Category Archives: Religion and theology

No matter how far you run, the Father’s heart goes farther

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Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace,
nor are your best days ever so good that you are beyond the need of it.
—Jerry Bridges

That summarizes the message of Luke 15 about as succinctly as anyone ever has. It’s unfortunate that the crowning parable of that chapter is usually referred to as “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” because the reality is, both sons are lost. One betrayed his father publicly and abandoned him physically, while the other betrayed him privately and abandoned him internally, but each in his own way was a prodigal, in desperate need of grace; neither realized it or asked for it until it was offered (no, the younger son didn’t come home repentant, but in hope of earning his way back into the family), but the father offered it to both of them anyway. As he always does, whether we want him to or not. Such is the gospel.

HT:  Of First Importance

Thought on worship

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I’ve been trying to work this thought into a fully-developed (and fully-coherent) post for several days now, and for one reason and another just haven’t managed it; I still want to do more with it, but for now, I think I’ll just put this out there as best I can at the moment.  There is the assumption in most churches, I think—even in many that would deny it consciously, I think it’s still there, unexpressed, at the level of subconscious expectation—that the pastor’s/worship leader’s job is to give people what they want in worship.  All our thinking is organized around that, and much of the language we use in describing our worship supports and contributes to that assumption.  I think the reason for that is that in the attractional paradigm for church growth, the “worship experience” is the core of the “attractional” part.  It seems to me that whatever the message the preacher is selling, be it self-help or social justice or self-realization or what have you, the worship—by which is usually meant the music part of the service—is the bait on the hook.  It’s the free weekend in Vegas to get you to come and listen to the pitch for the time-share (if they’re still doing that in the current economy; I’ve had people try to get me to take one of those trips more than once, but never wanted to):  the worship is the fun time, and then the preacher gives you the pitch.  If the music’s good enough and you like what he’s selling, you come back; but the emotional experience of the worship is definitely the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.This has taught us in the American church to see worship in this way, as what we get out of church in exchange for whatever we’re asked to put in.  Even in liturgical churches, people evaluate it that way—does the liturgy comfort me, do I like doing the same thing every week, do I not like doing the same thing every week, does the form help me do x, does the routine bore me, and so on.  What we miss is that liturgy is a discipline—and it’s a discipline because worship is a discipline.  It’s not about what the liturgy does for us, because it’s not about what worship does for us:  it’s about what the liturgy invites us, leads us, calls us, instructs us to do.It’s the discipline of recognizing that we don’t come to worship on our own initiative, but only in response to God’s call; of recognizing, as we praise God for his glory and holiness, that in comparison to him, we don’t look that great, and that no matter how wonderful we may think we are, we are in fact broken messed-up sinners just like everyone else—and need to humbly confess that fact to him, to each other, together.  It’s about the discipline of sitting ourselves down in his presence to receive his Word with open ears, open minds, open hearts—not to use it to get what we want, but to accept it and let him tell us what we need.  It’s about disciplining our hearts to receive his sacraments in that spirit, and to respond to Word and sacrament by affirming our faith, standing together to pledge our allegiance as a people to the King and Kingdom of Heaven, than which we owe no greater allegiance.  It’s about the discipline of intercessory prayer, which is our confession that we aren’t strong enough and great enough to make it all work on our own, and of the offering, which is our confession that we owe God everything, not least gratitude for all that he’s given us.  Even receiving the charge and benediction is a discipline:  it’s the acceptance of the fact that we are not our own and our lives are not our own, and that what we do and hear and say on Sunday mornings ought to form the lines of everything we do and say and think across the other six and a half days.As we look at the form and content of our worship services, “Is this what I want?” really ought to be the last question on our minds; what we need to ask is, “What is this asking me to do?  How is this forming me as a disciple of Christ?”  To mangle a line, ask not what your worship service can do for you; ask what you can do for God through your worship service.

What do love and grace have in common?

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They’re both a lot harder than we think.  I’ve been arguing for a while now that grace is painfully difficult to accept, because free is a higher price than we want to pay; yesterday, Jared Wilson put up a superb post pointing out that love doesn’t really make things easier, either.  It’s short and I’d love to copy the whole thing, but then you wouldn’t have any incentive to go over and read it there, so I’ll excerpt it instead.

