Category Archives: Discipleship

The prosperity gospel and the bursting of the American bubble

Posted on by | 2 Comments

The latest issue of The Atlantic has a big cover picture of a cross against a blue sky with a “Foreclosure” sign on it, and the lurid main headline, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” As is so often the case, the article in no way justifies the headline; it does, however, make a compelling case that a particularly pernicious American heresy, the so-called “prosperity gospel,” may have been a significant contributing factor.

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

THEOLOGICALLY, THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common . . . Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. . . . One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

The emphasis there is mine, of course. Read the whole thing; it makes me think that part of the crash this country suffered may well be God’s judgment on the idolatry of his people.

What we don’t get about the gospel

Posted on by | No Comments

This is just spot-on:

It’s no wonder that self-help books top the charts in Christian publishing and that counseling offices are overwhelmed. Our pride and our neglect of the gospel force us to run from seminar to seminar, book to book, counselor to counselor, always seeking but never finding some secret to holy living.

Most of us have never really understood that Christianity is not a self-help religion meant to enable moral people to become more moral. We don’t need a self-help book; we need a Savior. We don’t need to get our collective act together; we need death and resurrection and the life-transforming truths of the gospel. And we don’t need them just once, at the beginning of our Christian life; we need them every moment of every day.

—Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson, from Counsel from the Cross

(Emphasis mine.) That is, I think, the crux of the American church’s cultural resistance to the gospel; that’s the thing we don’t want to hear.

HT: Of First Importance

Sin and the gospel

Posted on by | No Comments

When the devil comes and says, ‘You have no standing, you are condemned, you are finished’, you must say, ‘No! my position did not depend upon what I was doing, or not doing; it is always dependant upon the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ Turn to the devil and tell him, ‘My relationship to God is not a variable one. The case is not that I am a child of God, and then again not a child of God. That is not the basis of my standing, that is not the position. When God had mercy upon me, He made me His child, and I remain his child. A very sinful, and a very unworthy one, perhaps, but still his child!

And now, when I fall into sin, I have not sinned against the law, I have sinned against love. Like the prodigal, I will go back to my Father and I will tell Him, ‘Father, I am not worthy to be called your son.’ But He will embrace me, and He will say, ‘Do not talk nonsense, you are My child,’ and He will shower his love upon me! That is the meaning of putting on the breastplate of righteousness! Never allow the devil to get you into a state of condemnation. Never allow a particular sin to call into question your standing before God. That question has been settled.

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Legalism tells us that we are still under the Law, that we must be good enough or we will be rejected. Lawlessness tells us that the Law is gone and we’re free to do as we please. The gospel tells us that when we fall into sin, we have not sinned against the law, we have sinned against love. The Rev. Dr. Lloyd-Jones, in this quote from his book The Christian Soldier, captures the heart of this about as well as it can be captured. We’ve been set free from the fearful, fretful tyranny of being good enough; the point of our sin is no longer that we’ve broken the Law and might be cast out from God’s presence, but rather that we have grieved the one who loved us and gave himself up for us, to whom we owe everything, and have contributed to the weight and agony he bore on the cross.

This is not, it should be noted, an easier truth to bear . . .

HT: John Fonville via Ray Ortlund

The keystone: humility

Posted on by | No Comments

The connection between my last two posts—the first on why we should talk with those with whom we disagree, and the second on the nature of wisdom—may not be all that obvious, but I think it’s a profoundly important one. Specifically, the connection is humility, which is necessary for both, and which comes from both. It takes humility to talk with those we believe are wrong, not so that we can demonstrate to them how wrong they are, but in a receptive way that is open to what we might learn from them; and doing so teaches us humility, which helps us to grow wise. Wisdom in its turn breeds humility, and teaches us how much we have left to learn from others.

