Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

by Douglas M. Jones III

Recognizing the centrality of the Church doesn't mean spending more time at the local church (it might mean less). It means that we view the world through medieval eyes-a world where the church spire, not city hall, is the most prominent point on the landscape.

We are far more comfortable removing our hat and lowering our eyes for the state than for the Church. Even though the full majesty and fire of the Triune God has determined to bring blessing and cursing through the institution of the Church, we treat the Church with the same deference we give a community bulletin board-a little info, a little humor, a little opportunity.

We call ourselves modern men, but in the memorable words of Andrew Lytle, we are actually momentary men.

The Bible tells us that other spiritual authorities exist, but that they are fallible and penultimate. Further, these lesser spiritual authorities are not just "allowed," they are inescapable. The question is not whether we will have them, but which of them we will have. We do not understand that when we have removed all traces of Nicean orthodoxy, this does not leave us standing in a fresh meadow with a newly-discovered Bible, but rather with the

ethereal magisterium of the latest heretical balloon juice cooked up at the Christian Booksellers Association, which never met a wind of doctrine it didn't like.

But in the modern world, authority of any kind

is a dirty word. True authority is written off as arrogance, but this simply shows how the arrogance of individualism dislikes any organized competition.

Families are not voluntary arrangements under our authority, to be altered at our evanescent whims and pleasures. The various ways in which the modern family has been disintegrating tell us a great deal about what it was like before it began to fall apart. Once a problem has become glaring, modern conservatives all too often simply want to call us back to the status quo ante-i.e., the way it was right before our problems became obvious. They want to return to that pleasant and tranquil time when the hurricane was still over the horizon, invisible and gathering force. We did not understand our danger, we were not preparing for anything, but it was nice and the sun was shining.

The doctrine of federal headship teaches that Jesus Christ is a federal head of all His people, in the same way that Adam was the federal head of the entire human race. In the fifth chapter of Romans, the apostle devotes a great deal of time to a comparison of these two Adams-these two covenant heads. When Adam was making his choice in the garden, he was not just another individual. He did not approach the tree of the knowledge of

good and evil as one of the guys. If that is all he were, then of course to condemn the entire race for his behavior would have been a gross injustice. The fact that this charge is commonly made illustrates how our individualist age thinks of Adam as someone who could be looked up in a phone book. But as a federal head, he was the entire human race. Put another way, we were all there, in him.