Why do we think it’s easier to love people than it is to just be religious?I’m not sure people who think and speak that way really even know what love is.Maybe the reason we don’t all, in the spirit of unity and rainbows, just set aside our differences and love each other is because it’s really freaking hard to do that. . . .It’s a lot easier to follow some rules everyone can see me keep than it is to truly, actually love people.Anybody can be on their best behavior. But to love someone who hates you? That takes Jesus and his cross.

Go read the whole thing.

Congratulations to Michael Spencer

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I’ve made a couple comments on Michael Spencer’s Christian Science Monitor piece, both expressing some of my differences with his argument and mulling how we as Christians ought to respond to it, and I expect I’ll have a few more things to say in relation to his essay; but one unalloyed positive thing to come out of this, which I hadn’t yet noted (and should have), is that this has dramatically expanded his audience beyond the following he’s built online as the Internet Monk and at Jesus-Shaped Spirituality.  As he writes,

[T]wo weeks ago, the phone rang and a young man in Boston asked to edit three of my pieces into an opinion piece on the op/ed of the Christian Science Monitor.
A week ago yesterday, he published it in print and on line.
Within 4 hours, it was on Drudge.
In the week since, the column has been everywhere in the media, and I have 12 interviews done or in process, with everyone from CNN to the Moody Network to a local Christian station.
Over 800 people posted comments or sent emails.Two of them were literary agents.One called today.If this day ever came, I had two things I wanted. 1) I wanted to write about Jesus Shaped Spirituality and 2) I wanted someone to see my writing as marketable somewhere outside of the usual Christian market.The first things I heard today were these two things. Both of them. Exactly.

This is wonderful news; it’s the blessing of God, not only for Michael Spencer, but for the whole people of God.  From things he’s posted, the iMonk has had a hard couple years; now, he’s in a position to say,

Perhaps the last two years were moving me somewhere; somewhere I couldn’t go otherwise. Maybe this was God’s long road to take me where he wanted me to go.Now I have an opportunity. An opportunity I’ve dreamed of. An opportunity that has come to me completely from the grace of God.What will happen next?I just have to keep writing.

May God richly bless him as he does, for his sake and ours.HT:  Bill Roberts

A good short sketch of the life of St. Patrick

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can be found today on the American Spectator website, courtesy of one James M. Thunder, along with a more detailed piece by G. Tracy Mehan III called “The Solitude of St. Patrick.”  I commend both to your reading, especially if you aren’t familiar with the true life and accomplishments of this towering evangelist-bishop of the early church; if you are, they won’t be news to you, but you ought to read them anyway, because St. Patrick is one of those people who’s always worth spending time with.  And then go and read his Confession, which stands to this day, over 1500 years later, as one of the greatest Christian books ever written.  Here is deep wisdom, and a great love for God; here is a true saint, and a model for the church.

Parading your ignorance and calling it “reality”

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or, The Irony of Ignorant Palin-Bashers Bashing Gov. Palin for Being IgnorantAs I noted yesterday, “echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools”; today saw a particularly egregious example, courtesy(?) of Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson, who smugly declares,

This isn’t an argument for abortion, but one for reality—drop abstinence only, make contraceptives available and consider adoption, relying on grandparents, or single parenting until the child herself grows up.

OK, so if we’re making a parade about “an argument for . . . reality,” let’s consider what the reality actually is here, shall we?  Unfortunately for Carlson, if we do that, she doesn’t come off very well.First, she says, “drop abstinence only.”  One problem:

Abstinence-only education doesn’t actually exist. It’s a term used by critics of abstinence education rather than purveyors, who prefer, simply, abstinence education. The term “abstinence-only” attempts to create the perception that abstinence education is a narrow and unrealistic approach. While such loaded terms are to be expected of activists, the media usage of the term is regrettable.