This might sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s true: wisdom is humble. Humility even more than wisdom is underrated, not the sort of thing we tend to praise people for, because it doesn’t draw attention to itself—and because we often tend to consider pride a good thing. From the point of view of the Scriptures, though, humility is one of the virtues which is supposed to define the people of God. The Catholic priest and philosopher Ernest Fortin went so far as to call it

the Christian virtue par excellence . . . humility first of all of a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many. But humility as well for the believer—to understand that all is grace; that we have no right to claim anything as our own—not our life, not our gifts, not even our faith. We are at every moment God’s creation.

Think about that: we worship “a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many.” That’s straight out of Philippians 2. No one ever had more reason to put his own interests and desires first, or to glorify himself, than Jesus; and yet he let go of glory, he let go of all the things pride values, and humbled himself to become a mere human being—and not even one who lived a rich, comfortable life, but a vagabond from the working class; and even beyond that, he accepted the horrible death of a convicted criminal. And he did it all for us, out of love, and set us his example to follow—and Paul points to that in 1 Corinthians 1 and calls Jesus our wisdom from God.

Does this mean, then, that God calls us to look down on ourselves, to put ourselves down and dismiss ourselves as unimportant? No. Those sorts of attitudes are counterfeits of true humility, and are really just pride in disguise; they still focus our attention inward, on ourselves, and they still put us at the center of everything we do. True humility takes our focus off ourselves altogether; it’s what Paul means when he writes in Romans 12:3, “Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.” Humility is seeing ourselves clearly, in the light of God’s holiness and grace, and accepting what we see; it is the place where we are well aware both of our weaknesses and failures and of our glories and strengths, and don’t make too much or too little of either, because we know that our value and importance rests not in what we have done or what we can do, but only and always in the fact that God made us and loves us. As C. S. Lewis put it, someone truly humble could design the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and look at it and know it to be the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and enjoy it just the same as if someone else had done it.

This is why the Scriptures consistently associate humility with wisdom—to take another example, Proverbs 11:2 says, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but wisdom is with the humble.” Wisdom begins with the understanding of our own limits—that is, I think, part of the reason for the declaration in Psalm 111:10 that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; one of the reasons for that is the recognition of just how great God is, and how small and limited we are. Wisdom requires the acceptance that we never know as much, we never understand things as well, we’re never as smart or as far ahead of the game, as we think—and that in consequence, we need each other. That requires humility.

We must humble ourselves before each other if we are to learn from each other; we must humble ourselves before God if we are to grow in his wisdom; we must humble ourselves to receive correction and rebuke if we are to learn from our mistakes; we must humble ourselves to confess our immaturity if we are ever to mature. We must humble ourselves to accept and admit our incompleteness, our brokenness, our sinfulness, if we are ever to be made complete, whole, and holy. And in the last analysis, we must humble ourselves to understand that “all is grace,” that none of us are self-made, but that “we are”—all of us—“at every moment, God’s creation,” if we are ever truly to be ourselves.

(Partially excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

 

Photo © John Salmon.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

What is wisdom?

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Looking over my previous post, it seems to me that lurking under the surface of my argument there is a deeper concern: how do we move beyond trying to feel that we’re right, and actually begin to become wise? In that, I think I might be moving a bit against the grain of Western culture; in this place and time, calling someone “wise” is still considered to be a compliment, but it’s not necessarily the sort of compliment that breeds emulation. We may recognize wisdom as a good thing in the abstract, but I don’t know that it’s something our culture really prizes all that much.

Indeed, I’m not at all sure that as a culture, we’re even all that clear on what wisdom is. We tend to get it mixed up with the other things that we think of as related to our minds, with knowledge and understanding and intelligence—which isn’t helpful, because wisdom isn’t any of those things. Granted, to exercise wisdom, it helps to have a lot of knowledge, but there are many people for whom great knowledge just means the chance to be greater fools. Similarly with intelligence; intelligence can amplify wisdom, but it can’t increase the number of wise options available. It can, however, allow for the invention of lots of new ways to be foolish. Understanding is good and necessary, but we can begin to take pride in our understanding, and when that starts to happen, it can lead us astray very quickly. As the saying goes, logic is often nothing more than a way to go wrong with confidence.

