beyond-culture-wars-may-june-1993

EYON

CULTURE WARS

AMERICA: Mission Field or Battle Field?

modernREFORMAnON © is a production of CURE Publications Ltd.

Managing Editor

modernREFORMATION -""

"---./

MAY/JUNE 1993

Shane Rosenthal

Assistant Managing Editors Doug Hoisington Sara McReynolds

BEYO

Layout Design Sara McReynolds Shane Rosenthal

ULTUREWARS

ARTICLES

Production Supervisor Sara McReynolds

Writers Michael S. Horton Dr. Robert Godfrey Alan Maben Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie Dr. Rod Rosenbladt

Artists Paul Swift John Dearstyne

CURE Board of Directors Douglas Abendroth Howard F. Ahmanson Cheryl Biehl Robert den Dulk Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Richard Hermes Michael S. Horton

Executive Leadership Team President Michael S. Horton

Executive Vice President

1

Beyond Culture Wars

by Michael S. Horton

5

Proclamation Over Protest

by Ken Myers

9

This Present Paranoia

by Kim Riddlebarger

The Apostle Paul & Oprah Winfrey

16

by Michael S. Horton

21

God & Other Law-makers

by Dr. John W. Montgomery

Are You Prepared to Give A Defense?

26

by Dr. Rod Rosenbladt

Kim Riddlebarger

Those Who Went Beyond Culture Wars

Executive Administrator

by Michael S. Horton

30

Jo Horton

Vice President of Communications Sara McReynolds

Vice President of Development Dan Bach

Development Assistant Beth Brewer

Vice President of Media & Production

DEPARTMENTS

Interview: '.It Discussion with J.l Packer & Others" Book Review

14

33

Shane Rosenthal

Products Manager Doug W. Gorman

Treasurer Micki Riddlebarger CURE is a non-profit educational foundation committed to communicating the insights of the 16th century Reforma­ tion to the 20th century Church. For more information, call during business hours at: (714) 956-CURE, or write us at: Christians United for Reformation 2034 E. Lincoln Ave. #209 Anaheim, CA 92806

p------------------------.

• • • • •

SUBSCRIBE TO...

•

A Bi-Monthly Theological Magazine Published by Christians United for Reformation

• D • • D • •

•

1 year (6 issues) $18.00

2 years (12 issues) $36.00 Copy & send to: CURE

2034 E. Lincoln #209 Anaheim, CA 92806

•

Name Address

• •

City/St/Zip Phone

• •

L­

._----------------------_.

-

BEYOND

Culture Wars

R

.C. Sproul tells the story of his letter to the best selling author of the Lords .. of Discipline, commending him on his style. The trend~ setting novelist replied from his flat in Rome informing Sproul that he had been the first Christian to compliment him on the novel. Raised in a fundamentalist home, this author told Sproul that the familiar circle from which he was raised now denounces him and proudly brands his literature satanic. It seems the only time that evangelicals get involved in main~stream society these days is to register some complaint, some degree of hostility. And when our bright, energetic, talented thinkers, artists and workers go out into the world to fulfill their calling as a calling, they are often gunned down by the brethren for selling out to the world.

Fundamentalists have always been hostile to the outside world, but now they are highly politicized. Their anti~worldly stance which was once kept within the four walls of the church building is now seen in mass rallies in public places. U.S. Senate chaplain Richard Halverson, an evangelical himself, recently said, "All evangelicals care about is their own agenda. They will keep all the phone lines in Washington busy and many of the callers are down~right nasty, yet when it comes to hundreds of other issues Congress faces, they never hear from Evangelicals." The only time we get involved in education is to protest public education. The only time, it seems, we get involved in the arts is to protest the public funding of obscene art. And pro~ life leaders often confuse the issue of abortion with getting Little Red Riding

Hood taken out of the public libraries.

Before, we were hostile to the world but we were separated from it. Now we are still hostile, but very much involved.

That's why our involvement is so harsh, so strident, and often so very negative.

Until we see our role in this world in a

positive light we will continue to come off as those who can only judge instead of contribute. We engage in discussions of politics as a disgruntled minority demanding its rights, its piece of the pie, while very often we know little and care less about the deeper philosophical and cultural issues of our time.

C

ulture wars-that is what this situation is being called as American society polarizes into two camps, each employing the language of the battle field, poised to gain control of the nation's public institutions. In this issue we will walk you through the culture wars debate with some additional essays on evangelism and

1110dernREFORMATION

apologetics. You might ask what all this has to do with evangelism and apologetics.

Everything! Ask the average person on the street what an evangelical is and you are likely to get stereotypical answers: portraits of TV evangelists, or particular political or ideological positions, but how likely are you to hear the "evangel," the Gospel, as the singular proclamation of the evangelicals?

Christianity Is Not a Culture The . first problem with the church being identified with the culture wars is a pretty basic one; Christianity is not a culture. It is a faith wrapped around a person who had a real life, a life of significance because he was God incarnate and rose from the dead as he promised. It is a system of truth claims. The Gospel has succeeded in a variety of cultures and has thrived among groups maintaining vastly different values and mores, and has been just as good at reconciling socialists to God as capitalists.

This past January, in the wake of the inaugural festivities, President Clinton gathered a group of Southern Baptists ministers to pray with him in Little Rock. They assured the evangelical community and the secular media that President Clinton was a sound, solid, Bible believing evangelical. Why? How did they know that? They said so because he even cried during the singing of some of the hymns. While all this was going on I did an interview with a Christian station in the Bible belt, and Clinton's Christian convictions seemed to be the chief interest of the callers. One caller said, "Isn't that amazing! Can you believe all that? Did you hear that just the other day Jerry Falwell responded­ and good for him-he responded, 'you can't tell whether a person is a Christian or not just because he cries at the hymns.

I want to know what is his position on abortion!'" I replied to the caller, "No, you are both wrong. The question is What is his view of Christ? Who does he say he is?" Neither group seemed to get

by MICHAEL HO RIO N MAY/JUNE 1993.

1

1110dernREFORMATION

the point. One group is driven by pietistic sentiment, the other by political ideology.

But Evangelicalism is rarely defined in theological terms. After all, doctrine is a distraction when there are wars to be won. Now, one might argue that one's position on abortion must be consistent with his profession of faith, and I do believe that we ought to seek the end of

and Calvin did so clearly four and a half centuries ago. There are two kings and two kingdoms, each ruling a distinct sphere. One of the leaders of the National Association ofEvangelicals (NAE) asked, when Clinton was elected, "Now what is to become of the kingdom of God?" as though Clinton had anything whatsoever to do with the kingdom of God, that is,

" It is an error to identify the Gospel with any particular

system or culture-that has been my own danger. "

-Billy Graham this savage inhumanity, but abortion is not in the Apostle's Creed. It itself is not an article of Christian faith.

We have substituted the Gospel for moral, political, and sentimental tests.

That's why Pat Robertson can't be called into question, in spite of his serious doctrinal errors, while Tony Campollo, who is a little left of the center politically, can be put on a heresy trail for his political views by a group of parachurch ministries whose supposed purpose of existence is evangelism. Today, the basis of unity is ideology, not doctrine. This is not to say that public policy issues shouldn't be important to a Christian.

Quite the contrary, every Christian ought to be interested in public policy issues, but as citizens, not as the church making stands on what the Gospel is. Yet too often in the past twenty years we have equated the Gospel with a particular cultural agenda. Surely no one would say that the late Francis Schaeffer shied away from public issues, but he warned, "Equating any other loyalty whether it is political, national, or ethnic with our loyalty to God is sin, and we better get our priorities straight now." He says, There is a tremendous pressure to lose the Reformation memory as the years pass and our first task is not to align our message with the middle class establishment only to have our children rebel against our faith because of our politics, but to recover the lost truth of our Reformation heritage.

This is why we must recover the biblical doctrine of the "two kingdoms" as Luther 2

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

as a public official. In the kingdom of culture, what Augustine called "the city of man," there are rulers, there are laws, there are customs which are regulated by human wisdom. In the kingdom ofChrist, or "the city of God, " there is one ruler, our Lord Jesus Christ, and he advances his kingdom, not through marketing, not through legislation or police force, but by the proclamation of the Word and the administration of his holy sacraments. If we confuse these two kingdoms-and we have-we will no doubt confuse evangelism with cultural, moral, and political programs.

A Grand Obstruction And that brings me to my second point-it is a grand obstruction for the people out there. What happens when we confuse evangelism with a particular social or political agenda? Well, we've seen it in history, haven't we? In the Crusades, evangelistic texts like, "Go ye into the world and preach the Gospel, making disciples of all the nations . .. " were used as a justification for political expansion and the building up of an earthly empire . .

When this confusion occurs it is very difficult to convince the South African victim of apartheid, or the Jewish victim of the holocaust, or those who suffered under the pro,Czar Russian Orthodox Church, that Christianity is not a source of political oppression. And whether or not it is true or an unfair caricature by the secular press (I tend to think it is both), evangelical Christianity is now being widely perceived as one more dying gasp ofone more ally of the status quo of white,

middle class culture, unwilling to let go of its power. The issue is whether we _~- "­ confused cultural values with the Gospel, ~ not whether those values are right or '-../ wrong. Billy Graham said,

It is an error to identify the Gospel with

any particular system or culture-that has

been my own danger. When I go to preach

the Gospel I go as an ambassador for the

Kingdom of God, not America. To tie the

Gospel to any political system, secular

program, or society is wrong and will only

serve to divert the Gospel.

We have to ask ourselves whether the Gospel really is our main preoccupation these days. Just over a decade ago Jerry Falwell said, "The sad fact is that today the United States could only kill three to five percent of the Soviets." That's a great pro'life movement! That will really get the world out there to stand up and take notice of what the Gospel can do.

Meanwhile the same leader said, "We have to stay away from helping the poor because it is a complex issue." The poor and unemployed had no reason to listen to our Gospel with Falwell calling them "That lazy trifling bunch lined up in unemployment offices who would not work in a pie shop eating the holes out ofdoughnuts." This same religious leader argued during the '50s that Christians ought not to stand up for the civil rights of the blacks. How can the Gospel be advanced when it is perceived as a radical political and social agenda, when it predictably sides with a particular segment of society, whether it is Jerry Falwell or Jesse Jackson?

I

have always wondered why any homosexual would listen to us when we talk about AIDS as the judgement of God. I have often reflected that it is a good thing that God does not hand out judgments for gossip and slander, or greed and self,centeredness, or self, righteousness, or many of our evangelical churches would be empty. But there are other reaches of alienation. Gallup tells us that white evangelicals are more likely than any other group to object to _ having black or Hispanic neighbors.

That will sure help advance the Gospel!

Evangelicals just simply aren't concerned about the Gospel, the "evangel," anymore.

1noderl1 REFO RM ATION It's about a culture. It's about preserving traditional values of, for, and by a certain segment of society. Francis Schaeffer was worried that evangelicalism would become so aligned with conservative middle class Americanism that any rejection of the establishment would entail a rejection of Christ, and that is exactly what happened in the sixties. God-albeit the "Unknown God" of the pagans-fit in when Ike was president. After all, Eisenhower declared, "There can be no good government without religion, and I don't care what religion it is."

But with the rejection of that particular cultural expression, and the growing diversity of the American population, there was not enough room for God. Why? Because we helped define God as a public mascot of society. As Os Guinness says, "He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower." But the Holy Spirit will not honor any other Gospel.

We have become the Rock of Offense, rather than Christ. The irony is we have taken the offense out of the Gospel-we don't preach sin and grace anymore-and have taken it over for ourselves. We're offensive for all the wrong reasons while we leave the Gospel itself devoid of its power. The minorities and the feminists, as well as the gays, and others who practice immoral life,styles-people with whom we may not agree-will not give us a hearing at the end of the 20th century-not because we have preached the Gospel and called them to repentance and they don't like that, but because we have framed our communication with them in terms of a war for social, political, and cultural control. Contrary to the religious leaders of his day, Jesus was the friend of sinners.

Prostitutes turned from their prostitution because, as Jesus said, "He who is forgiven much loves much." The Holy Spirit will not convert a single soul through moral crusades. He will not convert a prostitute through Senate bill 242, or change the direction of the homosexual by prime, time denunciation from moralistic preachers. Yes, we are called to preach the good news and to call men and women to repentance, but that is not a political issue, nor is it even, at the bottom, a moral issue. Preaching the good news to sinners

is a Gospel issue. Repentance can no more be coerced by the state than faith.

Both are the gracious gifts of God.

A Grand Offence And finally, the evangelical obsession with culture wars is a grand offense to God. At this year's National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) convention in Los Angeles, the star of Murder, Sbe Wrote, Angela Landsbury, was asked to address

the delegates, but the planners were going to cancel her appearance at the convention because in an upcoming movie she was to play the role of a prostitute.

That morning, the hosts of Good Morning America could not keep from making their obvious comment; "Wow, if that isn't an irony! A convention of televangelists barring someone from their convention for playing immoral roles."

Recently, I was asked to appear on a

his daughter to have an abortion. As we look across the Christian landscape right now I don't know how we have the gall to muster together out of our hypocritical selves the fire in our belly to attack the world for being worldly! Gallup and Barna hand us survey after survey demonstrating that evangelical Christians are just as likely to embrace life,styles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self, centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general. The statistics are neck and neck. That is why pollster Lou Harris reports, "After ten years of piety and ideology the American people have about had it with the approach of religious types." When are we going to realize that God is looking in our direction with his charge, "Because of you my name is blasphemed among the Gentiles"? How many evangelists will we have to see disgraced on national television for their own moral bankruptcy before we can say with the apostle Paul "I am not ashamed of the Gospel for it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes."

A

t the end of it all, the culture wars are not only misguided theologically and biblically, but even strategically. It is simply an illusion to think that there is any possibility of putting the lion back in the cage.

Secularism is here for a while and will only be turned back with better ideas,

, 'Repentance can no more be coerced by the State than faith, both are the gracious gifts of God." secular talk show with an ACLU lawyer to discuss the so,called "culture wars."

The host admitted I was her second pick.

The pastor/church leader she had previously chosen had just been arrested for embezzlement! I also happen to know five prominent Christian leaders who were writing books about traditional values while: one left his wife for another woman, another one was having an affair, and another (a pro'life activist) was counseling

and, more importantly, a spiritual reformation where the great themes of God and redemption are faithfully proclaimed and honored by the radical operation of the Holy Spirit. Secularism is the result of a vacuum which we created. Tim LaHaye and his battle for the mind asserted that secular humanism is moral, not theological, but that is the root of the problem: that people like Tim LaHaye have thought that the problem is MAY/JUNE 1993

•

3

1110dernREFORMATION

ultimately moral and not deeper, not theological. If you believe that our society's greatest problem or any individual's greatest problem, is behavioral, you have a weak view of sin, and consequently, a weak view of grace.

If you view sin in terms of actions, and not primarily in terms of conditions, you will see the answer primarily in terms of moral reform, not in terms of throwing yourself on the mercy of God. That is why Charles Finney, who said, "A revival is the work of man; it's simply the right use of means," was also a father of the movement toward abstinence from alcohol that lead eventually to Prohibition. You don't need a cross in this scenario, you need a kit to help you put your life back together, or a law or a rule to govern your behavior so you don't get out of hand. No, I must insist secular humanism is a theological issue, and

More often church services center on us as if our happiness were the goal of the universe. But, strangely enough, that is exactly what Tim LaHaye calls secular humanism. I am not the first to see this irony. Historians Hatch, Noll and Marsden write: Humanism or faith in humanity has been mixed with virtually every American religious heritage including evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Most commonly since the 19th century many Americans, including many evangelical Christian Americans have tended to believe in the essential goodness ofhumanity and the importance of believing in oneself, in self help, and the ability of a free people to solve their own problems.

Sounds like the litany of an average Christian bookstore these days. Further, the same people who protest the erosion of

" It is not enthusiasm but dogma that differentiates a ·· f Chrlstlan rom a· pagan" sOcIety.

-T.S. Eliot when we put it in its natural theological habitat, a strange thing happens, we realize that we ourselves are the secular humanists. LaHaye observes that the chief mark of secular humanism is to place man at the center of existence. But that is exactly what I see being done in churches across America. Aren't our testimonies designed to show people how God made me happy, how he satisfied me, how he worked for me? Aren't our worship services developed for our tastes, very often, and not for God's? Don't we tell people that once they become Christians, they too will experience the abundant life? What we should be telling people is that salvation isn't a matter of God making sure we are happy with him, but his making sure he is happy with us, and that is why we have the cross at the middle of it all.

B

ut churches don't center anymore , on the old rugged cross, where God saved us from himself by putting his own Son in our place to bear the wrath justly meant for us. No, that would make us unhappy to talk about wrath and hell.

4

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

moral absolutes are often quite willing to accept the erosion of doctrinal absolutes.

It is an amazing irony! I can be absolutely certain that God has a published position on public health care, but remain basically unsure about the attributes of God, the person and work of Christ, and the nature of salvation.

Conclusion I propose a two~fold strategy. First, we will have to clear up this confusion about the gospel and cultural values. I believe that the pro~choice position is morally wrong, but it is not heretical. These are two different categories. God will never be anyone's mascot and will never allow himself to be worshiped in either the carved image of the donkey or the elephant.

We cannot impose our will on the American electorate anymore, and we will have to stop it. We'll have to stop shaking our fists at our neighbors. We must call the church to a cease~fire with the world over gays in the military and engage in spiritual warfare for their hearts and minds for the first time perhaps in 40 years. Second, we'll not only have to

recover the Gospel proclamation, but we'll have to learn how to interact positively again with our culture. When the church was facing a really hostile culture in the first century-a lot more hostile than ours-Paul instructed the early Christians to "Make it your ambition to lead a quite life, to work well with your hands so that you may win the respect of outsiders and have enough to give those in need."

In God's charges against Israel recorded in Hosea, the moral breakdown is credited to the fact that God's people had grown ignorant of the One they worshiped. Truth again lays slain in the streets, slain not by villainous secular humanists, but by self~congratulatory be lievers. "A people wi thou t understanding will always come to ruin," not a people without enough laws, not a people without enough police officers, not a people without enough rules, not a people without enough moral values, for ultimately a people's morality is an expression of deeper convictions-but a people without understanding! T.S. Eliot once observed, To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality for the general culture, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity is a very dangerous inversion.

It is not enthusiasm but dogma that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.

For those who will tear down the cardboard and tin shacks and go for the quality materials, building on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, there is hope for the future. For those who will lodge their anchor this rock and know no other message than Christ and him crucified, there is the promise, "I will go on building my church and not even the gates of hell will prevail against it." "For what does it profit a man," our Lord asked, "if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?" 0 Michael Horton is the president and founder of

CURE and the author of Putting Amazing Back Into '-------'"

Qrace, Made In America, The Law of Perfect Freedom,

and is the editor of Power Religion, Christ The Lord,

and The Agony of Deceit,

1110dernREFORMATION

'

you dearly at the box office. It will decrease the profits of every business you own for years to come.' There's nothing unchris~ tian about that position in a free enterprise system.

PROCLAMATION

OVERPROTEST

I

n 1988, MCA/Universal released a film by director Martin Scorsese based on N ikos Kazantzakis's 1960 novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. Millions of American Christians were outraged, most of them without ever having seen the film, or knowing anyone who had. They protested bitterly that the film, its direc~ tor, and its distributors were guilty of blasphemy, of shameless and public scorn toward the truth about Jesus.

Christian leaders who were spear~ heading the attack on the film saw the controversy in clear~cut terms. Their side, com~ mitted to holiness and truth, was victimized by the profit~hungry, cyni~ cal, and impious Holly~ wood establishment, with the rest of the mass media siding with their L.A. colleagues. Although that characterization has ele~ ments of truth, there are may ironies in The Last Temptation affair that make it a microcosmic example of the great temptation facing American evan~ gelicals. Stated simply, that temptation is to become so preoccupied with power in the service of holiness and truth, that holiness and truth themselves have be~ come eclipsed. As more and more Chris~ tians succumb to that temptation, a fur~ ther problem is increasingly evident: the~ ology, the biblically rooted study of God, his Word, and his will, is gradually re~ placed by ideology, a system of assertions, theories, and goals that constitute a socio~ political program.

