In the Providence of God we have in front of us a dozen or so months of work, as well as things to do and various activities to be carried out in the presence of God, for His glory. This pastoral letter is the first I’ll be writing regularly to the members of our church in order to give you some important things to think about. The adjective ‘pastoral’ defines both the nature and the contents of these letters, which intend to provide the members of the Filadelfia Church with matters to meditate on as we continue on our pilgrimage across the desert of this world. Furthermore these pastoral letters will follow a ‘theme’ in that each one will be based on a particular issue, that is to say a subject which is worth spending some time to think about. Let’s begin thinking about time. Passing time.

The first consideration we have to make is that time does not belong to us. Periods of time and moments in our lives and in the lives of all men have been fixed by God by His own authority (Acts 1:7). In fact, the length of our lives is determined by God and our time is always under His control (Acts 17:26). Considering the rhythm of Genesis 1 and of the days which alternate with the nights we come to realize that while we participate in the passing of time, we cannot control it. During the daytime it is easy to  deceive ourselves into believing that we are in control of what is happening, but, when it is time to go to bed and to turn out the light, we are forced to let go of the hold we have on on the passing events of daily life.This shows us our own fragility, teaching us our dependence on God. Every night we have to let go and submit to a reality that is bigger than us. Every day the biological rhythm of life forces us to remember that it is Sovereign God, and not us, in charge of the universe. When we go to sleep at night, it is as if we are taken out of the world and life itself, while God carries on with the work in the world regardless of whether we or our work are actually present. While we are resting, unconscious of what is going on around us, God continues to be at work in favour of those who confide in Him (Psalms 127:2). Time does not belong to us.

Nevertheless, in a certain sense, time also does belong to us. In the morning, after a necessary night’s rest, we  wake up offering our prayer to God (Psalms 5:3). The morning is a time God gave us to make good use of as administrators. Among the talents which God entrusted to our care there is also time, and as required of administrators, we must remain faithful in what has been entrusted to us (I Corinthians 4:2).  After being passive during the night, in the morning, we are active and participate in the work that God has begun. And after participation in the work God began we are called to enter into His rest participating joyfully and seriously to the Christian Sabbath to be refreshed in our communion with the triune God. We shall consider again in more detail the weekly rhthym of work and rest, for now suffice it to say that whether at work, at school, at home doing the housework, in the life of the church, or in our relationships with our neighbours in the world around us, we are responsible for the way in which we spend the time that is at our disposal, respecting and honoring the weekly order God established in creation. Therefore, as the apostle Paul exhorts us, we must learn to make the most of our time because the days are evil (Ephesians 5:16). Lost opportunities won’t present themselves again! It is therefore imperative that we take care to use the time well which we are given to live, in order to make the most of the talents we have received. Let us reflect on how we should spend the time that we are living. The Lord Jesus reproached the  religious leaders because they refused to understand the signs of the times (Matthew 16:1-3). What about us? Are we learning to understand our existence in time, bearing in mind the wickedness of the times we are living in, and living in view of eternity? The time we have been allocated is not to be used for running after everything our hearts desire. Let’s refuse to take part in frenetic global consumerism, as impotent slaves of the mechanism of the economic market, or crushed under the dominion of technology. Having our daily bread we must consecrate the time which is left to live according to the will of God (I Peter 4:1-3). Time does belong to us.

Rev. Andrea Ferrari

The full-length documentary Reformation Italy is now available to watch online. It is approximately 30 minutes in length and features Rev. Ferrari, Rev. Mike Brown, Dr. Mike Horton, and Simonetta Carr.

What does confessional Christianity look like?

I recently had the privilege of trying to answer that question at a Reformation Day conference with a confessionally Reformed church in Italy — in truth, the only confessionally Reformed church in Italy — Chiesa Evangelica Riformata Filadelfia (CERF), in Milan.  

To say that CERF is the sole confessionally Reformed church in Italy is no exaggeration. The church is pastored by URCNA missionary, Rev. Andrea Ferrari. It is the only known church in Italy that takes the Three Forms of Unity as its confessional standards, and it is the only Reformed church that confesses Reformed standards in a robust fashion and uses them weekly in the life and worship of the church.

