I think Americans also are by birth persons for whom the word spirit is very difficult to comprehend. We do not know very much about spirit. We can deal more adequately with those things which we can in some way see, touch, feel, a taste that are apparent to have four, five, or six, or seven senses, however many they may be. Yet spirit is an indispensable word to all of us. We speak about the spirit of a person and by that we mean the most important thing that can be known about that person. We speak about the spirit of an athletic team, the spirit of a people, the spirit of an institution. One reason, it seems to me, that the word spirit is difficult for us is that we set up the contrast between spirit and the material, in a sense the contrast between spirit and material is correct, and yet I think it is essentially misleading.

If we think of the contrast between spirit and non-spirit, more in terms of that between the personal and the impersonal, we’d be much clearer nearer to the truth and find it much easier to comprehend what we mean by the word spirit. speaking, in theology I have found, if you will substitute the word personal for the word spiritual, you will be close to the intention of the word, and you will also be much more comprehensible. And by and large, you can substitute the word person for spirit. So The opposite of spirit, or the opposite of spiritual, is not so much the material, as though that is true, but it is more specifically the impersonal. Now, Karl Barth has said that there is little more that we can say about the Spirit of God than that the Holy Spirit is Jesus Christ at work in the world.

In a very remarkable book, Bishop Taylor, the go-between God, Bishop Taylor says spirit is the power of personhood. The Holy Spirit is God in the power of God’s personhood, making himself present to us. The spirit of a person is the power that makes that person truly present to another. The spirit of God is that power that makes God truly present to us. In another way, Bishop Taylor says, a spirit is life-giving energy. When we speak of the Spirit of God, we mean the life-giving energy of God, the personal energy of God that renews, that transforms, that elicits response. And Bishop Taylor goes on to say that this metaphor of life-giving image, of life-giving energy is far more useful than the metaphor of the potter in the wheel or the builder, which is much more mechanical.

Hence, if we are to think about the Holy Spirit, I do not know of a better way than that which Bishop Taylor suggests in a book that I think is very useful. When you preach Pentecost sermons on the go-between God, that the Holy Spirit is God’s power of personhood by which the personhood of God becomes powerful, powerfully present to us. The Spirit of God is God at work in the world. God at work in the world making alive, sanctifying, and perfecting. As such, the work of the Holy Spirit is indispensable to the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is that which makes us alive, which unites us to the life-giving sources in the work of Jesus Christ, makes the work of Jesus Christ personally alive, personally powerful in our lives. here, I need to say, parenthetically, that Christian piety is always Trinitarian in character.

And when Christian piety is not Trinitarian in character, it is always truncated or distorted. The longer I read theology, the more convinced I become that any genuine Christian theology has to be Trinitarian, and more than that we can say that any genuine Christian piety, any genuine Christian life has to be, again, a Trinitarian, related to God as God is related to us, as the unfathomable primordial source of our being, as God the Father, as God is related to us in his self-expression, in in his redemption, in his self-disclosure, in Jesus Christ, as God is related to us as the life-giving power and the power of his personhood in the Holy Spirit. Now, if you become a Unitarian in any of three different ways, Christian piety is always truncated.

The piety of the classical Unitarian, the New England Unitarian of the early days, the Unitarianism of the Father, always issues in a kind of austere faith that exalts in the creative energy of God, but leaves out some of the other aspects of Christian piety. Whenever you run into a Unitarianism of the Son, it may take expression in several different ways. It can take expression in terms of a Jesusology that you see in a good many hymns, where Christian life is really a love story with Jesus. He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own or in the garden with me. I wish to denigrate these hymns, but one cannot help to think that there are sexual overtones in these particular hymns and the kind of Jesusology in which God the Father, the primordial source and ground of our existence drops out, as well as God the Holy Spirit.

