christ-in-a-post-christian-culture-january-february-2009

DEFINING “CULTURE” ❘ IS THE PARTY OVER? ❘ CULTURE AND THE CHURCH

MODERN REFORMATION Christ in a Post-Christian Culture

VOLUME

18, NUMBER 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009, $6.50

MODERN REFORMATION

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Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry

Christ in a Post-Christian Culture

Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Department Editors Mollie Z. Hemingway, Between the Times MR Editors, Required Reading Ryan Glomsrud, Reviews Michael Horton, Final Thoughts Staff | Editors Ann Henderson Hart, Staff Writer Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Ben Conarroe, Proofreader Contributing Scholars Peter D. Anders James Bachman S. M. Baugh Gerald Bray Jerry Bridges D. A. Carson Bryan Chapell R. Scott Clark Marva Dawn Mark Dever J. Ligon Duncan Adam S. Francisco W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Donald A. Hagner John Hannah Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm Hywel R. Jones Ken Jones Peter Jones Richard Lints Korey Maas Keith Mathison Donald G. Matzat John Muether John Nunes Craig Parton John Piper Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie Rod Rosenbladt Philip G. Ryken R. C. Sproul A. Craig Troxel Carl Trueman David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith William Willimon Todd Wilken Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2009 All rights reserved.

For more information, call or write us at: Modern Reformation 1725 Bear Valley Pkwy.

Escondido, CA 92027 (800) 890-7556 info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org

14 Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is? As vital as it is to know our time and place, are the best markers “modern” and “postmodern”—or rather “this age” of sin and death and “the age to come”?

by Michael Horton

19 Living in the Matrix How can the church exist in today’s affluent and postmodern culture? In this changing culture, how can we remain rooted in that which never changes?

by David F. Wells

23 Culture and the Christian Can the church survive with or without the sanction of culture, or is the “church” something more than an institution?

by Jack Schultz

25 Text, Church, and World Is expository preaching as the standard issue of the pulpit and the staple diet of the congregation enough for their needs?

by David Gibson

30 Flying for Jesus How does a Christian operate in the business world without becoming either totally worldly or turning off colleagues/clients?

by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway

32 God at University College Dublin A Christian apologist serves on the defense counsel as God is put on trial.

by John Warwick Montgomery

12 Celebrating Calvin Ten ways modern culture is different because of John Calvin.

by David W. Hall COVER BY CORBIS

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In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Open Exchange page 4 Between the Times page 6 | Borrowed Capital page 10 Required Reading page 35 | Reviews page 36 | Final Thoughts page 44

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IN THIS ISSUE

Pilgrim Faith

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he Patriarchal narratives of Genesis have much to teach modern Americans about the relationship between their earthly pilgrimages and the surrounding culture. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob existed in a decidedly “non-Christian” society (pardon the anachronism). And yet, every step of their pilgrimage was a witness to the God who had covenanted with them to bless the world through them and the Seed who would come from them. By the time of the Mosaic economy, peaceful coexistence and witness were replaced with holy war and extermination of the Canaanites as the land became a visible representation of heaven in which no unclean thing could reside. Too often, American Christians rush to Exodus to find justification for their modern culture war. But doing so means neglecting the more pressing and proper analogies found in Genesis.

In this issue of Modern Reformation, we aim to provide some answers and resources to those of you who, though tired of the haranguing, don’t really know how to reorient your thinking and practice to peaceful nonconformity. Reformed theologian and Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton starts off the issue by reminding us that “important” cultural labels pale to insignificance when we realize that all of culture is wrapped up in the way the Bible speaks about time and place: “this age and the age to come.” David Wells follows Horton’s article by outlining some of the ways in which we can grab hold of the age to come, which is already breaking in on our present age, and bear witness to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who is still at work redeeming and renewing the created order.

Lutheran anthropologist Jack Schultz gives us an important look at the interplay between culture (a slippery concept, to be sure) and the institutional church.

British evangelical David Gibson chimes in by expanding on John Stott’s famous “two horizons” language to enable preachers to tackle culture as a third horizon of their work for the church. MR staff editor Mollie Hemingway offers a distinctive and practical “two kingdom” approach to life in the business world (something she knows a little about as a confessional Lutheran and journalist). And Lutheran apologist John W. Montgomery provides his take on the place God is most unlikely to be found today, the university campus.