Of course, it is not intrinsically wrong for Christians to secure and exercise

temporal power, whether political, eco~ nomic, or cultural. But Christians can too easily be tempted to throw their political or economic weight around when other responses would be more prudent. The dominant response by Christians to The Last Temptation of Christ (or at least the most well known and hence most public response) can be characterized as at~ tempts at economic coercion, with the most publicized being an offer to raise millions of dollars to buy the film from MCA/Universal in order to bum the negative and all the prints.

Meanwhile, a group of evangelical leaders banded together and called for a boycott of ail MCA~owned businesses, the principal intent again being to preventthe film from being seen. It was reported that a number of Christian leaders were "mounting a nationwide effort involving hundreds of Christian groups and costing millions of dollars to mobilize national pressure to stop the release of the film." They also didn't want "impressionable viewers to receive a twisted view of Christ that would keep them from faith in the his~ toric Jesus."

Some even suggested a boycott of the film's distributors. One boycott advocate argued:

The Last

Temptation of

Christ

by Nikos

Kazantzakis

We must send this unmistakable message to the producers and directors at Universal: 'If you continue to assault the Christian system of beliefs and undermine the morality of our children, it will cost

At the time of the protest, I wondered whether such tactics might unwittingly attract more attention to the film than it could have hoped to gain on its own.

The nature and style of the protests against the film were clearly intended to get maximum publicity; after all, a boy~ cott is not at all effective unless it is well publicized. If it is true that consequences matter at least as much as intentions, and if the goal was to minimize the spiritual damage done by the film, its militant critics must be willing to enter~ tain the question of whether they did more harm than good, whether more people saw the film than would have if a large public protest had not been staged.

T

he Hollywood sages know that there is no such thing as bad publicity, that being banned in Boston or any~ where else is much more likely to in~ crease box office revenues than reduce them, and that the worst thing that can happen to a movie is to be ignored. 1 have since heard reports that MCA/ Universal executives, fearing a huge loss on a boring and esoteric film, deliber~ ately leaked advance information about it to Christians, hoping for exactly the sort of response they received. Whether or not the report was accurate, surely it is possible that evangelicals played right into the hands of the publicists for The

Last Temptation of Christ .

If the goal of the Christian protestors was to remove stumbling blocks to ac~ ceptance of the Gospel, one must ask whether the protests themselves did not produce a significant and unnecessary obstacle for many. "Here come the 'born~ againers,' again," one can hear the cyni~ cal pagan sigh. "All they ever do is tell us what we can't do, can't see, and can't believe. They just want to control every~ body." The outcome might have been avoided if the organizers of the protest had been receptive to proclamation as

by KEN MYERS MAY/JUNE 1993.

5

lnodern REFORMATION an alternative to protest.

An alternative way of preventing the film from becoming a source of deception would have been to explain to people who the real Jesus is. The most powerful activity of the church in this world is the proclamation of the truth, even if that brings persecution, as it has again and again throughout history. The apostle Paul could have organized a boycott of the craftsmen who manufactured the idols that populated the Athenian cityscape (Acts 17) . His response, however, was more creative, in the fullest, life, giving sense of the word. In many ways, organiz, ing political and economic pressure does not require nearly the amount of energy, time, and commitment to the long,term success of the Gospel as being "prepared to give an answer [apologia, meaning "reasoned defense in a court of law"] to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" OPt. 3:15).

That approach was taken by a few Christians in the furor over The Last Temptation of Christ, but such efforts were few in number. I seriously doubt that many Christians agitated about the film gave greater attention to the history of the church's effort to formulate the bibli, cal doctrine of the Person of Christ. How many adult Sunday school classes exam, ined the debates that culminated in the definition of the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, or Anselm's argument about the God,man Jesus? I have little confi, dence that many Christians took the challenge this film presented seriously enough to gird up their intellectual loins to be able to explain to their neighbors or colleagues the significance of Jesus' hu, manity or the reality of his temptation and his sinlessness. It is not enough to cry, "Blasphemy!" when one does not under, stand exactly what is wrong and what true statements ought to be put in its place.

Because of that doctrinal ignorance, many who publicly denounced the film as bIas, phemous were also thoroughly unsuccess' ful in explaining to the public what blasphemy is, the sad result being that blasphemy was interpreted as being "what those born,again Christians don't like."

Generally speaking, the response was framed in terms of protest rather than proclamation. The goal of spiritual dam, age control was quickly understood to mean the exertion of economic pressure.

6

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

But such an action is civic and commer, cial rather than spiritual and ecclesiasti, cal. The means it employs (press releases, demonstrations, and boycotts) are politi, cal and economic means. Although such actions may well be permissible, given the dynamics of our culture, they may not be beneficial (cf. 1 Cor. 10:23), as matters spiritual and transcendent are all too easily obscured by a public relations fire, fight.

When the church condemns bIas' phemy, it is acting in its authorized role as a unique spiritual agency established by Jesus Christ, a role that transcends politi, cal and cultural boundaries. The church represents God's interests, not its own. It is never merely one power bloc among other interest groups, jockeying for posi, tion in society. Whenever it has behaved as such, it has always lost sight of its ultimate enas.

M

any commentators at the time of The Last Temptation's release noted the hypocrisy of Hollywood and its allies in championing the cause of a film so offensive to Christians, when it would never tolerate a comparable assault on the sensibilities of blacks, Jews, homo' sexuals, or other American "communi, ties." Why can't Christians be accorded the same "sensitivity" the media and other cultural elites extend to various minority groups? That argument may be sound, but it is also unwise. For by defining Christians merely as an interest group (better suited to a movement than to a church), one thereby legitimizes opposition to Christianity by other inter, est groups. The truth of the Gospel, including the truth about who Jesus was, is thus perceived as partisan instead of rranscendent and universal. In that way, ideological concerns, the concerns of "our group," supplant transcendent, theo, logical concerns. Such an approach un' wittingly gives encouragement to those hardcore ideologues who maintain that religious matters are mere expressions of political and economic interests. Thus, the secular cynics simply see our commer, cial pressures as nothing more than an economic power grab.

In adopting this strategy, the objective of condemning blasphemy was effectively preempted. Christians ought to denounce blasphemy not because it offends them,

but because it offends God. By defining the issue in terms of intolerance and insensitivity, the evangelical response made The Last Temptation affair into a matter of competing civil rights: under the First Amendment, Christians have the right to protest, but Martin Scorsese also has the right to make the film.

What If...

What would have happened if MCAI Universal held a press conference and announced their willingness to produce and distribute a film about Jesus that satisfied the evangelical market? Their decision is a combination of public, and profit,mindedness. The evangelical com, munity takes the company up on its offer and uses the money raised to by and burn The Last Temptation of Christ to finance instead a film based on the Gospel of John. Two years later, the film premieres at a gala opening in Wheaton, Illinois.

But the film's debut is tarnished in the press by reports of anti,Semitism in the script. The Anti, Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee strongly protest certain scenes in the film that are _ extremely offensive to Jews. As a result of the protests of the Jewish community, most theaters refuse to show the film.

It seems the script included much of the episode recorded in John 8, where Jesus confronts the Pharisees and chal, lenges their identity as children of Abra, ham: If you were Abraham's children, do the deeds of Abraham. But as it is, you are seeking to kill me, a man who h as told you the truth, which I heard from God. This Abraham would not do. You are doing the deeds of your father. If God were your father, you would love me ; for I proceeded forth and have come from God. But you are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.

If you live by the boycott, you may die by the boycott. If you present yourself merely as one of many patches in the pluralist American crazy quilt, you must behave with the same decorum you re' quire of others. If you try to use coercive _ economic means to prevent a false mes, siah from being presented in 70 millime, ter Dolby stereo, then you should not expect the economic freedom to present

1110dern REFORMATION the true messiah in cinematic glory, if that presentation is as offensive to some fellow citizens as Scorsese's presentation "--./ is to you.

A

s compelling as the case might be for Christians to adopt the tactics of Cesar Chavez, it seems that there are great risks in encouraging the perception that they are just another special interest group. Although one might respect the intentions of people who promote them, the use of boycotts in the name of Christ is always liable to distract attention from the prophetic, authoritative proclama~ tion of truth and repudiation of error that is the first duty of the church of Jesus Christ. It suggests that Christians are to be identified essentially as part of a politi~ cal movement, rather than as part of a spiritual body.

Some Christians confronting our cul~ ture have adopted the slogan of "taking every thought captive for Christ." They rely on that slogan as a mandate for the establishment ofcoercive mechanisms that prevent the public display of unchristian thinking. But that slogan is only a partial quotation of Paul, who spoke of "taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ." The captivity Paul has in view is not cultural hegemony, but repentance that produces obedi~nce. It is achieved not by political coercion, but by the power of the Spirit. Earlier in that passage, Paul also noted that "though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh." And did not our Lord say, "My kingdom is not of this world."

If the tactics of the parachurch domi~ nate Christian activity as it confronts a post~Christian culture, protests and poli~ ticking will loom larger in the public mind than the proclamation of the church. If public protest gives the impression that Christians are principally concerned about power and about their own standing in society and in the political order, it will become that much more difficult to take thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ. The boycott attempted to render judgment on MCA/Universal by a jury of angry consumers. That is a fine way to - distract New York and Hollywood execu~ tives from contemplating a judgment that will render all profit and loss statements meaningless.

When Ideology Replaces Theology What happens when, from within a Christian movement, one believer feels compelled to raise theologically based objections to some action or a statement made within the movement? I have heard Christians say, for example, that it is unwise to raise theologically based (i.e., biblically based) criticism of Operation Rescue because "they're on our side." I suspect that such sentiments are common within the pro~life movement, which often depicts itself as a Christian move~ ment. But isn't that to allow ideology to replace theology? Doesn't that involve the eclipse of truth by the pursuit of power?

It is a fact that modern evangelicalism has tended to be a subculture concerned

trusted in evangelical leadership if he adheres to social, cultural, and political conservatism, regardless of whether or not he can define "justification," which, according to Martin Luther, was "the article by which the church stands or falls."

It is one thing to put aside theological differences about sacraments, spiritual gifts, church order, or the nature of sanctification for the purpose of a joint evangelistic campaign. That is how mod~ ern evangelicalism has grown, whether through Billy Graham's ministry or through groups such as Campus Crusade, InterVarsity, or Young Life. But what has happened too often is that evangeli~ cal Christians have wrongly concluded that what one believes about sacra~

, , In many ways, organizing political &economic pressure does not require nearly the amount of energy to the success of the Gospel as being 'prepared to give an answer.'" more with doing than with knowing, with orthopraxis (right practice) rather than with orthodoxy. There has always been more concern with quick, practical solutions than with careful theological reflection; more emphasis on personal testimonies than on apologetics; a ten~ dency to interpret Christian experience in terms of a subjective "commitment to Christ" rather than as the life of faith as an elected gift of a sovereign God. Within evangelicalism, there is more regard for extemporaneous prayer than for creeds and confessions, more respect for believ~ ers who are practical successes-such as Christian fullbacks or Christian rock stars or successful Christian businessmen­ than for Christian thinkers. Evangelicals have disagreed on the nature of the atonement, on the meaning of the sacra~ ments, on whether or not one could lose one's salvation, on eschatology, and many other doctrines significant to the lives of individual believers and to the church.

Yet they agreed that to be a good Chris~ tian meant that you didn't play cards, go to movies, or drink alcoholic beverages.

Behavior patterns not even discussed in Scripture become more "the tie that binds" than the belief system that isthe entire substance of Scripture. One is most

ments, charismata, and other controver~ sial issues does not matter (at all), that it is really more Christian not to have any opinion on such things. Thus, there is no sacrifice involved in putting aside theo~ logical differences for a common cause; doctrinal distinctives are simply treated with indifference. This being the case, what is to prevent the evangelical move~ ment from becoming as theologically vacant as the liberalism it once de~ nounced?

P

eter Leighart, a Presbyterian.pastor, has written that evangelicalism is "maintaining high political visibility" while it is "increasingly doctrinally plu~ ralistic." The early church was accused of cannibalism and incest, because it took its sacramental life and its fellow~ ship so seriously. "Today" writes Leithart, "the world views the Church as an interest group, intent on seizing political power." That is certainly a gross distor~ tion, but it tells us something important not only about the world's own obses~ sions, but also about the "face" that the Church is presenting to the world. By contrast, the ancient slander shows that pagans, if they knew anything at all about the Church, knew that the Church MAY/JUNE 1993

•

7

1110dernREFORMATION

gathered to eat and drink the flesh and blood of her Savior and greeted one another with a kiss of peace. The world perceived the Church as a liturgical, not a political, community because the Church's public presence was primarily liturgical. 1 Leithart suggests that the church will know it has recovered a proper sens; of its mission when "the accusation of cannibalism regains currency."2

The Death of Christendom N ietzche warned us about it a century ago. As far as most 9f the culture is concerned, God is dead. Why, then, should the culture be anything other than hostile to God and his truth? The problem is a lot more complicated than a movie here or an abortion clinic there. Those are symptoms of a secularized culture, and just as the problem is complicated, so the solution must be long~term and serious. There must be a renewed commitment to Chris~ tian discipleship, particularly with regard to the life of the mind as we wrestle with the intellectual idols of our time. The church had well over a century to prepare for this moment, a time when the only cultures that act from religious motiva~ tions are Islamic. But instead of preparing, instead of praying and weeping for the awful tragedy of an atheistic society and developing reasoned defenses, we sported bumper stickers that taunted, "My God is Alive. Sorry About Yours."

In the face of the loss of cultural hege~ mony, conservative Christians are easily tempted to try to recover lost cultural ground by winning elections rather than arguments. Christianity once had cultural power. It has lost it. Therefore, we need to try to get it back, to recapture the culture.

The means that are suggested for doing that are almost always political organiza~ tion and the consolidation of power. Like most Americans, we believe that political solutions are ultimate solutions. But poli~ tics is more an effect of culture than a cause. People do not want easy access to abortions because laws are liberal; the laws are liberal because people want easy access to abortions. Of course, law does have some tutorial effect; the law is one piece of data that forms public opinion. But com~ pared to, for example, the mass media, the law is not all that powerful or as persuasive, and is rarely as decisive a factor in shaping public opinion.

8

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

Conclusion Those who defend the tactics of power argue that we are in a war, and that wars require fighting. The question, however, is not whether or not we are in a war, but what kind of war, and what kind of weapons are likely to be successful. The church is always at war, but it is a spiritual battle that requires spiritual weapons; the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteous~ ness, and the sword of the Spirit.

But Christendom was a cultural phe~ nomenon, not simply a spiritual one. The death of Christendom is not the death of Christianity; we must not confuse that.

Christendom was not the church; it was a generally friendly cultural setting in which the church lived and breathed.,

W

hat we are seeing now is only the death of a culture with a mixture of Christian and pagan assumptions. In fact, one could argue that the death of Christendom (or the death of a supposed "Christian America") is an opportunity to preach Christ clearly without the confusion of cultural assumptions. How~ ever, that means that the church has lost a long time friend whose tutelage was repaid with defense and an honored seat at the head of the cultural table. It is sad, but not fatal.

Though the spiritual war involves the culture and intersects with cultural issues, it is not a war for the civilization or for the country that most concerns the Chris~ tian. It is not the struggle for the customs, morals, laws, and politics ofChristendom, but the struggle for the minds and hearts of men and women, many of whom have never heard an intelligent presentation of Christianity throughout the course of their lives.

At the same time, the struggle for the mind and heart of our culture will have an unavoidable effect on the culture. In this secondary sense, we are engaged in a battle for civilization. Civilization is not the kingdom of God, but civilization serves the kingdom of God. Not only is the advance of the Gospel served by civilization; establishing institutions that are ordered and that reject barbarism is also an important way of loving our neighbors, and hence obligatory for all believers, even if Christian discipleship is not served by it. Surely we ought to be more preoccupied with serving our neigh~

bors than with ruling them. The involve~ ment of Christians in cultural and civic life ought to be motivated by love of neighbor, not by self~interest-not even by the corporate self~interest of the evan~ gelical movement.

The advance of the barbarians, whether they be in abortion clinics, university English departments, or mul~ tinational corporations, incites great passion and defensiveness. But Chris~ tians must remain clear about who the enemy is, what the cause is, and which weapons are appropriate to which battles.

Without such clarity, the church will certainly degenerate into a moral rear~ mament society and nothing more. That is just what theological liberalism did to many of the mainline churches. It would be a horrible irony if the moral passion of evangelicals led them to the same end.

We must recover the art of theologi~ cally informed discernment-not just for the "ivory tower" theologians but for the average Christian; to recognize the difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; and yet to accept our role in both without turn~ ing one into the other. There is nothing wrong with Christians getting involved with politics, especially in a democracy.

In fact, Christians ought to be interested in every aspect of life, just as is God himself. And yet, such involvement in culture, important as it is, is not ~he building of Christ's kingdom. By stand~ ing beside our Lord as he builds his kingdom, we can be assured that no film, no policy, no ideology, indeed, not even the gates of hell, shall stand in the way of our Sovereign's triumph. 0 Ken Myers is a graduate of the University of Maryland and Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and is the author of All God's

Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture. This article first appeared in Power Religion and was used by the permission of Moody Press.

End Notes 1.

Peter j. Lcithart, "The 'Mabclized' C hurch," First Things, May 1991, p. 10.

2.

Ibid.

Attention Modem Reformation

subscribers! CredendaiAgenda is a terrific

bi-monthly publication put out by

Community Evangelical Fellowship, Best

of all it's free! We encourage you to call

them at 1-800-488-2034 to begin receiving your free copy of the Credenda/Agenda.

'-../

lnodern REFORMATION

This Present

unbiblical fear of the world. This fear of the world in tum, produces a peculiar distrust and marked hostility toward the surrounding culture that much of evangelicalism sincerely desires to win to Christ. There is a noticeable paranoia which has infected much of the American church since the relative abandonment of the classical Protestant doctrine of creation.

In this historic Protestant understanding, the world, which was seen to be created as "very good" by God, and even as fallen, is still intended to serve as the place where God works out the redemption of his people. This high view of creation, and the role given God's world as the theater of redemption,

Paranoia

"T

his world is not my home, I'm just a' passing through, my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue," goes the refrain of a popular American hymn. Whether aware of it or not, evangelicals are engaged in a war with modern American culture. The world is understood to be a very evil place, and America is no longer thought of as a paradigm of moral virtue. Thus evangelicals do their best to exist in a society that they feel is increasingly hostile to their cause.

The goal held out to the weary faithful is to somehow survive as unwelcome pilgrims in a world and culture that is not thought of as "home," but merely as a place to endure, to just "pass through" while awaiting the eschaton and the return of Christ. In the midst of this uneasy tension, many American evangelicals, not surprisingly, reflect a good degree of fear and suspicion of the world around them, a kind of paranoia if you will.

And as recent trends seem to point out, there are several very disturbing indications that this hostility may in fact, be in the process of becoming mutual. American evangelicals are viewed with increased suspicion and fear by the secular world around them. The evangelical agenda is increasingly viewed as a reactionary militant foe to the pluralism and individual freedom championed in the modem world.

The term "fundamentalist" is applied pejoratively to everything from Islamic revolutionaries holding American citizens against their will, to Mormon polygamist sects hiding out in the fringes of American society. Evangelicals who attempt to stem the rising tide of secularism in society and who take a public stand against evil, are simply dismissed as "fundamentalists" who are not concerned about the difff'ring moral values of others, but only with repressing out of fear the new found

freedom experienced by Americans, finally liberated from the shackles of Puritan and Victorian legalism.

