Paraphrase of Matthew 6:25-32 (Presidential Election Version)
“There’s no reason to be anxious about the presidential election, its impact on things like whether you have enough food, drink, or clothes to wear. Is not life more than politics?
Consider the birds. They don’t even have political candidates. Yet your Father feeds them, and does’t he treasure you far more than they? Or consider flowers. They don’t stress out about making sure they have clothes, yet even Solomon in his best fashion wasn’t ‘dressed’ as beautifully as they. If God cares enough to provide for the flowers, which are here today and gone tomorrow, certainly he will take care of you!
I mean, let’s be real. Can all your worries about politics improve them even the smallest bit?
You don’t have to stress about such things like, ‘Who will get elected? How will it affect the economy? What about freedom of religion; global warming; increase chance of war? What sort of country will my kids (or grandkids) have?’ These are the worries that dominate the thoughts of unbelievers. But you have a heavenly Father who already knows all your needs. Relax.
So be reassured. There’s no need to have such little faith. God’s got this.”
Ecclesiastes recounts things, not as they should be, but as they actually are (unfortunately so). In Genesis 1, God creates and repeatedly calls it “good” (Gen 1). In contrast, Ecclesiastes details instance after instances of conditions it declares “vanity.” What is the source of these conditions? The curse.
In Romans 8:20 Paul says God subjected this world to “futility” (or “vanity”). Here he uses the same word for “vanity” as does Ecclesiastes (LXX), and I tend to think he does this intentionally. As such, these conditions (e.g., evil, suffering, and the sorrow they bring) are not the way things are suppose to be. Though may be typical—and so they are, universally so! But they are not normal.
So too, death is a product of the curse (Gen 3). In fact, Ecclesiastes 9 describes death as “an evil.” Death serves as another instance of the “vanity” that has thus far characterizes Ecclesiastes’ account of life “under the sun.”
But death is more than just one “vanity” among the others though. Death functions like the “final boss” of these vanities. It’s the ultimate “vanitizer,” as I have said elsewhere. That is, even if the other vanities don’t get you, this one always does—without exception. According to Ecclesiastes, death casts a long shadow over all that proceeds it, rendering it all “futile.” No matter what you accomplish or experience in this life, what difference does it make when, at the end of the day, death brings it all to naught?
Leo Tolstoy (Christian) and Albert Camus (non-Christian absurdist philosopher) capture well this absurdity that death imposes on our lives:
“My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man … a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”
—Tolstoy, A Confession
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.”
—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
In other words, Ecclesiastes needs Jesus.
That’s precisely why Paul’s discussion of Christ’s resurrection—the very thing that secures our own—mentions “vanity”/”futility” so frequently throughout 1 Corinthians 15 (four times: vv.2, 10, 14, and 58). It’s a controlling theme in his argument, the operating background to the importance of resurrection. “Futility” results if Christ is not raised. If Christ is not raised, we labor in “vain,” our faith is “vain,” our preaching is in “vain,” etc.
However, as Paul goes on to proclaim in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection (our hope) is what undoes the vanity of death. Or in Romans 8, the “futility” (again, the same word as in Ecclesiastes) to which creation was subjected meets its match at Christ’s return when he resurrects his people and restores all things (Rom 8:20). Christ undoes the realities of Ecclesiastes.
Praise God, the wisdom Ecclesiastes provides is provisional. There will come a day when we no longer live “under [its] sun” by in the light provided by the Son (Rev 22:5).
People say, “Time heals all wounds.” We talk about “getting over” things or “moving on.”
I think this can be true in some instances. For instance, maybe a dream you had doesn’t materialize. You grieve what never was, only to conclude, after some time passes, that you no longer desire that dream anymore. So you’re “over it.”