Wisdom, by contrast, is all about being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s about facing the questions, “Is this a good idea, or not? Is this the right thing to do, or not?” and being able to answer those questions correctly. It is the ability to perceive the best thing to do—and then to go and do it. If someone can tell you what they ought to be doing but doesn’t go out and do it, we don’t call them wise, we call them a very particular sort of fool. Wisdom isn’t wisdom until we put it into practice; it’s all about how we live. Wisdom is about doing truth, not just knowing truth.

(Partially excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

Growing to identify with Christ

Posted on by | No Comments

Identity is a complex set of layers, for we are many things. Our occupation, ethnic identity, etc., are part of who we are. But we assign different values to these components and thus Christian maturing is a process in which the most fundamental layer of our identity becomes our self-understanding as a new creature in Christ along with all our privileges in him.

—Tim Keller

What an absolutely brilliant way of putting it. I’ve written before (at least with regard to politics) that as Christians, we are to find our identity in Christ and Christ alone, and that when anything or anyone else holds that place in our hearts, that we’re guilty of idolatry; but the Rev. Dr. Keller has the right of it in pointing out that in fact there are multiple levels to our identity and always will, and that learning to find our identity first and foremost in Christ is a process. It remains true, though, that whenever anything sidetracks us into finding our identity first and foremost in anything or anyone else, that is idolatry, and must be corrected.

HT: Of First Importance

On the blessed inconvenience of children

Posted on by | 2 Comments

The quote atop The Thinklings‘ front page today is one of my favorites, from Gary Thomas:

Kids’ needs are rarely “convenient.” What they require in order to succeed rarely comes cheaply. To raise them well will require daily sacrifice of many kinds, which has the wonderful spiritual effect of helping mold us into the character of Jesus Christ himself. God invites us to grow beyond ourselves and to stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us. Once we have children, we cannot act and dream as though we had remained childless.

We’ve been thinking about that here this week, since our older girls’ parent-teacher conferences were last night. It’s interesting talking with their teachers (and listening between the lines a bit) and realizing how many of the parents they have to deal with who really don’t get this, or perhaps refuse to get this. I wonder if perhaps we’re seeing a spillover effect of the abortion regime—after all, if it’s legally acceptable to kill an unborn child because letting that child live would be too inconvenient, that deals a heavy, heavy blow to the idea that we have a responsibility to put the needs of our children ahead of our own. The sad irony is, this means that many adults never learn how much better life can be once we “stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us”; it’s the children who have the most to lose, but their parents’ lives are impoverished as well.

Embracing the wildness of faith

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Bill over at The Thinklings put up a post yesterday quoting Chesterton at length (something almost always well worth doing) on the value of fairy tales for children, and concluding with some additional thoughts of his own:

This really resonates with me, because from a young age I rode like a squire through the Arthurian legends, crouched quietly in the belly of the horse with Odysseus, galloped alongside Centaurs in Lewis’ Narnia, and went into the dreadful dark of Moria with Frodo and Sam. These led me one day to open up a Bible and begin reading what Lewis would call the “true myth” of the ultimate, and fully historical, defeat of the dragon.

As parents we should, of course, protect our kids. But I think Chesterton makes a compelling case here for not limiting them with politically correct, neutered fiction that contains no dragons. How will they ever know that the dragon can be killed?

I think Bill’s absolutely right about that. As Chesterton says in the essay he quotes,

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

This is much the same point Russell Moore makes in the post I quoted Monday, and so it’s no surprise that Bill follows up today by quoting Moore as well. He also adds an extended quote from Danielle at Count the Days on the absurdity that passes for “Christian education” in so many places. It’s a great post:

The other day, in my Religious Education class, this question was posed to us:

“What do you want to teach a child by the time they are 12?”

During class we were supposed to get in groups and discuss what we thought kids need to know by that stage in their lives, and honestly, I was kind of appalled by the answers I heard. . . .

