A Vast Gulf Fixed Between

Well-meaning evangelical friends often advise me to cool down my rhetoric or dial back the perceived intensity of my objections to certain aspects of Reformed Theology. “After all,” they remind me, “We are brothers in Christ.”

That is true, and I want to acknowledge it right out of the starting gate. The basis for Christian unity is common faith in the person and work of the resurrected Christ, not any particular theological position about divine sovereignty, the composition and future of the nation of Israel or the timing of our Lord’s return for his people, not to mention several dozen less serious matters.

At the same time, the differences in faith and practice between dispensational Christians and Reformed believers go well beyond the theoretical. They are hugely practical.

Every new pronouncement from the Reformed camp delineates these distinctions more starkly and makes them more difficult to ignore. There really is a vast gulf fixed between. My generation didn’t create it and we’d prefer not to perpetuate it, but what we can’t do is ignore it while remaining faithful to the word of God.

A Memorial on Nations

The triennial council meeting of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches recently adopted what they call a “memorial on nations”. Doug Wilson’s blog reproduces the text and makes a few comments on it. Here is the statement:

“We believe God made all nations from one man, Adam. At Babel God scattered their rebellious unity. But God, by the cross of Christ and His Spirit poured out at Pentecost, is reuniting and reconciling the nations, drawing them into one Church, the Body of Christ. Loving family, nation, and stranger in their order, idolizing or destroying none, we repudiate nationalistic and ethnic hatred, vainglory, and persecution. We seek to unite the nations in the worship of the triune God, sanctifying all peoples, languages, and customs to His glory.”

— CREC, Memorial on Nations

Doug’s comments qualify and explain this, though of course they obviously represent Doug’s interpretation of the text and not that of the CREC at large. Readers can only take the memorial at face value. In doing so, we cannot help noticing that any attempt to unite the nations of our world as they currently exist puts Christians hand in hand with the secular globalizers responsible for the present chaos in France. You cannot unite unlike things, even if you pursue that goal by the most loving and well-intentioned methods.

A Dramatic Upsurge in a Certain Kind of Sin

Of course, our Reformed friends would tell us that walking in lockstep with or pursuing the agenda of the globalizers and the coming Man of Sin who will lead them is not what they’re trying to do at all. They’re just trying to put out a fire in the ranks before it consumes their whole theological project. That fire is a growing movement of young Reformers toward nationalism, one that their older brothers in Christ correctly observe frequently manifests itself in frank expressions of something perilously close to ethnic hatred. Doug addresses the problem euphemistically when he writes:

“The first thing was that we have seen, in our own circles and elsewhere, a dramatic upsurge in the kind of sin that we are seeking to address with this memorial. There really is a ‘there’ there.”

Yes, there is. He’s not wrong about that. Further, Reformers who follow Doug’s prescribed methodology in transforming our world will not go far wrong:

“We understand our assigned mission to be preaching the Word, baptizing those who believe, administering the sacrament to them, and teaching them obedience to all the words of Christ (Matt. 28:19-20).”

All well and good. We can agree on that too. Evangelism and discipling are the mission of Church in our present age and the command of the Lord. The problem is not the “what” (the goal of unity) but the “when” and the “how”.

The ‘When’ and the ‘How’

Dispensational Christians believe the glorious outcome described in scriptures like Revelation 21:24 (“By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it”) or Isaiah 60:9 (“For the coastlands shall hope for me”) cannot be realized absent the personal presence of our Lord ruling over the world from David’s throne in Jerusalem.

While the salvation of individuals in this age or any other is always a matter of faith, the scriptures teach that the unification of the nations will be the direct result of sight. The nations will meet our Lord in the flesh, not via the eye of faith. Until our Lord has purged these entities of their rebellious, Christ-rejecting elements, the nations of this world cannot possibly be united. That cleansing of the nations is described in Matthew 25 and is unambiguously associated with the bodily return of the Lord Jesus to planet Earth:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.”

Once the goats are gone, you can unite sheep. But accomplishing this unity is not the purview of the obedient Church. That glory belongs to Christ alone. In our present age, the goats remain.

Uniting the Nations

Until the Son of Man comes in his glory and sits on his throne, nobody can unite the nations, at least not in anything good or godly. Those who seek to do so, even in the name of Jesus, are tilting at windmills. All they will get is the iron and clay in the feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, which will not hold together.

That’s not a small difference of eschatology. It’s hugely practical. Pursuing the mission of uniting the nations assumes a role in history to which the Church was never called, and which it has no hope of playing successfully. Nationalistic young Reformers get this aspect of things right even if they get other things wrong.