We’re working from theory to application in this issue, helping you know what you believe and why you believe it. It’s not just a slogan for us; it’s the only way we can engage a watching culture that needs to be exposed to the distinctively Reformational resources that Modern Reformation provides. That’s what 2009 is all about for us: even if Christendom is dead, Jesus is still Lord. No matter the culture, no matter the age, we want to bear witness to Christ for our neighbors, family, and coworkers. Thanks for partnering with us in that pursuit. Invite someone else to join us in the journey.

Eric Landry Executive Editor

NEXT ISSUES March/April 2009 The Imitation of Christ May/June 2009 Jesus Among Other Christs

P.S. All this year, we’ll mark the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth through a series of special articles by Presbyterian pastor and chair of the Calvin 500 Celebration, David Hall. Also, a special extra issue on Calvin will be available in June.

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LETTERS y o u r

If God is sovereign over all of life, why must we propose two kingdoms?

Why do I need to be a citizen of two kingdoms if he is my sole sovereign and reigns over all of life? Why not the view presented by Al Wolters, Nancy Piercey and others that the division between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness is one that transects all spheres of life including the ecclesiastical one?

The tools and rules used in these other spheres will be different, but part of our role as his vice regents is to discern from his Word and works what his will is and how we can be fruitful in these areas. I believe this is part of what we mean by the cultural mandate.

Depending on your eschatology, this does not always lead to an unrealistically optimistic view of what can be achieved. Nor does it necessarily create an overly engaged view of the role of the church as an institution, assuming we correctly define what the church is and is not.

Dr. William Crevier via e-mail Author’s Response At least as it is articulated in Lutheran and Reformed traditions, the “two kingdoms” are both under God’s lordship, through Christ’s mediation and the Spirit’s guidance. Yet God rules the temporal kingdom by common grace and the other by saving grace. The former is held together by a political constitution, with laws enforced by the properly coercive power of the state, while the latter is held together by its scriptural constitution, with its commands and promises advanced only by the Spirit through the ministry of preaching and sacrament. The former kingdom aims at a relative peace, justice, and the love of common friendship, while the latter kingdom lives out of the anticipation of a consummate peace, justice, and the love of brothers and sisters that transcends all natural communities (including the family).

This view (clearly expressed in Au-

gustine’s City of God) affirms our participation in both kingdoms while recognizing their distinct goals and means.

Michael Horton In an ironic twist, my mind became rather distracted after reading just the second paragraph of the article, “Distractions from Orthodoxy” by T. David Gordon (September/October 2008).

To quote the author, “Orthodoxy was and is already risky. It is the means by which the church (or some branch thereof) defines itself, by which it distinguishes itself from other societies and/or individuals.” And here we come to the statement that I find most distracting, if not disturbing: “Whenever it does so, it runs the risk of excluding those who ought to be included, the way Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are excluded by not affirming the deity of Christ.”

Does the author believe that the denial of the deity of Christ is not a valid reason to “exclude” a group or individual from the orthodoxy of Christian faith? Does he mean that Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are wrongly excluded from Christian orthodoxy?

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I have just finished the special political issue (October/November 2008). This has been the single most mind-changing issue of MR that I have read. As the mother of two small children, I had become absorbed in the upcoming election as it links me to the outside world by being able to vote on something that has nothing to do with diapers or naptimes. This election edition reoriented my mind to my higher kingdom callings, which are wife and mother. I was reminded that I will not change the world, and reminded that I am called to be dedicated to Jesus Christ through the callings that he has given me to do while in this world.

I have never been more aware of how important it is for Christians to be educated by the gospel of Jesus Christ. By having our hearts educated by the gospel, we will be able to make an impact on our neighbor, possibly and most importantly, unto salvation.

Ginger Zagnoli Northridge, California

Bill Bryson via e-mail Author’s Response The original read: “Whenever it does so, it runs the risk of excluding those who ought to be included, as opposed to excluding those who ought to be excluded, the way Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are excluded by not affirming the deity of Christ.” The sentence seemed awkward and having deleted the italicized clause, I never rewrote the entirety to reflect my original intention, which was to indicate that some groups (e.g., Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses) ought to be excluded and others not.

