Note: This is adapted from a paper written as part of my studies at the Antioch School. The objective of the assignment was to demonstrate that I had "developed an advanced biblical understanding of the philosophy that is to drive the ministry of the church and the instructions (i.e. “house order”) by which each local church is to abide."

In my last post, I argued that submission to roles within the body, and allowing those roles to be defined by Christ rather than purely pragmatic or social demands, was a crucial element of aligning our churches with the design found in scripture. That our practices needed to be primarily defined in light of the community of faith Christ is building rather than personal interests or cultural norms. Here, we turn our attention to what that looks like in practice. This primarily arises in two categories; first, the specified roles that exist within the church, and second, how those roles interact in key circumstances as part of the life of the church.

The actual roles within the house order in scripture fall into a series of nested dualities that ultimately reflect the relationship between God the Father and God the Son to varying degrees. The Father is the supreme and perfect authority; all things are in subjection to Him, and He carries out His authority in pure love. The Son is the perfect agent of the Father’s will, doing all He does in submission to the Father and joyfully glorifying the Father through His every word and deed. In all of this, the Holy Spirit unites and glorifies, participating in and highlighting the love that exists within the Trinity and pointing to both the Father and the Son in all things.

The relationship that exists within the Trinity is fundamentally one of love, in which the Father loves the Son and the Spirit, the Son loves the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Father and the Son, and there is no partiality or brokenness in these loving bonds. The three are one, truly one, such that we worship but one God in three persons. No person of the Trinity is lacking in anything, not even honor or power. The Father is not more God than the Spirit or the Son; every person of the Trinity is fully God and, therefore, fully empowered and worthy of all praise. The roles within the Trinity define the interpersonal relationships within divinity, but do not elevate or denigrate any person to any position other than True God.

This is the defining nature of the roles of the church. Every role within the church is engaged in presenting an image of this Trinity relationship, and every interaction among the body of the church is to display the pure love and true bond found among the persons of the Trinity. We must have this understanding in place if we are to carry out these roles correctly; we cannot emulate that which we do not know. We must also recognize the limits of our understanding and of our roles. We cannot perfectly understand God, or at least, if we shall ever perfectly understand Him it will not be on this side of eternity. We cannot perfectly practice the love of the Trinity within our own bodies, as we are not perfect agents of love while yet in these bodies. No roles within the church are perfect images of the divine nature, for a multitude of reasons, but a key one that warrants mention before we continue is that there is no role in the church that has absolute authority the way the Father does. Every leader in the church is also a servant, as Christ noted when He said,

Yet, we are to strive to have our image of the Father and the Son, empowered by the Spirit, grow ever more perfect. The way we live out our roles should be growing in a manner that always looks a little more like the Divine Household than it did before, always makes the love of the Trinity more clear to each other and the watching world. So let us bear this perfect love that we strive to emulate in mind as we consider the images we have been given.

I mentioned that this will be a study of nested dualities, so allow me to explain that before we examine the content of those dualities. First, note that our images are not trinities; there is no agent in our study here that emulates the Holy Spirit, but rather, the dualities discussed are empowered by that same Holy Spirit Himself. He is in all and through all that we do as believers in Christ, He is the One that binds us to Christ and each other, and He is the one who ultimately takes our dualities and uses them to point higher to the Father and the Son. As such, He will not be directly discussed through much of this article, as the rest of it will focus on the roles themselves, but it is vital to understand that nothing that follows this paragraph can exist in any true, holy, and workable form without His hand upon it. He is the vital role that makes all other roles exist, and it is His pleasure to avoid direct praise in favor of pointing beyond Himself to the Father and the Son in all things; so shall it be in this article.

Second, a note about terminology. I do not mean to describe a duality as a pagan may use the term; these are not sets of equal but opposite forces that find their purest expression in appropriate balance. Rather, they are two pictures that, taken together, present a larger picture. There are ways they are equal and ways they are not, but in a healthy church environment, they are never at odds. Fulfilling our roles well means that we are separate only so that we can be seen as united. A unity without parts is not a unity at all, but a single thing; for our images to work in a way that displays unity, then, there must be parts1. In God’s design, these parts are arranged in pairs that nest within and relate to one another.