But as this essay will argue, there are some indications that American evangelicalism actually may be more hostile to secular America than secular America is to American evangelicalism. And it is this hostility and fear that perpetuates this uneasy tension, and which in effect, cuts off many opportunities for fruitful dialogue with a society that is searching for, and needing honest answers to the hard questions of life. This point I think can be demonstrated by a general analysis of the massive evangelical subculture and a more detailed review of one aspect of that subculture, popular Christian literature.

I am convinced that one very important and often overlooked place to take the pulse ofmodem American evangelicalism, is to periodically scan the Christian Bookseller's best seller's list. These are published on a monthly basis in several trade publications, including Christian Retailing and Bookstore Journal. The type of books that evangelicals buy, even if not indicative of what evangelicals actually read, is a very good barometer of where the evangelical's heart and treasure really lie. What books people buy, I think, reflects what people think, what generally interests them and gives a strong clue about how they feel about the world around them.

The Doctrine of Creation One theme that constantly emerges from popular evangelical literature as a kind of unifying factor is an unhealthy and

has been replaced by a doctrine of creation that is more classically Greek and neo~ Platonic than Biblical, and which denies the essential goodness of the world, seeing creation as incidental to God's ultimate purpose, the redemption of the "spiritual."

We do not know if we are to fear what we can even see, touch or taste, and each author or authority who tackles this vague enemy simply postulates his or her own diagnosis as to the true identity and the cure for the "real enemy" that they alone have found. We merely know that the enemy is "out there," that it is evil, and more importantly, that it is associated with the world in some way, shape or form.

You might think that this inability to define our enemy might produce a paralysis of sorts. But instead, it has given rise to a mass number of books and ministries each claiming to have

ryKIMRIDDLEBARGER MAY/JUNE 1993

•

9

lnodern REFORMATION identified for us just exactly who this enemy is, and that their own particular solution to the problem is in fact, the answer that everyone else has missed.

This produces a great deal of confusion because what has resulted is hydra of individuals and para~church ministries who perpetuate this uneasiness, each one calling to attention many the different forms and nuances of the enemy and his (or her, as the case may be) influence.

The simplified progression works as follows-more enemies, more theories, more theories, more books, more books, more sales. What you see on the shelves in your local Christian bookstore is perhaps more result of corporate marketing strategies, slick advertising packages and the promise of "trust me, it will sell," rather than upon serious theological reflection by the publisher, their salesmen or the store buyers who are all honestly struggling to earn an honorable living.

mythical city of Ashton. And the unknown god of Alcoholics Anonymous, popularly called the "higher power," is far too secular for us, so we have Christian twelve~step programs, recovery books and journals, all designed, we are assured, to present a Biblical alternative to these secular programs.

W

hat may also come as quite a surprise to many, is just how large this massive evangelical sub~culture and the massive Christian retailing industry that underlies it has become. While exact figures are hard to come by, one report puts the sales of all items in Christian bookstores at $2.7 billion for 1990 alone.

Sales of Christian books nation~wide in all stores totaled over $1.5 billion in 1989. By all accounts this is a massive industry, and an industry that grows by leaps and bounds every year. Weare selling more books, more Bibles, more tapes and CDs than ever before, and all The Growth of the the while, our beloved America becomes increasingly more secularized. This is Evangelical Subculture Another factor which demonstrates borne out by rather distressing statistical evidence that indicates that only 25% of the depth of the uneasy relationship between evangelicals and the surrounding Christians who regularly attend church culture, is the huge growth of the massive . actually shop in local Christian bookstores. evangelical subculture. Since worldly What is most shocking about this is that this one quarter of the Christian population amusements are out, we have Christian music, Christian television, Christian manages to purchase 90% of all radio and evangelistic films. We can put merchandise sold, a figure that would catchy Biblical motifs on spandex pants amount to over $2.4 billion annually! and proclaim the glories of Christ instead The amazing paradox in all of this is ofdoing Satan's bidding! Since we cannot that the more Christians fear the world,

" There is a noticeable paranoia that has infected much of the American church since the relative abandonment of the classical Protestant doctrine of creation." tolerate senseless violence, the current wrestling craze is clearly taboo, but is very nicely replaced by a Christian equivalent: the Power Team. And since no truly God~fearing person would have the least bit of interest in horror films and suspenseful science fiction, conscientious Christians should never be seen reading a Steven King novel. Instead, evangelical readers are provided with an excellent alternative, the fiction of Frank Peretti, and the enthralling tales of supernatural warfare among angels and demons in the 10

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

the more they end up actually imitating and even perpetuating the very worldliness that terrifies them. Christian alternative entertainment is often a mere mimicking of pagan culture. The basic philosophical questions about what media can be used to communicate the Gospel and how each media effects the message it communicates, simply are not asked.

Because we are so prone to copy the various forms of media already found in the culture, whether it be a particular style of music, or a popular form of

entertainment such as rock concerts or television talk shows, we may find ourselves baptizing with Bible verses forms of culture that are intrinsically anti~Christian, or forms that tend to obscure the Gospel.

Even worse, we may take legitimate and God~honoring forms of media and misuse them by turning them into mere Christian propaganda. By "denying the world," and offering alternative entertainment, we find that "we are of the world but not in the world"-a rather lamentable and unbiblical situation. We are "of the world" because we are content to copy its various cultural products and yet we are obviously not "in the world" because we are selling 90% of the cultural products that we do produce to ourselves.

There are several major turning points in the recent history of Christian publishing that serve to illustrate the type ofuneasiness and paranoia that I'm talking about.

'---..-/

Doomsday Predictions If you were asked to name the number one best~selling book in America during the '70s, I'm sure that you would not mention Hal Lindsey's The Late GreatPlanet Earth published in 1970. But in fact, this sensational end~times account was the ~ best~selling book in America during the tumultuous '70s, selling over ten million copies to date and going through one hundred and forty printings. While The Late Great Planet Earth reflects the very popular dispensational premillennial approach to end~times, I would argue that its amazing success lies not so much in its eschatological perspective, as in the timing of its release, proving the adage that "timing is everything."

In '70s America stood on the brink of war at varying times, with both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

The evening news carried sensational and gut~wrenching film of the previous day's carnage of the best of American youth in the jungles ofYietnam. The Six~ Day War in 1967 had already rallied public support and interest in the fledgling nation of Israel through what was truly a great military miracle. It was David and Goliath all over again, only this time on television in our own living rooms. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, while pushing the superpowers to the brink of war, only enhanced favorable opinions of Israel's cause already formed earlier.

1110dern REFORMATION But international crises were not the only elements at work. In November of 1963, we watched our young president brutally murdered in Dallas. At the close of the '60s (1968), Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both tragically assassinated at what seemed to be the brink of an important turning point in American history. Who can forget the near anarchy that took place at that year's Democratic convention in Chicago? The whole world was watching. Lyndon Johnson's promised "Great Society" never did materialize, and instead we watched as many of our biggest inner cities burned with race rioting induced by bigoted hatred and ethnic violence. And what was any more traumatic for patriotic Americans than to watch President Nixon resigning in disgrace, again on live national television, due to the rapidly hemorrhaging Watergate scandal.

It was in the midst of our loss of innocence and well after the end of the post World War II optimism that The Late Great Planet Earth burst onto the scene.

People were desperately seeking answers.

What would the future hold? Would there be nuclear war? What would happen to America, Israel and the Soviet Union in the future? What would G od do in the midst of this? What would happen to Christians, who already had good Biblical reason to be less than optimistic about the future of the world? The Late Great Planet Earth had the answers from God's word, something secular prophets like Jeanne Dixon could never muster.

What answers did Hal Lindsey offer the church in the midst of such a fearful future? Quite simple ones actually. If you are a Christian, you will not be here to experience any of the horrible things that are going to happen upon the earth.

Christ is going to return, secretly, and remove all believers from the earth before the beginning of the Great Tribulation, which would see, among other things, the Soviet Union invade Israel and lose, there will be a rise of a ten~nation confederacy mimicking the Roman Empire. And finally, the Antichrist will be ushered to the stage of history. All of those events will take place after Christ has removed His church.

No single Christian book has ever created the excitement or relevance to current events as did The Late Great Planet

Earth. Here, in a popular form, were all of the answers to the great turmoil that America was experiencing. At last, we had something that could help us make sense of the horrors and uncertainties we were watching on our television sets each evening. But while The Late Great Planet Earth popularized a common scenario of end~times events and gave birth to a new genre of "Bible prophecy" books. On its heels followed sequel after sequel, and whole para~church ministries devoted to

Christ in an uncertain time. It may be that this is exactly where this genre of books have their most unfortunate side~ effect. It seems that every time there is some geo~political crisis anywhere in the world, a whole batch of these books burst forth onto the scene. The Desert Storm conflict, revived our long~ entrenched interest in the Middle East.

Coupled with Saddam Hussein's despotic desire to rebuild ancient Babylon, some publishers rapidly brought out a whole

" Unfortunately, the watching unbelieving world around us picks up on the 'this world is not my home-it's all gOIng urn attltude. " ¡ to b" end~times

events and teachings burst upon the scene. End times and Bible prophecy books became one of the most popular and influential forces in Christendom. In fact, it may be argued that the evangelical subculture was given birth largely as a result of the prophecy craze. The Jesus~people movement was, heavily based upon and influenced by this literature. Prophecy seminars and sensationallow~budget films about Christ's return were used as evangelistic tools.

The end of the world was coming and we had all of the answers. he end~times scenario popularized

by Hal Lindsey and others, is one which perpetuates a dislike and a fear of the world. Since the church is not going to be around after the "Rapture," and the rapture will take place at any moment, what happens to the church's role in the world, society and culture around it?

Since human government is nothing more than a vehicle for the rise of anti~Christ, its perhaps best if we not get involved.

The world itself will be savaged by nuclear war and horrible plagues and upheaval, and therefore, what place does ecological stewardship now occupy? The Late Great Planet Earth, and the mass of Bible prophecy books that it spawned, are clearly indicative of the uneasy and fearful relationship that American evangelicals have with the world around them.

It is argued, however, that these books effectively promote the Gospel. They give incentive for people to turn to Jesus

T

new generation of such books linking these events to the end times. Actually, the best~selling book on the recent crisis was John Walvoord's Armageddon, Oil and The Middle East Crisis. Christian Retailing Magazine, in the list for April 1991, lists this title as the number one best~seller, followed by a new book on the same subject, The Rise ofBabylon, by Charles Dyer. Walvoord's book was not even a new book, but was originally pu blished in 1974. Reprinted and revised with the impending crisis looming on the horizon, it now sports a snazzy "Desert Storm" motif complete with updated art work, depicting the newest armored and aerial combatants on the front cover. I marvel how each time a new geo~political crisis occurs anywhere with the world, the evangelical publishing enterprise can rise to the occasion with amazing speed. But that gets at the heart of the problem, doesn't it-we leap before we look. By the time many stores got all of their "Desert Storm" product on the shelves, the one~hundred hour ground war was mercifully over. Israel was kept from the crisis, as was the Soviet Union.

Prophecy pundits were forced to rewrite and re~think their various scenarios now that things didn't turn out as envisaged.

And that is the point. The Scriptures warn us quite clearly about such speculation. Our Lord himself warned us that no man knows the day or the hour of his return, except the Father in heaven (Mt. 24:36). One recent book goes so far as to argue that Jesus is telling us the MAYIJUNE 1993

•

11

1nodern REFORMATION exact opposite, that we can know the day and the hour. This is distributed by the same prophetic ministry that produced the now infamous 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Be in 1988, by Edgar Whisenant. Peter tells us that one of the characteristics of the last days will be that scoffers will come, saying "Where is this coming he promised?"(2 Pt. 3:3-4}.

Unfortunately, we have given those who will scoff a great deal of new ammunition.

The watching unbelieving world around us picks up on "this world this not my home-it's all going to bum" attitude and the consequence that we have helped to create, is the scoffing and contempt that those around us have for Christ, his church and his people predicted by Peter.

We have cried "wolf' too many times for secular America to take us seriously anymore.

Yes, Jesus is coming back soon. But will they even listen to us anymore? It appears to non,Christians who watch us that we have our own quite selfish agenda and that we really don't care about those outside the club or the very world that we share in common with those who may disagree with us. This is an unfortunate and unbiblicallegacy.

There was a time Christians were characterized as a loving, charitable, hardworking people, who did as Paul instructed those who were confused about the end (1 Thes. 4:11-12). They worked with their hands, they lived a quiet life, minded tneir own business and were at peace with their neighbors, all the time winning respect for the Gospel by their quiet, though productive life,styles. Sadly,

Conspiracy Theories A major plot for Christian conspiracies came during the late '70s with the secular humanist scare. It was those dreaded secular humanists who took such things as prayer out of our schools. These enemies of the faith foisted evolutionary teaching on our children. The humanists are behind the immorality that is rampantly sweeping across America. They champion pornography, adultery, and sex,education in our schools. Sound familiar? Christians of an earlier era, undergirded by the doctrine of total depravity and original sin, would have attributed immorality to the character of every fallen human being, including Christians themselves. But the new theorists are convinced that Americans are basically good people who have had their institutions stolen from them by a significant minority of intellectuals, artists, and members of the media. Some conspiracy theories even went to so far as to allude that our major network news anchors were all conspirators in a plot to promote un,Christian attitudes and perspectives in the general public to prepare the way for the rise of anti, Christ. And while all Christians lament the current state of the churches' witness and influence in our culture, are we really to believe that the predicament we are in is due to a satanic conspiracy, rather than to a more painful cause, the churches' lack of involvement in culture, including the arts, the media and the sciences?

We lost ground by default rather than by a Satanic conspiracy. But let's face it, conspiracy theories shift the blame for

, , Christians of an earlier era, undergirded by the doctrine of original sin, would have attributed immorality to the character of every fallen human being, including Christians. " those days are over. We have become so preoccupied with escaping from the world in many quarters, that we no longer are effectively communicating to the non' Christians that we care for, and are eager to help those less fortunate than ourselves- because Jesus Christ is coming back. We have sent a very much misunderstood message of hostility to our culture.

12

•

MA Y/JUNE 1993

the moral decline of our country from ourselves to our mysterious enemies, Satan, demons and the world. We left the world by no longer participating in the culture, and paganism and unbelief simply rushed in and filled in the void.

The effects of the conspiracy theories and these distinctly American slants upon things, and they way in which they are involved in the re,definition of doctrine

is perhaps best illustrated by Dave Hunt's best,seller, The Seduction of Christianity.

Dave Hunt did a good service for the Christian church, in what amounted to a tremendous act of personal courage. He took some very popular and successful ministries and ministers to task for some very unorthodox teaching. The problem, however, with much of Dave Hunt's work, including Seduction ofChristianity, is that woven throughout his research into these various doctrinal errors, is this re,occurring satanic conspiracy motif.

This only serves to detract the reader looking for a serious theological critique from the over,all research and general impact of the book. Since Hunt is deeply influenced by an eschatology similar to that of Hal Lindsey, there is an unfortunate tendency for Mr. Hunt to respond to those he opposes with a sensationalist flair. This is what Americans have come to want and to expect. You get the feeling by reading the book, that lying under every psychiatrist's couch are a legion of demons ready to pounce on any unsuspecting person needing therapy.

Here again, we find an almost irrational fear and overt hostility toward several very legitimate disciplines.

This attitude of hostility toward the world only perpetuates the evangelical paranoia to a greater degree. Could this be one reason why Hunt's Seduction was a best,seller, and why Francis Schaeffer's work never attained such status? Polemics of the previous generations, such as J. Gresham Machen's excellent Christianity andLiberalism, were characterized by clear' headedness and sober scholarship. Machen was warning the church in the thirties of what is now known as Protestant liberalism. Machen's book is now dated of course, but there is nothing in the book that would embarrass Machen should he come back and read the manuscript today.

Machen could have easily tied the theology of mainline Protestantism to an end, times apostasy. But he didn't. For Machen, the matter was a question of orthodoxy and the need to respond when orthodoxy was abandoned. For Dave Hunt, with the prophetic,conspiracy theory angle, the unifying factor underlying Seduction is the impending end of the world, and the satanic conspiracy which will usher the end.

Therefore, the thrust of the book turns

..

1nodern REFORMATION from one of a sober examination of serious doctrinal errors to one of sensationalism.

After all, writes Hunt, could not these doctrinal aberrations really be harbingers of the end? Isn't Satan the one behind all of this?

The irony in all of this is that the more we attempt to warn people of these possible satanic conspiracies, the more we end up giving our arch,foe exactly what he wants_ lots of free publicity. U2's Bono recently said in an interview, "Mock the devil and he will flee from you, but the fear of the devil leads to devil worship." Is it possible that we are helping to create an unhealthy interest in the occult? Watch Christian television for an hour or two and count the number of times you hear the word "Satan" versus the number of references to "God," or "Jesus." There is a fine line between love and hate. Both are an obsession.

This new model of spiritual warfare has led some to assume that evil and suffering are the immediate result of this invisible cosmic struggle between angels and the demonic forces of the Prince of Darkness.

The problem is not with the inherent sinfulness residing within the shadowy darkness of the human heart and the resulting rebellion against God and his word. Instead the problem lies with someone or something else-the demonic.

There is suffering and evil in the world because of Satan and demons, not because I, too, along with all of my fellow human beings, are guilty with Adam for rebelling against God. Instead ofseeing the world as portrayed in the creation account, as "very good," in this model the world is viewed as merely incidental to the ultimate reality, and what really matters- the "spiritual" world.

The world is the arena of combat where the ultimate reality is taking place. For ultimate reality is now to be found in Spiritual Warfare The huge popularity of Frank Peretti's another dimension, as invisible legions of This PresentDarkness, and its sequel Piercing angels and demons engage in heated the Darkness also reveals the sense of battle, and wherein evil and suffering on uneasiness and fear of the world in what the earth results from the residual fallout" I think is a disturbing trend. While Peretti caused by these angelic forces as they endeavored to produce a fictional account manipulate human pawns as tools in their of the supernatural warfare revealed in the struggle for power. Spiritual warfare is scriptures, many Christians, who often where the action is now!

Those who see reality exclusively lack even the most basic theological and biblical training, have ended up reading through the lens of warfare between angels Peretti's fiction as though it were systematic and demons will inevitably read the theology. Because the intended audience turmoils of life as proof of a struggle is sometimes ill, informed about the purpose between these spiritual combatants. People of the genre of fiction and the reasons for are now looking for answers to the great telling a compelling story simply on its questions of life in an another, "spiritual" own merits, many reading Peretti's fictional dimension. Yet many evangelicals are account of spiritual warfare possess little teaching are that we should be looking for ability to discern between his riveting demons and evil spirits as the sole fantasy and the biblical doctrines which explanation for any given situation we he had hoped to illumine. People have in may encounter. Weare being told that if many cases, actually re,defined their views we want to be victorious Christians then all we have to do is to exercise the proper of the supernatural based upon a fictional novel, instead of developing a biblical dominion-and inevitably, the proper view of the supernatural and then technique-over these demons to liberate ourselves and our society. Christians who interacting with fictional literature.

The result of the success of Peretti's follow this line of thought often develop book is that a whole host of similar books a tendency to become hostile and fearful have followed in its wake, many of these of the world, because after all, demons less than sound in content. Cumulatively, may be lurking behind every crisis, whether this has produced a whole new generation it be physical or emotional.

Christians are buying spiritual warfare of Christians who now see the world through a supernatural grid that has more books almost as fast as they can be in common with Greek and Persian written; And what message does this send mystery religions than with Christianity. ' to a watching and unbelieving world that

is more open to sound answers than ever before? The message that we are sending back to them is that they are but stooges of the devil.