But interestingly enough, you’ve got another type of Unitarianism in Protestant scholasticism this very opposite, that centered in upon the revelation of God and Jesus Christ in the scholastic theologians, and here you find a piety that’s highly intellectualistic and characterized by intellectual agreement with propositions about the nature of God and the universe. And then, of course, in our own time, in particular in the charismatic movement, you have had the Unitarianism of the Holy Spirit, in which the Holy Spirit is divorced from God as the primordial source and ground of existence, from God who is in the self-expression of divine reality in Jesus Christ. And whenever you have a Unitarianism of the Holy Spirit, piety is always overly introspective, always fastidious about the spiritual temperature of one’s own heart and one’s own soul.

And just as a preoccupation of one’s physical health does not lead to physical vigor, so this overly fastidious preoccupation with one’s spiritual health does not lead to spiritual prosperity. Now let’s come a step further and note that the work of the Holy Spirit, God, in the power the divine personhood, making the divine reality present in our lives, always works through a means. The divine presence is always mediated through something. Now, Christian theology has traditionally called that through which the presence of God is mediated the means of grace, and that is our theme of today, the Holy Spirit, and the means of grace. From one perspective, the so-called means of grace are constitutive of the church. From the human perspective, from the organizational perspective, the means of grace are the by which the church comes into being, the church grows, the church is built, and therefore they can be studied by sociologists, by psychologists, by historians.

Now there are objections to the use of this term, the means of grace. One is the means of grace have the connotation of a mechanism, they lead to a kind of mechanical conception of the way God’s grace is mediated. And actually, there’s something very tempting about that. If God’s grace were mediated by a mechanical, in some kind of mechanical means, it would make it a lot easier on all of us. It would make it as easy for a preacher as it is for a medical doctor when the person has pneumonia. If the medical doctor tends to someone who has pneumonia, the medical doctor can give a tablet of penicillin, and one of the person wants to get well does make a difference. I’m convinced you never really get well of any serious illness unless you want to, but within limits.

When the person wants to get well of pneumonia or not. If you can get the penicillin in the person, I presume the person would recover, at least in some measure. Now, it would be very nice if we could do it that way in the Church. If we could get some medicine of immortality, and it’s not strange that very early in the history of the Church we had the concept of the medicine of immortality from the Apostolic Fathers on down, and this medicinal imagery for grace became very common in the medieval period, that grace is a thing that we can inject into a person, and whether or not that person likes it, or whether or not that person deep down really wants it, So long as that person does not specifically reject it, this grace will do the person good.

Now that was formulated in a doctrine, ex opere operato, that most Roman Catholic theologians today are very sensitive about, but it belongs to the tradition, it belongs to the Council of Trent at the sacrament’s work, ex opere operato, from the deed performed. is, if the deed is performed, it has its effect in the human soul. Now, there’s always a recognition of the fact that if you come, say, to the Mass, specifically saying that this Mass is not going to do me any good, specifically rejecting the sacrament, it does not have this effect. But if you come to the Mass thinking about who won the football game on Saturday, the Mass, the taking of the sacrament, will be effective in the transformation of the human soul. I do not want to disparage that too much.

Some Roman Catholic theologians today would argue that that’s what good Protestants meant when they said that the final validity of the sacrament depends not upon the faith of the person who administers the sacrament, not upon the faith of the person who receives it, but the final validity of the sacrament depends upon the objective work of the Holy Spirit and that there is a certain objectivity to the sacrament that any Protestant would assert that is irrespective of the feeling particular condition of the person who receives the sacrament. But in any case, we’ll be coming back to this theme in different ways. There’s always the danger when you talk about the means of grace that you fall into the habit of thinking that these means somehow contain grace and somehow confer grace apart from personal commitment and decision.

As the Protestant Reformation came down hard on that particular point, sometimes back I’d write an article for the Encyclopedia Americana on reform theme, and I put one of the four or five basic principles of Protestantism was the radical rejection of magic in religion, and I got it back from the editor saying that representative of the Protestant anti-Catholic bias, and then I had to change it and say the Protestantism emphasizes the conscious choice and decision, and you cannot bypass conscious choice and decision by techniques or by sacraments. This is what Luther meant when he said, no faith, no sacrament. Well, what then are the means of grace? Well, the Medieval Church finally settled on seven. At times they had 35, 18, 11, but they finally settled Council of Florence, 1439, that there were seven sacraments.