While not every duality here will get equal weight of discussion in this paper, these are the essential ones for consideration as we move forward. The relationship between God the Father and God the Son is the template, and each will be listed in that order (that is, the member imaging the Father will be listed before the member imaging the Son). The primary dualities are the Son and the Church, the Church and the Home, and the Church and the World. Within the church is the duality of Leaders and Congregation, and within the leadership are the Elders and the Deacons. Within the home are the Family and the Servants, within the family are the Parents and the Children, and within the parents are the Husband and the Wife. Lacking some element here is not utterly devastating; a household without servants, for instance (which is most of them now), simply lacks that role. We are concerned here with how those roles work together to image God, not any debate about whether or not every role needs to exist in every place where it can exist2.

Christ is the head of the church, as the Father is the head of the Trinity. Christ’s relationship to the church images the Father’s relationship to the Son, in that Christ has supreme authority over the church, and carries out this authority in loving relationship. As the Trinity never operates in a manner in which the Father is not in authority, so the church is not designed to ever operate outside of the authority of Christ.

Likewise, the church is designed to operate with leadership in place that has the power to direct its operations and carry out church discipline. This leadership does not have ultimate authority; leaders of the church submit to Christ as Christ submits to the Father, and serves the body as Christ has served the church in His laying down His life for it. This was discussed in more detail elsewhere, but essentially, a church cannot be a church until it has leadership, specifically because it cannot perform its essential duties or maintain its adherence to Christ without trained leaders who point to Christ in their own deeds and in the relationship they have to the rest of the church body. Similarly, the church cannot be a church without a body that submits to the authority of the leadership as the church submits to Christ, since it is the body that carries out the work of the church in the world as the church carries out the work of Christ in the world and Christ carries out the work of the Father in the world.

Within the leadership are elders and deacons, the two offices defined in scripture for the governance of the church. Together, they are the leadership addressed in the paragraph above. But they have distinction between themselves, and within that distinction, the elders set direction as the Father sets direction for the Son (and as the Son sets direction for the church), and the deacons carry out the will of church leadership through service to the body as Christ carries out the will of the Father through His service rendered to the church (and as the church carries out the will of Christ).

Part of the work of church leaders is to direct the regular life of the church. This means that it is church leadership that ultimately calls and leads meetings of the assembled church body. The leadership keeps order at the assembled meetings, points all that happens to Christ, and carries out the essential functions of equipping and establishing the body. The congregation, then, follows the order as established by the leaders and submits to biblical teaching and direction as it is delivered during their times of assembly. Elders are described by Paul as having an ability to teach, because it is part of the fundamental nature of church leadership to pass on the knowledge and will of Christ to the body.

Relationships within the body are intended to showcase the patient love of Christ, as well as the importance of the church’s mission, at all times. As such, Christ gives us direction in Matthew to approach one another about sin and disputes in a manner that gives the offender multiple opportunities to repent and make things right, with increasing support from the church. When this process is not fruitful, however, Paul operates on the understanding that it is the leadership of the church that holds the authority to discipline the wayward member. Gilliland argues that this responsibility is a natural expression of the patient love expressed in the Matthew process when he says, “The Christian who lapses into unchristian behavior requires patience, much teaching, and genuine caring and love. The discipline of the Christian church must be the work of those who have a truly pastoral heart.”3 That is, the heart that qualifies one for church leadership is the same heart needed to practice discipline within the church in a manner that respects the offender and emphasizes the proper mindset of the church toward the offense.

Disruption of these relationships, then, not only alters the practices of the church, but corrupts the image the church is meant to be displaying. If the deacons operate as elders, or the body operates without leadership, or the elders fail to submit to Christ or serve the body, then the essential function of the church—as the manifested glory of God in the world tasked with carrying out the redemptive mission of Christ—falls apart.

The affairs of the Christian home are subject to the affairs of the Christian church. As God the Father sets the course of divine work and God the Son carries that work out in the world, so the church delivers its mission to the home, which then carries out that work. The home displays the same relationship within its neighborhood and direct connections that the church displays within its community. Thus, the structure of one informs the other; as Banks notes that “those who belong to [local church communities] should see one another primarily as members of a common family,” highlighting that the church operates in the same manner as a home, and the home operates in the same manner as the church.4

The home, similarly, has offices, and there are specific elements of church life that happen within the home. The finances of the church, for instance, come from the finances donated through the homes; if the homes within the church do not understand their responsibility to support the work of the church with their resources, and do not graciously and joyfully give of their resources to the God who provides for them, the church will find itself lacking and struggling to afford its basic tasks. This then cycles back into the homes, as the church is called to provide for any among them who are lacking. This is seen in the creation of the office of Deacons, whose first task was to oversee the support of widows, and James 1:27 reminds readers that concern for widows and orphans is a crucial element in the life of the church and the believer. As those homes with resources give those resources to the church, the church has the means to provide those resources to the homes that lack. In this way, the relationship between the church and the home is not only reflective of each other, but cyclical in practice, much like the love that flows eternally between the Father and the Son.