Conclusion From my reading of Scripture, the best method of binding Satan is still the preaching of the Gospel (Lk. 10:18; Rv. 20:1-3). And while no one who takes the Scriptures seriously can deny the reality of the demonic, there can be little doubt that the great interest in these type of books reveals how uneasy evangelicals are about the world around them. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that there are now more best, selling books about "spiritual warfare," and related themes, then there ever were about the central figure of the Bible­ Jesus Christ. It's interesting to note that the fictional classics by C. S. Lewis, Chronicles ofNarnia and the Space Trilogy, have not to my knowledge seen any increase in sales, as they do not reflect this uneasiness with the world around us.

The one Lewis book that has experienced a renaissance of sorts is The Screwtape Letters, which is Lewis's account of a senior devil giving instructions in deception to a junior devil. It seems that the type of fiction, particularly fiction oriented toward spiritual or occultic themes, contributes more to present popularity of such books rather than a general revival of the genre itself.

Certainly Frank Peretti is not to blame for the current pre,occupation with the "spiri.tual" world. All that he did was produce a first rate novel. But there can be no doubt that the success of This Present Darkness, and the rise of a whole genre of "spiritual warfare" novels betrays a bigger problem. The most pressing present darkness is that night into which the evangelical church, along with an increasingly anti, rational culture, will descend unless evangelicals stop singing, "1 can't feel at home in this world anymore." 0 Kim Riddlebarger is a graduate ofCal State Fullerton and Westminster Theological Seminary in California. He is currently the vice president of CURE, and a contributing author to Christ The Lord: The Reformation and Lordship Salvation, and

Power Religion:The Selling Out of The Evangelical Church. This present article appeared first in Power Religion, used by the permission of Moody Press.

MAY/JUNE 1993

•

13

1110dernREFORMATION

INTERVIEW:

scales. If one goes up, .the other goes down. Once upon a time folks new that God was great and that man by comparison was small. And each individual carried around a sense of his own smallness in the greatness of God's world. But the scale pans are in a different relation today. Man has risen in his own estimation, he thinks of himself as great, and grand, and marvelously resourceful. This means inevitably that our thoughts about God shrink. God goes down in our estimation, God gets smaller. He also exists now for our pleasure, our convenience, our health, rather than we existing for his glory. Now, I'm an old fashioned Christian and I believe that we exist for the glory of God. So the first thing I always want to do in any teaching of Christianity that I attempt is to try and get those scale pans reversed, to try and show folks that God is the one of central importance. We exist for his praise, we exist to worship him, we find our joy and fulfillment in him, and he must have all the glory. He is great, and he must be acknowledged as great. And I think there is a tremendous difference between the view that God saves us, and the idea that we save ourselves with God's help. Formula number two fits the modern idea, while formula number one, as I read my Bible, is scriptural.

We do not see salvation straight until we recognize that from first to last it is God's work. He didn't need to do it, he owed us nothing but damnation in fact, after we'd sinned.

But what he does is to move in mercy. He sends US a Savior, and he sends his Holy Spirit into our hearts to bring us to faith in that Savior, and then he keeps us in that faith and brings us to glory. It's all his work from beginning to end; God saves sinners. It does, of course, put us down very low, and that's the aspect of the Gospel that presents the biggest challenge to the modem view point. But it also sets God up very high, we must not forget that. It

Christianity

In America

ARoundtable Discussion with authors].1. Packer and James M. Boice, Senate Chaplain Richard Halverson, Fuller Seminary Professor William Pannell &CURE President Michael Horton Horton: Do you think the complaint is justified that our evangelical witness in this day and age is shallow and superficial?

Boice: Yes, I would agree with that complaint. I think we are contributing to the very thing we ought to be working against for various reasons.

One reason is that we are so preoccupied with numbers. We're so interested in getting people to make a profession that we often forget to take the time to explain the content of what it is they are about to profess. I notice, by contrast, that our Lord himself never did that. If anything, he seemed to be afraid of numbers. When the numbers got too high, he asked the tough questions, questions that would weed out those who were following only because it was simply the most exciting thing of the hour to do.

Packer: I think this is right. There is such a thing as culture Christianity, a Christianity that only goes skin deep and is taken in because it is part of the culture of your home or group to which you belong. What you receive in this case, you receive by osmosis, rather than by any sort of thinking.

Then when the time comes and the tough questions are asked, your mind begins to wake up and you realize that all you've got is the veneer of a "Christian life,style" without any deeply rooted convictions at all.

14

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

Culture Christianity is always a problem at this point. Those who have received it think that they are Christians because of the way that they have been conditioned, when in many cases they still have not been converted.

Pannell: What we have failed to do in many of our Christian circles is to present in a stimulating way real biblical questions. Today, people tend to think that you can go to church, be a Christian, and get along best if you leave your mind in the glove compartment.

Horton: Could it be that we have a cheap and limited view of God and his grace?

Halverson: I certainly think we've lost that sense of awe when we talk about God in our modern evangelical culture.

I don't sense awe in many of the evangelical gatherings that I attend. I have a feeling, for example, that if Jesus were to walk into one of our churches or conventions, that we wouldn't want to stand up and cheer and sing, "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." I think we would fall immediately to our knees in an attitude of worship. But today, I think we tend to equate noise with praise and worship, and that troubles me a great deal (see Am. 5:21,24).

Packer: I think you've hit on something fairly basic here. I think of the two pans of an old fashioned pair of

lnodern REFORMATION reveals to us a God who is very great, very gracious, very glorious, a God who is certainly worthy of our worship.

Pannell: I'm always impressed with the conversation that Jesus had with some of his contemporaries when they asks, "What can we do that we might do the works of God?" The assumption being that whatever God laid on them, they could handle. Jesus responded by saying, "This is the work of God, that you believe on him who he has sent."

And they could no mor:e swallow that than they could any of the other . teachings of Jesus. This one stuck in their minds, and I think the reason for that is because it lays all the burden on God to be the savior. And that's just un~American. To think that we would need someone outside ourselves to save us is in violation of the spirit of American independence.

Horton: Could that be why we don't frequently hear the preaching of the cross in evangelical churches? If we do hear the cross it's only in terms of how much God loves us, but we never really hear why the cross was actually necessary.

Packer: Well, before we ever start talking about the cross showing us the love of God, we ought to take the time to define what was taking place at the cross so as to explain why the death of Christ shows us God's love. The first thing to say, surely, is that the achievement of the cross was the putting away of our sins.

And had that not happened through the wisdom of God who put his Son in our place, we should have had to pay the price for our sins, and that would be eternal spiritual loss. Thus, the meaning of the cross is that a God, who was my stern judge, has become my loving heavenly Father because he has put away my sins; the Father, through the Son, redeeming the world. So really, our relationship with God becomes the most important issue we can ever face, and the cross of Christ

becomes the most momentous event in history, becaus~..thrbugh it, we p.aye a loving heavenly F~t:her; the judge who takes account of us for our guilt having been fully satisfied. This is the God~ centered way of looking at the cross.

Boice: But that~s just it, how are we going to look at the cross, or mankind, or God? If your basic premise, for example, is that God exists to serve mankind and you happen to be going through a period of suffering, God is going to have to solve your problems for him to mean anything to you. The health and wealth gospels that we've heard so much about are merely out~growths of this man~centered religion. But if you take it the other way around, that is, if we're there for God's benefit, then God has a purpose even in our suffering. Christianity does not involve our solving everybody's

and the right people in the Supreme Court and Congress, we've got the: . kingdom of God." And this concerns me a great deal.

Pannell: I think there is a consensus in the world today as never before that the human race needs to be saved. I think that's what communism, or for ¡that matter, our own political parties, and other "~isms" are about. This leads inevitably to a contemporary idolatry called nationalism. And to the degree that the church is seduced to these ideologies, to that degree the church loses confidence in the power of the Gospel. And the cross just becomes something you wear around your neck.

Halverson: Years ago we had a breakfast in Washington for Malcolm Muggeridge, who as some of you may know is very pessimistic. After giving his speech one gentleman, who happened to be constitutionally incapable of hearing anything pessimistic, approached him and said, "Brother Muggeridge, you've been very pessimistic, can't you say anything optimistic?"

He responded, "Why my friend, I'm very optimistic because my hope is only in Jesus Christ." And then he let that settle for a moment.

Then he said this, "Just suppose the apostolic church had pinned its hopes on the Roman empire?" I've never been able problems, but instead involves our to forget that. In a day when we are showing we can go through human problems in a way that honors God. pinning our hope in the good 01' U.S.A. There's a little text that came And until Christians in our country to mean a great deal to me a few years understand that, Christianity is not ago when I was preparing to preach an going to have the impact that it once ordination sermon. Jesus said, "I will had, either for revival or for cultural build my church, and the gates of hell change. shall not prevail against it." Now he Halverson: I feel that this is where we said that. I can't believe he has ever are today. Although we say we believe failed, or ever will fail in doing that. in God, we really believe in man. I've So I have to believe he is building his lived in Washington D.C. for thirty years and I hear this all the time. They church. The problem is the church never verbalize it quite this way, but we're building. 0 what they're saying is, "If we just get the right man in the White House, MAYIJUNE 1993

•

15

l110de rn REFORMATION the resurrection. The arguments were compelling enough for them to invite Paul to the theater~in~the~round for further discussion. So, suddenly Paul's ideas weren't put off in a comer where religion is so often sent, but he was brought to the secular center of town where philosophy and the latest ideas were debated. He got there, not because he protested or demanded his rights, but because he had persuaded the vanguard with good arguments.

The Apostle Paul

& Oprah Winfrey

What Would The A.postle Paul Say on aDay-time Talk Show?

I

I'm told that 90 million people tuned in to Oprah Winfrey's interview with Michael Jackson not too long ago.

That piece of depressing news made me think of what would happen if one of the apostles appeared on a major daytime TV talk~show.

As a matter of fact, the Apostle Paul did get a spot on the ancient world's equivilent: the Areopagus, where, as Acts records, the Athenians did nothing but debate the latest ideas. As one stupid thought leads to another, my imagination moved to an ad for the program: "Next, on The Oprah Winfrey Show: The Apostle Paul On Resurrection & Repentance.

And Tomorrow: Cats That Love Mice Too Much."

In this brief compass, I want to take a look at Paul's apologetic approach in terms of his audience, the speech itself, and his mission, at each point drawing out lessons for our own context. Finally, I want to offer five theses for getting beyond the culture wars. What would Paul say today if he were to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show? Would he want to talk about the conservative political agenda?

Gays in the military, women in combat, pornography legislation, the banning of offensive movies, school prayer? Or would he come to do battle for the gospel of the Left? And it doesn't help to say that the ancient world is too removed from our situation to offer any reasonable parallel.

H o mosexuality, abortion, adultery, divorce, crime, and a wide range ofviolent and sexually explicit entertainment was on offer. But Paul does not lead the charge for a cultural war in the Athenian courts for control. Let's follow the course he took in an effort to gain wisdom in our current struggle.

16

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

The Audience Paul's audience was primarily made up of two philosophical sects. The first were the Epicureans. These followers ofEpicurus (341-270 B.C.) were basically deists, who narrowed religion to that which is rationally conceivable and morally justifiable. These were the ancient rationalists. They believed there were gods, but these gods played no active part in everyday life. They were the ancient secularists, indifferent to religion and to the gods. "Eat, drink, and be merry; but we ourselves are at the center of the universe, and we are autonomous creatures. We must chart our own course."

As Walt Witman said, "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul." They were very much singing the song of their own souls.

The Stoics were at the other end of the spectrum from the Epicureans. Zeno was their founder (340-265 B.C.). His followers were Pantheists. While God was far removed from the Epicurean world, here he was part of it. God was part of trees, rocks, animals, etc. This is the New Age movement of the Ancient World focusing on the unity of human beings and ferns! The Stoics were also Fatalists, because they did not believe in a personal God, but in Fate. What the two groups shared in common was a love for the latest ideas. Paul had already been talking to members of this debating society about Jesus and the resurrection. I can't imagine that it would have been a hot topic if he had simply asserted it. He was probably passionately arguing it and that meant that he probably had reasons in favor of

The Speech Paul's speech was very interesting.

Basically, he explains our Apostle's Creed.

He starts, "I beli~ve in God the Father Almighty, Maker' of heaven and earth."

It was a good place to start, because the Stoics and Epicureans were in need of understanding ¡God himself before they could understand Jesus and the resurrection. So Paul represents God as the Father, creator and sovereign ruler.

Interestingly, this is the main point of confrontation because it's not a "felt need." Paul did not walk into town and take a survey of topics that they would like to talk about at the Areopagus.

Instead, Paul let a good case stand on its own. You can create in a person a need he never knew he had. Even apart fro~ the Holy Spirit, you can create (purely intellectually) in a person's mind a rational need that makes sense. (Of course, only the Holy Spirit can take that out of an intellectual state and give you a real felt need for it.) The point of confrontation Paul selects is idolatry.

Paul reaches out and the bridge he builds is not necessarily a positive bridge. He is talking about idolatry as a bad idea, though he does call the people "extremely religious."

He is using "religious" in two senses here: one is positive, as it is normally used and the other meaning is "superstitious." This is not really what most philosophers want to hear!

Yet, Paul attacked them for being too religious. Nietzsche said that when Christian dogma falls apart there will be a rain of gods.

Likewise, G.K. Chesterton told us that when men stop believing in the one, true God, it's not that they won't believe in anything, but that they will believe in everything and anything.

by MICHAEL HO RIO N

1110dernREFORMATION

H

Ow do we stand on this point? Robert Bellah and his associates in Habits of the Heart mention "Sheila,ism." Sheila says, "I don't really go to church, I kind of have church in my home. I believe in God; it's kind of that little voice inside me." And so, Bellah aptly concludes, that means there are approximately 256 million religions in America, one for each of us.

We have had a prolifenition of deities every bit as much a forest of idols as Athens was when Paul found it. But isn't that OK as long as we are religious?

President Bush, speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters' convention last year, announced, "America is the most religious nation on earth," and received a standing ovation. Think of prayer in public schools. It doesn't matter.what god we worship. As Eisenhower said, you have to have religion at the bottom of civil society; without it there's no morality, law, etc. "You have to have religion-and I don't care which one it is." As long as we have school prayer, does it matter if a Mormon prays, or a Buddhist? We would like a Christian prayer in there, if possible, but we don't need to pray in the name of Christ. The word "God" has no content in America anymore! No more content than it had for the Athenians. That is why Paul wanted to fill the category of the "unknown god" with his content. We must recover the doctrine of God in our society. People have no idea who God is. J.1. Packer's book Knowing God was such a rare exception to what is most often found in evangelical literature. "By 'God' most Americans refer to a general sense of good and happiness in the world," according to The Day America Told the Truth. Ask the average Christian to define the biblical portrait of God and it is difficult for him to do. People can tell you about their real or alleged "experiences" with God, but the objective content of the doctrine of God has been lost. We must re,focus our own preaching, teaching, and reading on recovering and understanding who God is all over again.

What does Paul do to present his biblical doctrine of God? First he told the Athenians that the biblical God is creator of all things, visible and invisible. Now this was not something that either the Epicureans or the Stoics wanted to hear.

They were united in believing that the realm of matter was evil and the realm of

the spirit was good. The best thing one -could possibly do was meditate and break through to a spiritual state where one could focus on heaven and spiritual things, and experience the sublime. And so Paul is being very radical here! He says God created everything, including .the matter they considered evil. The ancient Gnostics, who tried to blend this Greek philosophy with Christian revelation, said that Jesus only appeared to have a human body, he

over both. Instead, we think that God is Lord over religion. So, in order for us to go into music, it must be "Christian" music. We distinguish between "Christian service" and secular work, because we don't really believe that God is the Lord over all areas .of life. His sovereignty extends beyond religion! He doesn't sit around in temples, Paul says, waiting for someone to offer incense to him, or light a candle for him. He is active, engaged

" By 'God' most Americans refer to a general sense of good and happiness in the world. " -from The Day America Told The Truth didn't really have a human body. Similarly, the resurrection of the body was not accepted by Gnostics because the whole idea of salvation was to get away from matter-escaping this world. We have a lot of Gnostics in the evangelical church today. Paul wants the Greek philosophers to realize that God is not a removed deity who set everything into motion and has no contact with everyday experience. No, God is the creator of those things they thought were intrinsically evil.

N

otonly does biblical doctrine declare that God is the creator, but it also declares that He is Lord. Again, pagan dualism insisted that there is a part of creation that is good, created by the "good god;" and another part that is evil, ruled by a "bad god." Here Paul asserts that God is sovereign over everything, even that which is considered evil. God is not only sovereign over the realm of spirit, but matter as well. We often take the pagan view, in that we agree God is sovereign over the realm of heavenly things, so that when we talk about religion and spiritual things we are "talking about God now."

But when we talk about art, politics, culture, or science, then we are not talking about God! How different that.is from the founders of modern science, who came out of the Reformation and said that science was the "second book of God." The Bible tells us why we are here, and science tells us how and when we got here and that these things are complimentary because there is one creator and one Lord

and interested in every aspect of the world he created. Paul stated he gives all men life and breath and everything else.

There is the unity of the race. From one man, one historical Adam, God made an entire race. He has predetermined their times, their existence, their residences, and everything else about their lives. The ¡ Epicureans here are confronted with the personal God who is not removed from human life. It is interesting that many people see predestination as a doctrine that attempts to show the distance between us and God. But here Paul uses the doctrine.to show how close God is to us.

Arminianism is half,way to Epicureanism, or secularism, because it's half,way to the point of saying that God is removed from the process of salvation.

If God is my co,pilot, or partner, with whom I cooperate in the' process of salvation, we are half,way to removing God from the picture. I maintain that if it was good enough for the Apostle Paul to preach God's sovereignty over all of life, it's a good enough doctrine for us to bring back to a culture that is basically deistic on one side and New Age,ish on the other.

God is also the Father. "From man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth, and he has determined the time set for them and the exact places where they should live.

God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live, and move, and MAY/JUNE 1993

•

17

1110dernREFORMATION

have our being, as some of your own poets have said." Karl Barth called man "the pilgrim." God addresses us from the scriptures as pilgrims. Even if we grew up in a wonderful, warm family environment, we are still alone, alienated, and disturbed

Calvin asked if we should begin with the knowledge of God, or the knowledge of ourselves. It doesn't matter which we start with because you can't talk about man without eventually talking about God. Man depends on God to have any meaning

" The world does not need your idea of God; the world ne'eds God's idea of God, and we believe that God has revealed himself in scripture so that any other god is an idol. " because we are pilgrims. Away from God of his existence and to have any definition. we are always alone, even in a crowd. . Again, Paul is emphasizing, against the Paul is telling the Greeks, you are not Epicureans, God's involvement and his alone, for God is so close to you right now nearness. Paul is telling them it is foolish that you could reach out and touch him to worship even the very delicate, brilliant by faith. imaginations of our own hands and minds.

How many times have we heard , "My Paul does not buy into Stoicism either.

He wasn't saying that God was a part of idea of God is ..."? So what?!

The world does not need your idea of nature, because he had just established the sovereignty of the God who God; the world needs God's idea of God, determines history. Nor was he saying and we believe that God has revealed God was a part of history. He is the Father himself in scripture so that any other god of the race, not in the usual sense where is an idol. This means that the god of you have the universal fatherhood of modern Jews is not the same God we God and the universal brotherhood of worship; the god modem Jews worship is an idol. A deity who does not exist in man. He is the universal Father of the race in that we are created in his image, trinity and has not revealed himself in the and no other creature bears his image. person and work of the incarnate second There is a limited sense in which God is person of the holy Trinity, is not the the universal Father of all. We must be biblical God. And Paul is saying that as careful here, because it is not, of course, revelation unfolds, we are responsible for in the sense of adoption for all people. our decision in that moment. No, Abraham did not believe in the Trinity, but he would have if it had been revealed to him. There is an unfolding progression to redemption. When we stand in a particular place in time, we are . responsible for the degree to which God has revealed himself up to that time. That's why Paul says here, "In the past, God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all men everywhere to¡ repent."