When you get to the Protestant Reformation, there is the rejection of the seven sacraments. Hendrikus Berkhof emphasizes Protestantism stood for personalism in religion, and because it stood for personalism in religion, it should have rejected all of the sacraments, according to Berkhof. But it wavered, and it kept two. But with its emphasis on the personal, it did insert the sermon beside and above the sacrament. But I was interested in some of the Lutheran creeds specify four means of grace. They are the Word, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and then the power of the keys, or mutual conversation, and consolation of the brethren. I never noticed that phrase, but I like that phrase, and you’ll see why in a few minutes, that one of the means of grace in the Church is mutual conversation and consolation of the Brethren, or later Luther and Theologian put it, the word of conversation.

More recently, in our lane, Luther and Theologian added prayer as a means of grace. Charles Hodge, in our Presbyterian tradition, he says there are a vast number of means of grace, but in the we will contend ourselves with those that have scriptural origin, namely the word, the sacraments, Lord’s Supper, and baptism, and prayer. Now, the fundamental question here is, how are these means of grace related to the Holy Spirit? And you get two extremities, those that emphasize the means of grace as containing grace, and on the other extreme are those who emphasize the immediacy of the divine human encounter. Now I think the problem, I will come back to this in a minute when I talk about Barthes in connection with baptism, so I don’t want to labor the point here, but this would not be the exhaustive of what I want to say at this point.

I I think we can handle this problem more easily if we remember that the divine grace is always personal. But the personal must be mediated by the impersonal. The means of grace are the means by which God gives himself to us. And I would prefer, personally, to say that the means of grace are the occasions by which God may give himself to us. They are the occasions of the divine presence. Incidentally, I throw in here a parenthetical, I don’t want to put in too many parenthetical things. I got the same problem I did yesterday. But the story told about Henry Sloane Coffin, who was on the committee trying to work out the union between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians back four or five decades ago. And finally, Dr. Coffin got weary with the discussions, and he decided he would bring them to a conclusion.

So he asked the question of the Episcopalians. He says, what do you do with the elements of the communion, with the bread and the wine, when you have them left over after celebration of the sacrament? And they told him all the elaborate procedures that they went through and care with which they were handled. And one Episcopalian said to Dr. Coffin what he hoped they would say. He said, what do you do with them? Oh, he said, we throw the bread out for the birds and we empty the wine in the sink. And that terminated that particular I think that represents the two extreme positions. How do you regard the bread and the wine that remains after the celebration of the sacrament? Now, I want to come at this problem from the specific approach of a Reformed theologian, namely Hendrikus Berkhof, in his recently translated systematic theology of Christian faith.

He comes at the problem of the means of grace from the perspective of the Church as Institute. By Institute, he means the Church as a human work, as an organization. And he asked the question, how does this Institute maintain itself, how does this institute transmit itself, and tradition its faith in our society? Here, again, we can note, somewhat parenthetically, that this is increasingly a critical question in our particular society, because we are now at the end of the transition from the parish church in Christendom, to the voluntary church in a free, pluralistic, secular, mobile, mass-media-dominated, urban society. In other words, from a society in which all the cards are stacked in favor of the church, as Martin Marty has put it, to a society in which all the cards not only are not stacked in favor of the Church, but many of them are stacked against the Church.

We all know that from my own experience. When I was a boy, it really didn’t matter too much whether or not the Church transmitted the faith to me, the culture would have. The public school I attended was a Protestant school in which the Bible was taught and prayer was made. The whole culture transmitted the faith. This was true even in Richmond, Virginia when we moved here in 1959, but it is certainly no longer true. Now, Berkhof asks, how does the faith transmit itself? How does the the Christian community make itself alive? How does it grow in this kind of society? And Berkhof feels, we would do well. You have to remember Berkhof is a European, writes out of European background, not out of an American background. Berkhof feels, we would do well to break with the concept of sacrament.