T. David Gordon

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido CA 92027 760.741.1045 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

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Understanding Genesis 1

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David Gordon’s article “Distractions from Orthodoxy” (September/October 2008)

even by the 1611 KJV’s margin note at Gen. 1:5b). is sure to attract flak for its bold declaration of a perspective seldom heard but Compared to the straightforward word-for-word sorely needed. Today, even the definition of the gospel itself is being hijacked: translation of the Hebrew (e.g., in the NASB), the these days one can read even from a leader in a purportedKJV rendering removes words, adds words, and alters the enly “conservative” Reformed denomination that the “six twentire chronological sense—yielding a rendering “at variance ty-four, not-a-minute-more” view on the Creation Days is with grammar, as well as with the actual fact” (Keil & a fundamental element of the gospel itself (assent to which, says Delitzsch). Originating in the Vulgate, the traditional rendering he, is “salvation”). By contrast, Gordon’s position that “utapparently was the product of a desire to make the text conterly nothing impinges upon the resolution of the question” form to the new “24-hour” notion of “day.” It is perplexing helps provide a more accurate perspective. that “the communions that studied this matter (at considerable However, the controversy over whether Genesis 1ff. specexpense of time and money)” almost entirely skirted the quesifies the age of the earth (a question of secondary importance), tion of the “authentical” text of the “refrain” (Gen. 1:5b, has long obscured other questions of fundamental importance. etc.)—despite the confessional requirement of Reformational orthodoxy that “in all controversies of religion, the church The Creation Days are defined (at least as to what they are is finally to appeal unto” the “authentical Scriptures” in the not) by way of contrast to the ordinary days of human exoriginal tongues. Is the church obligated to receive as divine perience in Old Testament Israel, and by the chronology of revelation the Scriptures as written, or is the church the authe creation of the latter. What was an ordinary “day” in Isthor and thus also the authorized redactor of the Scriptures? rael? The Scriptures are clear—Jesus himself gives the defAt stake is the very doctrine of sola scriptura. inition in John 11:9, cf. 9:4 where Jesus’ “hour” was defined Third, there is the question of the Creator/creature disby the motion of the sun across the sky as traced by a suntinction and how the word “God” is to be understood in Gen. dial (differing considerably from the clock “hour,” depend1:1–2:2:3. Why have depictions of the creation account been ing on the time of year). In fact, the concept of an “hour” the occasion for “exchanging the glory of the incorruptible (as a unit of duration of time) is entirely absent from the Old God for an image in the likeness of corruptible man” (Rom. Testament, but it is Jesus’ definition that accords with passages such as Genesis 1:4b–5a, Exodus 20:9, and Psalm 1:23) throughout much of church history? (cf. WLC Q&A 104:22–23. Was Jesus wrong? (That undeniably is a ques109.) Why are popular univocal interpretations that the Cretion of orthodoxy.) Yet the “populist hermeneutic” presumes ator (the Triune God, WCF IV.1) was engaged in bodily, physthe authority to impose a contradictory definition based on ical rest on the seventh day (twenty-four hours “under the post-biblical technology and science: twenty-four “hours” sun”) so widely accepted—even in confessional Reformed that are defined by the operation of a manmade clock (whose churches? Unfortunately, it seems the chief subject of Genoperation requires the unbroken operation of ordinary esis 1:1–2:3 has come to be regarded as days, not God (which, Providence). Here is an almost totally unrecognized case of at thirty-five times is actually the most prominent word in the exegetical fallacy of “worldview confusion,” a product of the text.) Why is it that the demand for “literal interpretathe Zeitgeist of Western civilization (especially the Enlighttion” does not seem to include the word “God”? enment). Ironically, it has been my experience that even seminary-trained proponents of the modern “literal view” shibDavid Van Dyke boleth are unable to meaningfully define the word “hour” Hudsonville, MI that is fundamental to their definition.

