W. B. Pope on Preparations for the Church in the Gospels (Part 2)

David Fry and Johnathan Arnold continue their discussion of William Burt Pope's doctrine of the church, looking at the second half of his section on "The Preparations in the Gospels."

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

Those are two really key words. Unity, the sacrament of his people's corporate unity with himself and with each other. And then baptism, the sacramental rite of initiation. So initiation and unity are really key words.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

The form is changing, but the reality of God's reign and people coming under that reign or being excluded from that reign is still present.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

You're listening to the Holy Joys Podcast, co-hosted by Jonathan Arnold and Dr. David Fry. Visit us at holyjoys.org and stay tuned for weekly discussions of theology and ministry practice. All for a holy, happy church.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

This is, I think, the strongest connection we have between kingdom and church. Because we have I'm going to build my church when the church gathers, and in both cases, it's to exercise kingdom authority, right? The keys of the kingdom, what binding and loosing. And then he's going to go on now and he's going to uh connect all of this to the sacraments, right? With provision made for the permanent memorial of redemption in the Holy Supper, the sacrament of unity and baptism, which is the sacrament of initiation.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

So before you get to baptism, uh he uh he mentions it is interesting first that he mentions uh the Holy Supper before baptism. Uh that's interesting. But that he uh he says provision was made for what he calls the permanent memorial. Um now by per permanent uh he means you know it's it's it's lasting the life of the church. Um but I find it interesting that he uh here is emphasizing memorial, or that that's becomes a primary uh term for uh the Holy Supper. And of course, that is the emphasis both in the Gospels as well as in 1 Corinthians uh 11 uh on you know, do these things in remembrance of me? So there is a s is a strong uh emphatic. But note here that that's also commonly associated with a particular uh uh Protestant understanding of the sacraments, and that he's aligning himself with that sort of uh and we'll see what he does. You know, is he aligning himself with a more of a Zwinglian or a Calvin uh Calvinist Reformed? We'll see that play out here as he gets to the sacraments, but uh that that alone, that emphasis alone, places him you know outside of say the or at least uh it would be an indicator to me that he's going to go a different direction than Luther, and certainly a different direction than the Roman Catholic Church.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Interesting, yeah. I mean, I think all the Protestants would acknowledge a memorial aspect, um, sure, even in their confessions, but um Pope in his section on the sacraments stresses that it's more than a memorial. Uh he really emphasizes the the undervaluation of the sacraments, which uh he thinks is due to ignorance or yeah um just a lack of understanding. And and so I I think yeah, I don't see Pope here as his view being characterized by by the memorial aspect.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Yeah, I think I think uh what I guess uh I could conclude my comments on that here by just saying he's gonna Anglican size this as we go through. Uh so uh yeah, he's still not you know, he's not going to be Roman in his understanding, but uh he is going to come back. But I find that an interesting uh I I don't know I should call this an introduction, but the first mention of this, because one of the things that Pope does is he will often introduce something and come back to it. And so I'm wondering how this is gonna relate to what he has to say later. And I'm I'm just wondering if maybe this is not a uh really the best of his introductions to the sacraments.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Yeah, maybe. I love I see so this is where I was gonna jump ahead to. This is what I think he's doing here. We he's been talking about the kingdom, the way that the church relates to the kingdom, and how Matthew 16 and 18 form the link between those two things. Now he brings in the sacraments and he emphasizes unity and initiation, but these things are in relationship to the covenant and to the ancient rite of circumcision. So I think what Pope is saying here is the church is where the reign of God is present, and the church is entrusted with this responsibility to bring in and to exclude to bring in to exclude members, just as ancient Israel had its rights for bringing people in through circumcision and uniting them in the Passover meal.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

And so he makes provision for his new community to have the same kind of rights because the it's it's the form is changing, right? This is the key. The form is changing, but the reality of God's reign and people coming under that reign or being excluded from that reign is still present, and so it requires visible signs and sacraments. And so I think you're you're right. Pope intentionally prioritizes the supper because to be one body, to for this congregation to form, it has to have one bread. We are one body because we share one bread. And then once that body is formed, individual members can come into it through baptism. But this is all of that, right? The sacraments bring together the old the old covenant, people of God, with the new covenant, people of God, united in uh in signs of initiation and union under God's reign.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Yes, yeah. So those two those are two really key words unity, the sacrament of his people's corporate unity with himself and with each other. All right. So there's a two-focus, two-part unity. And then baptism, the sacramental rite of initiation. Uh, so initiation and unity are really key words. And then he he moves to another idea that touches on something that you mentioned earlier. Uh, he says the new congregation or church was, as it were, formally consecrated to God by its head, that's Christ, in what may be called the high priestly prayer. That's John 17. Interestingly, was it were you the one who did this, or does he do this? Uh, where, and maybe it's just in that phrase, formally consecrated to God, that recalls Solomon's dedication to the temple, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:09

And yes, that that's what I think he's doing here, is he's portraying Jesus again as the new Solomon, which links back to I will build my church. Because that's what the Davidic king does.

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Yes, yes. And so John 17, which I had never thought of it in this way, but John 17 is a sort of recapitulation of Solomon's dedicatory prayer and building construction of the temple and then his consecrating it of it to God. That's what Jesus now is doing with the church. Uh, he's he's about to build the church and he's going ahead and he's consecrating it uh to God as well. And of course, in that prayer, we you you know the prayer, he prays for his disciples, right? He prays for unity, right? He prays for unity among his believers. That's sort of a a point of emphasis uh in that prayer, also.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Yeah, so I want to go back just for a second before we move on, because I'm still wrestling with why does Pope say provision was made for the permanent memorial of redemption? And I wonder if this comes back to Pope's emphasis that the church is the sphere and organ of the Spirit's administration of redemption. So his point here is not to stress the memorial nature of the sacraments. I don't think that's what to stress that this is the product of and the visible manifestation of the fruit of Christ's accomplished redemption. So I wonder if the the word to lean into there is redemption rather than memorial.