First of all, we can no longer believe that the sacraments have a clear-cut biblical basis and origin. And secondly, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, new forms of spirit emerge. New forms of transmission emerge, forms of the means of grace. Now the number of forms is not endless. Only a limited number are suitable to transmit the message of God in Jesus Christ. In other words, the means by which the church transmits itself in our society is limited by the nature of that which is transmitted, namely the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ or the presence of God in Jesus Christ. How then does the Church transmit itself in this kind of society? Well, first of all, Berkhof insists upon instruction, upon teaching, and by instruction He means communicant classes, he means church school classes, he means all the ways in which we incorporate people into the covenant.

This instruction is more than the passing on of information, though it is surely the passing on of information. It more closely resembles what is called initiation in many organizations and communities. It is initiation into a life, into a pattern of life, as well as communication of information about that pattern. The question arises, what knowledge is necessary? knowledge has to be transmitted in instruction? Well, the old medieval communicants’ classes insisted upon the creed, that is, the faith, upon the commandments, the Ten Commandments, upon the prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, upon the sacraments, and upon what they called household duties. Now, almost all the old medieval communicants classes concentrate upon that. And actually, you can’t improve upon that very much if you put it in a contemporary setting.

That the instruction, which is the means of God’s grace, is initiation into the creed, to the commandments, to the prayer, the sacraments, and household duties, such as having a prayer before you sit down to eat, or having a prayer when you go to bed at night. This is the way that Martin Luther tried to write his Catechism. It is also the model for Calvin’s Catechism. So, Berkhof says, one of the fundamental means of grace today has to be instruction in the faith. We need to ask the question, it seems to me, more specifically, what knowledge is necessary. And here I would like to emphasize biblical knowledge. I do not know how Christian faith can be transmitted without a knowledge of the Bible. For the first time, we now preach to congregations that are biblically illiterate and who do not know who Abraham is or was, who Isaac is or was, who the Apostle Paul is or was, who do not know who the Apostles were.

When I was a graduate student, I had a running battle with one of my professors, Albert Outler, which came first, community or truth? And he always believed that coming out of the Southern Presbyterian Church, I was committed to the proposition that truth came before community. And as a good Methodist, he thought that community came before truth. But the last time I was talking to Albert Outler, he suggested that one of the most serious problems confronting the church today is the communication of knowledge of the Bible. And I told him, I said, it seems to me you’ve reversed the pattern here and you’re advocating that truth is necessary to community. And he said, well, the presupposition of community, he did not see how you could have a Christian community but composed of people who do not know the stories, the persons, the images of the Bible.

A few things are more characteristic of our society than the biblical illiteracy of it. One could make a case that Abraham Lincoln wrote some of the finest theology that was written in the 19th century in America, say the second inaugural address. Abraham Lincoln was not even a member of the organized church, but participating in the culture of his day, he came to a deep and profound understanding of the Bible. I would say that an Abraham Lincoln is not really a possibility in our society. As a matter of fact, the only honest to God church person we’ve had as President of the United States since Woodrow Wilson was Jimmy Carter. We’ve had prayer breakfast Christians and other secularized versions of the Christian faith in the Presidency. But since Woodrow Wilson, you would have to say that Jimmy Carter is the only honest-to-God churchman whom we’ve had in the presidency.

Some of my friends sent me copies of Carter’s Playboy interview as an indictment of Carter, and then I thought the proper answer to him, which I sent back, was that we have not had of President since Woodrow Wilson, who knew enough about the Bible to have given Carter’s Playboy interview. Well, instruction. Secondly, baptism. Now here I would like to discuss this at greater length because it illustrates the problem of the sacraments in our society. For Berkhof, baptism is an initiatory sacrament, and for Berkhof, children may properly be baptized because of the significance of the right for communion for the community. But, let’s look at this problem a little bit differently of baptism from the point of view of the debate in Europe, which really began in 1937 when Emil Brunner, in his lectures that were published in this country as the divine human encounter, declared that the contemporary practice of infant baptism was little short of scandalous.