A second (and connected) issue concerns what is the “authentical” text of Scripture for the words of context for “day” in the “refrain” (Gen. 1:5b, 8b, 13, 19, 23, 31b). The Westminster Confession (I.8) declares the “authentical” Scriptures to be “the Old Testament in Hebrew...and the New Testament in Greek” (against the claims for the Vulgate by Rome). Yet, the popular “literal” interpretation is based upon the traditional non-literal rendering of the “refrain” (so designated 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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Conflicting Kingdoms

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have read the discussions and debates about the two kingdoms—the Kingdom of God (the

The Christian and the non-Christian may both church) and the “kingdom of man” (the state)—in the special political issue (October/No- wish to do good to their fellowmen. The one bevember 2008). The debate, though it addresses the fact that state governments are ordained lieves that men are going to live forever, that they

by God and delves into other aspects, it did not address the sovare created by God and so built that they can find their ereignty of God, which is a critical issue in the debate. true and lasting happiness only by being united to God; God being sovereign, besides ordaining which state leader the other believes that men are the accidental working has authority, can also intervene in the affairs of any state of blind matter, that they started as mere animals and have at his behest. Nebuchadnezzar viewed the kingdom of more or less steadily improved, that they are going to live Babylon as his personal accomplishment, so he had to learn for about seventy years, that their happiness is fully atthe hard way that the kingdom’s accomplishment was God’s tainable by good social services and political organizations. doing and not his. Consequently he was driven from men Both may be keen on education but the kinds of education to dwell with the wild beast, ate grass like an ox and was wet that they wanted people to have would be different. The with dew until: “Thou know that the most High ruleth in the Materialist may ask: Will it increase happiness to the makingdom of men and giveth to whomsoever he will” (Dan. jority? The Christian may have to say: Even if it increases 4:25). As a consequence of God’s sovereignty, he can provhappiness to the majority, we can’t do it. It is unjust. identially intervene at will to accomplish his goals. “He raised up the spirit of Cyrus…to build him a house in Jerusalem” According to the Bible, this conflict will continue until the (2 Chron. 36:22). He placed Joseph as second-inNew Jerusalem comes down from heaven at Christ’s second command to Pharaoh in order to preserve his chosen peocoming. ple, and he hardened Pharaoh’s heart—even beyond Sometimes the state may attempt to solve a social problem Pharaoh’s ability to harden his own heart—in order to demonby introducing legislation. But while the law may abate the probstrate his miraculous power to liberate the people. lem, it cannot cure it. This is a dilemma that we face. Lewis obThe next fact about these two kingdoms not mentioned served that “you cannot make a good society by law and within the debate is that they are antithetical. For example, Jesus out good men you cannot have a good society.” The believer speaking to his disciples forewarned: “If the world hated you, has to live in this conflicting situation until he dies or until Christ know that it hated me before it hated you...but I have choreturns. But God is the believer’s helper in this regard. He does sen you out of the world, therefore the world hated you” not only save him from the kingdom of the world, but he gives (John 15:18–19). The kingdoms are antithetical because the him the help he needs to remain safely on board. Jesus promsubjects of each kingdom serve two different masters: God ised the disciples that he would send them another Comforter on one hand and “the god of this world” (Satan) on the oth(John 14:26), which is the Holy Spirit. He has also given his er (2 Cor. 4:4). Augustine portrays this in The City of God. They Word. So we find that much of the Old Testament speaks to are antithetical by virtue of their character. civil laws to maintain peace, fair play among individuals and Not only are they antithetical, they will never exist harmoral standards. In the New Testament, Jesus said: “Render unto moniously. There will be this constant conflict of their modi Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that operandi. There may be times when the head of the state is a are God’s” (Matt. 22:21); and Paul, besides outlining doctrines Christian and it appears that there will be harmony, such as to preserve the purity of the Christian faith, dedicated much when Constantine became emperor of Rome. This resulted in effort in telling believers how to apply the Scriptures to their the masses streaming into the politically favored church. But daily lives. Thus, for Christian clergy to have a significant efmany who streamed in were politically ambitious, religiously fect on society, it would be better if they focus less on influencing disinterested and still half-rooted in paganism, thus threatenlawmakers and more on sharpening believers’ awareness of the ing the secularizing and misuse of religion. Thus, regardless of characteristic difference between the two kingdoms, equipping his godly influence, he could not harmonize the two kingdoms. them to remain in God’s Kingdom as salt and light. This is no The two kingdoms may intersect where they have common small challenge, but would be a more effective strategy. ground, but they can never harmonize. In God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis has referred to the two kingdoms as Christian and nonLester Forrester Christian, respectively: Queens Village, New York J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 5

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Guess Who Believes In Bigfoot?