It's not enough to have their own idea of God, they must have God's idea of God. I don't want 18

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

any more people in America worshiping God if it's this little god that we've been throwing '. around. Until we give some definition (theology), I don't want anyone embracing the god ,o f American sentiment.

P

aul continues, almost in, the exact words of the Apostle's Creed: '~In Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord" It is time to repent. That is what Paul told them in the Areopagus. In spite of God's nearness and involvement with every detail of your lives, you still don't acknowledge him. A lot of people like to hold a positive view ofgeneral revelation, as though, somehow, people can become Christians as Buddhists. There are many evangelical leaders and spokesmen who are moving in that direction: the "Anonymous Christian," Carl Rahner calls them, the Christian who doesn't know he's a Christian. In fact, he can even be an atheist, says one evangelical leader, but he really is a Christian, even though he doesn't believe in Christ. He's moving in that direction. That's a positive view of general revelation. But Paul shows in Romans chapters one and two that general revelation only has enough power to convict us of our crimes. It does not have the power to lead us to salvation.

That's why Paul says in essence, "You've got to believe my revelation. This is revelation I'm bringing you. You have to accept it. You will not get this from a beautiful night at the Pops concert. You will not get this from reflecting on the beauty of nature. You won't get this from some amorphous religious experience.

You are only going to get this from revelation, which is outside of you.

Whatever lenience God has shown in the past, Paul warns, as far as the content necessary for saving faith, now he requires all men and women to reject their idols and worship the only Way, Truth, and Life. "There is no other name under heaven, by which men may be saved."

We often think of our own situation as unique. Today, we think that pluralism is a new problem, asking, "What do we do about all these people who aren't Christians? .This is a new problem in Christian history." A new problem? It's encountered every time a missionary goes to a foreign land, where Christianity has never been planted, or hasn't been

,

present for centuries. Every time missionaries go there they have had to deal with the fact that these people didn't get up that morning believing that they would go to hell unless they accepted Christ. It is no different for us, and that is hard for us to say. We tum the situation from a mission field into a battle field when we say, "But it shouldn't be like that in America, where we've had the Gospel, where we've sent so many missionaries." To think that America would be the object of Korean missions, which it is now, is a source of incredible humiliation for us. It ~is ultimately an issue of pride. Weare going to have to realize that America is a mission field, not a battle field. Weare not going to take America back-America is lost!

America at its very foundation is exactly where the Athenians were in the Areopagus, worshiping the unknown god along side all the idols they did have time to worship.

It's time to trust Christ. The resurrection is the event which completes the work of redemption. He was crucified for our sins, and raised for our justification.

He is the life everlasting. Paul said, there is judgment at the end of time that is secured by judgment within time. At the cross, God issued his verdict: He who believes in my Son has eternal life, and he who does not believe in him is condemned already. God judged every believer's sin at the cross, buried it in Christ's tomb, and conquered it in Christ's resurrection. To reject God's judgment of Christ in my place, within history, is to confirm God's judgment of me in my own place at the end of history. That's why Paul is using the resurrection here as the confirmation of that fact. The resurrection is the confirmation of the believer's justification, and the unbeliever's judgment. If this man rose from the dead, he can put any kind of spin he wants on the event. If somebody is raised from the dead and says he's coming back the next time, not to save, but to judge, that's a pretty reliable word.

pitiable. Christianity isn't valuable because it helps people. It isn't really valuable because it motivates them to do nice things, nor because it gives them exciting experiences, but because it makes sense of the whole meaning of history.

The resurrection gives weight to this moment in which we are living. It defines the whole purpose of our lives, the whole meaning of human history and human existence. The coming judgment, says Paul, is going to be according to strict justice; either through the imputation of Christ's righteousness which renders us before God as absolutely perfect, or through the perfect standards we think we can live up to. He says in Romans that those who live by the law will be judged by the law, those who do not have the law will be judged by the law written on their hearts.

O

confrontation and stimulating engagement is what our secular contemporaries are looking for from us.

Not pronouncements, not dicta from our papal throne, but engagement, dialogue, discussion, and persuasive arguments.

ur whole faith depends on historical . facts. Historical facts that are just as real as the events of the Civil War. Paul told the Corinthians that if Christ was not physically raised from the dead, then Christians are really stupid and

H

ow about Paul's reception? It was mixed. Some jeered. This is not the sort of testimony you'd see on Christian television, where the guy gets on and says, "Oh, it was a wonderful event! It was very exciting! We had about three people respond. It was just tremendous! The rest jeered. Others said, 'We'll hear you on this later.' It was so exciting." But even if it's not spectacular, even if it's not exciting, and there are no fireworks, it is still evangelism. It is apologetics, and the kingdom of God did in fact advance with Paul's speech. Ironically, we are willing to get jeered for our stand on moral and political issues but we are so ashamed of being jeered for the Gospel that we will take out the offen~ive parts.

What an irony! With Paul, some were intrigued: "We would like ¡ to hear you speak on this subject later." See, direct

1110dernREFORMATION

This must be our effective evangelistic strategy. Our arguments have to be good.

Paul's Mission Do we see the world out there as a mission field, or as a battle field? The answer makes all the difference in the way we approach the world and the people around us. Is our mission as Christians, and was Paul's mission as an Apostle, one of persuasion or one of power? Notice that here, Paul doesn't appeal to power. He hasn't tried to close the Areopagus down for a city,wide boycott because of their unclad statues that need to have drapes put over them.

He doesn't put posters up around town inviting people to attend a public burning of idols. He doesn't even engage in power evangelism, chasing demons or binding forces. Although he was an Apostle, and confirmed the Gospel through signs and wonders, Paul refuses to distract them from the real issue, which is ultimately a war of persuasion-a war of ideas and convictions. We have to recover the fine art of persuasion. Paul had been proclaiming Jesus and the resurrection, arguing daily in the open marketplace.

Don't you love these phrases? Not in the religious places only, but in the open marketplace. The marketplace then, unlike our Safeway or Ralph's, was a place not only for the marketing of fruit and vegetables, but of ideas. It was the natural place where people debated philosophy and politics and religion.

There is no "Christian ghetto" approach.

Paul doesn't pin up posters and say, "Please come to our church for an evangelistic meeting." In Acts 18, where Paul goes to Corinth, we read, "Every Sabbath, Paul used to speak in the

" We speak 'Christian.. ese' because that's comfortable to us.

We have a whole empire of Christian books, tapes, TV, and radio, with a tiny fraction of non.. Christians ever listening. ' , synagogue, trying to persuade both Jews and Greeks." Look at those words: "proclaiming," "arguing," "persuading."

These words have dropped out of the evangelical vocabulary when it comes to missions. Missions elsewhere, yes; but MA YIJUNE 1993

•

19

1110dernREFORMATION

not missions here at home. Because we've lost the fine art ofargument and persuasion, we've turned to other methods that are less intellectually demanding.

Notice Paul's use of secular literature.

He quotes Eratus, Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus." Why doesn't he just read the Bible?

Because Paul didn't hide himself in a comfortable but irrelevant Christian subculture. He enjoyed reading the stuff.

It also built a bridge to those to whom he was to minister. Paul was genuinely impressed with this capital of ancient

-

doing it for ourselves. If we really did put the Gospel first, and if saving souls were as important as we pretend it is, we would push aside all obstacles and dig in to try to understand our culture as best we can.

Instead of putting our ·culture off and fighting our culture, we would be trying to persuade the modem "Athenians" of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Five Theses First, we must recover the proclamation of God's character. Second, we must

"We can't persuade people to embrace Christianity until

we appreciate the strength of that which keeps them

from embracIng · ·It. " culture, idolatry and all. We can't persuade people to embrace Christianity until we appreciate the strength of that which keeps them from embracing it. Until we understand the attraction of the idols, we will never know what arguments will persuade them away from them.

Furthermore, there is much for a Christian to appreciate in pagan culture-its art, architecture, and medicine (anesthesia is nice). There is much in pagan culture that is not directly influenced by Christianity that has value to it, and God is even Lord over that. Those advances continue because of the goodness ofGod's hand. Paul gains their attention by appealing to that which is familiar to them, not by that which is familiar merely to Paul himself. He reaches beyond the core of literature which interests him most, the Torah; and reaches out to them by taking the trouble and the time to get to know and understand their culture.

This is all so simple if you are a missionary, or if you have a missionary background. These things are simply what every missionary does. But we don't think of ourselves as missionaries anymore. We think of ourselves as military soldiers on the American battlefield, and that is our problem . We speak "Christian~ese" because that's comfortable to us. We have a whole empire of Christian books, tapes, TV, and radio with a tiny fraction of non~ Christians ever listening to it happily. We are not doing it for the world, we are 20

•

MA Y/JUNE 1993

recover the proclamation of Christ's person and work. Third, we must recover the art of persuasion. Fourth, we must recover an interest in our culture and our Creed. T .S. Elliot wrote, Just as the supposed intellectuals who regard theology as a special study with which they need not concern themselves, while at the same time the theologians observe the same indifference to literature and art as special studies which do not concern them, so the masses regard both fields as territories of which they have no reason to be ashamed of remaining in complete ignorance. Accordingly, the more serious authors have a limited and even provincial audience, and the more popular authors write for an uncritical and illiterate mob today.

That is what we are seeing, not only in the secular world, but in the evangelical culture as well.

Lastly, we must be the ones to accommodate our language-not our message, but our language. We are doing the opposite: We accommodate our message but not the language. We still speak Christian~ese, we still talk about "living the abundant life", being "fire baptized," or having a "yielded spirit"; language that nobody understands outside of the evangelical world. And yet, we are accommodating the message to the world.

We market the Gospel to the world and

its felt~needs while failing to interact with the culture on its own terms. I'm suggesting that we need to do the reverse.

We need to keep the Gospel intact, but bend over backwards to accommodate our language and our life~styles to that kind of reflection.

I recently entered my bank, and one of the tellers, who I've suspected for some time is homosexual, said to me, "You know, I notice you keep depositing these checks that say Christians United for Reformation. What exactly do you mean by 'Reformation'?" I answered, quickly, so as not to anger the mob behind me in line, "Well, basically, we are trying to get Christianity out of the hands of the TV evangelism business, and back to doing serious stuff." He said, "When I saw 'Reformation' I thought you were against movies and TV and everything. Aren't you talking about a political reformation?" "No," I said, "What we are doing isn't political. It's a theological reformation." "You're kidding ! Well, are you a part of the religious right?" "No. Our issues are not political." "Well, what is your position regarding gays in the military?" "We don't have a position on gays in the military." "You mean, you're a Christian organization, you want a reformation, and you don't have a position on gays in the military?" "No, we don't. It's not about Christ, or restoring the Gospel."

"Well, what's your personal view?" Now the line seems very long and fidgety. I said, "Well, it is a military issue and it ought to be handled in a way that is both fair and good for the military, after all, we have adulterers and people who are living together in the Army." He said, "You know what, you can call my life~style an abomination if you give me the right to co~exist with you like that."

I responded, "Why shouldn't I give you the right to co~exist? I expect the right to co~exist with you, and I am a sinner too." Then he asked for some information about CURE. To date, he has read some of our literature and has said he is working through a lot of issues. Brothers and Sisters, we can handle evangelism two ways. We can view the world as a battlefield, or we can view it as a mission field . I don't think there is any question as to which strategy was selected by the Apostle to the Gentiles. 0

~I

Inode rl1 REFORMATION

God & Other

Law-makers

I

n my opinion, the integration of theology and secular disciplines, or theology and culture, ought to take place if we are to have an impact for Christ in the world today. In this article therefore, we're going to deal with the subject of why law needs theology. And after we've done that, we're going to tum it around and see why theology needs law. As we do this, you'll be picking up apologetic approaches that seem to me to be vital for the effective proclamation of the Gospel in the secular age.

the Natural Law: To live honestly, to harm no one, and to give each one what he actually deserves, or to attribute to each person what is, in fact, his own. In other words, all law and the structure of the state ought to be achieving this sort of thing: maximizing honest living, eliminating the possibility of one person

I

History Shows Law Needs Theology We go back to the classic period of legal theory, which extends from the Greeks on to the 18th century, and during that long period of time, a particular understanding of law existed. This is called Natural Law Theory. What is meant by Natural Law here is that God has built in to human life certain absolute moral and legal standards. There is an innate sense of justice that is given to man and all true law must reflect that innate understanding. The term natural here means that it is already builtin. Now, during those long centuries, the conviction existed that the purpose of a legal system and the purpose of a state was to arrive at justice, to approximate those inner standards of right that people knew to exist. One of the classic illustrations of Natural Law theory is in the Justinian Code. The Justinian Code was the great Christian law code of the 6th century, sponsored by the emperor Justinian, and it gathered together the best of classical Greco~Roman law and it put it into a Christian framework. And at the beginning of the digest, which is one of the parts of the Justinian Code, there is a definition of

modem times, this theory of natural law fell apart. One of the reasons that it fell apart was its own ambiguity and lack of specificity. What exactly did constitute this unwritten law? One of the most horrendous illustrations of the ambiguity can be found on the metal doors leading into the death camp at Buchenwald, one of the two worst death camps of the Nazis during the Second World War. Engraved on the doors going into the camp is this expression: "Each man gets what he deserves." It is the German translation of the third element in the definition of Natural Law in the Justinian Code. In other words, because the nature of what each man deserved was not accurately spelled out, when modem pluralism came on the scene, it became possible to inject into this notion of Natural Law virtually anything that one wanted to. So, the Nazis said, Well, they are J ews­ they go in here and they never come out! But let's go back to the 18th century when the Natural Law theory first unraveled.

harming another, and insuring the proper attribution of resources to those who ought to have them. The Justinian Code epitomizes the understanding of Natural Law over those centuries. It also helps us to see why, even at times when there were absolute monarchs, they weren't absolute, because the expectation was that they would bring about a conformity to the Natural Law. They were under that kind of structure of law that is built into the human heart.

Now, as modem pluralism appeared on the scene, as the unity of Christian

~~:~~iZ:~i~~ by JOHN

n the 18th century and in the decades immediately preceding it, there were political theorists in Western Europe known as "contract theorists." These were people who said that in order to determine the nature of an ideal state, you want to imagine people in a state of nature before the state arose. These people are in a pre~political condition and they will contract with each other to bring about a state, a state that will reflect the Natural Law within them. The unraveling is seen by the fact that different contract theorists came out with totally different views of the state. We have Thomas Hobbes who saw human nature as "nasty, brutish, and short." So, the purpose of the state for him is simply to keep people from eating each other.

Hobbes writes of people who contract with each other to give up all of their rights to one of them, who acts as an absolute ruler. Why must they do this?

Because if they retain any rights or powers of their own whatsoever, they will use them to kill each other. So, the

W. M0 NTGO MERY

MA YIJUNE 1993

•

21

1110dernREFORMATION

idea is that they must be controlled by some political entity that will prevent that. This of course, is the political basis of a modern totalitarianism: People don't know what is good for them. If left to

There are no natural law standards, there is no innate sense of justice-the only law that exists happens to be the law of the land, that is to say, the law that the state brings into existence. Law is a

the Second World War. During the war it appeared that something especially messy was going on, namely, hideous a troci ties- inhumani ties beyond imagining. At the end of the war, the Nuremberg war trials took place to deal with exactly that. The Nazis who were on trial were very satisfied with legal positivism. Why? Because it made it possible for them to say, "Of course you don't agree with us. Of course we did things that you think were wrong, but we operated within the framework of our own legal system, and there is no higher creature of the state, or as John Austin standard by which we can be judged. Our said, "Law is the command of the legal system is internally consistent, we sovereign." If you are in a representative just didn't think that people like Jews democracy, it means law consists of what were genuine persons who deserved legal the congress or parliament passes. Or if protection. The only reason we are on you are in a common law country, where trial is that we lost, and you won!" This in a very real sense law is made by judges forced the prosecution at Nuremberg to in judicial decision, whatever th~judicial . appeal to "higher" standards. Robert decision is, that is the law, and you can Jackson, associate justice of the Supreme never ask any other question about it. court of the United States, one of the You can never say, for example, "It may prosecution team at Nuremberg, in look like law, taste like law, and smell like summing up said this: "We rise above the law, but it is against justice! And therefore provincial and transient, we seek it isn't law at all." You can't say that, guidance, not only from international because there is no longer any higher law, but from the basic principles of standard. H.LA. Hart, who was professor jurisprudence ofphilosophy oflaw, which of jurisprudence at Oxford, said if you try are the assumptions of civilization." Of course, the Nazis were not impressed, to judge the ultimate principle in the legal system, what he called the "rule of they regarded this as rhetorical puffing, recognition," this would be like two trains and nothing more. There is no attempt passing in the night because you would to show where such assumptions of only be able to judge it by another legal civilization come from, or how they can system. Therefore, it could be turned be identified, or how they can be justified. around and the other person could judge That, of course, created a gigantic you. So that is of no consequence. Hans question mark over legal positivism. The Kelson said this at a lecture at the subsequent history of this has been University of California: attempts by secular legal scholars to shore up legal positivism, because they don't think there is any hope of getting It is of the greatest importance to be aware Natural Law theory back into the picture. . that there is not only one moral or political They see that as hopelessly ambiguous, system, but at different times, and within different societies, different moral and just as people have since the 18th century.

, , The integration of theology and secular disciplines, or theology and culture, ought to take place if we are to have an impact for Christ in the world today." themselves, they'll dest~roy themselves.

So, we turn the thing over to someone who presumably can handle the whole business in a better fashion. Hobbes called that leviathan a "mortal god" that controls everything in the state.

In diametric opposition to this we have Rousseau. In his work, The Social Contract, Rousseau argued that man was born free, but that everywhere he is in chains. Now, says Rousseau, we've got to get rid of those shackles. How do we do it? We create a situation in which each individual is able to do "his thing," which is exactly the opposite of Hobbes.

Then John Locke, who had a great influence on the American Declaration of Independence, as a Christian believer, said that man is fallen, but that he is a creature of God. So there is a positive and a negative side. Locke then came up with a theory of limited rights. That is to say, man gives up some of his rights to the state, but there are other rights he must never give up. These are the inalienable rights which he must retain, because if those were man's to give, they would also be man's to take away. The inalienable rights are the ones that the founding fathers believed ought to be guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Of course, that begged the question, who could establish those rights, or be sure that those were in fact inherent to human nature, and that they represented the positive and not the negative side of human nature. All of those questions were left up in the air by the contract theorists, indicating clearly that the Natural Law theory was insufficient.

We come to the middle of the 19th century in which a new philosophy of law replaces Natural Law theory. This approach is known as Legal Positivism, or Realism: 22

•

MA YIJUNE 1993

political systems. These systems come into existence by commands or custom, and if men believe that the personalities who created them, like Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed are inspired, well, they will consider them absolute. But as a matter of fact, there are, there were, and probably always will be different moral and political systems, and therefore the values constituted by them are only relative.

Those positions were set forth before

A

n attempt to help this messy situation comes from John Rawls, probably the greatest political philosopher of our time, who has influenced the whole scope of political philosophy in every country where his great work A Theory of Justice is available. Rawls delivered a lecture sponsored by Amnesty International to try to show the grounding of human rights. Rawls's approach is to go back to those contract theorists. He

1110de rl1 REFORMATION

thinks that he can build up a proper society from man in a pre,political state of nature. What he does is to abstract all the prejudicial, personal quantities from man's activities so that people cannot base their political decisions on their own interests.

He takes away their relative age, their strength, their wealth, and all of that, so as to get them to a point of basic, rational equality. Then they come up with principles of justice and a kind of modem liberal state. .

