Fighting Back the Chaos in Your Local Church
How Statements of Faith and Confessional Documents Are Key
Introduction
This little ditty won’t be a full essay. More like a long form (A nice word for long-winded) thought.
Last month I wrote an essay on The Symbolism of the Serpent and how it’s a symbol of undifferentiated, undefined, chaos that devours all differentiated, defined and ordered things over time. For those who don’t know what I mean, here’s what I mean. It’s the chaos we fight on the margins of the world. It’s the blur in the corner of your eye that you can’t quite make out. It’s the monster beyond the ordering light of the fire. It’s the spirit that wants to destructively dissolve all things (solve et coagula), including you, and scatter everything back among the undifferentiated dust of the ground.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit since I wrote that essay.
I think the great temptation of our day is Nihilism and meaninglessness. To think that since we’re going to inevitably go back to the dust, nothing we do really matters. That line of thinking usually goes something like this. “Death is the great equalizer! So, I might as well just give into the chaos, because ultimately at the end of the day, it wins.”
There’s always a little bit of truth in every lie. That’s what makes them so tempting. We do return to the dust and the chaos serpent is cursed to eat the dust. If you’re playing on the team that sings the Nihilist blues, it does look like chaos wins.
However, I want to point out that though it’s certainly true that “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” will be read at all of our funerals, the reality is that what happens on the other side to each of us isn’t equal.
There will be a division between the sheep and the goats. The sheep are the ones that followed the ordering voice of the Good Shepherd, and the goats are the ones who wander off and do their own thing. Sheep are orderly creatures that are dependent upon shepherds, and goats are chaotic creatures who are notorious for stubbornness (I know, I have two that I’m constantly dragging around the yard and off mountain sides). That means that though death is the great equalizer, the team we play for matters.
And that still doesn’t change the fact that the telos of man is to bring order to the chaos because He is an image of God. Man was not created to live in undifferentiated chaos and darkness, as tempting as the thought may be to some.
Fighting Chaos in the Church
So, what does this have to do with the local church? The title of this essay is “Fighting Back the Chaos in Your Local Church,” after all.
Well, I think that there’s a temptation in our day. That temptation, in short, is wokeness, which is a destructive ideology that wants to make dust of all order that came before it and to scatter it to the four winds. It’s a chaos monster that wants to dissolve everything from biological sex, to how that biological sex is expressed in masculinity and femininity, to who can and can’t preach and be pastors, and on and on.
It is the chaos serpent of our age that God has called men of order to fight. Every age has its hydra to behead. The Apostles had theirs, the early church had theirs, the Reformers had theirs, Machen and his warrior children had theirs. This is ours.
So, here’s how you can fight back the chaos in your local church.
Having thorough doctrinal standards in your local church is key in this moment. Having thorough doctrinal standards helps us to do positive theology and negation theology. It allows us to say what we're for, what we're building, and by extension what we're not.
Over the past several years, I have observed a trend. If you do not have thorough doctrinal standards that differentiate one thing from another, your church runs the risk of having revisionist parasite interpretations read into confessional statements. When this happens, it's like creating a new world from the bones of your old world, re-creating the classic mythic struggle of chaos and order between Leviathan and Yahweh.
It's okay to disagree on secondary issues of the faith. However, if we do not spend adequate time defining primary issues and differentiating this from that, we will invite in confused, undefined, undifferentiated chaos. In other words, we run the risk of inviting in the void, because that's what the void is - confused, undefined, undifferentiated darkness. I've seen it happen many times now.
Confessional standards that are vague on topics such as biological sex, how biological sex is expressed in the world in masculinity and femininity, human sexuality, and who can and can't preach or be pastors run the risk of becoming a host for Parasite Theology.
Conclusion
By making sure that our churches, networks, and denominations have thorough doctrinal standards, we are able to differentiate and bring order to conceptual and theological chaos. Basically, to tie this in thematically with other things I’ve been writing since the beginning of the year, this is just another way of saying we need to make sure that our cosmic imagery and world picture is spelled out in a detailed way confessionally.
Just having the Apostles Creed, Nicene Creed, and Athanasian Creed won’t be enough. Your churches should affirm them, but we have to also be aware that they deal with Trinitarian chaos, not sexual chaos.
At this point, I don’t even think that the Westminster Confession, 1689 Confession, or the Savoy Declaration will be sufficient. Though they certainly say that God ordained marriage between one man and one woman, they are not immune to the dark sorcery of those who treat biological sex in a fluid manner and call women men and men women. Look at the PCUSA, and Side-B conversations in the PCA and the SBC. The Congregationalists are long gone.
Most of these confessional documents don’t spell these issues out in detail because there was a presupposed, shared cosmic imagery. No one at the Westminster Assembly or in Petty France could have imagined the kind of sorcery we see today. Thus, there is a need for the church to continue reforming by building upon what came before it (so we’re not throwing away the work of our ancestors), and to craft thorough confessional statements that speak to the issues of our age.
That’s a step. There are more, which I’ll talk about later. But for now, happy head hunting.
I can tell almost instantly when I listen to a pastor preach or teach (or opine online) whether or not he has a working definition of the creeds and confessions of the church. We've lost much ground.
This is so good. I’ve been on a soap-box lately about primary doctrines. Our pursuit should always be who God is, because right, truth, the church, the kingdom are all implications of his character. I love that you brought the chaos monster into this. Chaos loves to draw our eyes to secondary doctrines. It’s confusing and eventually chaotic because we forget God in the process. You said this already.😆 Sorry, I’m just so happy you did! I wrote a YA fantasy where the antagonist is the chaos monster. The church, especially the young church, needs to know the tricks of the leviathan, both in their personal lives and the corporate church. Keep up the great work!