According to prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, traditional religious belief is “dangerously irrational.”

Nonbelievers claim that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

By discouraging religion, the reality is that the New Atheist campaign won’t create a populace of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Rather, it may well encourage new levels of mass superstition. Atheists may cry foul over this suggestion, but if you put your faith in reason, this is what the empirical data tells us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive study released by Baylor University, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in pseudoscience and the occult, including everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. Further, the Baylor study shows that the irreligious and those belonging to more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, are much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion contracted out with the Gallup Organization to ask American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity.

Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Do dreams

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foretell the future? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Can places be haunted? Do creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster really exist?

The answers were then examined statistically to create an index of belief in the occult and the paranormal.

Only 8 percent of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week showed a strong belief in these things, while 31 percent of people who never worship expressed strong belief.

Another notable conclusion from the study was the disparity among just Christians. For instance, 36 percent of those belonging to the United Church of Christ expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, while only 14 percent of those belonging to the Assemblies of God did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the faith of the re-

spondent, the less likely they were to believe in the paranormal and pseudoscience.

Fifty Ways to Leave Your Church Body The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh voted in October to secede from the Episcopal Church and to join the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone in South America in October. At least 17 of 74 parishes chose to remain with the Episcopal Church. Laity voted 119– 69 and clergy voted 121–33 to secede.

The Rev. David Wilson, who preached at the convention, said people on both sides have “diametrically different beliefs” about sin, salvation, and Scripture. “It would be far better to bless each other in separating...than to continue the internecine warfare,”

Notable Quotables “I never thought I’d see the day but I now tell couples in premarital counseling that their wedding clothes must be dignified and lovely.”

—The Rev. David Moyer of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, after a bride elicited gasps from the congregation for exposing her backside.

“There is respect for our religion here. In the public school, I would not be allowed to wear a veil.”

—Nadia Oualane, 14, a student of Algerian descent who wears her hair hidden under a black head scarf and attends a Catholic school in France.

“We have to change. We’re a wonderful little church; we’re just in a bad location.”

—Rev. Norman Markle of New Hope United Methodist Church in Marietta, Georgia, explaining why he began his early morning drive-in worship service.

“I don’t want to discourage her from being who she is. She isn’t wearing it because she wants to be a thug. This is ridiculous.”

—Taire Ferguson, whose daughter Tabitha was disciplined by Dallas school officials for wearing a rosary.

They consider rosaries to be gang symbols.

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he said. “If we act today out of godly motives, with godly love toward one another, then both sides will be on God’s side.”

The vote came after decades of controversy between the conservative diocese and the national leadership over Christology, biblical authority, and sexual ethics. Bishop Robert Duncan was deposed by the Episcopal House of Bishops in advance of the vote, but is now the “Episcopal commissary” to Pittsburgh from the Southern Cone.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori let it be known that she considers the secession a violation of canon law and that church property will be fought for.

“I have repeatedly reassured Episcopalians that there is abundant room for dissent within this Church, and that loyal opposition is a long and honored tradition within Anglicanism. Schism is not,” she said in a statement.

Many of the Episcopal loyalists are also conservative but disagree with secession, observers note. The Diocese of San Joaquin, based in Fresno, California, aligned with the Southern Cone in 2007.

A Flexible Public School Curriculum

Parents and religious leaders in New York are fighting the inclusion of yoga classes in public schools, saying the instruction violates the separation of church and state.

Two high school teachers began teaching yoga in 2007 to help students relieve stress before exams. They were preparing a district-wide program.

“We are not opposed to the bene-

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fits. We can understand the benefits.

We are opposed to the philosophy behind it and that has its ties in Hinduism and the way they were presenting it,” the Rev. Colin Lucid of Calvary Baptist Church in Massena told the Associated Press.

The school district denied there was any religious instruction with yoga.

