Joseph Minich - People of the Promise: A Mere Protestant Ecclesiology

List ofcontributors

Joseph Minich is a graduateof Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington D.C. and is currently pursuing aPh.D in Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas. Some of his writingcan be found at The Calvinist International and MereOrthodoxy.

BradleyBelschner is a systems analyst at EMSI, an economic modelingfirm, a determined generalist, and an enthusiast of Reformation theology. Hehas served as a co-editor of the Modernization of Richard Hookers Lawes project.

StevenWedgeworth (M.Div., Reformed TheologicalSeminary) is the pastor of Christ Church of Lakeland, Florida (CREC).Steven has published essays on politics, theology, and history, and is theco-founder and editor of The Calvinist International.

AlastairRoberts (Ph.D, University of Durham) is a leading evangelical blogger andauthor of several forthcoming books, including Heirs Together: A Theology ofthe Sexes and Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemptionthrough Scripture (both Crossway, forthcoming 2018). He blogs atwww.alastairadversaria.com and also serves as Editor of the Politics ofScripture section of Political Theology Today.

E.J. Hutchinson (Ph.D, Bryn MawrCollege) is Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College (Hillsdale,Mich.), where he has taught since 2007. His research interests focus on theliterature of Late Antiquity and the Neo-Latin literature of the Renaissanceand Reformation, and he is translating Niels Hemmingsens De Lege Naturae forthe Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law series. He is a memberof the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Bradford Littlejohn (Ph.D,University of Edinburgh) is the President of the Davenant Institute andteaches philosophy at Moody Bible Institute (Spokane). He is the author of fourbooks, most recently The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: RichardHooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology (Eerdmans, 2017),and has published numerous articles and book chapters in historical theologyand Christian ethics. He also serves as an Associate Editor of PoliticalTheology.

Andre Gazal (Ph.D, Trinity International University) teaches at TrinityEvangelical Divinity School, the University of Northwestern Ohio, and NorthGreenville University. He is the author of Scripture and Royal Supremacy inTudor England: The Use of Old Testament Historical Narrative. He has alsocontributed to the Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States (Rowmanand Littlefield, 2016) and the Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and Reformation(Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 2017).

Jordan Ballor (Dr. theol., University of Zurich; Ph.D, Calvin Theological Seminary)is a senior research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion& Liberty in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is the author of Get Your HandsDirty (Wipf and Stock, 2013), Covenant, Causality, and Law (Vandenhoeckand Ruprecht, 2012, and editor of many other volumes).

Jake Meador is the VicePresident of the Davenant Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Mere Orthodoxy. Helives in Lincoln, NE with his wife and two children. He is the author of Searchingfor Shelter: The Quest for Community in a Fractured and Furious World (IVP,forthcoming 2018). His writing has appeared in First Things, Books& Culture, Front Porch Republic, Christianity Today, and FareForward.

AndrewFulford is a Ph.D candidate at McGill University, where he is researchingthe relationship of Richard Hookers thought to narratives of the emergence ofsecularity in the early modern period. He is the author of Jesus andPacifism: An Exegetical and Historical Investigation (Davenant, 2016), andessays on John Calvin and Richard Hooker.

For PeterEscalante

Mentor andFriend

CONTENTS

Part I: Introduction toProtestant Ecclesiology

Part II: ProtestantEcclesiology in Scripture

Part III: Protestant Ecclesiologyin History

Part IV: ProtestantEcclesiology Today

PREFACE

Bradford Littlejohn

THETASK of the present volume is, at first glance, a simple one: to present thebasic core of the Protestant doctrine of the church, shorn of the distractionsof the secondary disputes about polity, ministerial offices, sacramentalefficacy, liturgy and more that have so often preoccupied discussions of thechurch. Of course, precisely because such disputes have often elevated thesesecond-order issues to first importance, this task is not so simple. Certainly,it cannot claim to be a mere descriptive task, as if we were pretending tofunction merely as historians, investigating the history and founding documentsof the Protestant churches to find the shared kernel concealed in thevariegated husks of the Reformation traditions. No, our endeavor here is inlarge part a normative one, and unabashedly so. We aim to present in clearoutline form what the basic principles of Protestant ecclesiology shouldlook like, as an offering to a church today bewildered by the myriad offashionable models on offer.

Of course, ours is not, we hope, an arbitraryecclesiological wish list vying for attention amidst these fashionable models.In other words, although it is not merely descriptive, neither is it merelynormative. On the contrary, it is built on the fruits of three descriptivetasks (as all good Protestant theology should be): an exegetical description ofthe revealed content of the Scriptures, an historical description of thecentral claims of the Reformation and post-Reformation dogmatics, and adogmatic description of what, according to the internal logic ofProtestantisms claims, must be its true doctrine of the church. These threetasks correspond loosely to the Parts II through IV of the book, respectively,though to some extent, each is operative in greater and lesser degree at everypoint.

The kind of exegetically and dogmatically guidedhistorical retrieval, in service of an urgent contemporary need, and thuspresented in accessible prose without needless footnoting frills, is what weseek to model in the new series of which this book is the first offering,Davenant Retrievals. Readers familiar with our recent publication efforts mayrecognize some similarity to the objective of our Davenant Guides, which seekto offer short and accessible introductions to key issues of current debate intheology and ethics, drawing on a magisterial Protestant perspective anddefending its contemporary relevance today. The difference is our DavenantGuides are intended to be very short, introducing a single neglected keyconcept or commitment within magisterial Protestantism (though one that may bevery broad in its implications), whereas Davenant Retrievals aim to present amulti-faceted view of an entire dogmatic locus, drawing on the expertise of arange of contributors. Each volume in this series, we envision, will be theresult of a series of essays appearing in the themed quarterly issues of ourjournal, Ad Fontes