In other words, Carlson’s beating a straw man, asking conservatives to drop something that we don’t advocate; she’s busy feeling smugly superior to people who do not in fact exist.  Good for her ego, bad for her argument, and worse for her understanding of what’s actually going on (which might be a trade she’s happy to take, for all I know).Second, as Mollie Ziegler Hemingway also points out, the smugly superior types like Carlson not only don’t know what abstinence education is, they don’t understand what it’s about.

The liberal caricature of abstinence education is of school marms rapping the knuckles of teens and telling them—day after day—not to have sex. In fact, a review of curricula for abstinence education programs shows surprisingly little about sex—and a lot about building self-esteem, understanding risky behavior, finding responsible partners, and growing a family.ReCapturing the Vision, one abstinence curriculum used for girls-only education, begins with a unit designed to help students see their bodies as beautiful and to accept themselves as they are. Other units teach them how to define their morals and values, resist negative influences, manage conflict and understand their emotions, and determine how to achieve personal, academic, professional, and financial goals. The final unit uses mock interviews, job searches, and résumé writing to help girls transition to adulthood.In other words, abstinence education isn’t only, or even primarily, about preventing teen pregnancy. It is about learning life skills, encouraging the formation of families, and taking responsibility for your behavior, which helps explain the cultural chasm between its supporters and those who saw Bristol Palin and screamed “hypocrisy!”

Third, when Carlson says we should “make contraceptives available,” she might be surprised to know that Gov. Palin agrees with her.  This isn’t speculation, either, as the governor is already on the record on this subject—and not in the way that her ignorant detractors assume from their bigoted stereotypes:

In a widely quoted 2006 survey she answered during her gubernatorial campaign, Palin said she supported abstinence-until-marriage programs. But weeks later, she proclaimed herself “pro-contraception” and said condoms ought to be discussed in schools alongside abstinence.“I’m pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues,” she said during a debate in Juneau. . . .Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella said the governor stands by her 2006 statement, supporting sex education that covers both abstinence and contraception.

The irony of the whole thing is, that position put her at odds with both the GOP platform and her running mate, which is why the Los Angeles Times titled its story on this “Palin appears to disagree with McCain on sex education”; but when the MSM decided it was more politically advantageous to stereotype Gov. Palin and beat her for something she doesn’t actually believe than to use what she does believe to try to drive a wedge between her and her running mate, the truth was conveniently forgotten.Fourth, the implicit assumption that since Bristol Palin got pregnant, she must have been taught about sex in a non-liberal-approved fashion is just that:  an assumption, and an unwarranted one, at that, as Hemingway points out.

No one bothered to find out what type of sex education, if any, Bristol had received and assumed her mother—despite on-the-record comments supportive of teaching both abstinence and contraception—opposed sex education.

(As Hemingway further notes, even if the assumption were correct, “it is empirically laughable to judge the effectiveness or utility of abstinence education based on one teen pregnancy”; but folks like Carlson who are pushing an agenda don’t care about inconvenient truths like that.)Finally, Carlson asserts that people should “consider adoption, relying on grandparents, or single parenting” rather than allowing/encouraging teens to marry.  Her sweeping unfounded assumption here is almost too grandiose and simplistic to answer; this doesn’t qualify as an “argument for reality” because it shows no effort to understand what the reality is.  To wit, who says people don’t do all those things?  No evidence I’ve seen, certainly; and in the case of the Palin family, it’s been crystal-clear ever since the news broke that family support, not just from grandparents but also from great-grandparents and others, was very much a part of the plan for the care and support of little Tripp and his parents.  (As for her suggestion that single parenting is a better option than marriage, I can only conclude two things:  one, Margaret Carlson has never studied the issue in any meaningful way; and two, she probably wasn’t a single mother as a teen.)Taken all in all, I can only conclude that Carlson’s column on the Palins would be a good deal better if she actually had a clue what she’s talking about.  It’s a pity that the media we have now don’t care enough about such things to enforce them.