Yoga is a Hindu religious discipline that aims to bring harmony to the mind, body, and soul. Many Westerners practice yoga as purely athletic endeavor.

Bad Theology, Bad Financial Advice The Prosperity Gospel is partly to blame for the current financial crisis, according to Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside. While researching a book on black televangelism, the professor said that some preachers told poor parishioners that God would help banks ignore credit scores to bless them with their first house.

The results, he told TIME, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma, added, “It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, ‘If you give this offering, God will give you a house.’ And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy.”

Prosperity theology encourages adherents to demonstrate their faith by contributing to their churches and remaining verbally upbeat about worldly bounty they are told God promises believers.

Audit Us, Please Thirty-three ministers across the country publicly endorsed a candidate for president in sermons during the fall election in a bid to change federal tax laws they consider unjust. The Alliance Defense Fund, a group of Christian

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By the Numbers 58. Percent of young white evangelicals who support some form of legal recognition of civil unions or marriage for same-sex couples, according to a survey conducted for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. Twenty-six percent support same-sex marriage. White evangelicals over age 30 are less supportive: 46 percent favor some legal recognition, but only 9 percent of older white evangelicals favor full marriage rights.

20. Number of American women out of 1,000 who had an abortion in 2004, the last year for which data are available. That number is a drop from 1980’s high of 29 abortions per 1,000 women. The total number of abortions has dropped over the last two decades to 1.2 million in 2004.

57. Percent of white Southern evangelicals who believe torture is justified, according to a survey

by Faith in Public Life. A Pew Research Center poll from early 2008 found that 48 percent of the general population believes that torture can be justified.

90. Cities through which Zondervan is traveling for its “Bible across America” tour to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the New International Version. At churches, universities, retail stores, and American landmarks, people of all ages and walks of life will have the opportunity to handwrite a verse in the Bible, which will then be published and sold nationwide.

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lawyers who fight for conservative social causes, organized the Pulpit Freedom Sunday project.

“The sermons are intended to restore a pastor’s right to speak freely from his pulpit without fearing censorship or punishment by the government,” the group said in a statement.

Alliance Defense Fund sent copies of the sermons to the Internal Revenue Service to provoke a challenge to the laws barring religious groups that accept tax-deductible contributions from partisan politicking.

“What they’re doing is talking to their congregations about biblical issues related to candidates and elections, and they believe they have the constitutional right to do that,” senior legal counsel Erik Stanley told the New York Times.

While a legal challenge is the goal, it’s possible that the Alliance Defense Fund will face any ensuing sanctions rather than the ministers who participated. Three former IRS officials asked the agency to investigate the lawyers for “inducing churches to engage in conduct designed to violate federal tax law in a direct and blatant manner.”

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Hundreds of Muslim employees at meat processing plants in Colorado and Nebraska walked off their jobs in September, protesting their employers’ refusal to grant them time to pray during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Close to 100 workers were fired in Greeley, Colorado, and about 80 lost their jobs in Grand Island, Nebraska.

The prayer at sunset is one of five

Luther Would Be Pleased In news that would have delighted the Reformers, Pope Benedict XVI launched a marathon reading of the Bible broadcast live on Italian television. Lasting seven days and six nights, 1,300 readers, including former Italian presidents, ordinary citizens, soccer stars, foreign diplomats, cardinals, actors, singers, and intellectuals, read every verse from Genesis to Revelation.

The reading was timed for the twenty-second Synod of Bishops, a gathering of 250 bishops and heads of religious orders who met in Rome to discuss “the importance of the Word of God in the life and mission of the church.”

A survey commissioned in preparation for the synod showed people in Catholic countries read the Bible less

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Sunnis, Shiites, and Solidarity

required daily in Islam. Observance of the sunset prayer is particularly crucial during Ramadan because Muslims can’t eat or drink until they perform it.

The standoff marks the beginning of a Muslim labor movement, according to the Religion News Service.

“American Muslims in recent years have become more organized and aware of our rights as Americans,” said Ameena Mirza Qazi, a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “As American Muslims become more a part of the American fabric—as educators, professionals, leaders, day laborers, and factory workers—we increasingly avail ourselves of rights that every American values.”

About 20 employees who were fired last year at the Nebraska plant filed charges with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for denial of religious accommodation.