It was very obvious that Brunner had great difficulty integrating the sacraments in any sense, much less the baptism of infants with his doctrine of the Church as the personal correspondence between the word of God and human obedience. Along with Brunner’s indictment, you had further indictments by New Testament scholars who argued about whether the baptism of infants belonged to the practice of the church. Jeremias arguing that it did, along with Cullmann, Aland arguing that it didn’t, and Cullmann replying to Aland and Aland, then replying to Jeremias. No one has to come to the conclusion that there is no overwhelming course of evidence that there was baptism of infants prior to the year 200, but this is not the final answer to the question.

It might be psychologically impressive if you could get illustrations specifically of the baptism of infants in the New Testament, but whether or not we’re going to baptize depends upon theological grounds, as well as upon historical precedents. Now, that’s telescoping a good bit of material, which we can come back to this afternoon in questions and answers. Karl Barth made his onslaught on infant baptism in a lecture he gave to students in 1943. Now here, Barth still holds to the sacraments. He holds to the sacraments particularly in the cognitive and ethical functions, the cognitive function and the proclamation of the Gospel in the fires of sacraments where the gospel acted out and ethical in the sense of the human response to the gospel.

He rejected the notion of the causative doctrine of the sacraments at that time that the sacraments contained grace and communicated grace. Emil Brunner never had quite the courage of Bart. Even in this earlier period, but even later, Bart went beyond this earlier period in rejecting the traditional notion of sacraments that had been asserted in the Church since Augustine in any case. In 1968, Bart no longer regarded baptism as a sacrament, but as an ethical action in response to the grace of God. As far as Bart was concerned, there is only one sacrament, and that sacrament is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the outward, invisible sign of the invisible grace of God. And there is one sacramental action, and that is the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Water baptism for Bart is the human ethical response to the sacramental action, the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the true sacrament of Jesus Christ. Now, the three main notions of the sacrament, that the sacrament is causative, that is that it is an effective, causative, creative action on man, that the sacraments convey grace Bart rejects. He also rejects the sacraments in the cognitive function as the gospel acted out, as the proclamation of grace. What he maintains is the ethical action by which this water baptism is the ethical response to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, not less impotent, Bart said he would want to insist that everyone in the Church should be baptized, but quite obviously, only those who can respond ethically, that is adults, us are entitled to be baptized.

Here you have the rejection. Now, what Bart really does in the end with the Lord’s Supper, I cannot say, the Lord’s Supper Arthur Cochrane published a book. One of Bart’s students published a book. The Lord’s Supper is Eating and Drinking with Jesus. And I would think that on the basis of what Bart does with baptism, if If he had written an elaborate discussion of the Lord’s Supper, he would have had to deal with the Lord’s Supper primarily as eating and drinking with Jesus, and certainly not as a means of grace. This raises a question then of the baptism of infants, which of course Bart rejects. Calvin put the baptism of infants within the covenant and the promise. The covenant God made with Abraham, Calvin insisted, is enforced today. And he goes on to insist that there are at least four primary reasons for maintaining the baptism of infants.

First, baptism confirms the promise that is given to pious parents. The sacraments certify, confirm, attest, seal the promises of the action of God. all know in ordinary common human experiences how outward acts, confirm, seal, elaborate personal promises. For example, a handshake or the signing of our name or the giving of a ring. And so it is in baptism. The practical consequences of this public confirmation of the promise of God, this public claiming of the promises of God for our children, of our hope in that promise, are as varied but as real as our experiences. Who can estimate its significance as a ground of hope in any day, but especially in our day when so many parents say that if they had to do it all over again, they would not have children at all.