One girl had the audacity to call me “harsh” because I said that they need to know that they are sinners. How can anyone have an appreciation or understanding of salvation without first knowing what sin is and that they are a sinner? I understand that the average child cannot comprehend the intricacies of theology, but what Jesus-loving Children’s Minister can look at the kids in their ministry and knowingly keep the whole Truth from them? Bible stories are great and important in building a foundation for these kids, but knowing who Zaccheus was, or being able to sing the books of the Bible in order isn’t going to get anyone any closer to Heaven. Just sayin’.

I guess the reason it frustrated me so much was because I was thinking of my own (future/potential) children. I don’t want my ten/eleven/twelve year old thinking that “being a good person” or being “obedient” means anything without having a personal, intimate relationship with Christ. I mean sure, I want obedient children ;), but in the grand scheme of things that would not be on the top of my list.

And then perhaps the most important point she makes is this:

Children can be taught all kinds of things as long as they are taught in love and kindness. Give kids the opportunity to understand, instead of withholding Truth from them. Offer them the whole Gospel, not just cartoons or cut-and-dry facts. I know I probably sound like some hardcore beat-truth-into-them type of lady, but I hate the thought of kids wasting what can be the most influential years of growth on pointless trivia or partial Truth.

Amen. This is something of a soapbox of my own, and has been for a while—I don’t post on it a great deal, just on occasion, but it’s something I care quite a bit about in my congregation, and with my own kids—that so much of what we call “Christian education” in the church is just awful, trivial, milk-and-water stuff aimed at teaching kids to be nice, dutiful little serfs rather than at raising them up as followers of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, I think, that too many adults—and not just adults in the church, either—have lost touch with the wildness of the world, and the wildness of their own hearts. Part of it, as N. D. Wilson says, is that our rationalistic and rationalized, scientific and scientistic, we-are-civilized-and-we-can-control-everything culture tends to teach us to see all things wild and perilous as evil; we have tamed immense swaths of our world, made it comfortable and predictable, orderly and obedient, and so we see these as good things, and anything that threatens them as bad.

This logically leads us to lose sight of the wildness of evil, both within us and outside us. Hannah Arendt had an important insight when she wrote of “the banality of evil” (an insight which I believe is much less understood than quoted), but it’s equally important for us to understand that while evil is indeed dreary and banal, uncreative and far less attractive than it likes to pretend, it is not thereby tame and predictable and contained. We get reminders of this when things like 9/11 happen, but if we can convince ourselves that such things are outside our own experience—that their lesson doesn’t apply to us—then we do so as quickly as possible, convincing ourselves that our own lives are still safe and tame and under our control.

The consequence of this domesticated worldview for the church is that too often, we’ve tamed our faith. We have trimmed it to fit what this world calls reality instead of letting our faith expand our souls to fit God’s view of reality, and we have ended up with a domesticated faith in a domesticated God. After all, if we don’t see our world as a big, wild, uncontrollable world that threatens us and makes us uncomfortable, we don’t need a big, wild, uncontrollable God who makes us uncomfortable and calls us to fear him as well as love him; a god sized to fit the tame little problems we’ll admit to having will do nicely.

There are various antidotes to that, but one of them is, to bring this back around to Bill’s post, to Chesterton, and also to Tolkien, a keen acquaintance with the world of faerie. We need stories that do not only show us the wildness of evil somewhere else (for many of our movies and books do that much), but that show us the wildness of evil in our own hearts, and also the wildness of good. We need stories that powerfully communicate, not only rationally but also viscerally, the truth that (to borrow a line from Michael Card) there is a wonder and wildness to life, that true goodness is a high and perilous thing, and that the life of goodness is an adventure. We need to learn to hear the call to faith as the call expressed so well by Andrew Peterson in his song “Little Boy Heart Alive”:

Feel the beat of a distant thunder—
It’s the sound of an ancient song.
This is the Kingdom calling;
Come now and tread the dawn.