The problem with this is exactly the problem of the earlier contract theorists: Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke. The problem is that human nature is not purely rational, and people are not going to make purely rational decisions. The decisions people make are based upon the differences that they perceive exist within them. You go to Genghis Khan and you say, "Genghis, what you need is a liberal state." And Genghis says, "Arhhh!" You say, "Now listen, Genghis! We can't bring strength into this. Granted, you are stronger than the average person, but we can't consider a thing like that. That's got to be abstracted from the situation. Genghis then grabs you by the throat, and says, "Really?!"

And he turns you upside down, pounds you into the ground, and proceeds to establish a state in which he can rape and pillage.

To assume that there is this over, arching rationality that everybody ought to conform to is incredibly naive. As the psychoanalysts have pointed out, many decisions that are made are not based on a rational ground anyway. Other things bubble up.

N

Ow, this has been a long, agonizing trip through the history of modem jurisprudence, so what is my point? My point is simply this, that if you want a standard of justice (and you do, otherwise you can't handle the Nuremberg trial problems of the modem world), you are going to have to get it from outside the human situation in order to make sure that it is, in fact, absolute. Water doesn't rise above its own level. Standards that human beings try to create will not rise above the level of the human beings that create them.

Even Rousseau in a fairly sober moment said, "It would take gods to give men laws." You can't derive them by analyzing

human nature, because human nature is a mixed bag. Human nature consists of the original created goodness, but it also consists of the fallen nastiness. Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes were all right, in that they were looking at different aspects of human nature. Even Rawls is correct that there is the rational element. But the fact is, that is not the full picture.

Which elements do you pick in order to establish true human nature? The mixed bag means that you can't derive from an analysis of human nature the ultimate principles that you need. What you do need to solve this problem is standards breaking in from the outside. If they are transcendent, if they are created outside the human situation, they are validated by the very God of the universe, then you can say regarding particular laws, "These are not what they ought to be. These need to be changed and brought into conformity with God's eternal standards."

This is why law needs theology. Only theology can take you to those ultimate standards which are not built up inductively by looking down someone else's throat to find out what's going on inside. Instead, it takes what God has already given as an absolute. The only inalienable rights will have to be rights that God has created, because if man creates them on any level, then man can take them away. That's why law needs theology.

Why Theology Needs Law Now, let's look at the other side of the reversible reaction. Why does theology need law? Because in a pluralistic age you can't just go out, stand on a soap box sporting a long beard and a ¡white robe

in a secular, pluralistic age, if you want to provide absolute standards to a legal system, that you be able to justify them.

O

ne of the greatest skills within the law is the skill of evidence.

Evidence is a central discipline within the law, because legal systems are dispute, resolution systems. When people cannot solve their intractable disputes they go to court, so this can be handled in a fairly civilized manner. Lawyers can be seen as substitutes for the parties, so that instead of the parties bashing themselves over the heads to determine who is the stronger, there then becomes (in substitute) a verbal bashing which makes it possible to resolve the dispute with more pleasant consequences for the society.

In order to resolve disputes in society by a legal system, you've first got to find the facts. Then you bring the law to bear upon the facts. So, lawyers have to have techniques for finding facts. The techniques are the evidential techniques that make it possible to determine the difference between what is fact and what isn't. Theology is not strong in this area.

Theology tends toward proclamation, tends toward the pulpit, raised up above . the level of the humble masses beneath.

The idea is that you simply present the truth, and people are supposed to take it.

Through much of Western history that's exactly the way it went because there weren't any very significant alternatives offered. But now we are in the modem, pluralistic world that caused the breakup of Natural Law theory, and in this modern, pluralistic world, everybody and his brother maintains a different basic understanding of the

"If you want an absolute standard of justice (in order to handle the Nuremberg trials of the modern world), you are going to have to get it from outside the human situation. " and say, "Lo, here are the absolute, divine standards!" People will not accept them simply because you say so; and they shouldn't, because there are all sorts of kooks out there maintaining the same thing. Claiming divine absolutes is a very facile operation. It becomes mandatory

universe. If everybody just shouts at each other or tries to build higher pulpits than the other person, it really doesn't accomplish very much. It becomes necessary to take these viewpoints and arbitrate them to determine where the facts do lie, if anywhere, in these disputes.

MAYIJUNE 1993

•

23

lnode rnREFORMATION That's where the law can help theology, in its method. It can get theology to a more sophisticated and mature view of establishing facts.

Some Illustrations First, law deals with probabilities. It does not deal with absolute certainties or with mere possibilities. The significance ofthis is that in arbitrating diverse religious claims, people invariably expect absolute certainty and/or they will introduce any lame~brained possibility imaginable. Say, for example, you present evidence for Christ in a discussion. A non~Christian asks, "Is that evidence 100% certain?"

Well, no, it isn't, because that evidence is based on observation, and observations can be mistaken. There is the possibility that there might be a problem there, but there is strength to the testimony. The non~Christian responds, "Aha! I've got you! It isn't absolutely certain, and yet, you expect me to make a 100% commitment to this. I will not commit myself 100% unless I have 100% certainty." And you might leave with your apologetic tail between your legs feeling immensely depressed.

But you shouldn't feel depressed at all.

If you operated in terms oflegal reasoning you would be able to deal with that, because absolute certainty is possible only where facts are not in the picture at all! Absolute certainty occurs only in pure mathematics, deductive logic, and tautologies, where the statement has the same predicate as the subject. Those are realms of definition. The minute you enter the realm of fact it is a matter of evidence-that's how courts work!

In a civil case, the judge says to the

certainty, it's moral certainty. There can be reasonable doubts, but there cannot be unreasonable doubts. The doubts that can operate here are in the reasonable realm. .

I

n the case of the resurrection argument, the non~Christian might say, "Listen, isn't it possible that Jesus was a Martian, cleverly dressed in a Jesus~suit, so that he was able to perform miracles like he did.

It's possible isn't it?" In a contingent universe, anything is "possible," but we must look at the evidence. "But it's possible! It's possible, therefore I don't need to accept Christ!"

Suppose that went on in the law. If a murderer is caught with a bloody axe in his hand, and the jury refuses to convict because of the possibility that invisible Martians did it, the courts will not accept nonsense like that in the slightest. The fact of the matter is that you've got to go with the admitted evidence, and you must draw conclusions from that. If you ..:.an take any possibility imaginable, then ofcourse, all logic falls. The whole universe crumbles under those circumstances.

The law of evidence can take us back to reasonable probabilities in handling situations, but what about absolute commitment? When a jury brings in a guilty verdict in a murder case (in a jurisdiction that exercises capital punishment), that murderer will 100% lose his head on the basis of that probabilistic evidence.

This is part and parcel of ordinary life.

When you cross a street you check the probability of getting across safely. It is never 100% because this is an area of fact.

But if the probabilities look good, you go

, 'In a pluralistic age you can't just go out and stand on a soap box with a long beard and white robe, and say, 'Lo, here are the absolute, divine standards!'"

jury, preponderance of evidence will decide the case. Weigh the evidence. If it's 51 % for the plaintiff, he wins. If it's 51 % for the defendant, he wins. In a criminal case, which is much more severe because of the consequences, the jury needs to be convinced to a moral certainty beyond reasonable doubt. It is not absolute 24

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

across the street, and you take 100% of yourself! All that Christianity asks is that we act reasonably in terms of the weight of the evidence in its behalf. And that's not any different from what all realms of life expect. In the case of Christian faith, you are working on the basis of a high level of probability for the evidence that

God was in Christ. You commit yourself to this by adding to the evidence the dimension of faith. Faith jumps the gap between probability and certainty. In terms of the concept of reasoning, you get immense help from the law in the area of theology.

Finally, I'm going to illustrate this by a very concrete instance. A few months ago in London's Inns of Court School of Law, I debated an English rationalist historian, G.A. Wells, Professor at Berbeck College, University of London.

The debate with Wells turned on questions of fact: Was Jesus an historical person? Did his acts really occur, as set forth? Did he really say what they claimed?

And, is this sufficient for making a commitment for eternity?

Wells, of course, answered all of these questions in the negative. I employed a legal style of reasoning to deal with him, and I want to give you several illustrations to show how this all worked. Take the matter of the New Testament manuscripts-How good are the manuscripts ? Wells said the manuscripts are of no value whatsoever because we don't have a sufficient absolute basis for establishing them. Wells needed careful instruction as to how probability works in historical scholarship. We compare the strength of th~ case for the New Testament documents,",w ith the strength for other historical materials which everyone accepts. If it turns o ut that the case for the biblical documents is strOnger than the case for other historical material which everyone accepts, then you cannot logically reject the New Testament documents. They should have been accepted first, rather than rejecting them.

This points out the fact that if this is the situation, in rejecting the biblical documents, it is on some ground other than evidence. Of course, that ground is a moral ground. If these documents are sound, and Jesus turns out to be the Lord God of heaven and earth, you may be in big trouble, and you can no longer function as the god of the universe. You have been demoted and must conform to something.

This is exactly what autonomous man does not want. He wants to run the universe himself. It has been said, first God created us in his image, and ever since, we've been returning the compliment. I was able to show that the

1710dern REFORMATION New Testament documents are immensely better historically than the documents we all accept. The documents of the classical world don't have the same kind of solid bibliographical internal and external evidence in their behalf as the documents of the New Testament. And that means that if we accept the one, we must accept the other. It is obvious we can't throw out our classical knowledge merely to be rid of Jesus Christ. The lawyers who have looked at the New Testament documents have invariably been willing to go with them.

A.N. Cherwin White said, "I don't understand what the higher critics are doing. I compare the evidence for the best known contemporaries of Jesus and particularly the four documents which give evidence for Tiberius Caesar, and I find that all four of these are inferior to the four Gospels in terms of objective, historical criteria. I can't very well get rid ofTiberius, and therefore, I must confront Jesus Christ." Lord Haleshim, the Lord Chancellor of England (retired), came into the faith much like C.S. Lewis, dragged into the kingdom by the shear weight of the evidence. He was involved in a forgery case when he asked himself, could anyone have gotten away with a literary forgery where the N ew Testament was concerned? The answer was absolutely not! Why? Because of the presence of hostile witnesses. These documents were in circulation while people were still alive who had been instrumental in the crucifixion ofJesus. They would not have stood by and allowed that kind of material to circulate without refuting it, if the material had been forged, altered, or even turned into the faith~experiences of the early church. The Jewish religious leaders would have gone after them, hammer~ and~tongs. They never could have pulled it off. Haleshim examines this and says that the only consistent conclusions we can reach are that these documents are worthy of belief.

Take the resurrection itself. Legal reasoning applied to the resurrection is found in Frank Morrison's Who Moved the Stone? Morrison says, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, there must be an explanation for the missing body. There were only three interest groups here: the Romans, the Jewish religious leaders, and the disciples. The Romans and Jewish

religious leaders are not going to move the stone, for it is against their interests.

The Romans did not want more of a fuss, which would have certainly resulted if they had taken the body from its burial place. The Jewish religious leaders would have been the last people on the face of the earth to take the body, because then

Jesus Christ, nobody was present at the moment of resurrection. But Jesus was assuredly dead before he was put in the tomb (Read an excellent 1986 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the examination of the crucifixion), and for forty days after Easter morning he was assuredly alive. He ate

, 'Theologians and Christian believers need to have contact with the disciplines that can help in the defense of the faith. · d ·1n a vacuum. " ApoIogetlcs oes not· eX1st rumors would have started that Jesus rose from the dead. The documents tell us they were worried about this, and they asked the Romans to put the guard at the tomb to prevent it. As for the disciples, they aren't going to steal the body, and then go out and proclaim that Jesus rose from the dead, and get executed for it.

They would not be willing to be executed knowing that what they presented was untrue. There have been many deluded people through the centuries who have been willing to die for things they thought were true that weren't, but that is not the case here. We are talking about people who allegedly knew that what they were proclaiming was false and still went out and died for it.

T

here is a doctrine in legal evidence: "the thing speaks for itself." Let us say that you go to the hospital to have your left leg amputated. So you go under the anesthetic, and when you come out in the hospital room, your left leg has indeed been amputated, but so has your right arm. Now, you were not able to see anything during the operation, but in a case like that, does the burden of proof lay on you to prove that the hospital staff did something they shouldn't have? Not on your life! The thing speaks for itself.

There was negligence, and the negligence was under the sole control of the defendant, and you as the plaintiff were entirely passive. Under those circumstances, the burden of proof shifts, so that it is necessary for the wretched hospital and its staff to show why there is now an extra limb in their supply cabinet.

Now, in the case of the resurrection of

fish and allowed Thomas to touch the nail prints in his hands. This was a physical, concrete resurrection of the same person.

If he was dead at point A, and alive again at point B, the thing speaks for itself, and the burden of proof lies on the person who says, "There ain't been no resurrection!"

The evidence is on your side, not on his.

Well, where does this lead? It leads in the following direction. Christians must do more than just enter into the warm womb of their church. Theologians and Christian believers need to have contact with the disciplines that can help in the defense of the faith. Apologetics does not exist in a vacuum.

The law is one illustration of fields that can be of tremendous help in the defense of the Christian faith. At the same time, all of these fields in their fundamental principles, are in desperate need of absolutes. These fields lack absolutes, and the absolutes can only come from God himself. And these same fields can simultaneously offer bridges by which the Christian faith can demonstrate its factual validity to those who so desperately need it. 0 Dr. John Warwick Mongomery holds eight earned degrees in philosophy, theology and law, and is the author of more than forty books including, History & Christianity, Faith Founded on Fact, Human Rights & Human Dignity, and The Shaping of America.

I Retraction Notice I In the March/April '93 edition of Modern Reformation we described Dr. Stephen Baugh as the assistant editor of Kerux: A Journal of Biblical­ Theological Preaching. However, Dr. Baugh resigned from this position in Nov. 1989.

MA YIJUNE 1993

•

25

1110dernREFORMATION

#\r'~:

Ya)u' Pr~;p!~lr~qjl

TOJ Gi'i~i~; A; D!~t~~l~~ if'

A Crash Course in ' Evidential Apologetics

C

hristian apologetics is the strategy of setting forth the truthfulness of the Christian faith. Its concentration is upon the intellectual vindication of the Gospel as true, and superior to every other intellectual system on the market. The best evangelist may be praised for encouraging people to commit their lives and hearts to Jesus Christ as their sin~bearing substitute, but for many hearers, the scandal of the Christian message (that one cannot save onesselfby works of law, but is in total need of some grand substitute who is able, in their place, to satisfy the awful demands of a completely holy God) is never gotten to.

How so? These hearers are not convinced that the message of the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15 is true-however much it may appeal to their real human need for forgiveness and redemption. The message of Law and Gospel may be attractive, but it has in their minds not yet "passed the bar" of epistemology (the philosophical term for measuring what we legitimately know to be true).

The historical origin of apologetics is to be found in the legal procedures in ancient Athens. The plaintiff brought his accusation before the court. The accused had the right of making a reply (apologia) to that accusation. This reply was an effort to demonstrate the falsity of the accusation.

Hence we have the verb apologesthai (to make reply, to give an answer, to legally defend oneself) and the noun apologia ( the answer given, or the defense made).

The classical example of an apologia is, of course, the famous Apology of Socrates before the Athenian court of law. It is preserved for us in the Dialogues of Plato.

(The social use of the noun "apology" or the verb "to apologize" in the sense of excusing oneself for some miscue or blunder or offense is secondary in classical Greek, although it is the popular meaning in 26

•

MAY/JUNE 1993

contemporary English practice.)

Switching to the N ew Testament usage, both the verb and the noun occur, but are never rendered as "to make an apologetical defense" or "to make an apology." Rather, our translations will translate "to make reply" or "to give an answer" or "to make one's defense."

And there is considerable apologetic activity recorded in the New Testament.

For example, on numerous occasions Jesus was accused of some fault by the religious leaders of his day, and to this accusation our Lord made his defense (apologia)­ even though it is not named as such. One thinks of Matthew 22 where three leading questions were asked of Jesus by the three leading Jewish sects of that day. In each instance, Jesus made reply (apologia). Or think of the Apostle Paul as his activity is described in the closing chapters of the Book of Acts. The Apostle defended himself before the mob in Jerusalem (Acts 22:1 ff.), before the Jewish council (Acts 23: 1 ff.), before Felix (Acts 24: 1 ff.), and before Festus and Agrippa (Acts 26:1 ff).

I

n the case of the apologists of the first two centuries, we see focus made especially on the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in the person and work of Jesus Christ and in the salvation he wrought by his death. And apologetics "comes of age" with the great St. Augustine. Augustine saw to the bottom of the issue, namely, that the fundamental issue is Christian defense of the Gospel where the truthfulness claim is made, and the reality of the possession of a true knowledge of God. There are apologetic elements in most of Augustine's writings, but his masterpieces are The City of Qod and The Confessions. In wrestling with the

problems of the truth of Christianity and the problem of true knowledge underlying Christian faith, Augustine laid the foundations of Christian apologetics.

The Plight of the Non-Christian You may have been a Christian for years. If so, God be praised for it. But I ask you to think back to before you were. Or, if that is for some reason impossible, walk with me for a moment or two in the moccasins of the contemporary pagan.

N ow by "pagan," I am not referring to a person's moral behavior. I simply mean what the Christian ancients understood by the word "pagan," viz. someone who rejects the historic Christian Gospel of Christ. I use the term "pagan" in this sense only (and so, I think, should all of us) . Moral evaluation has virtually no place in Christian apologetics for the simple reason that the Christian is a sinner before the Ten Commandments in the same sense that the pagan is a sinner before the Ten Commandments.

To divide the world into the categories "sinners" and "Christians" without an understanding that the Christian's righteousness is only the imputed righteousness of Christ is to witness not to Christ, but to our own self~ righteousness, our Phariseeism, our "prissiness. " One critic has said that our century is characterized by the words "secular" and "pluralistic." And so it is. We think not in biblical categories today (as did people of a prior generation), but in secular ones-period. And our secularized culture is also characterized by the word "pluralistic." That is, many religious positions exist side~by~side in our twentieth~century western world­ positions which logically may all be false, but cannot all be true.

I asked you a moment ago to imagine what that would be like for you if you were uncommitted to any religious persuasion whatever. What would you make of it, if in the same morning on some California campus you were confronted by the Mormons, the Christians, the Hari ~ Krishnas, the Atheist Student Fellowship and others? It makes one think of the movie Airplane, in

by ROD ROSENBLADT

'nodern REFORMATION which the pilot was trying to get to his plane, only to have to run the gauntlet of religious people on either side of the airport walkway. His answer was a relatively simple one. By use of his training in the marshall arts, he simply kicked, punched and rolled all of them out of his path!

Attractive as that sounds, it is not really a solution to the pagan's problem.

He legitimately wonders 'how he would be able to adjudicate that a given religion's truth-claim was true vis-a-vis conflicting claims. How would you solve that problem? Would you try to judge according to aesthetic standards, the most beautiful religion being the one to which you would commit yourself? But what guarantee do we have that beauty is the test for truth? Perhaps, if there is a God, he is worse than Descartes' "evil genius"-not only planting confusion in our minds at every moment, but worse!

Perhaps he is a cosmic sadist and the answer to the problem of evil is that cancer is for his amusement! If this is true, then choosing a religion because of its beauty would be worse than foolhardy.

But perhaps you could choose by religious experience, electing for that position which seemed to most easily offer inner ecstasy. (One could imagine choosing between representatives of the Trinity Broadcasting Network and today's followers of Timothy Leary who would liturgically partake of Peyote !) How about that option? Blissful as it would be, it would hardly solve the epistemological question: Have I committed to a religion that accurately reflects the way things are in the universe? Pentecostal ecstasy and its secular equivalent (drug-induced bliss) finally both avoid the question of truth.

Or perhaps one would commit to a religion on the basis of its internal consistency (coherence) . This option is certainly more philosophically sophisticated than those which we just considered, but still inadequate because of its naivety. That is, one can invent consistent positions which are out of touch with the nature of the objective universe. Consistency may be desirable, but as a primary test for truth it is hardly adequate. There are relatively coherent positions which are just weird, but others which approach the demonic!