But in general, I tend not to like this framing (“getting over it,” “moving on”). I don’t think it’s true in a lot of instances. For example, when a loved one dies, do you ever “move on” and “get over it”, or do you—hopefully, because even this isn’t always the case—just learn to live with it, grow accustom to it, acquire the ability to manage it? In fact, it’s a bit messed up to assume we should just “move on” from a loved one’s passing, as if we come to accept it (death isn’t acceptable, and time doesn’t make it so). The same can be said of other suffering and evil we endure. Time doesn’t somehow undo those things.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. That’s simply false. And arguably it’s an anti-Christian eschatology that sees time as salvific rather than the return of Christ (see Rev 21:4 where Christ wipes away all tears). Time can create some distance from the immediacy of our wounds, making the pain less sharp, more dull. But I think the pain is often still there. Instead, we (again, hopefully) simply learn to accommodate it.
“Time doesn’t heal all wounds. That’s simply false. And arguably it’s an anti-Christian eschatology that sees time as salvific rather than the return of Christ.”
This, of course, doesn’t mean we are resigned to wallow in our grief. Hope is a virtue according to the New Testament (alongside faith and love, e.g., 1 Cor 13:13). In other words, hope is something we must exercise. It’s not something we just happen to experience if we’ve lucky enough to experience its conditions, as if hope happens to us. No, we must fight to fixate on our hope. And that hope has a name: Jesus.
Nonetheless, hope anticipates what’s future. So, at present, hope does not undo suffering, pain, and grief. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13, Paul says we do not grieve as those who lack hope. Nonetheless, he does say we grieve! Hope does not erase or invalidate grief. Hope sees its reversal as already accomplished, but not yet fulfilled; already won, but not yet enacted. Each side of this coin is important; to neglect one at the expense of the other is to adopt something less-than-Christian.
So we resist the sort of “toxic positivity”—yes, even its Christian variety; especially its Christian variety!—that, whether stated or unstated, expects one always to be happy, never to be sad or hurt. The Christian way is neither stoicism that tells us to simply accept what is (i.e., our problem is trying to resist) nor some Jesus-branded Buddhism that tells us our problem is our longings (i.e., we suffer because of unmet longing; so if simply we rid ourselves of longing, we eliminate suffering). No, Christian hope protests both these options. It forces us to long for something more—not to accept what is—to long for Christ (maranatha).
Lament has a firm place in our faith. In fact, lament is an act of hope, putting the current sorrows, evil, and pain into confrontation with the God of hope. Indeed, a failure to grieve and mourn the pain and evil of this word is not virtue but apathy.
I attended a “celebration of life” (read: post-funeral party) this afternoon with my wife. It was for my wife’s friend. She was only 36 and had a 3-year-old son. Absolutely tragic.
It was a bit of a weird scene. They had a DJ who was playing dance music and dancing in the corner. Lot’s of drinks, food, and chatter. They were going for good vibes as a way of honoring this woman who lived life full of energy. But it was a jarring juxtaposition given the reason that brought us together.
Have you ever noticed that some don’t call them funerals anymore, “but celebration of life” services? Our culture doesn’t like to deal with death. We like to keep it out of sight and out of mind. We find it unsettling. We probably don’t know what to do with it existentially. So even when we do have to deal with it, like at a funeral, we like to recast it as life, “a celebration of life.”
But the juxtaposition made me think: Gosh, this is all so tragic, this woman dying at the mere age of 36, leaving her son behind who will likely barely even remember her. It’s heart-breaking.
But the reason it’s so heart-breaking isn’t because we’re the natural result of some mere evolutionary process that causes us to develop attachments to others due to its evolutionary advantage, with the byproduct that we grieve their loss. No, the reason we experience such deep tragedy in this world is because it’s haunted by what it should be. And the more beautiful and good something is meant to be, the more tragic and distressing its loss and destruction is.
We don’t just live in a world where unfortunate things happen—and that’s just the way it is. No, I think we sense something more sinister at play. Thus, we’re instinctually unwilling to accept this world as is. We internally want to resist it. We internally protest. We feel it as evil. We deeply sense something has gone wrong, that things are not the way they are suppose to be. And not just that, but that something good and beautiful has been disrupted—making it all the severer.
Think about those movies where a curse is invoked. The curse becomes an active force wreaking havoc, ruining the good, a force of harm. Tragic events aren’t just happenstance, the way things are. They are the torturous workings of the curse. The characters are constantly haunted by its reality. It chases them down. It won’t leave them alone. They struggle to escape it’s presence.