In Ephesians 6, Paul describes various relationships within the home and shows the image of the Father/Son relationship in them. Servants (or slaves in some renderings) submit to the authority of their masters as Christ submits to the Father, not merely in grudging action but in sincerity, while the masters are commanded to treat their servants with a sincere and respectful heart that mirrors the way the Father directs the Son. Children are called to honor their parents, while the parents (namely the fathers) are called to a mindfulness in how they raise up their children without unnecessary provocation.

But these are presented in light of the longer text (Ephesians 5:22-33) before it, which details the relationship of the husband to the wife. Paul explicitly states the image-bearing nature of the marriage relationship repeatedly throughout this section, pointing husbands to the part of Christ and wives to the role of the church. He points to the self-sacrificing love of Christ for the church as a normative expectation for the love of a husband for his wife, framing the submission of the wife as a healthy response of a woman enjoying the grace and support her husband shows her rather than the fearful response of a woman under the command of an abusive or demanding husband. In this way, also, the marriage images the church, where the husband encourages the growth of the wife toward her full potential in faith in the same manner as Christ builds up the church and calls it to growth toward its full potential in faith.

Incidentally, it is the image-bearing nature of the marriage relationship that sorts out a number of questions the church receives about other gender-related issues. By lacking the interplay between a man and a woman, a same-sex marriage is incapable of displaying the same image as a man married to a woman, and therefore the marriage displays a false (or at least incomplete) picture of the relationships it is meant to display. The role of elders within the church in their relationship to deacons, serving the same functional role in its image duality as husbands to wives, is sensibly limited to men, while the role of deacons is not.

Note, however, that this overall structure does dictate when and where the church has authority in the home. The relationship of the church and home is essentially big-picture; the church gives direction to the home, but the relationships within the home dictate how that direction is actually carried out. The elders do not have authority to replace the role of parents in the lives of children, but do have a requirement to hold the parents accountable to whether or not their parenting actually serves the greater mission of the church. The church cannot tell the wife whether or not she’s allowed to work out of the home, as this is a matter that falls within the means of the home governing itself; but must ask stern questions of the husband if the wife isn’t growing in her walk with Christ, as this would suggest a breakdown in his role to support her growth as Christ supports the growth of the church. Ultimately, each relationship being described falls under the broad direction of the relationship in which it is nested, but retains some autonomy in its actual practice. Which sets us up to discuss the final category of relationship relevant to our topic.

If Christ has conquered the forces of this world and begun to establish His rule, and the church is His agent in the world the way Christ is the Father’s agent, then that implies a relationship between the church and the world that grants the church a certain amount of authority. However, since the world is not yet fully under the rule of Christ, it cannot be expected to operate as though it is. Note that the world does not have instructions in scripture regarding the church that mirror the instructions wives have regarding husbands or that the church body has regarding its leadership. This is at least a little bit practical; a world in rebellion against God is not going to submit to the commands of scripture simply because those commands come from God. So what does that mean for how we approach the relationship between the church and the world?

First, note that the church is called to be above reproach from the world; 1 Peter 3 and Romans 13, for instance, urge that the behavior of the church toward the world be pure and unblemished by evil, with the intention that the world sees the goodness of God and responds in faith. Compare this with the call of elders to be above reproach in 1 Timothy and the role of husbands as faithfully and lovingly guiding their wives to greater knowledge of and faith in Christ. In this way, the church leads the world toward God, even if only by example.

Second, our showing loving guidance toward the world is self-sacrificial, as Christ’s love for the church is. We are called repeatedly to lay down our rights or lives, if needed, in service to pointing the world around us to Christ. We are to rejoice in trials, accept any trouble brought to us for doing good (while striving to have no trouble brought to us for doing evil, that is, avoiding such trouble by avoiding doing evil), and recognize the authority of the world so far as it exists.

This last part is essential; there are areas where earthly authorities really do have authority, and we as the church show our submission to God through our submission in these areas. Where the laws of man call for taxes, or honor, or participation in civil engagement, to the degree that those things do not compromise the mission of the church, we are to render what is being demanded. Homes, essentially, have dual citizenship. They are subject to the church, and they are subject to earthly authority. Where these things clash, a Christian home must submit primarily to the church; where they do not, a Christian home must be faithful to both.