For its annual Reformation Day conference this year, Rev. Ferrari focused our attention on the Belgic Confession, which was lobbed over the wall of the castle of Doornik on November 2^nd, 450 years ago.

The Heidelberg Catechism is more well-known and celebrated than the Confession, and no doubt its 450^th anniversary two years hence will draw a good bit more attention. Though the Confession and Catechism were written within two years of each other, they were written under radically different political circumstances. While the Catechism was created at the direction of Frederick III and the authorities in the Palatinate, the Confession as a defensio produced by a persecuted church, a church under the cross.

Because it was borne of persecution, the Belgic Confession bears witness to a crucial aspect of confessional Christianity, namely, its awareness that the Christian life is lived under the cross. The first editions of the Confession contained a letter to King Philip of Spain, under whom they were suffering, followed by a listing of “Certain passages of the New Testament, by which the faithful are exhorted to render a confession of their faith before men”:

• Matthew 10 [32, 33]. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.
• Mark 8 [38] & Luke 9. For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
• 1 Peter 3 [15]. Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you;
• Romans 10 [10].  For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.”
• 2 Timothy 2 [12]. If we deny Jesus Christ, he also will deny us.

Guido de Bres, the author of the Confession, is justifying his disobedient action before the civil authorities, much as Luther had done a generation before, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

But he is also expressing something that he and his fellow confessors had learned through much hard experience and the shedding of blood. Jesus promised his church not prosperity, but suffering. He prepared his followers for that day when they would be hauled before the tribunal, and asked to recant their faith, and he promised that the Holy Spirit would give them words to say. And it is the confession of faith in the most difficult of circumstances, against the most stern opposition, that is the true test of our fidelity to the Son of Man. If we are ashamed of Him, of His Gospel, he will be ashamed of us when he comes in glory. If we deny Jesus Christ, he also will deny us.

Read in the light of these prefatory texts, the confession takes on a whole different significance. De Bres alludes to Romans 10 in the opening words of the first article, “We believe with all our heart and confess with our mouth that there is one simple and spiritual being, whom we call God.” The confession is not an intellectual exercise, nor an abstract statement of theological precision made for the sake of proving detractors wrong. It is, rather, a matter of life and death, made in the teeth of a furious earthly judgment, with an eye to coming heavenly judgment.

Obviously, I don’t dream of the day when the Reformed churches will once again be persecuted for their faith. Nor do I seek to draw an easy equivalency between the severe suffering of an earlier day and the relatively insignificant opposition we face today in North America.

But there is nevertheless a confessional sensibility, for lack of a better term, to the Belgic Confession that should characterize confessional churches whether they are a persecuted minority, or a ruling elite. It is, nevertheless, a bit easier to sense when you are a minority, as we forty saints were who gathered for worship and study in Milan a few weeks ago, as the sole confessional Christians in a nation of 60 million souls.

And it is this: Pure faith in Christ, truly confessed, will not ultimately be popular. It will draw opposition, from both within and without the church. It will be confessed at a price. While we should pray for the great success of our evangelistic efforts, we should not be surprised if this message doesn’t fill stadiums, or win laurels from cultural appraisers.

This point was brought home to me in reading the online comments on a Wall Street Journal article this week, “How Calvinists Spread Thanksgiving Cheer” (Nov. 18, 2011). One commenter dismissed the article because it discussed the charitable efforts of small church of “only” 1,500 members, and was therefore culturally irrelevant. I was reminded that the entire Eastern Classis of the URCNA has a little more than 1,100 professing members.

This confessional sensibility also results in a polemical statement of the faith. No fewer than 21 of 37 articles in the confession explicitly frame their teaching up by opposing errant views — a pattern the confession learned from the very pages of the New Testament. It is also a pattern that we see in the earliest days of creedal Christianity, as the church has ever sharpened and defined its faith in the face of error. Confessional Christians should not be afraid of clearly stating what we believe, and the errors we reject.