One of the most alarming facts in our time is the increasing number of people who do not think children are worth the price and who would choose to have no children if they could do it again. You remember the response to the question that Ann Landers asked of her readers and 70 percent responded that if they had to do it all over again they would not have children. Well, over against that kind of fact, the baptism of infants, the claiming of the promise of God for children becomes especially significant, it seems to me. Calvin says that children also receive some benefits from their baptism. They are engrafted into the body of the church. They are thereby commended to the church, that to other church members. In baptism, the congregation obligates itself to be the child’s sponsor to the end that this child shall grow up trusting God and seeking to do the will of God.

And then thirdly, Calvin says that when the baptized grow up, they are spud to an earnest theo for worshiping God by whom they are received as little children through a solemn symbol of adoption before they were old enough to recognize him as father. Martin Luther, as is well known frequently in moments of depression, would explain, but I was baptized. Perhaps not as many young people today take comfort in the fact that they were baptized, but again, perhaps more than we know do. I was impressed with a quotation I came across some time ago from Ortega y Gasset, who obviously very much outside the life of the church, but he wrote autobiographically. He says, when I was a child, I was a Christian, now I am no longer. Does this mean, strictly speaking, that I do not go on being a Christian?

The Christian I was, is he dead, annihilated? Of course not. Of course, I am still a Christian, but in the form of having been a Christian, but I’m not exactly certain what the form of having been a Christian is. But I am certain that there is something there, that once having stood within the circle of faith, once having been baptized, this is indelible. Roman Catholics like to talk about the indelibility of sacraments. There is something that is indelible about having been baptized. Once you are baptized, you are baptized. Once you have been placed within the circle of faith, you have been placed there. And that has to be, it seems to me, a continuing influence in one’s life. Even if one rebels against it, one is shaped by it. But infrequently, we are shaped more by that against which we rebel than we are by that to which we rebel.

Now, these, it seems to me, are very valid. Calvin wrote them in the 16th century when everybody was getting their children baptized in the context of Christian society, but it seems to me it is still true. The question that we have to face is, what is the relationship of the community of birth to the community of faith? Now, in a highly voluntaristic society such as ours, a rationalistic society, we tend to minimize the community of birth, but I think we do that at our peril. In any case, when we are talking about the means of grace, the means of transmitting the faith, we have to give attention, I think, to the relationship between the community of birth and the community of faith. Now, if one is born within the fellowship of the Christian family, and if one is born within the fellowship of the Christian Church.

Then, quite obviously, the Church has to assume certain responsibilities in terms of nurture, in terms of training, that sometimes go by the board in our particular kind of society. I’m trying to telescope too much material here, and I don’t want to telescope it too much, but what does it mean to tradition the faith? Well, it means something different to tradition it to those who are born within the Church, and those who come into the Church from the outside, insofar as anybody in Western civilization can come into the Church from the outside. We recognize this with theological students. There’s all the difference in the world in theological students who are read in honest to God church families and those who are not read in honest to God church families.

The difference is sometimes overwhelming and sometimes those who are born in honest to God church families do not understand the blessing that they have. no saying that it takes two generations to make a shoe cobbler. Well, in one sense it takes two generations to make a preacher. There is no substitute for having been born and nurtured from the beginning in the life of the church. Now, one can come at this from another point of view about what it means to transmit the faith to those who are born outside who are born into nominal church families, but we can talk about that in discussion. Thirdly, Berkhof says, means of grace, instruction, baptism. Third, Berkhof says, the means of grace is a sermon. Now, here you have three options. is the notion of the sermon as casual information, an informative sort of thing, informal presentation to the congregation.

One has the impression that this was true of a great deal of Roman Catholic preaching for a long time, and it comes to expression in many ways. The sermon, therefore is not taken seriously as a means of grace. Then in the Lutheran tradition, sometimes you get the opposite extreme, where the sermon has a very strong sacramental character, and the word of the sermon is identified with the word of God. So much so that some very orthodox Lutherans at times could say that you do not ask forgiveness for sermon because by the power of God’s Spirit, the sermon conveys the word of God. Now, thirdly, I think there is, that’s an extreme form of Lutheranism. In case there are Lutherans here, and I recognize that generally speaking, the difference between what I’m going to say at the moment is not great and I would assume that Lutherans like Tappert, Professor Tappert who recently died and others are very much what I’m seeing now.

