Revised: Pastor Todd Pruitt: When Progressive Justification is Too Pagan
I am becoming more and more convinced: all theological debates within the institutional church boil down to a call for temperament in heresy. The Protestant/Catholic church is supposedly God’s preordained institution that ferries salvation wannabes from point A in justification to point B in justification. God has supposedly given the institutional church, His authority on earth to “bind and loose, and to kill and make alive.”
Yes, it simply boils down to this: you start at point A, and by submitting yourself to the authority of the institutional church, you receive grace gasoline to get your totally depraved junker to point B. The only place you can get grace gasoline is in the institutional church which is the ONLY place “sacraments” can be received which “impart grace” to the believer. By the way, “grace” does not always refer to salvation in the Bible. More times than not it refers to the love of God in action which of course includes salvation, but many other actions as well.
What are these “sacraments”? Answer: baptism (gets you into the grace club), the Lord’s Table, and public preaching of the word. Calvin and Luther stated this grace gasoline idea albeit by other words in no uncertain terms, and they are the spiritual heroes of the institutional church for that reason.
This brings me to an article written by Pastor Todd Pruitt of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The article was published on the “Crosswalk” .com blog. The name of the blog in and of itself makes my point completely. Get it? “cross”… “walk.” You walk (Christian living) by the cross. You began by the cross (point A), and now there is only one place where you can get what you need to walk by the same cross that saved you in order to get to point B—the institutional church.
Pruitt has a complaint via the article: music in the church has become one of the sacraments that impart grace. It has been added to the list of grace gasolines. We can’t have that. That’s going too far with progressive justification heresy. C’mon people, let’s show some moderation here! If we go too far with these things, it is “pagan” according to Pruitt.
To make his point, Pruitt states that music has been made a mediator between God and man when there is only one mediator between God and man. Huh? I must ask then, what exactly are “ruling elders” in the institutional church? You know, the ones who have the “power of the keys to God’s kingdom” (John Calvin’s “power of the keys”).
Says Pruitt in the article:
It is also ironic that while many Christians deny the sacramental role of those ordinances which the Lord Himself has given to the church (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) they are eager to grant music sacramental powers. Music and “the worship experience” are viewed as means by which we enter the presence of God and receive his saving benefits. There is simply no evidence whatsoever in Scripture that music mediates direct encounters or experiences with God. This is a common pagan notion. It is far from Christian.
Sigh. So let me get this straight: baptism (the rite of church membership according to Calvin), the Lord’s Table, and one he mentions elsewhere, “God’s word” (elder preaching of the gospel), imparts “saving benefits,” but his beef is that music is included in the sacramental list?
Reality check. We don’t gather together to obtain “saving benefits” to get us from point A to point B. That’s ancient pagan caste to the core. There are NO saving benefits left for God’s people—we received the full package when we believed unto salvation. We do not receive the Holy Spirit on an installment plan. An institution where “saving benefits” can be found is MEDIATION, period!
Organized religion with authority structure is a mediator—this is unavoidable. Christians are called on to fellowship together under one authority and to strive for the “one mind in Christ.” Individual gifts are the focus, and fellowship for the purpose of exploiting those gifts to the fullest is the primary purpose of Christian fellowship. Certainly, in striving for the unity of one mind in Christ, things will be done decently and in order, but Christians don’t meet together for the purpose of “worship” to begin with—that is a way of life. Christians don’t meet together for more salvation; they can’t get themselves anymore saved than they already are. Striving to be more “set apart” is not salvation.
The crux of paganism is spiritual caste which is a structured authority for purposes of mediation…and control. All of the white noise in the institutional church regards the question of balanced paganism.
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