The real meaning of the evangelical response to Bristol Palin

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I really didn’t want to write about the news of Bristol Palin’s broken engagement, which I found saddening and disheartening.  In analyzing it, I had two main reactions.  First, that this story is basically about a teenage girl who’s done some unwise things and made some bad decisions, both of which are pretty common at that age.  (I was going to write, “that age at which we tend to think we’re much wiser and more mature than we really are”—but as far as I can tell, that describes every age.)  If you’re honest, you’d have to admit that you did some really dumb things at 17.  For my part, at that age, I didn’t do much of anything besides go to school, go home, read, and go to church on Sundays—I didn’t hardly have the opportunity to do dumb stuff—but I did.  “Teenage girl does something foolish, pays consequences” is an afterschool special or a Very Special Episode; as “news,” it’s strictly dog-bites-man.  The only thing that makes this “newsworthy” is who Bristol Palin’s mother is.Second, am I the only one who read the piece in the AP and thought, “Wow, Levi Johnston’s sister is a real witch”?  It might not be fair, but I definitely got the vibe that she was jealous of Bristol, glad that Levi dumped her (since it also read to me like he was the dumper and she was the dumpee), and gleeful at the opportunity to shred her reputation in the national media.As far as national media reaction, though, I really didn’t want to go there.  As long as it was just confirmed PDS cases like Bonnie Erbe, I could let it slide; after all, the folks at National Review dispatched her quite handily.  (For those who might not know, PDS stands for “Palin Derangement Syndrome,” the official diagnosis for anyone whose rational processes go into violent spasms any time the word “Palin” is mentioned or a moose becomes visible on the horizon; for some reason the alternative name “Palin Madness Syndrome” never caught on.)  I didn’t see the benefit in giving Ms. Erbe’s commentary the unearned dignity of being treated seriously.  Granted, the fact that she and other echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools (when in fact she explicitly supports doing so, though she does believe that sex education should encourage abstinence) deserved a response—but if I’d posted about that by itself, as I’ve been meaning to do, I could and would have done so perfectly easily without mentioning Bristol Palin.And then I ran across Jon Swift’s post, and I couldn’t let that one pass.Swift, a self-described “reasonable conservative,” asks the question, “Why is Bristol Palin different from Murphy Brown?” and comes up with the conclusion, “She is different because she is a conservative”—a conclusion which he then proceeds to argue and extend at tedious and tendentious length.His argument, to put it politely, is full of holes and rests on a number of unexamined assumptions; he gives a few examples of cases where conservative commentators had non-identical reactions to superficially similar situations and then concludes (without further evidence) that this is because of the political views of the people in question.  (Since one of his examples rests on the assumption that “Mary Cheney is a good conservative woman who will no doubt teach her children that they shouldn’t become lesbians like their mother,” this is particularly dubious.)  He then launches into what he apparently considers to be biting satire on Christian conservatives, writing,

We should have the courage of our convictions and not play the liberal game of moral equivalency. Instead of trying to explain away Bristol’s pregnancy we should be defending it, holding her up as an example of the difference between liberal teenage unwed mothers and conservative teenage unwed mothers. Because just as it is true that, as Richard Nixon once said, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” when a good Christian conservative has a child out of wedlock, that means it’s not immoral.

The truth of the matter is, even if one concedes that he’s caught Kathryn Jean Lopez and Lisa Schiffren in the hypocrisy of which he accuses them—which I do not grant, but for the sake of argument—that doesn’t prove anything.  It doesn’t prove, first, that their hypocrisy is ideological at its root, nor second, that they would be representative of most conservatives in that respect.The first is, contra Swift’s evident assumption, something which does in fact have to be proven, since political persuasion is not the only difference between, say, Bristol Palin and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, and he doesn’t bother to examine Lopez’ and Schiffren’s arguments to see what they’re actually saying—he simply summarizes their positions and moves on to the ad hominem part.  The second rests on yet another assumption on Swift’s part, that evangelical attitudes toward teen pregnancy and unwed motherhood are still as hostile as old stereotypes make them out to be—and here’s where his argument fails altogether, because that’s simply no longer the case.I’m reluctant to give props to David Frum, who looks more like a giant wooden horse every time I see his byline, but he did a much better job than Swift on this issue in an article he wrote six months ago for Canada’s National Post.  He opened his piece in a manner Swift would no doubt approve—”Whoever imagined that we would see a Republican convention rapturously applaud an unwed teen mother?”—but then went on to actually think about what that really meant, and what it really tells us:

That moment confirmed a dramatic evolution in American politics: the transformation of the pro-life movement from an unambiguously conservative force into something more complex. . . .The pro-life movement has come to terms with the sexual revolution. So long as unwed parenthood is considered disgraceful, many unwed mothers will choose abortion to escape disgrace. And so, step by step, the pro-life movement has evolved to an accepting—even welcoming—attitude toward pregnancy outside marriage.