C.S. Lewis speaks of Christianity as the “true myth.” By this, he wasn’t saying that Christianity is unhistorical or untrue. No, he was saying, Christianity makes sense of our myth making. Myths provide meaning. And Christianity is that meaning-making story that explains all of our other attempts to make meaning.
So too Lewis said he believes in Christianity like he believes in the sun, because it illuminates and makes sense of everything else. It resonates with reality, our existential longing, our deep desires and sense of this world. Christianity “resonates” with the way things actually are.
One of the ways I think Christianity resonates with reality is this idea of the curse. When Adam and Eve sin, creation came under God’s curse (Gen 3).
The older I get, the more and more messed up I feel this world and this life are. It’s not just happenstance unfortunate events. It’s like a curse from a movie, an active presence wreaking havoc. We feel the tragedy not merely of unfortunate things we wish weren’t the case but of things we know ought to be beautiful and good, like the life of a young 36-year-old woman and her three-year-old boy.
Hercules Collins’ An Orthodox Catechism is a Baptist adaptation of the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism. In his, preface, Collins compares the theological development by these early Baptists to the reforms under Joshua, Hezekiah, and Ezra and Nehemiah, as they went back to scripture to recover “true worship” as prescribed by God. Collins specifically mentions that these Particular Baptists agree with the other “orthodox divines” in the “fundamental principles.” They simply differ on some things about “church-constitution” (ecclesiology). In other words, Collins sees the Baptists as providing further reformation (like Joshua, Hezekiah, Ezra, Nehemiah) specifically in the realm of ecclesiology (“church-constitution,” “the true form of God’s house”). In other words, early Baptists saw themselves as simply continuing in the spirit of the Protestant Reformation, extending Reformation principles to ecclesiology.
I will quote the entirety of his explanation:
“In what I have written you will see I concenter with the most orthodox divines in the fundamental principles and articles of the Christian faith, and also have industriously expressed them in the same words, which have on the like occasion been spoken, only differing in some things about church-constitution, wherein I have taken a little pains to show you the true form of God’s house, with the coming in thereof, and the going out thereof. But I hope my zeal in this will not be misinterpreted by any that truly fear God. That God whom we serve is very jealous of his worship; and forasmuch as by His providence the law of His house has been preserved and continued to us, we look upon it as out duty in our generation to be searching out the mind of God in His holy oracle, as Ezra and Nehemiah did the Feast of Tabernacles, and to reform what is amiss, as Hezekiah, who took a great deal of pains to cleanse the house of God, and set all things in order, that were out of order, particularly caused the people to keep the Passover according to the institution. For it had not, says the text, been of a long time kept in such sort as it was written., And albeit the pure institutions of Christ were not for some hundred of years practiced according to the due order, or very little through the innovations of antichrist; and as circumcision for about forty years was unpracticed in the wilderness, yet as Joshua puts this duty in practice as God signified His mind in that particular, so we having our judgments informed about the true way of worship, do not dare to stifle the light God has given us.
