I was playing with the band at Mars Hill Downtown Seattle last week (3/7), and the sermon was given by John Piper (2/28 in Ballard), “Be Killing Sin Or Sin Will Be Killing You“. While there has been the usual quick and affirmative tweeting and facebooking about it, what is interesting (and a little troubling) to me is the conversation that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t happened.
Pastor Piper’s message included an interpretation of Romans 8:5 (particularly the phrase “the things of the Spirit”) which I can only call cessationist. For those of you fortunate enough not to regularly wade waist-deep in theological lingo, cessationism is the belief that extraordinary manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s activity were normal in the first century of the church, but ceased at some point around the end of the first century, and that today the Holy Spirit restrains Himself and acts in and through believers and soon-to-be-believers in much more subtle ways. The way this usually comes out in a cessationist’s theology and preaching is that Scriptural descriptions of overt and recognizable Spirit phenomena which are to continue to and through the present day are passed through an interpretive matrix which transforms them into actions which are outwardly indistinct from well-studied human action and in which the Spirit’s distinctive action is not discernible anywhere outside of the inmost secret parts of those involved. For example, “prophecy” becomes “right preaching”, or “tongues” becomes “bible translating”. In this particular sermon, it was Pastor Piper’s equation of “the things of the Spirit” (Romans 8:5) with Scripture (by way of 1 Corinthians 14:37 and Ephesians 6:17), and thus “have their minds set on the things of the Spirit” was equated with “are deliberately filling their minds with the promises of Scripture, i.e. verses” (my loose paraphrase).
Now, I’m not saying that anything wicked or evil or heretical has gone down here. I’m not saying Mars Hill shouldn’t have given him the pulpit. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to the message — in fact, you probably should; my qualms aside, it has much to commend it. I’m not saying that the “things of the Spirit” aren’t Scriptural. I’m not saying that the Spirit will do anything contrary to Scripture. I’m not saying that the Spirit won’t normally make use of Scripture as His preferred mechanism to make plain to us that which He is doing. I’m not saying that having command of a vast wealth of memorized verses is anything but beneficial to the believer. I’m not in any way implying, insinuating, suggesting, or alluding that understanding and submitting to the whole counsel of Scripture is not immensely beneficial to those who would walk in and think upon “the things of the Spirit”. However, it seems to me that simply equating Scripture and Spirit is a problematic way to read Paul because it dismisses the Spirit as the involved, experienced, active personal actor when a believer is “living according to the Spirit” (see Gordon Fee’s scholarly work God’s Empowering Presence), and that a theologically aware trinitarian congregation that is also self-consciously charismatic would be attuned to and not entirely comfortable with such an oversimplification.
That John Piper gave a sermon that was cessationist in some of its points is, of itself, not surprising, and not really problematic, at least not in any way that I’m interested in addressing right now. If you understand me to be chucking a stone at Piper, keep reading, because stopping here, getting into a huff, and either leaving or posting in said huff will cause you to entirely miss the points I do think worth talking about, which follow from reflecting upon what appears to me to be a peculiar juxtaposition of facts:
- John Piper gave a sermon which included clearly cessationist readings of Scripture in the pulpit of Mars Hill.
- Mars Hill’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit is continuationist/charismatic, i.e., rejects cessationism.
- Mars Hill’s teaching emphasizes the importance of studying your bible and thinking theologically, no matter what gets said from the pulpit.
- The conflict betwen (1) and (2) has not produced any significant public clarifications, conversations, dialogs, etc.
Now, there are a number of ways I can understand how these seem to hang together, the first and most likely being that #4 is incorrect and that I am simply not in a place to have noticed this flurry of theological engagement and dialog. I am not plugged into the heart of the Mars Hill leadership network and I am not a social butterfly intimately connected with a network of community groups, so it seems entirely plausible that the conversation could be going on in many places and has simply escaped my notice; if that is the case, mea culpa and my apologies for wasting all of your time.
Another potential explanation is that I’m wrong about #1, that in listening to the sermon three times in relatively short succession (I was eating dinner during the fourth service) I have somehow profoundly misunderstood an essential pastoral point in its narrative; again, if that is the case, then I’m sure someone will gleefully point it out to me, and I will be glad to acknowledge my misunderstanding and again apologize for the few minutes it’s taken you to wade through my wordy, thick, and often belabored prose. (Sadly, I’m almost certain that even if I’m completely right about #1, someone will try to argue about it simply to score some sort of theological pissing content points. Just an FYI, I do not intend to play that game.)
Similarly possible is that I have overestimated, and therefore overstated, #2. However, I think Mark’s sermons on the matter have been fairly unambiguous and I do not think that the conflict between #1 and #2 rests upon some subtle minor point of charismatic doctrinal minutiae.
However, there are other possibilities that have, I think, important pastoral implications for Mars Hill. For example, it could be that this discrepancy between Piper’s pneumatology (theology of the Holy Spirit) and Mars Hill’s is well-known, and people simply have chosen to politely overlook it, taking the wheat and leaving the chafe, and that I am demonstrating my own immaturity by even making an issue of this, in which case the community is to be commended and encouraged and I am to be reprimanded. Unfortunately, it has not been my impression that Mars Hill’s culture defaults to such a style. If anything, I was under the impression that we were in the midst of a multi-decade effort to offend and thereby scare away the neatnik nit-pickers who seem to flock to whatever the latest hot “Reformed” trend is, so I find it unlikely that the begged-for conversation about the distinction between Scripture Memorization as Sanctifier and the Holy Spirit as Sanctifier has simply been charitably skipped.
It is possible that Mars Hill’s people are simply not accustomed to applying critical theological thinking to sermons from well-spoken-of ministers. That it could be so seems wholly unremarkable to me; a quick look at the cultural morass we find ourselves in illustrates why. But it does imply that the translation of #3 (above) from theory into practice isn’t going as well as it ought, and such barometers can be rightly used to inform pastoral course-corrections and sail-trimming.
Equally likely and more difficult to rectify (in my estimation) is the possibility that the street-level pneumatology of Mars Hill has almost nothing to do with its charismatic doctrinal statements and occasional sermons on the subject, and that in spite of what may be said and thought at the top, many (most?) Mars Hillers are not at all familiar with the categories, concepts, and language that surround the Spirit in the New Testament, and are thus simply unable to detect the theological divergence between Pastor Piper’s reading of Romans 8:5 and Mars Hill’s affirmation of the presently-phenomenally-active Spirit. Again, if this is true then it’s an important navigational aid that it may be unwise to ignore. Indeed, whichever of the aforementioned logs may be lodged in either or both of my eye sockets, this last possibility has to me the appearance of a splinter that steadier hands than my own should recognize the importance of removing.