Reformed Christians in the west are no longer hung for their faith, as De Bres was, or consigned to the flames (though many around the world are still persecuted mightily). But we are tempted to seek influence, or to soften the difficult doctrines we confess. I know as a church planter, I have often worried how the rougher edges of our confession will sound to the new visitor. Many of us do speak — absurdly, given our size — of transforming the broader culture in which we live. As though we should expect to be welcomed as guiding lights by a world lost in darkness and opposed to the things of God.

We are also tempted to send our missions dollars off to grand programs which are accomplishing great things, we are lured by glossy brochures and internet video. The desire for bigness that permeates our culture, permeates also our church. It is a difficult choice to support a minister of Word and Sacrament, laboring against such long odds to plant confessionally Reformed churches in the challenging context of Italy.

What does confessional Christianity look like?

It is a small church in a small storefront in a small suburb north of Milan, the only such church in an entire nation. It is the preached word, the breaking of bread, and a handful of professions of faith. It is a faithful and learned pastor, praying and working that Christ’s church might be established in a land of long-dead faith.

[Please pray for CERF in Milan, and for Rev. Ferrari. Please support their work through the consistory of Christ United Reformed Church of Santee — they are outgrowing their building and wrestling with whether to remodel or build elsewhere. Please pray that the Lord would raise up church planters to assist Rev. Ferrari in his labors, Italians and/or Americans who are willing to come alongside him and continue to build a foundation for a federation of Reformed Churches in Italy.]

So, I have little doubt that (historically-speaking) were it not for the emergence of Renaissance humanism in cities like Florence and Naples there might not have been a Reformation in cities like Wittenberg, Geneva and Heidelberg. Were it not for Italian humanists like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, I might not be reading Martin Luther and John Calvin today. God works through means. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say He used Italian humanism to bring greater glory to Himself. Neither do I think it’s a stretch to say that it’s because of Italians that I have a clearer understanding of God’s Word and by His grace a better grasp of the gospel.

It was in cities like Florence and Naples that the Renaissance was birthed. Teachers impressed on their students the return to the original sources, an impression that would be one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation: ad fontes. What the church in Italy needs more than anything is a recovery of Scripture. We need to go back to the source. Christians are people of the Book. We are keepers of the Old, Old Story. It’s God’s Word that spoke us into being. His Word that created faith in our hearts, making us new beings. His Word that guides our worship. His Word through which we see everything else.

There are many obstacles in the way of planting Reformed churches and establishing a Reformed denomination in Italy. The good news is that the same gospel that is foolishness to Greeks, Italians, Chinese, and Americans, is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes—Greek, Italians, Chinese, and Americans. It’s the Word that creates the church, Christians, and true worship. The church in Italy (and wherever it’s found) needs to commit itself to Scripture; go back to the source. It’s the Word that is above all earthly powers, the truth that abides still, revealing a Kingdom that is forever.

Eric Chappell

Since I wrote you last June many things happened. The members of CERF continue to be faithful in their Christian profession, and we continue to have a number of visitors who desire to commit themselves to Christianity and especially to the Reformed faith.

We also had number of visiting preacehrs in the last months. On Ascension Day, two URNCA pastors from California visited us on their way back from a mission trip in Armenia: Rev. Adam  Kaloostian, pastor of Ontario United Reformed Church, and Rev. Mosves Jambazian, pastor of Pasadena United Reformed Church. Besides being edified by the ministry of preaching, it was encouraging for the people of CERF to hear these pastors and to see that the communion of the saints is not only a theoretical doctrine.     

Later, we were visited by PCA missionary Mike Cuneo, a graduate of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Mike is a good man working to plant a church in the city of Viterbo, 75 miles North of Rome. As we both struggle to find like-minded people, we try to meet and invite each other to preach in our churches from time to time.