Resistance to the Apologetic Enterprise To the amazement of many apologists, the most vigorous opposition to their work comes from the church. The nature of the objections varies, but objections they are.

From old liberalism we heard that science was the way to understand the world of fact and theology should just listen to science. Most liberals believed that Christianity is not basically a religion of propositional, objective truth, but a

as the incarnation, death and resurrection ofChrist. With Protestant existentialism (R. Bultmann), the saving events of scripture were moved even farther from the possibility of objective verification.

For Bultmann, the "core" of Christian faith does not center in historical events at all. Rather the center is the existential experience of salvation in the present (a sort of Heideggerian message with lots of New Testament word studies to demonstrate that Heidegger's atheistic existentialism and the New Testament

" To divide the world into the categories 'sinners' and 'Christians' is to witness not to Christ, but to our own · hteousness, our Ph· · .." seIf..rIg ariseeIsffi-our prISSIness. way of life focusing on feeling (Schleiermacher) and social action (the Social Gospel) . To make matters worse, the old liberal believed that Christianity was not qualitatively different from the other religions of the world ("many roads leading to the same God"), and so, the Christian was not called upon to try to convince others of Christianity's truth­ claims.

W

hat of the position that succeeded old liberalism, Barth's Neo­ orthodoxy? Barth was the one largely responsible for the demise ofold liberalism, but actively objected to the apologetic enterprise. He tried to maintain the objective, factual character of the saving events in scripture, but also tried to "wall them off' from the possibility of secular examination. Using the category of "meta­ history" or "supra-history," Barth maintained that the miraculous events of scripture were not subject to the canons of ordinary historical inquiry. In later years, he switched to saying that validation of the miraculous events of scripture cannot be apart from prior belief in them. But both points of view arrive at the same point, anyway. Neither scripture nor the saving events recorded in scripture can be objects of "proof' to the unbeliever. Rather, "faith" (or, blind acceptance) is the way to know that the Bible is God's word or that the resurrection took place.

But at least Barth tried to maintain the factual, objective character of such events

writers were really saying the same thing).

Verification is only by means of present experience of "encounter" with the so­ called "Christ of faith." Both Barth and Bultmann were convinced that objective, factual investigation of the Bible would destroy confidence in its truthfulness, so each (in his own way) removed scripture from scrutiny.

What about the Christian pietists?

Ironically, their position is similar to that of the radical critic, Bultmann! See if these words of piety sound familiar: "Christianity has to do with the heart and behavior-not with propositional truth and the mind." "The key thing is experiencing Christ in a saving way."

"The primary hurdle to 'getting saved' is thinking too much." "All of us seek to justify ourselves by use of our minds and by 'head knowledge.'" These are but echoes of Bultmann's statements.

What about those who rock-ribbedly hold to "the faith once for all delivered to the saints," who hate all forms of liberalism and any dilutions of the once­ given faith? Surely, those who hold to a high view of biblical inspiration and a N icene Christology would always cheer the defense of the Gospel as true?

Unfortunately, no. The so-called "orthodox" camp has often been occupied by what are called "fideists." Amazing as it sounds, some of these fellows go so far as to say that the non-Christian, from his non-biblical viewpoint cannot even rightly interpret secular facts (e.g., the MAYIJUNE 1993

•

27

lnodernREFORMATION chemical composition of water, or the material stress factors necessary to build a safe bridge!).

The "fideist" (literally, one who has "faith in faith," who holds that one must first blindly believe before one can know or rightly understand revelational truth)

theme of Christmas, put the matter of John 1 nicely in a hymn: "He whom all the universe cannot enclose/Doth now at Mary's breast repose." Or think of Luke who says that Jesus "made clear by many and manifest proofs his identity." Again, the Apostle John reports Jesus once saying,

" The fideist (literally, one who has 'faith in faith'), says that it is not only dumb to attempt to defend the truth of the Gospel, it is actually unspiritual to do so. " says that it is not only dumb to attempt to defend the truth of the Gospel; it is unspiritual to do so--an insult to the Spirit ofGod and a substituting of human wisdom for the Spirit's converting work.

God the Holy Spirit is the one who converts; we are called to simply preach the Gospel-anything more is unspiritual.

Where does one begin debating these positions? First, it must be said that we all know better. Christian and non,Christian alike are capable of interpreting "secular" facts, and daily demonstrate this. We all can agree concerning the chemical makeup of water, or about the material stress coefficients necessary to build a safe bridge. These brethren, for all practical purposes, undercut one of the basic tenets of the New Testament: the incarnation of Christ. The eternal logos ("Word") became flesh at the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria. So' called "spiritual truth" is linked here with the ordinary, the empirical, the historical, and the plain. Any system which tries to divorce "revelational truth" from "ordinary" or "secular truth" is fundamentally misguided. The incarnation of Christ stands against all attempted splits. That is, if one cannot come to understand something of revelational truth by ordinary means, it is like saying that the fact of the incarnation is somehow different from "secular facts." But that is exactly what John 1: 1,14 denies! If God really became man in Jesus Christ, then his entrance into the human sphere is open to examination by non, Christian and Christian alike, and the honest doubter will find compelling evide~ce in support of Christ's claims.

Luther, who was at his best with the 28

•

MA YIJUNE 1993

"If you do not believe my words, believe me for the sake of the works that I do; they bear witness of me." John's use of the word semeion (signs) makes it perfectly clear that Jesus' miraculous activity was there in order to convince those who did not yet believe that he was the promised supernatural Christ-not those who already did.

The Basics of an Evidential Defense of the Gospel The biblical basis of an evidential approach to the defense of the Gospel was just alluded to. But let us consider a few additional examples.

Think of Doubting Thomas. He had said to the other disciples, "Until I see the nail prints in his hands and thrust my finger into the wound in his side, I will not believe!" The Lord Christ would have had every right to chastise Thomas for this, but in fact did not. Instead, he graciously offered exactly what Thomas had demanded as concrete, empirical evidence for his deity. As Dr. Montgomery has described the matter, "Though Christ told Thomas that it would have been better for him to have believed without seeing (i.e., that he should have believed the testimony ofhis fellow disciples who had already seen the risen Lord), this rebuke was not given as a substitute for the proof Thomas needed. Rather, it followed both Jesus' appearance to Thomas and Thomas' affirmation of Jesus' deity. Only after Jesus brought Thomas to faith through graciously giving him evidence of his resurrection did he point out to him where his faith had been lacking." (Montgomery,

Lutheranism and the Defense of the Christian Faith p. 9).

Or think of the story of Jesus healing the paralytic. The paralytic's friends had brought him to where Jesus was, hoping that he would heal their friend.

But the crowds were so dense that they could not get through them while carrying a cot. They came up with the idea of going to the roof, taking off some of the tiles, and lowering their friend's cot down into the room where Jesus was. Jesus spoke immediately to him: "Be of good cheer, my son. Your sins are forgiven." The Jewish religious leaders in the back of the room grumbled, "Who can forgive sins but God?" (In this they were, of course, correct!) Jesus, knowing their question asked, "Which is easier to say? 'Your sins be forgiven,' or 'Rise, take up your bed and walk'?"

Note that the question was not, "Which is easier to do?" but "Which is easier to say?" The answer is that it is easier to say, "Your sins be forgiven," because that act is, by its very nature, invisible.

But, our Lord went on, " .. .in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgiven sins, I say to you, 'Rise, take up your bed and go home.' And the man rose, took up his bed and returned home praising God." Jesus linked the invisible and non' empirical (the forgiveness of sins) with the empirical, concrete and testable (the healing of the paralytic's body).

There is no split here between the so' called "spiritual" and the empirical

O

ne of the ways that the apostles and the earliest Christians argued that Jesus was the Christ of Israel and the Savior of the world was by appeal to Old Testament prophecies which were fulfilled in him. The earliest Christians, in presenting the Gospel as true, spoke to their Jewish brethren in terms of Isaiah's prophecies or of Psalm 22 being supernatural, predictive prophecies of what had just been fulfilled in Jerusalem (and in Bethlehem before that). And we need to do a little work on that one, too. It has always been a major arrow in the quiver of Christian presenters.

Another integral aspect on an evidential approach to the defense of the Gospel centers on miracle, particularly the miracles performed by our Lord, and even more specifically, his bodily resurrection from the dead. And

1nodern REFORMATION why is this such an integral part of the case? Very simply because he pointed to these events as the ultimate verification of the truth of his claims concerning himself.

"If you do not believe My words, believe me on the basis of the works that I do. They bear witness of Me." "Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days."

"But just as Jonah was in the belly of the leviathan for three days, even so (kathos) shall the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days."

The apostles made use of the argument from the resurrection of Christ with regularity. It was Peter who implored all of us to engage in apologetics when the non,Christian demands it: "But always be prepared to give a reasoned defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is within you ..." (1 Pt. 3: 15).

And it was the same Peter who spoke of being an eyewitness to Christ's majesty and his resurrection from the dead. Think of his words, "We have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his ma jesty." The key element in the apostles' defense of the Gospel was miracle, and particularly Jesus' resurrection. Our defense should be no less centered on this.

And think of the practical advantages of this. As I mentioned, belief in Christ's resurrection is central in Christian belief.

In defending the truth of the Gospel from this vantage'point, one is returning to one's evangelistic task in defending the fact of Christ's resurrection; there is no split between "evangelism" and "apologetics" here.

In the evidential case we are going to have to deal with the matter of the historical reliability of the Gospels. It is unavoidable in an evidential case. But, we are lucky. Today, the smorgasbord of what is available (and always increasing) is evidence to the truth of the fact that the primary documents of Christianity were early written, and there was no time to "fiddle" with them. Some have dated Mark in the mid,50s. The earlier the

dates of these books, the harder it would have been for the followers of Christ to tamper with them. It is convenient to say, "I don't have to come to terms with the reports of Christ's resurrection from the dead, because actually, Luke was written by a drunken French monk in 800 A.D." You really could avoid the claim that way. Unfortunately for the non, Christian, he can't escape through that route. The dating of these documents is integral to the case.

In doing this, notice, we must not fall prey to that which we are so easily seduced into-that is, extra,biblical evidences, whether it is the Shroud, Josephus, etc. First of all, we should build the case for the historical integrity and reliability of what is in the Gospel accounts. We must ask the unbeliever to imagine cutting the beautiful leather off his Bible, trimming the gold edges off, darkening the red letters of Jesus' words, and tearing it into separate books. The non,Christian has it in mind that it is a "holy book," and that one must not treat this as if it were a compilation of sources from the pens of Paul or Peter or the other Apostles. We must get him to imagine' that these are historical reports, or letters, written very "early on in the game." Also, we must evaluate them in the same way we would a manuscript of some other secular or antique work. We must help the non,Christian to see that we are not viewing the Bible as a gold,edged, leather, bound book let down out of heaven on a string. Sometimes the orthodox, high doctrine of inspiration can bite us in ways we do not expect. What we want to deal with is whether this particular letter, or that particular biography, is dated early, and whether it was written by people who

are asking is for him to employ faculties he uses in his everyday life.

Application at Rockwell Cafeteria Most apologetic conversations center on one or two of about eight or nine questions. Paul Little summarizes these nicely in his book, Know Why You Believe.

There is no high,level degree required to understand this material at all. Remember Peter's words quoted earlier about always being ready to give a defense. This doesn't take a master's degree or doctoral work. It can be learned by the average layman without committing to years of study. The major problem is that since the same questions are answered over and over again, we simply "tune out."

The temptation is to leave the conversation, because we've answered this same question so many times before.

A

nother obvious advantage of approaching the defence of Christian truth by examining evidence is the connection with science. The possibility ofempirical evidence is always attractive to a scientist. Now, I spent three of my four baccalaureate years in pre,medical studies. That meant that I lost the advantage of many of you in the humanities-while many of you were learning the history of the West, I was inhaling formaldehyde fumes while dissecting a cat or dogfish. Evidential argumentation touches someone in the field of science because things of the past are legitimate sources ofscientific inquiry.

There was a big fight in the positivist movement over this. That is, some said, "Something is only science if it is repeatable." Then, someone asked, "What about geology?" Brows furrowed,

"Any system which tries to divorce 'revelational truth' from

'ordinary/secular truth' is fundamentally misguided. The

incarnation of Christ stands against all attempted splits."

were eyewitnesses of the events.

This is done in the same way we would examine any other work coming to US from antiquity. Notice, we are not asking the non,Christian to employ a "religious method" in order to arrive at the answer to the religious truth question. What we

until finally the pOSltIVlSt relented, "Alright, it's in." Then someone asked, "What about history?" And another fight ensued. But with geology in, there was no stopping history. That is, if you have dependable eyewitness accounts describing the macro,facts of what took MAYIJUNE 1993

•

29

lnodern REFORMATION place in front of them, and recorded them with any degree of accuracy, the one who is a true scientist will agree that this opens the door for him to evaluate the truth claims of the facts on the grounds of probability.

An evidential approach links "Christian" knowledge with knowledge as we have access to it in the rest of our lives (remember what ¡it means that "...the Word became flesh"). This is no esoteric approach-what we are asking of the non~Christian here is to take the same approach that he would use to discover whether John Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 or whether he actually slipped on a banana peel in the town ofCrankshaft, Oklahoma on Halloween Eve, 1974.

Conclusion Now, what is the upshot of all this?

Obviously, the recommendation that we do evangelism in an evidential style.

It will require some reading (it's finite).

Apologists of a generation ago, had only the works of C.S. Lewis (which came slow to America), Wilbur Smith's Therefore Stand (still in print), the new work of a Baptist, Bernard Ramm, and the books of Edward John Carnell. We, though, live in a day when we have a plethora of apologetic material in print, available at variegated levels.

The other conclusion to all this is that we are the ones called to evangelize.

We don't get to say, "Let my pastor do it-he went to seminary." Fortunately, apologetics does not require a degree of any sort. But we must start in our parishes, teaching our children, correcting their curricula, holding classes, etc. All this is do~able. Weare not called to quit our jobs to begin reading the necessary materials. Much of this is very straightforward. It is a finite task, and can be accomplished if we start in the context of Sunday schools. I recommend it, to the evangelization of the world in our generation, and to the glory of the name of the saving Christ. 0 Dr. Rod Rosenbladt is the professor of theology at Christ College Irvine, and is a contributing author to Christianity for the Tough Minded, The Agony of Deceit, and Christ Th e Lord.

Those Who Have Gone Beyond Culture Wars he most respected non~Moslem group in Egypt, I understand, is the Presbyterian Church. When I asked an Arab missionary why this was so, he told me that over a century ago, the Presbyterian missionaries came in and built schools and hospitals, earning their right to discreetly witness to Christ. To 'this day, Presbyterians have a good reputation in Egypt even while most other Christian groups are viewed with suspicion and the missionary work continues, though without the fanfare often associated with crusade evangelism.

Reflecting on this missionary strategy, I wondered how we might work in the United States at the end of the twentieth century if we really believed it was a pagan land hostile to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

By several measures, this is precisely what America is, but the problem is that the church in America today doesn't seem to get the picture: We are still living, acting, fighting, and demanding as though ours was a Christian culture that needed moral repair, rather than realizing that it is a post~Christian culture that needs to hear the gospel all over again...for the first time. What if we went into the office tomorrow as missionaries to a pagan people~ group that was hostile to the "strange ideas" we held? How would that affect your patterns of thought, your ways of relating, and your behavior? Ever since the earliest days of the church, the strategy has been clearly laid out: "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody" (1 Thes. 4: 11). History seems to vindicate the wisdom of that strategy.

Instead of organizing boycotts, the early Christians endured forms of persecution and hardship about which modern American Christians, contrary to the

T

hype, know absolutely nothing. The church at Smyrna sent out a circular letter informing the Christian community of martyrdom in their area: "Cut by scourges until the anatomy of the body was visible, even to the veins and arteries, they endured everything." As each martyr watched the one in front go to his or her death, the executioner would ask, "Are you a Christian?", to which the Christians replied, "By the will and gift of God, I am a Christian," Even in the fatal answer these brothers and sisters offered the gospel to their oppressors.

I

n his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin carefully explains the gospel and tries to disperse the false impressions of Christianity that have put the Jews off, Instead of listing the Jewish persecutions of Christians, Justin has an eye to winning Trypho, not alienating him with the language of warfare , Trypho replied, "This is what amazes me .. .Moreover, I know that your teachings, written down in the so~called Gospel, are so wonderful and so great that in my opinion no man can keep them; for I have read them with interest.

But this is what we cannot grasp at all: That you want to fear God and that you believe yourselves favored above the people around you, yet you do not withdraw from them in any way or separate yourselves from the pagans; that you observe neither festivals nor the sabbaths; that you do not circumcise; and further, that you set your hopes on a man who was crucified, and believe you will receive good things from God in spite of the fact that you do not obey his commandments" (10.1.2). I wonder if Trypho could be in such wonder and awe about the message we preach today. In fact, if you stopped the average person on the street and asked him or her what an

by MICHAEL HO RIO N

30

•

MA YIJUNE 1993

"

evangelical was, I would be surprised if the distinctives Trypho listed would roll off the person's tongue. And as for the Christians being different only in their belief, hope, philosophy of life, and distinctive commitment to service, Tertullian offered a similar defense: "Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of mankind by country, speech, or customs. They do not live'in cities of their own; they do not speak a special language; they do not follow a peculiar manner of life ... They take part in everything as citizens and endure everything as aliens ... They have a c~mmon table, but not a common bed...They obey the established laws, but through their way of life they surpass these laws ... We are a united body. We are bound together by a common religious conviction, by one and the same divine discipline and by the bond of common hope...We pray for the postponement of the end. We gather to bring to mind the contents of Holy Scripture as often as the world situation gives us a warning or a reminder ... Even though we have a kind of cash box, the money does not come from admission fees, as when one buys membership or position in a society. That would be like 'buying religion'" (Second Apology, 10).

Further, abortion was unheard of among the early Christians: "Some women destroy the unborn child in their womb by taking drugs, thus committing infanticide before they are delivered" (Minucius Felix, Octavius 31.1,5). An interesting piece of information, especially at a time when evangelicals pour their energies into banishing abortion from society while the practice thrives in their own churches (1 in 6 abortions is performed on an evangelical Christian). The Christians were prepared by the apostle's warnings that they would be wrapped up with Christ, not only in his benefits, but also in his suffering, and this freed them from fighting their cause as a special interest group. Not only were they not fighting for dominance through power; they were not even fighting for their own survival. And yet, in the irony of it all, the did in fact gain dominance through persuasion and the remarkable character of their lives.

They lived quiet and productive lives, as Paul had counseled, making friends and working hard in their communities, and giving testimony by word and life to the

liberty of Christ in the face of pagan bondage. Justin told the Gentiles, "We, more than all other men, are your helpers and allies for peace" (First ApologyI2).

In a letter, one saint wrote, "Happiness does not consist in ruling over one's neighbors or in longing to have more than one's weaker fellowmen. Nor does it consist in being rich and in oppressing those lowlier than oneself...On the contrary, anyone who takes his neighbor's burden upon himself, who tries to help the weaker one in points where he has an advantage, who gives what he has received from God to those who need it, takes God's place, as it were, in the eyes of those who receive. He is an imitator of God. In this way, though living on earth, you will know with awe that there is a God who reigns in Heaven, and you will begin to proclaim the mysteries of God." In other words, the radical discipleship of the early Christians was the strategy, as they sought to out,serve, out,think, out'love and out' live those who sought to dominate.

Theophilus of Antioch observed, "With them justice is lived out, laws are kept, and faith is witnessed to by deeds. They, confess God. They consider truth supreme.

Grace protects them. Peace shields them.

The holy Word leads them. Wisdom teaches them. Life is decisive. God is their King" (To Autolcycus Book III. 15).