As I wrote about Frum’s article at the time, though I think “welcoming” is an overstatement,

Frum has captured and crystallized something of which I was aware—in my own attitudes and approach to ministry, no less than in the lives of others—but which I hadn’t consciously thought about. Put simply, when pro-life concerns cross with the concern for other issues, the tie goes to the baby.

The truth is, Frum is (if you’ll excuse the pun) dead right on this subject.  Sure, time was that conservative Christians in this country stigmatized teen pregnancy and disapproved of it as hard as we could; and then folks started pointing out that we weren’t really discouraging teenagers from getting pregnant—all we were doing was driving them into the ungentle hands of the abortion industry.  Collectively, we took a look at ourselves and realized that the critics were right; and over time, we by and large decided that we could live with teenage pregnancy and teen single motherhood—just don’t kill the baby.That’s the message on which most evangelicals in America have settled, when it comes to kids like Bristol Palin:  just don’t kill the baby, and we’ll do what we can to support you and help you out.  Why else have we started crisis pregnancy centers all over the place?  We didn’t have a utopian choice here, we had the choice of two evils; we stared it dead in the face, thought about it for a while, and picked the lesser one.  This is the bargain we made, and I believe it’s done more to reduce the abortion rate in this country than any government policy, even as it’s boosted the rate of illegitimacy.  Frum quotes the statistics:

As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies born out of wedlock—now reaching almost 37%—and a striking decline in the incidence of abortions. In 1981, 29.3 abortions were carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.

Now, it seems to me likely that some of those young women wouldn’t have gotten pregnant at all if there were still the old stigma attached to unwed motherhood and illegitimacy; it also seems to me likely that for far more of them, that stigma wouldn’t have been enough to keep them from having sex, but only to send them running to the nearest abortionist to keep anyone from finding out they’d gotten pregnant.  I can’t prove that scientifically, to be sure, but that’s what my experience suggests to me, and many of my colleagues in ministry would say the same.I don’t remember exactly how many weddings I’ve done (it’s not a huge number), but I remember how many couples I’ve married who were virgins on their wedding night:  one.  Is this a good thing?  No.  Is it reality?  Yes.  Will it be changing any time soon?  No.  And if we’re going to make any headway against it, is it going to be through a return to older tactics?  Will we accomplish anything by trying to scare teens away from sex and making examples of girls who get pregnant?  No.  No, we’re not—it isn’t going to happen.Our culture is sex-saturated, we’re flooded with erotic stimuli, and there’s a powerful cultural push toward sexual activity—combined, alas, with other trends that are pushing the average marriage age later and later—and we aren’t going to be able to shovel our way out of this flood by making a negative case.  There is nothing to be gained by making a pariah and a target out of girls like Bristol Palin, and whatever you may think about evangelical Christians, we’re smart enough to see that.  We need to keep working on rolling back this tide, but we aren’t going to do it that way; we’re working on other approaches (including the abstinence-education programs Gov. Palin has been unfairly derided for supporting), but they’re going to take time.  And in the meantime, we have to live in this culture as it really is, not as we wish it were, and to do the best we can with what we have.What’s the difference between Bristol Palin and Murphy Brown?  Twenty years.  Twenty years’ bitter experience of the law of unintended consequences, that’s all.Update:  Welcome to folks coming over from The Point and C4P—I hope you take the time to have a look around.  Those of you from C4P might be particularly interested in today’s post responding specifically to Margaret Carlson.