Now albeit there are some differences between many godly divines and us in church constitution, yet inasmuch as those things are not the essence of Christianity, but that we do agree in the fundamental doctrine thereof, there is sufficient ground to lay aside all bitterness and prejudice, and labor to maintain a spirit of love each to other, knowing we shall never see all alike here. We find in the primitive times that the baptism of Christ was not universally known. Witness the ignorance of Apollos that eminent disciple and minister, which knew only the baptism of John. And if God shall enlighten any into any truth, which they shall stifle for base and unwarrantable ends, know that it is God who must judge, and not man. And wherein we cannot concur, let us leave that to the coming of Christ Jesus, as they did their difficult cases in the Church of old until there did arise a priest with Urim and Thummin, that might certainly inform them of the mind of God thereabout.”1
Likewise, earlier in the preface, in explaining his reason for constructing this catechism, he remarks,
“Now that … you may be the better established, strengthened, and settled on that sure rock and foundation of salvation, Christ’s merits, in opposition to the poor imperfect works of an impotent creature; also settled on the foundation of church-constitution, on which you are already built, through the grace of God which stirred you up to search the divine oracle, and rule of Divine service, as Ezra and Nehemiah searched into the particular parts of God’s worship, by which means they came to the practice of that almost lost ordinance of God, the Feast of Tabernacles, which for many years was not practiced after the due order, though a general notion was retained about it.”2
The early Particular Baptists saw themselves as part of a larger family along with the Reformed Presbyterians and Congregationalists (see The Savoy Declaration, which is based on The Westminster Confession of Faith). This is evidenced by the fact that these Particular Baptists seem to deliberately repurpose The Westminster Confession of Faith (as The Second London Baptist Confession), The Westminster Catechism (as Benjamin Keach’s The Baptist Catechism), and The Heidleberg Catchesim (Hercules Collins’ An Orthodox Catechism). They did this, among other reasons, presumably to show their general alignment with these Reformed brethren and the broader Reformed tradition. In fact, we see this motivation explicitly stated by Keach in his preface to The Baptist Catechism:
“Having a desire to show our near Agreement with many other Christians, of whom we have great esteem; we some years since put forth a Confession of our Faith, almost in all points the same with that of the Assembly and Savoy, which was subscribed by the Elders and Messengers of many Churches, baptised on profession of their faith: and do now put forth a short account of Christian principles, for the instruction of our families, in most things agreeing with the shorter Catechism of the Assembly. And this we were the rather induced to, because we have commonly made use of that Catechism in our families, and the difference being not much, it will be more easily committed to memory.”3
So the preface to earlier confession, The First London Baptist Confession opens with the following, clarifying that these Baptists considered themselves among the Reformed and thus were “unjustly” labeled Anabaptist by their detractors:
“A confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly, but unjustly called Anabaptists; published for the vindication of the truth and information of the ignorant; likewise for the taking off those aspersions which are frequently, both in pulpit and print, unjustly cast upon them.”
Likewise see the assessment of Reformed scholar, Richard Muller, on the 18th century Particular Baptist John Gill:
“The eminent Particular Baptist preacher, theologian, and exegete, John Gill (1697-1771), stands as proof, if any were needed, that the thought of English nonconformity and, within that category, English Baptist theology, is in large part an intellectual and spiritual descendant of the thought of those Reformers, Protestant orthodox writers, and Puritans who belonged to the Reformed confessional tradition. This must be acknowledged despite the pointed disagreement between Baptists and the Reformed confessional tradition over the doctrine of infant baptism; this one doctrine aside, their theology is primarily Reformed and what disagreements remain are disagreements with and often within the Reformed tradition rather than indications of reliance on another theological or confessional model.”4
Or hear from Reformed theologian, Herman Bavinck: “From the outset Reformed theology in North America displayed a variety of very diverse forms.” Among whom he mentions Baptists who “gained a firm foothold on Rhode Island under Roger Williams in 1639.” He concludes:
“Almost all of these churches and currents in these churches [Baptists and the others he mentions] were of Calvinistic origin. Of all religious movements in America, Calvinism has been the most vigorous. It is not limited to one church or other but—in a variety of modifications—constitutes the animating element in Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and German Reformed churches, and so forth.”5
Tom Hicks explains at greater length:
“In England during the post-Reformation period, there were great debates over the nature of the church, even though the heirs of the Reformed faith agreed on the gospel and most other doctrines. The Reformed Anglicans wanted an English state-church with an Episcopalian form of government. The English Presbyterians also sought cooperation between church and state, but with a Presbyterian form of government. Independents agreed with the Anglicans and Presbyterians that infants should be baptized, but they did not agree with any kind of formal church-state synthesis. … Independents also believed in a congregational form of church government….
The first ‘Reformed Baptists’ … founded ‘baptistic congregationalist’ churches because, while they agreed with the Independents on almost all other doctrines, they disagreed on infant baptism. It is important to understand that the first Reformed Baptists didn’t see themselves as a certain kind of ‘Baptist.’ Rather, they viewed themselves as congregationalists with baptistic convictions when it came to the subject of baptism.
