Last night, I read a recent post [link] by the Baptist pastor
Kent Brandenburg wherein he provides a quote from an Evangelical pastor, Paul
Washer, which piqued my interest:
If you use carnal means to attract men, you're going to
attract carnal men. And you're going to
have to keep using greater carnal means to keep them in the church.
Later in the post, pastor Brandenburg brings up two
important Biblical concepts, that in my experience, are rarely discussed,
and/or practiced in our day: church discipline and separation.
While reflecting on the above issues of carnality,
discipline and separation, some of the quotations from the writings of John
Henry Newman that I have recently provided here at AF—see this post—came to
mind, and seem germane to our topic at hand. Here again are the quotes I am
thinking of:
There is in truth a certain
virtue or grace in the Gospel which changes the
quality of doctrines, opinions, usages, actions, and personal
characters when incorporated with it, and makes
them right and acceptable to its Divine
Author, whereas before they were either
infected with evil, or at best but shadows of the truth. This is the principle, above spoken of, which I have called the Sacramental. (An Essay on the
Development of Christian Doctrine, 1878/1989. p.
368 - bold emphasis mine.)
Confiding then in the power of Christianity
to
resist
the
infection
of evil, and to transmute
the very instruments
and appendages of demon-worship
to an evangelical use, and feeling
also that these usages had originally
come
from
primitive
revelations and from the instinct of
nature, though they had been corrupted
;
and
that
they
must
invent
what
they
needed, if they did not use what they
found ; and that they were
moreover possessed of the very archetypes,
of which paganism attempted the shadows; the rulers of the Church from early times were prepared,
should the occasion arise, to adopt, or imitate, or
sanction the existing rites and customs of the populace,
as
well
as the philosophy of the educated class. (Ibid. pp. 371, 372 - bold
emphasis mine.)
In the course of the fourth century two movements
or
developments
spread
over the face of Christendom, with a rapidity characteristic
of
the
Church
;
the
one
ascetic,
the
other
ritual
or
ceremonial. We are told in
various ways by Eusebius, that Constantine,
in order to recommend
the new religion to the
heathen, transferred into it the outward
ornaments to which they had been accustomed
in their own. It is not
necessary to go into a subject which the
diligence of Protestant writers has made familiar to most of us. The use of temples,
and
these
dedicated
to
particular
saints,
and
ornamented
on occasions with branches of trees; incense, lamps, and candles;
votive offerings on recovery from illness ; holy water ; asylums ; holydays and seasons, use of
calendars, processions, blessings on the fields ; sacerdotal
vestments, the tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to the East, images at a later
date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, and the Kyrie Eleison, are
all of pagan origin, and sanctified
by their adoption into the Church. (Ibid. p. 373,
- bold emphasis mine.)
I suspect that pastor Brandenburg would equate the
adoption of “instruments and appendages
of demon-worship”—i.e certain pagan ceremonies,
festivals, rituals and eventually the use of images—with ‘carnal means’. I am
not so certain that I can provide a solid apologia to discourage this.
But, with that said, of late I have been reflecting on a
concept which some have termed, ‘accommodation’. The apostle Paul alludes to a
form of accommodation in his first epistle to the Corinthians:
For though I be free from all men, yet have
I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews I
became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as
under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; To them that are
without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law
to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I
as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men,
that I might by all means save some. And this I do for the gospel's sake, that
I might be partaker thereof with you. (1 Cor. 9:19-23)
The question that needs to be addressed is: when
does adoption and accommodation become ‘carnal means’?
Grace and peace,