Living in Laodicea

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“And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen,
the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.“‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me
on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”—Revelation 3:14-22 (ESV)I laid out below (or attempted to lay out, anyway) my principal concern about the iMonk’s recent jeremiad (a term I use as a compliment, be it noted) in the Christian Science Monitor.  I agree with him that there are far too many churches in this country that aren’t about the gospel, that have given themselves over to the idolatry of causes (whether political, cultural, or otherwise), and are doing a poor job of teaching the gospel to their children (in part because most of the available curricula are terrible).  I even went so far as to say the other week that “too many churches are doing a better job of training future atheists than they are of training Christians.”  But to make blanket statements about “evangelicalism” as if that’s just the way evangelical churches are, which is what it seems to me Michael Spencer was doing (and, imho, too often does), strikes me as unfair; I know a lot of churches that aren’t like that, too.  For my part, I know I do an imperfect job, but I do my level best to preach the gospel, week in and week out, and to see to it that our teachers teach the gospel—and I’m just not that unusual.  Rather, I’m a lot more typical than a lot of the critics of evangelicalism realize.  (And I’ll tell you this, too:  even among those big-church-with-hip-worship-team pastors, in my experience, there are those who really do care about the gospel; as they’re struggling free of the attractional paradigm, a lot of them are doing so with a real sense of relief.)That said, if this were still mostly an intramural conversation among evangelicals, I’d still be less concerned; even if I think Spencer’s argument is overstated, I do recognize that overstatement has its uses for getting people’s attention (as Flannery O’Connor memorably argued).  What concerns me now with its appearance in the Christian Science Monitor is how it’s likely to be used, and the purposes for which it’s likely to be used:  to beat up on people, and to push political agendas.  That, I believe, will be truly unfortunate—and quite possibly, ironically enough, serve to worsen the very situation Spencer was aiming to address.  That bell can’t be unrung, of course, and we can’t control what people outside the church will make of or do with his argument; but there’s one thing we can do, which is the one thing we need to do anyway:  rather than pointing fingers (whether at the iMonk, or at those whom he critiques, or at the media, or anyone else), we can stop, open our hearts, and examine ourselves.We have a model for this, as Jared Wilson pointed out earlier today, in Ray Ortlund, who responded to Spencer’s piece with a moving and thought-provoking meditation on this passage from Revelation, the letter to the church in Laodicea:

This was the church in Laodicea. This is too many churches today. We focus on our strengths and successes. And there is just enough good going on in our ministries that we can plausibly refuse a blunt reappraisal of our weaknesses. But the Lord is saying, “That whole mentality is wrong. It is lukewarm. It makes me want to vomit (verse 16). . .  I am confronting you that you don’t love me wholeheartedly, so that you go into repentance and reevaluation and change. Here’s what you need to do: Stop telling yourself you’re okay and go back into re-conversion (verse 18). Change your complacency into zealous repentance (verse 19). Hey, are you listening to me? I’m that faint voice you can barely hear any more. I’m outside your church, banging on your door. You didn’t even notice when I walked out. But I’m back, one more time. If anyone in there is listening, just open the door and I will come in. I won’t smack you down. I will befriend you (verse 20). The others in your church may or may not join us, but all I’m asking for is one open, honest heart.”Usually, our churches settle for half-way remedies, which is why they limp along in mediocrity. But every now and then, someone humbly opens that door, and Jesus walks in. He is ready to bless any church if anyone there is willing to start admitting, “I am not rich, I have not prospered, and I need everything.”

The path to life doesn’t begin with gathering political power and influence, or with building up money and possessions and prestige; it begins with that humble admission that those things aren’t really what matters, and that in truth, we really do need everything from Jesus.  May God humble our pride that we may truly depend on his grace.

An object lesson in humility

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A while back, linking to one of John Stackhouse’s posts, I wrote the following:

it’s not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it’s to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. . . . We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn’t guarantee that it’s true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it’s about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren’t.

That was something I’d been kicking around for a while, which I was foolish enough to think I’d come up with on my own.  Turns out the only reason I thought that was because it had been too long since I read Chesterton.  Here’s the root and spring of that idea, from Orthodoxy (only much better put, as you would expect), courtesy of Ray Ortlund—and along with it, the reminder of the importance of humility:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.