SPEAKER_02 8:52

Yeah, yeah, probably so. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. So then he goes he continues it with that prayer in the section there where he's speaking about John 17, and then he talks about Jude 1. Uh the emphasis there is on unity. He kind of goes back, kind of double-clicks on that that idea of unity, which he brings up in the Holy Supper, and uh, you know, prays that we would be one, that we would be made perfect in one, uh, both the spiritual and eternal unity of perfection. Oh, interesting here, I think this is interesting. He gives the analogy of the Trinity, right? He says of the church, you know, that spiritual and eternal unity perfection, of which the highest type is to be sought, though it can never be found in the interior relations of the Trinity. That the Trinity is the perfection, the the eternal reality of the of the um of the unity which Christ prays for the church, uh, of which we can only be a um a creaturely manifestation of, right? So the so he's grounding the unity of the church in the unity of the Godhead. And uh I like how he does this. Of course, modern theologians have tried to do all sorts of things with Trinitarian theology to try to find grounding for different understandings of how believers relate or the nature of the church and so on. Uh, I think he does it in a pretty simple and and really actually pretty concise uh manner. Uh I I have tried to do that before, but not as concisely as what he does.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Yeah, that little phrase, though it can never be found, is really important for me. I get very uncomfortable, as you know, with what some contemporary theologians have tried to do. I know the whole issue of social trinitarianism is very confusing and convoluted, and everybody is sure what they even mean by that phrase, right? There's different forms of social. So I know it's a little simplistic to just out of hand dismiss social trinitarianism, but I but there are at least some forms of social trinitarianism that try to almost ground the distinction of the persons in their relationships, right? Like I vow relationships rather than the relations of origin, right? Nicene Trinitarianism. And that's what makes me really uncomfortable when we're drawing this like psychological model of the Trinity and then trying to like project that onto the church, when really it seems like what we're doing is almost projecting human existence onto the Trinity. I do recognize that in some way the church is the image of God. We image God, we're like Him in certain ways. So I have in here in my notes analogous, right? This is analogous, right? An analogous unity.

SPEAKER_02 11:54

Okay. I don't think I had any further comments on section three. Uh do you have anything else to wrap us up on paragraph three?

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Just this is probably the strongest statement that Pope makes about the fact that the church is something new. This is kind of where, you know, before he's he's pointed out the newness of the name and of the community, um, but now he really says um the savior in the gospels is is he's he's thinking future. Um when he talks about the church, he's really looking forward. Right. And that's a helpful corrective for me. I think he's right about that. And and yet I want to say that when Jesus says, I will build my church, there's a sense in which he's already been building the church through his ministry and even in the old testament. Because there's still a sense in which the Old Testament people of God are the church in the broadest sense, the ecclesia. And so it's not something totally new. So there's definitely a future emphasis. I don't think we need to say it's something completely future, because there are some theologies of the church that really want to stress that. So I don't think we need to say that, but I think this is a helpful corrective that at least the the emphasis, Christ's primary focus is on something yet, yet to be to be formed.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Yeah, I don't think it's really dissimilar to you know the Apostle John saying, you know, I give you a new commandment. It's an old one, but I give you a new one, right? Oh, yeah, that's helpful.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Oh, that's really helpful. Okay. Um, and then in section four, again, he says, you know, was not founded as a corporate institute. Um, but in another sense, okay, but so here's basically the point I was trying to make. In another sense, he was laying its foundation during the whole of his earthly ministry. Uh he left a large body of instruction which waited only for Pentecost. And um, and then he makes this statement about how the germs and principles uh of ecclesiology are found in the gospels. I think the statement that uh in this section is uh that I have marked that I want to draw attention to is we shall find that this holds true in a very remarkable degree concerning the doctrine of the new church or kingdom. So this to me, I think is one of the strongest statements that Pope makes concerning the near identity of church and kingdom.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

And I think that's because uh as he mentions down the about three lines below that, as he he's giving a list here of the Savior's teaching, and that includes the principles of his own government in it. So the reason he can call the church the kingdom, and uh again, I don't think so much a an identical sense as much as a almost a more of a predication, uh, is because it is the sphere of his government. Uh it is a manifestation of his of his rule in the world.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

It's the Westminster confession, right, that says the visible church is the kingdom of Christ. Do you think Pope would affirm that? And in what sense how would he interpret that?

SPEAKER_02 15:32

Yeah, I mean I I think he would he would just say it it is it is to it is to the world what our bodies are. So when someone says, hey, where is Jonathan Arnold? Uh they are thinking, okay, Jonathan Arnold is you know sitting in his office in Pennsylvania because that's where his body is, right? And so I I think it's similar to that. Where is the kingdom of Christ? Well, it's it's there, see, there are there are the believers who are assembled. You know, that's that's the and yet we know that there is uh much more to personhood than physical manifestation, and so we also know, and and this will bear out in his uh in the rest of what he has to say here, uh, there is more than the visible manifestation, uh, which the church is. And so that's why he does affirm the visible and invisible. And there are people, you know, in ecclesiologies today, they tend to lean toward one or the other in their emphasis, and he is consciously trying to strike that balance between the two. And so he's he will make some statements that seem to be very strong one way or the other, and we have to understand it comprehensively, as he is he is trying to traverse that line that includes both, that says that that one is not actually more important than the other. Uh, that you you have to have the the visible and the invisible, uh, just like you we have body and and spirit or body and soul.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

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