Come to the Father;
Come to the deeper well.
Drink of the water
And come to live a tale to tell . . .

Take a ride on the mighty Lion;
Take a hold of the golden mane.
This is the love of Jesus—
So good but He is not tame.

Photo © 2008 by Wikimedia user Corinata.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. 

Grace for the poison tongue

Posted on by | No Comments

We do amazing evil with our words. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” our folk wisdom tells us, and to hear the way people tell it, you’d think they’re mostly opposed, that the pen mostly seeks to resist the sword; but in truth, the pen is at its mightiest when it’s egging the sword on. It’s easier to exhort people to evil than to good; it’s easier to tear them down than to build them up; it’s easier to wound than to heal; it’s easier just to let our tongues flap in the breeze of our thoughts than it is to control them (thoughts or tongues, take your pick). Indeed, James 3 argues at some length that no one has ever yet succeeded in controlling the tongue, and I think the apostle is right; we can control it to some degree, but it always escapes us in the end.

Which means we need grace; we need to be forgiven for the evil that we do. It’s beyond our power to be good enough on our own. It also means that we need to show grace to others, even (and perhaps especially) when they show us none. Just as we struggle to control our tongues, and sometimes fail, so too others are going to fail sometimes, for we all stumble in many ways; that’s just life in a tomato can, as my old organist would say. We have been given grace, because we desperately need it; in return, we must show grace to others, because they also desperately need it, whether they acknowledge that need or not.

If someone says something they shouldn’t, it may be my responsibility to correct them, but if so I’m called to do so with love and grace; if I do so harshly and gracelessly, am I not as much at fault as they? Or if I upset or offend someone else, and they speak harshly to me, what is my responsibility to them? Because they spoke without grace, is it okay if I respond in kind—or do I need to show them grace anyway? Clearly, I need to control my tongue whether they’ve controlled theirs or not.

It’s not my place to decide whether they deserve grace—none of us deserves grace. Grace doesn’t come from what we deserve, it comes from the love of God; and it’s only as far as the love of God fills us and motivates us that we’ll be able to control our tongues and show his grace to others. Which means that the bottom line here isn’t “try harder,” it’s “submit yourself to God, draw close to him, and let him do in you what you can’t do in yourself.” The only way to live in grace is to live by grace.

(Partly adapted from “A Greater Judgment”)

Sticks, stones, and poisoned arrows

Posted on by | 4 Comments

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.

—James 3:5b-10 (ESV)

When you were young, and someone insulted you or made fun of you, did your parents tell you to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? You know, most pieces of folk wisdom, I can see where they came from, but I have no idea why that one showed up; whoever came up with that one must have been someone who never heard a negative word in their life—or who was too thick-skinned and thick-skulled to notice. Honestly, that’s the dumbest famous saying that ever got famous; to borrow a line from Mark Twain, it’s “the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved.” Granted the harm that sticks and stones can do, it’s generally a lot easier to heal the body than it is to heal the spirit, if only because we can see what we’re working with; and often, it’s a lot easier to wound the spirit than it is to wound the body. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but only words can break me.

This is why James describes the tongue so starkly—it’s a restless evil, a poisoned arrow, a small fire that can set the whole forest ablaze; but though we might find his picture bleak, it’s hard to argue with. Yes, we also say many good things, and yes, we do much good with our words; but as he says, with our tongues we bless God, and with the same tongues we curse those he made in his likeness, and that should not be. For all the good we may do, we can undo many good words with one ill one. Winston Churchill famously said that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has finished putting on its pants; or to go back to Twain again, “the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.” We might also say that for many people, self-confidence is a fragile flower, but self-doubt is a weed; sow a few seeds of the latter in the garden of their soul, and they may take years to recover. It is far easier for us to speak evil powerfully than it is to speak good powerfully, just as it’s easier to roll a boulder down a mountainside than up it; this is why Shakespeare could write in Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

(Excerpted, edited, from “A Greater Judgment”)