The coming evangelical collapse?

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The iMonk, Michael Spencer, has been arguing for a while now that American evangelicalism is going to collapse some time in the relatively near future; now the Christian Science Monitor has taken notice.  Yesterday, they ran “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” a condensed version of his argument, in their op/ed section—to considerable notice.  After all, Spencer’s thesis is attention-grabbing (and easily exaggerated to be even more so), and one of the things he gets right—that evangelicalism is strongly identified in the popular understanding “with the culture war and with political conservatism”—means that his argument is seen to have strong political repercussions, and thus generates interest far beyond the circles of those who actually care about the problems and paucities of evangelical theology and praxis.I’ve been thinking about Spencer’s argument since he first posted this series, and meaning to interact with it here; I haven’t felt I had the time or energy to do so in detail (and anything less would be insufficient), but I think it’s important to do so, and all the more so now that he’s hit the mainstream.  I appreciate a lot of his critique, because the church in this country has some serious weaknesses, and religious complacency is definitely one of them in many areas; but I think his argument has serious problems as well which need to be considered and evaluated.The biggest one is definitional:  Spencer’s thesis is essentially about a word, “evangelical,” of which the definition is problematic in several respects.  In the first place, it’s viscerally problematic for him (and for others).  Mark Twain is credited with the line, “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it”; as far as I can tell, if the funeral Spencer is predicting actually comes, he will thoroughly approve.  I don’t deny that he has good reason for his negative associations with the word “evangelical,” but I do believe that his negative response to the word leads him (and others) to paint with a broader brush than is warranted, and to tar a lot of people unfairly.This goes along with the second problem, which is that the way that the word “evangelical” is used—its assumed definition—is problematic, because it’s extremely fuzzy.  This is the first issue John Stackhouse raised against Ron Sider, and it applies here as well:

What does Sider mean by “evangelical”? He doesn’t actually say. . . .Does Sider mean the evangelical Religious Right? Or does he mean all American evangelicals—say, those who identify with the NAE or Christianity Today magazine or Billy Graham—many of whom, like Sider’s own Anabaptist kin, would not recognize themselves in his contemporary sketch of American evangelical political power brokers? It’s not clear. And it never gets clearer.

This same “terminological confusion” applies to Spencer’s argument:  about whom, exactly, is he talking?  This fuzziness creates two problems.  One, it accepts and encourages an operating definition of “evangelical” that is disconnected from the core of evangelicalism and is based instead on cultural factors, then uses that definition to draw conclusions about that core.  Thus, for instance, if his statement that “evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism” is true, it’s at least as true that a lot of people have come to be identified as evangelicals because they’re politically and culturally conservative and want to attend a church that agrees with their beliefs; the problem is as much one of accretion of nominal Christians as it is of evangelicalism selling out to “Christianity And.”  I talk more about the idolatrous character of American politics than most people, but I still think it’s important to differentiate here.  The problem is less about evangelicalism going off the rails than it is about a number of the people in the pews not being evangelicals at all, but merely fellow-travelers.Two, this fuzziness allows Spencer to generalize his own experience and the view from his window to a greater degree than is actually warranted.  He declares, for instance, that

There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile.