In June and July, Westminster Seminary California student Eric Chappell spent seven weeks with us as part of a pastoral internship. We asked Eric to expound Paul’s letter to the Colossians, which he did in twelve Christ-centered sermons. Besides preaching each Lord’s Day, Eric also accompanied me in some pastoral visitation and every Saturday afternoon led English classes for the benefit of our members and also for some of our friends outside the church. On the Sunday before Eric’s departure we invited those who followed his classes in English to attend the worship service, which they did. It was encouraging!

In Italy, the month of August is the time in which most of the people take their vacation. This is true especially of cities like Milan, which become deserted with usually only a few tourists remaining in the city. So, when the majority of the congregation was away to enjoy some time of rest and fun, our family spent some time in the Alps. We rented an apartment and we enjoyed some cool weather and quietness. My wife Cristina and my Mom Ivana relaxed at home while myself, Simone and Daniele went up and down from beautiful mountains. As usual, since it is only a hundred miles north of Milan, we came home each Lord’s Day during this time in order for me to preach at the church.

We ask you to remember us in prayer in the following ways:

1. Pray for the faithful discharge of the ministry of the church by the minister, elders and deacons.
2. Pray for a growth of the life in Christ in the members of CERF.
3. Pray for the a work of conviction, regeneration and sanctification in the visitors.
4. Pray for the future planting of confessional Reformed churches in Italy.

Pastor Andrea Ferrari

The Lord said to [Moses] : Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the Lord?

These words speak of the creative power of God. As we know, God has ‘created man male and female, after His own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures’ (WSC, Q. 10). The verse in Exodus is important with respect to the fact that man is created after the image of God ‘in knowledge’. That means at least two things: 1) God has created man with the ability to acquire knowledge; 2) God has created man with a specific modality through which to acquire knowledge.

Our text points out that the way in which man acquires knowledge is through speaking, listening and seeing. As God is a speaking God, a hearing God, and a seeing God, so man is a speaking being, a hearing being, and a seeing being. But is there any superiority, any priority in these faculties? Is the mode in which man acquire knowledge determined more by speaking, by hearing or by seeing?

First of all, we should consider if there is a primacy and a pre-eminence of one of these faculties or powers in God himself. John Frame notes that “it would be hard to find a subject more frequent in Scripture than the word of God” and God’s ability to communicate. Frame explains that God’s speaking is so fundamental in God that, in all of his acts – (1) God’s intratrinitarian actions, (2) his decrees for the creation, (3) the act of creation itself, (4) his providence and (5) the redemption of his people and the deliverance of creation from sin and its consequences – “revelation, or divine communication, is an aspect of each of them.”[1] Language and words, spoken and heard, have a pre-eminence in God.

Moreover, the witness of Scripture, as well as of experience, is that man distinguishes himself among other creatures by what we may call ‘intellectual’ or ‘rational’ knowledge. Beasts and animals know instinctively through seeing, listening, smelling and touching, but not intellectually by speaking. Language has always been considered among the chief differences between humans and animals. Of course, animals have ways to communicate, but their ways of communication through seeing, listening, smelling and touching do not possess any element such as words. Words can be endlessly combined to express new messages. Moreover, animals cannot exchange information for instance about time and possibilities, and even if some of them may express in some elementary form feelings and desires, they cannot express feelings and desires of others (just think of a pig saying : ‘How can cows enjoy eating only grass? I don’t!’).

How Do Good Works Happen to Good People?

The doctrine of justification by faith came as genuine comfort to people who believed they needed to be righteous to merit God’s favor.  It taught that the only way for believers to satisfy the demands of the law was to look to Christ in faith and receive his perfect righteousness.  Only his life of obedience and his vicarious sacrifice on the cross could satisfy the demands of a perfect God. 

In other words, the Protestant answer to how am I right with God was – Jesus Christ and his righteousness, imputed to me by faith, makes me right with God.  Lutherans and Reformed Protestants both affirmed the sufficiency of Christ for satisfying the demands of the law.  No more were good works, Masses, the monastic life, or other forms of self-denial necessary for righteousness before God.  Simply by faith a believer could attain to that holiness that Adam would have achieved if he had not disobeyed God and that the Final Adam did achieve through his life of obedience and his sacrificial death.