Every relationship within the church, then, is always engaging with the world. And in its engagements with the world, each must seek to point to Christ in all things, to glorify Him in their dealings with each other and the world, and to practice their relationships as images of the patient love that exists between the Father and the Son. By recognizing how each relationship in the life of a Christian reflects the other relationships, and looking at each as images of the divine love within the Trinity, we can more readily understand the nature of our roles and how to faithfully live them out.

1 Not that God has parts, but He does have persons. These are not separate in the way that we as individuals are separate, but they are distinct in a way that allows them to have unity in relationship. We are, in all respects, imperfect images; this is merely one way in which our lacking points to His fullness.

2 Some roles are more necessary than others, but this is not a matter for this paper.

3 Gilliland, Dean S. “Growth & Care of the Community: Discipline and Finance.” From Pauline Theology & Mission Practice, 237–246. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1983. 243.

4 Banks, Robert. “The Community as a Family.” From Paul's Idea of Community: The Early House Churches in Their Historical Setting, 52–61. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980. 54.

The first few things I would want to affirm will be fairly straightforward, as I hold pretty orthodox views on the basics of Christianity. These are things that, for the most part, are not really contested within Christianity, and I would go so far as to say that these cannot be laid aside without abandoning Christianity. As such, I'm just going to toss all of these into one post and then focus on more secondary and/or controversial topics for the remainder of the series.

The Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection of Christ, and this is where I started when I began my deconstruction phase. I did not consider anything short of a literal, physical resurrection from the dead to be acceptable; if Christ was dead, or never existed, then I was prepared to throw the whole religion out as baseless and false. If Christ did not exist, then all of Christianity is built on a lie; if He died and stayed dead, He failed to prove Himself to be God in flesh, and therefore Christianity is built on a lie. A symbolic or metaphysical resurrection is not even worth considering, as it cannot be verified and means essentially nothing. I recently saw a tweet where someone asked, "if it was absolutely, undeniably, 100% demonstrated tomorrow that Christ was still dead in a grave, how would that affect your faith?" and I read through response after response of people saying it wouldn't do anything to their faith.

I don't know what their faith is, but it isn't the one Paul declared would be in vain if Christ had not been raised.

I looked at the gospels as historical documents, because that's fundamentally what they claim to be. I could go into detail in another post, but I was convinced that they were faithful recollections of real events, with Luke and John having the most convincing lines of argument for me. Luke because of his research; the number of details that Luke includes that support his claim to be operating from eyewitness interviews was staggering. Luke stated outright that his goal was to ensure his reader(s) could have confidence in the teachings they've received, and he makes sure to name sources, include stories that other gospels didn't include that show Christ interacting with people beyond the disciples, provide geographic and cultural details that improve clarity, and (as he continues into Acts) distinguish between the things he personally witnessed and the things he didn't. John stood out to me for his honesty and intimate familiarity with the story, how he really turns his focus to who Christ is and lets the person of Jesus stand out on the page even more than the specific things Jesus did or what order exactly He did them. The bit where John and Peter run to the tomb and John is the only writer who records that, well actually, he won that race, but that's an aside; details like that drove home that this was a real person telling real stories about his own real experiences, show a bit of the character of a man who wants to note that he ran faster than his friend, but is willing to admit hesitance to actually enter the tomb.

Incidentally, and this isn't a core doctrine, it's just a side note here, but John is also why I believe in a very early dating of the gospels, which was important to my acceptance of their claims. There is no dispute among scholars, Christian or secular, that John was written after the synoptic gospels, and almost certainly after Acts. Everyone agrees that John wrote last. A great many people, however, put John after 70 ad, and I don't. My reason isn't historical or based on any specific papyrus or anything--so take it how you will--but rather it's literary. As a writer, I am struck by the fact that John has no apparent sense of dramatic tension. He shows throughout his writings that he is a writer who cannot allude to something and then wait to reveal what he's alluded to. Consider this segment of John 2:

I want to note two things about this passage. The first is that John, at the very beginning of his gospel, gives away the ending because this is the type of writer he is. Jesus has alluded to His resurrection and John, writing about it later, simply cannot contain the urge to tell us exactly what this is a reference to and exactly how you, dear reader, should respond to that. The second is that the writer who cannot hold onto spoilers, who cannot help but point to the fulfillment of anything hinted at in his text, does not connect a conversation that predicts the destruction of the temple to the actual destruction of the temple. Even when he points out that Jesus' primary point here was to talk about Himself rather than the temple, he doesn't contrast that with the natural post-70 reading of the passage that would remind people of the temple's destruction. It gets no mention, not even as a thing to be corrected. If John is the kind of writer that I have claimed he is, if he's the kind of writer I see when I read him, the only explanation for this oversight is that John did not yet know about the literal destruction of the temple when he wrote it. This, in my mind, dates his gospel to before 70, which means all the other gospels are even earlier, and this serves to help the case of gospel validity. That Matthew, Mark, and Luke all wrote and distributed their accounts, with names and sources and identifying details, during the lifetime of eyewitnesses and people who knew where Jesus had been buried, and no one trotted out His body or wrote any damning contradiction or managed to show any evidence to the contrary, is a fact that I cannot ignore. If Jesus was a fictional character, or still dead, then the opponents of the church would have held all the cards and could shut these claims down just as quickly as they shut down the claims of other contemporary false messiahs. That they didn't means that the story of Jesus Christ was different in a way that ensured they couldn't. And that way must be that the accounts were true. Jesus Christ really walked the earth, really taught crowds, really performed miracles, really died, and really rose from the dead, and those closest to Him really had their entire lives changed to such a degree that they couldn't help but tell the world what they'd experienced in His presence.

Everything else is built on this.

In the most recent sermon I've delivered, I claimed that everything we know of God the Father we know through Christ. This is because I was specifically talking about knowing God the Father at that time; it would be more accurate, as a general statement, to say that everything we know of the Godhead, the supernatural, and even our own fundamental natures, we know through Christ. When God the Father speaks, it is Jesus' voice we hear. When God the Spirit makes us aware of truth, it is God the Son He is delivering. When human writers sat down to put the scriptures into writing, it was the Eternal Living Word that filled their minds and found translation in the act of recording. This is, I maintain, the fundamental nature of God the Son's function in the Godhead: He reveals and realizes. His death and resurrection are revelatory at their core, displaying the weight of our sin and the love of God for us and the grace that He has available to cover that sin; and in doing that work, He realizes (that is, makes into reality) the salvation of God's people. As the means by which all things are created, He reveals the creative purposes of God and realizes them, and as the One for whom all things are made, He reveals the God-centered order of creation and realizes the God-directed purpose of creation. He is both the light that shows us what God intends us to see and the means by which the revealed is made concrete. The credibility of God the Son, then, is paramount. If there was any deceit or falsehood in Him (and, therefore, in His words), if anything we know of Him is false, then we can know nothing He speaks on with certainty. The resurrection of Christ proves that He is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do. By proving Himself to us, He assures us that He is the credible source of all His other claims. Now, having come to understand that credibility, we can look at what He has revealed.

Third, that a proper relationship with the Father is characterized by allegiance* to Him alone, through Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit. God will not split our affections, and will be second to nothing. Submission to Him is submission of all that we are, and we become all we were designed to be in the process. I tell people that I'm evangelizing to that I'm not just giving them a chance to escape Hell someday, but rather, I'm asking them to lay absolutely everything at the feet of Christ; our lives, our histories, our skills, our goods, our relationships, our bodies, our identities, our views and habits and desires and goals, everything that defines our sense of self, absolutely everything is given over and nothing is held back. All that we can rightly have when He sends us into the world as a redeemed soul is that which He gives back to us, which always includes a body to stand with and a Father to love and a King to bow before and an eternity to enjoy all of it. I am asking them to consider the person they have been so far utterly dead, and to start a brand new life, whatever that may mean in God's plans for us. Everything else, everything but Him, falls in line behind this overarching drive to be who He has called us to be and live as He has called us to live and do as He has called us to do; and anything that contrasts with that purpose, regardless of how comfortable or important it has been to us so far, must be dropped aside. In salvation, we are not merely recipients of a transaction, we are adopted, and while I will go into this more in the next post, the basic idea here is that we are brought into a new family and held to the expectations and identity of that family.

These, I believe, are the basics of the Christian faith. Everything else stems from them or explains them in more detail. All our models, all our atonement theories, all our theological frameworks and terminology find their soul here. Here we have creation, fall, and redemption; here we have God and man and our need for Him and His love for us. Here we have the Bible, in which God the Son reveals God and ourselves and what God has done and how we respond to that work, which can have no falsehood without sacrificing its essential purpose. In these things we must have unity and unwavering adherence; any deviation from this, any different Christ, any other gospel, any allegiance placed equal or higher than God, any ultimate source of truth other than the Father revealed through the Son through the lens provided by the Holy Spirit, is not Christianity. It may share many things with us, but it is not of us.