I’m sorry, but while that might be true in his experience, it isn’t true in mine, and I know an awful lot of colleagues who would similarly demur.  For one thing, while I know it’s trendy in some places to beat up on megachurches, and I’ve taken a club to them myself once or twice, there are a couple of points which need to be made on this.  One, the real issue with megachurches isn’t their size, but rather the attractional approach that built so many of them (and far more smaller churches); and two, as the attractional paradigm is failing—and failing its practitioners as much as anything—more and more people are becoming aware of the fact, and turning away from it.  I’ve heard statements a number of times lately from large-attractional-church pastors to the effect that “I love the ministry but I hate what I do.”  There’s a growing and broadening awareness that the attractional paradigm has built institutions but not the church, and with it a growing and broadening aversion to servicing the institution anymore.  What we’re seeing, in many of these churches anyway, is the abandonment of the model born out of the awareness that the model isn’t the gospel and doesn’t serve the gospel.  What we’re seeing is a trend that could lead, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, to the conversion of many megachurches to the gospel.Of course, there are and will be many more that continue on in the the “pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented” model that has worked for them to this point; I suspect that they will shrink, as “customers” move on to other things, but I expect we’ll also see shrinkage among those who abandon that model, as people complain that “it isn’t our church anymore.”  Well, no, it’s God’s church, which is part of the point.  This does mean that I agree with Spencer that we should expect decline in the numbers of culturally-identified evangelicals, but I disagree with him on where that’s likely to come from:  I think  it will largely come from the decline of the megachurch, as the paradigm he identifies continues to fail, and as churches which have used it successfully to build numbers shift away from it in pursuit of something else (the gospel, one hopes).That said, characterizing the evangelical world outside the megachurch as composed solely of “dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile” is simply wrong.  Certainly there are some of both; on the other hand, there are also new churches whose foundations are strong and whose future is vibrant, and there are a lot of established churches that are a long, long way from dying.  Granted, these churches face a significant demographic challenge in attracting the unchurched among Gen X and younger, and granted, there are many established churches that will fail to do so; but that’s far from a new phenomenon.  I was taught in seminary that churches have a normal life-cycle, and that when they enter the decline phase, some manage to reverse it, some try to do so and fail, and some don’t even try; churches dying is a hard reality, but not a new one.  It’s also not an inevitable or a universal one, because some churches do revitalize themselves for a new period of effective ministry.  Those that don’t, make way for new church plants to take their place.  We’re seeing both those things in the American church—maybe not in Michael Spencer’s experience, but certainly elsewhere.What’s more, we’re seeing some denominations rising to the challenge of supporting, encouraging, and equipping that new growth—my home denomination, the Reformed Church in America, is an example of that.  Spencer asserts that denominations are going to become largely irrelevant, but he doesn’t support that and I don’t believe it; when it comes to denominations, I don’t get the sense that his horizon extends very far beyond the Southern Baptist Convention.  Some denominations will become largely irrelevant, those being the ones that are all about politics (whether external, national politics or internal, ecclesiastical politics)—such as, alas, the one in which I serve, the Presbyterian Church (USA)—if they don’t change their ways.  Those that follow the RCA’s path of refocusing themselves on being a support structure for the mission of the local church, rather than on using the resources of the local church as a support structure for the agenda of the national office, will be completely relevant; and as long as they dedicate their efforts to planting and supporting new churches and revitalizing older ones, the survival rate among both types of congregations should be considerably higher than Spencer’s prediction implies.Of course, this begs the question:  will those churches be truly evangelical in any meaningful sense?  Will they be gospel-centered and gospel-driven?  No doubt, some won’t be.  Having charged Spencer with conflating that which is truly evangelical with that which is not, I don’t want to be guilty of the same thing by implying that all church plants and revitalized churches are or will be gospel-driven.  Sadly, there’s nothing new about that; from what I can see, the only times and places in which the church has truly been united around the gospel have been times and places of external persecution, in which it was publically unprofitable to be a Christian and the gospel was the only intelligible reason to join the church.  As long as there are other reasons to do so that make sense to the world, people will do so for those reasons.  Nominalism isn’t an evangelical problem, it’s a problem for all streams of the church in all ages in which Christian faith is publicly acceptable.There is, of course, much more that can be said in regard to Spencer’s essay, and I do want to take some time later to respond to some of his individual points.  My great concern, though, is that the heart of his argument is muddled because he fails to define and delimit whom he means when he says “evangelicals,” and thus that he’s able, in my judgment, to draw conclusions which are rather more sweeping than his actual evidence warrants.  That said, the issues he raises are ones to which all who care about the church in this country, and particularly that the church should be about the gospel mission of Jesus Christ, should consider very carefully—we should all examine ourselves most closely to see whether we’re affected by the problems he lays out, and if we are, we’d best address them pronto.  As Spencer says (and on this I agree with him whole-heartedly), we live in a crux time in which “the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential.”  May God so move our hearts to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness that we may avoid the former and realize the latter, not for our fame and profit but for his glory.HT:  Jared Wilson