Of course, Rome had not taught that Christians were capable of satisfying God on their own.  The Roman church held that grace was everywhere necessary if people were to be saved.  The question was whether the grace wrought in the believer would eventually generate the holiness necessary for salvation or whether Christ’s merits alone, credited to the believer apart from anything she might do, was the basis for escaping all claims of the law against sinners.  In effect, the Reformation distinguished justification from sanctification, and made the former the only way to achieve the righteousness (through faith alone) that God required. 

Obviously, this was a significant threat to the entire Roman Catholic system of piety. Not only did it contravene the teachings of Rome, but it seemed to remove any incentive for good works.  If believers were righteous simply by trusting in Christ, what motivation did they have to be good or virtuous?

The Reformed answer to this dilemma was to insist that the saints who were justified would inevitably produce good works.  The Heidelberg Catechism addressed this specifically in the following manner:

Question 86. Since then we are delivered from our misery, merely of grace, through Christ, without any merit of ours, why must we still do good works?

Answer: Because Christ, having redeemed and delivered us by his blood, also renews us by his Holy Spirit, after his own image; that so we may testify, by the whole of our conduct, our gratitude to God for his blessings, and that he may be praised by us; also, that every one may be assured in himself of his faith, by the fruits thereof; and that, by our godly conversation others may be gained to Christ.

Justification was never present in believers without the sanctifying work of the Spirit.  In fact, because believers no longer needed to fear condemnation – Jesus paid it all – they could seek to follow the standards of the law not out of sense of fear but from a grateful heart and out of genuine love for their heavenly father. 

But while the Reformers taught that justification would not make believers negligent about good works, they also recognized that sin continued to afflict saints.  Even the good deeds that believers performed were still tainted with sin – and no better than filthy rags.  As the Westminster Confession explained:

We cannot by our best works merit pardon of sin, or eternal life at the hand of God, by reason of the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come; and the infinite distance that is between us and God, whom, by them, we can neither profit, nor satisfy for the debt of our former sins, but when we have done all we can, we have done but our duty, and are unprofitable servants: and because, as they are good, they proceed from his Spirit; and as they are wrought by us, they are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, that they cannot endure the severity of God’s judgment.  (16.5)

For this reason, although justification was a once-for-all reckoning of the believer with God, and although sanctification was an ongoing work of the Spirit in those justified, saints needed continually to fall back on the righteousness of Christ.  Their own righteous deeds, though worked in them through the power of the Holy Spirit, were still marked by abiding sin and so incapable of satisfying God’s holy demands. 

Calvin explained the importance of justification to sanctification and good works in his catechism in the following way:

M. This then is your meaning — that as righteousness is offered to us by the gospel, so we receive it by faith?

S. It is so.

M. But after we have once been embraced by God, are not the works which we do under the direction of his Holy Spirit accepted by him?

S. They please him, not however in virtue of their own worthiness, but as he liberally honors them with his favor.

M. But seeing they proceed from the Holy Spirit, do they not merit favor?

S. They are always mixed up with some defilement from the weakness of the flesh, and thereby vitiated.

M. Whence then or how can it be that they please God?

S. It is faith alone which procures favor for them, as we rest with assured confidence on this — that God wills not to try them by his strict rule, but covering their defects and impurities as buried in the purity of Christ, he regards them in the same light as if they’ were absolutely perfect.

The Reformers saw clearly the predicament of the fall.  No amount of goodness achieved by Christians could overcome the guilt of sin or change a believer’s nature sufficiently so that their good works were good all the way through.  Only the righteousness of Christ could satisfy God’s righteous standard and provide believers with the comfort and motivation to endeavor to live lives worthy of their calling as sinners made righteous by the righteousness of Christ.

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Right with God

The Eastern and Western churches severed ties in 1054 and ever since the two branches have approached the doctrine of salvation in different ways. For Eastern Orthodoxy, the question that informs belief is “how can I overcome my distance from God?” Here the problem for humanity is not so much moral and legal as it is metaphysical. The distance between God as infinite and man as finite is so great that the purpose of salvation is to bridge this gap. In which case, a believer, according to the Orthodox scheme, is saved by participating in divinity, which begin with regeneration and yields a change in one’s being.