W

ell, did the strategy payoff? You bet. In fact, it paid off so well that it Christians had won, by their excellence, the leading positions in society and it was now politically expedient to be a Christian.

Even the emperor converted. It was this success that led to the toleration and then official endorsement of Christianity by Constantine, commencing the enterprise of Christendom. What we are experiencing now is the collapse of this fusion of western culture and Christian symbols, words, and ideas. It is not Christianity, but the medieval synthesis, that has run out of steam. We are back, it would seem, to the crossroads faced by those early Christians: not "How do we keep a Christian empire going?", nor, "How do we get it back?", but "How do we bring the gospel to the nations, including our own pagan land?" We are back to first things, back to the mission,field.

In what remains of this article, I want to trace some examples of missionaries

1110dernREFORMATION

(whether called to the foreign mission, field, or called by God to a secular vocation) who give us clues for our own strategy in the modern and postmodern world.

David Livingstone (1813,1873), a Scots Calvinist missionary, came from a hard,working home and attended night school to obtain a general education, eventually pursuing medicine and theology. Serving under the London Missionary Society, Livingstone set out for South Africa, from which he launched a celebrated career throughout Africa as a missionary, explorer, and geographer of uncharted territory. All of these he conducted with distinction. One biographer writes, "He held to his early belief in the ultimate unity of all truth, biblical and scientific. But a mastering motive for his journeys was that they could help drain 'the open sore of Africa,' the Arab slave trade." Livingstone was convinced that, by developing indigenous agriculture, along with preaching the gospel, the Africans could gain independence from colonial exploitation.

"Livingstone sawall his work in the context of a providential plan in which gospel,preaching, the increase of knowledge and the relief of suffering marched together" (A. F. Wells). Clearly, his sense of urgency regarding the kingdom of God, advanced through the preaching of the gospel to all nations, was related to, though not confused with, his passion for cultural change, as indicated in his journal: "I place no value on anything I have or may possess except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. If anything will advance the interests of the kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping it I shall most promote the glory of him to whom lowe all my hopes in time and eternity." Heroism"whether that of Livingstone, or that of the scores of anonymous first century martyrs, demands a set of convictions worth dying for, which is probably why Tom Wolfe told TIME magazine, "Ours is not an age that is likely to produce great heroes."

William Wilberforce (1759,1833), as a member of Parliament for 45 years, threw himself into the struggle to abolish the slave trade after being converted to what he called a "real Christianity," MA YIJUNE 1993

•

31

1110dernREFORMATION

which focused on Christ and redemption.

Note, once again, that, far from discouraging him from involvement in social issues, Wilberforce's conversion to evangelical faith created a fresh sense of urgency and mission in all areas of life.

The formal abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 was due to Wilberforce's determined leadership and he then moved to secure its abolition in ' Europe and America as well. The so~called "Clapham Sect," of which Wilberforce was a member, was a powerful group of evangelicals in Parliament who met regularly to pray, read Scripture, and seek wisdom in understanding their important tasks. In addition to abolishing the ¡ slave trade, Wilberforce was instrumental in reforming legislation concerning child labor laws and the state of the prisons. In contrast to many Christian activists today, especially those who are not called to political life, D. W. Bebbington observes, "Wilberforce influenced prominent politiians quietly and persuasively~~particularly his friend William Pitt, who was Prime Minister 1783~ 1801 and 1804~06. He used his chann, tact and eloquence in a political life to which he was sure he had been called by God."

I

ronically, it was not the so~called "liberally~minded,"

Enlightenment~

oriented secularists who first championed the abolition of slavery, but those with clear Reformation convictions about God, humanity, redemption, and the kingdom of God and culture. In fact, as British historian, Christine Bolt, has documented, it was orthodox Calvinist vicars in The Netherlands who first sounded the alarm at the Dutch slave~trade (Anti~Slavery, Religion and Reform, p.83). "The only nineteenth~century Dutch mass~movement which was directed toward change," according to Bolt, was a movement inspired by "a new Calvinist revivalism among the Dutch Protestants ... " (p.94). In the United States, it was evangelical revivals during the last century which led to the abolition of slavery and child labor, and the right of women to vote. While much of evangelical activism, reflecting the increasingly Arminian theology of the revivals, increasingly confused moral crusades with the advance of the gospel, still it was this tradition of wedding personal and public life that made possible many of the freedoms 32

•

MA Y/JUNE 1993

and rights which secularists enjoy and often seek to deny to others.

In the arts, of course, ever since the Reformation itself, evangelicals were leaders in music (J. S. Bach, G.F. Handel, Mendelssohn) and painting (the Dutch Baroque was inspired by Calvinism, and the German by Lutheranism, with such artists from both camps as Rembrandt, Durer, Cranach, Holbein, and many others). They were the leading writers of the Golden Age and even in countries, like France, where they were a tiny minority, Reformation folks founded the societies of modern science in addition to founding schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and reviving Oxford, Cambridge, and Heidelberg. In fact, it is ironic that evangelicals have been at the front of the chorus, shouting at the "cultural elites." There is a noticeable suspicion on the part of many conservative Christians today that friends in culture are most likely to be found on the level of "popular culture." After all, even when we build our own sub~culture, we model it on the pop~ culture and pop~styles and pop~stars of "low culture." Our services side with the TV culture rather than the Ivy culture. So we are sure the "secular humanists" are operating their headquarters out of the universities and the opera houses simply at least in part because of our suspicion of "high culture" and familiarity with popular culture.

But the evangelicals in other periods of our history were leaders in nearly every field, like those early Christians who served their way to positions ofleadership.

Hardly shunning the "cultural elite," they were the "cultural elite"! The leaders of the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Timothy Dwight were not only evangelists and missionaries; Edwards was president of Princeton, Whitefield was Oxford~trained, and Dwight was president of Yale. In fact, according to one encyclopedia, Edwards was the greatest intellectual America ever produced. Can you imagine that being said of an evangelist today?

These institutions did not lose their commitment to Christian truth because they were taken over by "godless, secular humanists," but because great Christian thinkers began to come in fairly short supply and an interest in success, numbers, and soul~business replaced the earlier

integration of heart and mind. The average Christian could read, and did so.

He or she could defend the Christian essentials and explain why he or she embraced them with more .objectivity than a personal testimony of "how it worked for me." Are We going to use "come out and be separate" as a command to vacate secular society and then castigate those with whom we disagreed for relegating us to a reservation? Our anti~intellectual, anti~institutional, anti~

doctrinal, and anti~world stance, in sharp contrast to the witness of our forebears, has prepared us for constant conflict and warfare in the secular city.

N

evertheless, even today there are people like Chuck Colson, W aterga te co~consp ira tor ~ turned ~prison reformer; Wayne Alderson, president of Pittsburgh Steel, whose Christian convictions led him to transform a company on the brink of management~ labor wars into a productive environment where both worked together for a common aim. There have also been Christian people like Karen Peterson, a corporate executive who provided a "jump start" and training to a homeless man and gave him a job in the mail room.

The point of all of this is not to cast gloom and doom on our age, in sharp contrast to supposedly "golden" eras gone by, but is rather to remind us that there are models to be followed for positive engagement in our world, without confusing or separating the gospel and works, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of culture.

Finally, God uses not only the folks who make it into history books, but everyday people. In fact, "not many wise, noble, etc., but God has chosen the foolish of this world to confound the wise; the weak to confound the strong," so that he gets all the credit (1 Cor. 1).

We change the world most, not by loud protests and demands for our piece of the pie, as though Christianity were struggling along with NARAL and the NRA for its power in Washington, but by simple, daily faithfulness .in our calling and by being always ready to give to everyone an answer for the hope we have. Our pagan neighbors are living up to their convictions. Are we? 0

­

Inodern REFORMATION

/'

,

'

'.

~

I<

N:()::· pf~~~::.Jt()r.·:· rl':ij·ih:• • · bY·l1ti~{d.~P :· · welti·: '.': . "'~

""~'

...

.

,-

.,' .

:.":

.. "j~'n';;tr~o;4~;ftf~slii~';,:rb~n: th~· th;~I~~~~1;"h~lna, tornedf,ili:c~l~: . Ev,qgeficai:;no 1;~:~~~~;:i;"rni, ..

;,,:~ :nefo'r<the rn '\Vh9mtheihavealways bet~(~Q, b'a've.now, abar;done~t d~c:t~i~e, in favpio£ ;lifeu' (p.l3~1). ":'. ..,': Wi~h' <1 'generous,gr~t')~~~~ 'ofevangeJi~~li~,m'~· finestsdlohiis; ,<i:Gord~n'CQnwelr:p~ofessor; 'w,a~" enabled to,~~k~·~' ",.' sabba.t!c.aL to.: fea~t' ~n:' ~(wtdi range :ofthemost relevantsQ~!()~6gk,~t; htHoijC~ra~lthe~l9gi'cal- off~rings 'and:gtyi psa"hetter,: ~sight ' ,,'into'why .theologi~~f distdurs¢: lias;'Jor 'alrpracti~arp~rposes), p~enab~tid9rted in. mode~~r~yai:lgelicalism; An~ 'itI~~tM to have paid __ oft While the 'author is rep~Ji@1unn places and fre~u~~Iy m~kesobservations' witho~t buiitlinlas:strong~f a c~s~ ashe (and th~ ,'.- : "'. re'st ,o{~s) }l§sutiies is' th~re, the.t'e 'is: ~ ~dllth ofinsight in .N'0 :Phce~F0r 'I~uth,[~tal.] .which' makesjfanuntort~"n~te: bo'o~: ,;'" . '. ~ .. ~. ~ Unfortunate bequse' the 'bl~ak~ pictur~ weJina here is not painted by the extravagant .strokes of a.tl9vice', butis a' C'arefuht~dy based ., " ,,, '" -: ~':,'sm', ~' resp~~ted~t})Qlar'S1n,d~pth, t~;earch. '". ,..,,':, :,.. ,.' ", " ' : ' , : . ,'" " ", ,. ,: ,.::','~:' .~: --,,, : .~,:" ., '~' Welkarg~~s, (h~tiwo:th~gsarehappe:njn$}o ~trifttiij~ 9tirJlj~r,ch~s:,.~In :t~~ (ifst.instance; ,th~!~: ~t~ those. cl0,not ",care -for'tl1e9JQ,gy, alL -Thesej)~9p.l~i(eshaped" by.modernity,with -its'worship.oCSuccess,' lll~ ,manager-ialr and' thera'pe4t{c;~, .' ,."" ~ Theology: gets 'iii t):i.e.way'a~d serves' a~s'.a, cli~~r&ionJiom the :gospeYof modernity, ~itn 'its~d~ctrin~~ofprogress,: p;pulis~; mar~et, ' . " driveh 'cpnsuin~rism; a'ott welLbeing. Therr there are tho~e 'who d9 <;are for theology, bti(a' different theology: .that is, :a,reshaping of " : . .' ,,' ~aas~ical PfQtesi:iHiti~~,that r~:ndeis 'the term 'lIeva~gelical" little more 't~an :a s!ogan. .Theology 11 is,dl's;pp~~ring in 'the sense that ~hil~ . " ," ·. :iiS~artides ' of bdief a;e', ~tili pr,qf~s~tg., they,.are no fonger def~ni~g. wh;t it'~eans to _be a~ eva(igelical or how evangelicqlfsw should be ,...., .:' "::pia.cti'Cei ,At tts cente;,rhere i,snovnLv~ctiuin into :whlch':modernity is pouri~Ii' .and the r~ul~ ts a faith' tl;;t, un1ike'~ist.oric , :. .

- ,. ' J1tthoaox:y, is no lOnger d~finingitsel(~he,9lQ'gicallyn ('p,L09.), " ~ . , ." ,... " .....-But, as the a:utho~,a~gues;IIWit~ou~ Jlleology,there J:anbe nQ~Church, ~~ause. dl~ologY.~h6Ids,the''k€}qo Ghii~t~~n . . , ",' '::.',: ';i,d~':1ti~y) to Christi~~~cQntinu~tyj :~o ,gen~in.e' piey<t9:syr~o~~.F9~§hfp, .aNi 19 the:~ort ,<l Chiisilan-t~()t!ght, thatseekS:toj;~:i~g t~e .... :, " ';" ~~:, iIllP.?f.t'9f God's Wo,r~, irlt,Q , 9:uLw~orl({IIV (p:292), :Dr. ~~U"s ' ~t>_ntra:s~·s.·)-:fsr( jtl~~~)1<;~,', th~~~pj~~ts"o(artides~, GhrJ~tfaniiy Today f~taL1. .,,: :;:, in J959 ',,":itl} those of 198? t str.~ki~glfC1~in'onsirating, the shitt,from·the :~iet 'of:sgljnd,doctr!~gl: i:ef}~ction ,t0 ' sha~l<?~ ,~I!~hes. .• ,,,, ," " :" :, .,' G9nte!11P@rary '\v9r~h\P,'iJ:~adership JournalJ tt~l;l; ~im:in:ades,. C1iid. other flxtliresof~the:contemporaty ~'v~ngelbl ,world do ~nOt. esc;ape , .: ,,: '. ~~~ . t.ri!!¢iSiU,o(t:~is "'Y~rk:'~'Wllo :wo~id.h~~_e ,~h:ought.:f?~: ~)(~l1!p~~:' Jh~(G9~i~(ia~~~y,I<N~Y TitaL] wou~d~atry a.proposal tor the ' ~ ~:' remakirrR of ey,angelkal fai~h}h~q~u.ltleq . 0ne of th6 ,cardinal- beliefs' ohhe Pr~t,e~tant· Reforriu'ition"justif-ication 'qy 'faieh?" .(p.lO).­ , , ' . That');why"th~ author msistnqat, he writes _thls~book as a,disbeliever: ' ~par: ,i;: a disbeli~yer.in modernity, the 'n~'w ' religion :, 'whi,~h evangelicals <:!£:1d,the "s~~ul~r humanists" they: ~r~:fond :of beraiing:snare i~ co(nrrion.. Wells 'say,s that at tim~s 'like the~e; people . ,:: ~ofren.. .ctY Jor ~e~ival, .qQa"ye,t, ~h€ ~rii:~~; ~theroot }~su~~, Ir~ 9e.~p:~r tharUi, 'll1~r~, 'recoverYQf ,end~usi~sm: , "ThJs:is"why ~e ne'ed ' .' " .,' .,:reformat'i,ori rather-than' te:vj'va,L ~ The.hitbiis·of the modern'world, h6W$O"ubiq~itou~in th,e:e\lang;h;at' world', . 6.~ed .to.be ,p~t ·to . '; ... ~ . de~r:h~ :nCjt g[v.en . ne~ lii~'. :,:A.p(ttbey "are by.this p~int ~~'i~~i~~ibl~;thar~~thitfi les's thaIUh~inirusio~ of' in his grace,:.~~thi~g " "~':: ]Gss ,tha~a. 'fUllreco~ery-~fhtft:rutl1.;wilrsilfficeii:(pJbn. , '~~'~:,",-".,.:' . ':',' ''':.~:, .,' .',::,.. " ~'. ~':;, "A':" ",:' ... ~;:,: ..'"-" . ,§ur~li anyo~e 'famil}~E'~Jt~}his, magazineana CUR'E's~0ncerns' ing~n~raL wtl-! 're.c9·gjj.i~dhe:the~~~ in:thrs; ~99k. 1£:1 spite ' , . ," qtthfresonance th~~e :a'rguin€nts have'for'tho~e of u~~}lb agree ulat' the 'evan'gelical world is in cle~~~ate trouble (and if it is i,~ , "" trouble, what are·we to "thirilf ofthe rest :Of Christendom?),' I fear that some 'Of the author's' arguments are so c6u~chea 'In anti-modern

,.. :~, ,"" ..; languag~' ~~~r ~h:i.'aJi€~~a~.j~~ i~ ·t~· :lohg ,{6~ lithe' gQoa ~ol,day's~' < whe;: ~ural-r~the.r: ~h~n u~b~~, < (ntelle~tu<il 'rather than.,irld~~tr'i\ll, '~ilnple

,.'.' ", ' }~rh~i Uian teeh!1~togicaLcateg()ries-ruled t,h.,e:sJay;,. Th~Jact.ls:~:w'i .<ire'ill 'a iiostm09~!n society and.thts,)$'tile w@rld in w~ic,h ~vew ".

. .. ' ~ sp~~~e :(phiTosophy','the) rrs,sCience,: ~~tertainm~nt).-e,dt1cf~i6ri, ·a!l4' retlgion) lives a~d. qi6ves and has i!s' heJijg. Instead of lamen,~irt.g . " ~ ...,'th~ proce,s~. ofmode;niza(~Qnana: the.,condit'io~of moclernity .{and pos~m9c!egif(y ),;'shouldn'Cwe .be 'attemptiI1g' fp ,pe(:suaoe:our :··'· , ~", ':.' '~~ .' , , . -:, ,neighb;rs t!lat the ';~ai w'a.'( fQrwa'rd '(no~ 'that isn't ~ l'la;ty ~~p'he~i.s~ f9! themodern';dea dfprogress) i; t~' r~c,ove(?eifaih 'thing's w~ " " <. , • have l~ft behind?, this, it seems'tQ me:' is,a tactical questio~ and tactics, like ·prqgress,:urba'~'(cehters: and new tecl:mo!ogi~s are, ." ", " " ~ 'ppportu~i'tieS as w.etl as 'challenges; tl'ependini on.the sedous~ess w'itk: whi~h ~euply:our'discetriqH~tit.." T.he, R~formati()nl,as'Wells ' " . .' 't~cognize;, made the mo~t ;i ili~se 'c'Oh9 itforis i'n.its,time and :Place; , -S~n~ly~ we' fl~,ed .to.~mlerg~'fn:llh'e :idols of ~~der:njty, and'l '. ' ><.'"

<"'.

,

,Y

who

M"

,

,:

,"

."

at

;

~"

·O~Wh~tev~r .Happ.~ri~d ~to ~Evang~liGal~ih~olo'gYr(Gtand.:R9.,pjds; '-Eefd~~Ijs,',:t993)" :, , }9J]~p·· (cl'6tb.)'.,' ~~':Re~ie,~ea by 'M.i~h~~:1-H:9~q:in:':~:,.,. ,.~~>: ""<",.':"",',:; ~>,. ~:',~ :,~'"

.'

j

,...... ....

"'

'

,A.

.

....•..

",.

'.."

..

0

Oqq

=:f9fone' was chall~ngea."to thi~l(' ~ote: de,~pW 'about my, O:wn ~capitulad6~' t9 fnespi;it:9ftl\e ~ge, .but' ~e';h~tl19, ~opeJor 'a :~ ." ' ' s~c9nd-~volul~e f(QmDr: ·W~lG':~ ~i~tirig9.iS,h~d· pet\'lWtpinfiebui[d . the ,;wa(ls :Qfconf~ssional)denti.tYJor an. ~;~,rigel!caljsm , ... .,., ,,, <

... ,~:thar cannot,~~~elnbei,: theJ:istt:i;;;e ':;t-had bn·e. ' ... ",.v.<• •

" " ,,;';~'-'· /.~"~

"":"',

~,.<

.,-.,

, ..

'<. ........ :

.~.:.<.<

\.. .

,,0. ~ ~,

.;.

c"

,"

. . ,.. ,. .

'

'.

~"

:, .'"

,

"

, : •• :':'

•

'

MAYIJUNE 1993

•

33

W hen individuals accept Jesus as Savior, must they also accept Jesus as Lord?

Does salvation necessarily demand discipleship?

The

Reformation and Lordship Salvation

Michael Horton, well-known author and editor of Made in America and Power Religion, provides a comprehensive treatment of the Lordship/Salvation controversy, written from the Reformed perspective for the ,widest possible audience.

--IN ,

.

.

.

....

..~

(

... ~-:.. '

.