That is, it seems to me that in Reformed theology there is a notion of the sacramental doctrine of the sermon where the sermon is the occasion of the grace and the presence of God. Now I have a friend, Ed Dowey, who teaches theology at Princeton Seminary, and when I speak of Calvin’s sacramental doctrine of preaching, Dowey always gets very disturbed, and he says there is no such thing. But I think that simply represents his particular perspective, and I would go on and argue that the best way of describing Calvin’s understanding of a sermon is sacramental understanding. The The sacrament becomes the occasion for the presence of the word of God. Now, it’s not automatic. As a matter of fact, Calvin wrote that if a hundred people hear a sermon, 80 of them will not hear the word of God 20 will.

Those were in Calvin’s optimistic moments. That’s in the Institutes. When he was preaching the sermons on predestination on Esau and Jacob, he was much more pessimistic. He said only 10 percent really hear the word of God in the sermon. But it seems to me that what Calvin is saying is that the words of the sermon by the grace of God become the occasion for the very word of God. You cannot identify the word of the sermon with the word of God, but the word of the sermon, which is a human word and therefore must be carefully crafted and so forth, becomes the occasion for the divine And it also means that even a poorly crafted sermon may be the occasion of the divine word. An excellently crafted sermon may be dull and have no impact whatsoever.

In any case, for Berkhof, preaching is a central fact in the life of the Church. is the central occasion where the reality of the congregation comes into existence. Martin Luther said that the organ of Christian faith is not taste, is not touching, is not seeing, hearing. And the organ of the faith is the ear. The church exists, the reality of the church, the unity of the church exists when the Word of God is heard, and heard in particular, in the sermon. So much so that one can almost say that humanly speaking, as the sermon goes, goes, so goes the church. And that may be the reason so many churches have such poor life in our time as documented in the statistical reports to the various church judicatories. The fourth means of grace. I’m going to quit, Wilford, in just a moment.

But the fourth means of grace is the discussion for Berkhof. And I find this very meaningful and very significant. Berkhof says, Many owe their faith and growth in Christian faith to religious discussion groups, to conversations, then to the officially recognized means of grace. I ask you to put that question to yourself. Has your own faith grown more through the ecclesiastically recognized means of grace, or has your own faith been enriched and deepened more through personal consolations, personal conversations, and religious discussion groups. Conversation, Berkhof says, plays a much larger role than we are aware in the transmission and and in the communication of Christian faith and in the transmission and communication of Christian community, more important than Christian faith, transmission of the community.

Now, Berkhof also recognizes that it’s very easy to trivialize discussion and conversation. But if we take precaution against the trivialization of Christian conversation, personal consolation, the religious discussion group, I suspect most of us will find that the community is maintained and the faith transmitted more this way than the other way. Then fifth is the Lord’s Supper. I’ll skip that, because that’s frequently discussed. Sixth, Berkhof says, is a diaconate, the calling to practice Christian mercy. Now, it’s interesting that Burkhoff makes this a means of grace, more than a Christian duty, that the practice of Christian mercy is one of the means by which human life is transfigured into the image of God, and by which the Christian community is created.

His emphasis is not at this point on what the diaconate may do for the poor or for the needy, but the diaconate as a means by which the grace of God is communicated to the community and establishes the community. The Office of Deacon in Reform Churches was instituted by Calvin to communicate, to institutionalize Christian mercy and Christian compassion. Sorry, I have 12. The seventh means of grace is the meeting, the gathering of the congregation in which the sermon, baptism, Lord’s Supper takes place. But Berkhof wants to insist that this gathering of the congregation, in and of itself, the meeting, the coming to gather to hear the Word of God and to respond to the Word of God is the means by which the faith is transmitted. We may do other things with these means of grace, but Berkhof’s discussion, I think, is very suggestive. If we are talking about how a Christian community is brought into being, and how it is transmitted in a pluralistic, secular, mass-media-dominated, mobile urban society.