For the West, in contrast, the fundamental question driving salvation is “how am I right with God?” Here the basic problem for sinners is a legal one of guilt and the penalty that stems from this verdict.

The Protestant Reformation started with the same question that had motivated much Roman Catholic teaching and practice throughout the Middle Ages: how can sinners be right with a holy and perfect God after they have sinned against him? For Rome and the Reformers, justification was the critical doctrine, but each side defined it differently. For Rome, justification was a process, beginning with baptism which regenerated the believer and bestowed the grace necessary to cooperate with God and perform good works. Over the course of one’s life, or with time in purgatory to follow, a Christian could, according to Rome, finally become sufficiently righteous to satisfy God’s demands of perfect holiness.

The Reformation, however, taught that sin was so deep in men and women that no amount of good works or cooperation with God to relieve the burden. As such, justification became the only solution. It is a one-time declaration by God of a sinner’s righteousness. That righteousness did not come from the Christian but from Christ’s work in satisfying the penalty for sin (dying on the cross) and living a perfect life. Believers received this righteousness, imputed to them, not by good works but by faith alone. This insight into the nature of salvation made justification the material principle of the Reformation – as in the matter over which Protestants rejected Rome’s teaching..

The confession of the Huguenots in the Gallican Confession (1559) summarizes well this crucial doctrine:

Art. 17 We believe that by the perfect sacrifice that the Lord Jesus offered on the cross, we are reconciled to God, and justified before; for we can not be acceptable to him, nor become partakers of the grace of adoption, except as he pardons [all] our sins, and blots them out. Thus we declare that through Jesus Christ we are cleansed and made perfect; by his death we are fully justified, and through him only can we be delivered from our iniquities and transgressions.

Art. 18 We believe that all our justification rests upon the remission of our sins, in which also is our only blessedness, as says the Psalmist (Psa. 32:2). We therefore reject all other means of justification before God, and without claiming any virtue or merit, we rest simply in the obedience of Jesus Christ, which is imputed to us as much to blot out all our sins as to make us find grace and favor in the sight of God. And, in fact, we believe that in falling away from this foundation, however slightly, we could not find rest elsewhere, but should always be troubled. Forasmuch as we are never at peace with God till we resolve to be loved in Jesus Christ, for of ourselves we are worthy of hatred.

So important has the doctrine of justification by faith alone been to Reformed Protestants that John Murray, the longtime professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary could write:

“The basic question is: How can man be just with God? If man had never sinned the all-important question would have been: How can man be right with God? He would continue to be right with God by fulfilling the will of God perfectly. But the question takes on a radically different complexion with the entrance of sin. Man is wrong with God. And the question is: How can man become right with God? This was Luther’s burning question. He found the answer in Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, that we are justified by faith along, through grace alone . . . .

“It is to be acknowledged and appreciated that theologians of the Roman Catholic Church are giving a great deal of renewed attention to this subject, and there is a gratifying recognition that ‘to justify’ is ‘to declare to be righteous’, that it is a declarative act on God’s part. But the central issue of the Reformation remains. Rome still maintains and declares that justification consists in renovation and sanctification, and the decrees of the Council of Trent have not been retracted or repudiated. . . .

“Renovation and sanctification are indispensable elements of the gospel, and justification must never be separated from regeneration and sanctification. But to make justification to consist in renovation and sanctification is to eliminate from the gospel that which meets our basic need as sinners, and answers the basic question: How can a sinner become just with God? The answer is that which makes the lame man leap as an hart and the tongue of the dumb sing. . . . Why so? It is the righteousness of God by faith of Jesus Christ. This is not God’s attribute of justice, but it is a God-righteousness, a righteousness with divine properties and qualities, contrasted not only with human unrighteousness but with human righteousness. And what his righteousness is, the apostle makes very clear. It is a free gift. . . (Collected Writings, vol. 1, 302-304)