It is common for teachers of Baptist history to identify Arminian ‘General Baptists’ (Smyth and Helwys), who held to a general atonement, as part of the same group as the Calvinist ‘Particular Baptists’ (Spilsbery, Kiffin, Knollys), who held to a particular atonement. Most Baptist scholars today would say that the term ‘Baptist’ merely identifies the genus of churches that baptist believers. Therefore, they think Baptist churches come in two different species: General Baptists (Arminians) and Particular Baptists (Calvinists). …
[But] the General and Particular Baptists did not consider themselves two different kinds of Baptists. They would never have joined in formal association with one another, and, in fact, the Particular Baptists regarded the General Baptists as dangerously heterodox. … The General Baptists had been heavily influenced by the continental Anabaptists and their theological errors. …
Reformed Baptists, therefore, are not a species of the genus ‘Baptist.’ Rather, they are a species of the genus ‘Reformed.’ Reformed Baptists are not a branch of a Baptist tree; rather they are a branch of the Reformed tree. … Reformed Baptist identity is catholic first, then confessionally Reformed, and finally Baptist.”6
Matthew Bingham agrees, writing,
“[T]hese men and women [mid-seventeenth-century ‘Baptists,’ and, more specifically, those commonly known as ‘Particular Baptists’] are most helpfully understood, not by any of these labels, but rather as congregationalists who, as it happened, reached novel conclusions regarding the legitimacy of infant baptism. This repudiation of paedobaptism did not instantaneously alter either their basic theological orientation or their relational networks; nor did it automatically confer upon them a new ‘Baptist’ identity, a supposition strongly supported by their basic inability to settle upon a consistent term of self-identification.
A coherent, overarching pan-‘Baptist’ identity may well have developed over subsequent decades, but it is problematic to project this back on to the English Revolution and Interregnum. Moreover, even the rejection of paedobaptism was itself made possible and plausible by a more basic congregational ecclesiological paradigm, a conclusion substantiated by the intense conceptual pull which believer’s baptism would exert throughout congregational circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, I have suggested that the mid-seventeenth-century dissenters ubiquitously referred to as ‘Particular Baptists’ would be better described as ‘baptistic congregationalists,’ a label which more accurately describes their mid-seventeenth-century self identity, and does not insert them retroactively into an imagined pan-‘Baptist’ denomination which, at that time, clearly did not exist. This leaves open, of course, the question of what term might best describe the so-called General Baptists. I am inclined toward something like ‘baptistic separatists,’ a term that highlights their distinctive sacramentology without also implying that they exhibited relational and theological continuities with mainstream congregationalists. To properly locate them, however, will require sensitivity to the unique relational and theological matrix out of which they emerged, a task only possible when one jettisons unhelpful and anachronistic denominational categories.”7
Some have argued that Baptist ecclesiology, e.g., believers-only baptism, was so novel it excludes Particular Baptists from the Reformed tradition. Regarding credobaptism specifically, Hick’s responds that the Particular Baptists were simply attempting to recover the original practice of the church catholic. “The early Particular Baptists understand that prior to Augustine, the baptism of believers alone was widespread.”8 Furthermore, he notes,
“It’s important to remember that there is a sense in which all of the church polities of the post-Reformation period were somewhat novel when compared to the time just before the Reformation. … Baptist polity was no more of less novel than the other ecclesiastical polities of the post-Reformation period. Rather, Baptists were simply trying to apply the biblical doctrines of sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) and justification sola fide (faith alone) to the church.”9
In other words, these earliest Particular Baptists sought to take the principles of the Reformation and simply apply them further, more consistently and exhaustively, to the life of the church.10
Notes
Collins, Hercules. An Orthodox Catechism. Edited by Michael A. G. Haykin and G. Stephen Weaver, Jr. Palmdale, CA: RBAP, 2014. Pages 3–4. ↩︎
Richard Muller, “John Gill and the Reformed Tradition: A Study in the Reception of Protestant Orthodoxy in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Life and Thought of John Gill: A Tercentennial Appreciation, ed. Michael A. G. Haykin (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 51. ↩︎
Herman Bavinck, John Bolt, and John Vriend, Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 200–201. ↩︎
Tom Hicks, What Is a Reformed Baptist? (Pensacola, FL: Founders Press, 2022), 17–18, 20. ↩︎
Matthew C. Bingham, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 152–53. ↩︎
Kirk E. Miller 