Last year, a Tyson Foods plant in Tennessee replaced Labor Day with Eid al-Fitr—the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan—as one of eight paid holidays. After public outrage, the original schedule was reinstated. Beginning in 2009, Muslim workers will have the option of taking off Eid al-Fitr in lieu of another paid holiday.

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frequently than in the United States.

Only 38 percent of Poles, 27 percent of Italians, and 20 percent of Spaniards had read even one passage of Scripture over the previous year, the study found, compared to 75 percent of Americans.

The major themes of the synodical presentations included learning to pray using the Bible, improving the quality of homilies, and ensuring an accurate interpretation of Bible passages. Bishop Desiderius Rwoma of Singida, Tanzania, was one who spoke of the importance of homilies.

“If we speak of people being lukewarm concerning matters of our faith and the phenomenon of religious sects, which are spreading at an alarming speed in many parts of the world, the causes for this can possibly be traced back to lack of good and proper preaching,” he said.

Environmentalism as Religion Instead of using red ink to highlight the words of Jesus, HarperOne published a new Bible with green ink to spotlight more than 1,000 verses about the goodness of creation and God’s charge to mankind to care for it. In the New Revised Standard Translation, Genesis is mostly green, as are big chunks of the Psalms. When Jesus tells followers to consider the lilies of the valley, his words are in green.

The book is printed with soy ink on recycled paper and eco-friendly linen.

And instead of commentary from theologians, The Green Bible has essays by conservationists. It concludes with a reading guide tracking environmental themes.

“We need a Bible like this,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals and environmental activist, told USA TODAY. “I’ve traveled the country for two years now speaking at college chapel services. I ask, ‘Has anyone here ever heard a sermon at their home church on the stewardship of creation?’ Rarely does even one hand go up.”

BETWEEN THE TIMES t h e

ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP/Getty Images

Satanic Verses, Take Two

The publisher of a book about the Prophet Mohammed and his child bride had its offices set ablaze. The incident may have involved a petrol bomb pushed through the firm’s letterbox, police said.

Gibson Square is responsible for the publication of The Jewel of Medina—a fictional account by American author Sherry Jones of Mohammed’s relationship with his youngest bride Aisha.

American publisher Random House announced last August that it had cancelled publication of the book in the United States because of fear of violence.

Prior to the firebombing, publishing

g o o d ,

t h e

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director Martin said that in “an open society there has to be open access to literary works, regardless of fear. As an independent publishing company, we feel strongly that we should not be afraid of the consequences of debate.”

Prayer Wars in Virginia Six of seventeen Virginia State Police chaplains have resigned because of new restrictions on prayer. The state police superintendent ordered them to offer only nondenominational prayers at public events.

To “require those troopers to disregard their own faith while serving violates their First Amendment rights and prevents them from serving effectively as chaplains,” House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith, a Salem Republican, told the Washington Times. “These men had little choice but to resign.”

Col. Steven Flaherty, the state police superintendent, asked the chaplains to offer only nondenominational prayers at public events, such as trooper graduations and annual memorial services.

He said he made the order in response

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to a recent federal appeals court ruling that a Fredericksburg, Virginia, city council member may not pray “in Jesus’ name” during council meetings because the opening invocation is government speech. The case involved the implementation of a policy that all invocations at city council meetings must be generic and nonsectarian. A council member argued that the government doesn’t have the right to dictate the content of official prayers and can’t require nonsectarian prayers.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who sat in for the decision, wrote that since the government wasn’t forcing anyone to pray against their conscience but merely offering them the opportunity to pray on behalf of the government, First Amendment rights weren’t violated. If the government wants official prayers that don’t mention Jesus, the council member can decline to pray “on behalf” of the government, she wrote. And he can pray according to his own conscience on his own time.

Join the Conversation!

Have you ever considered writing for Modern Reformation? Here’s your chance! We’re reintroducing many of our old departments and we want your words to be featured in them.

“Open Exchange”: A forum for reader response. If you’ve ever read an article printed in our pages and thought that something else needed to be added, this is the place for your contribution.

“Ex Auditu”: Examples of Christ-centered sermons. Christ-centered preaching is sadly rare in all our circles. Have you heard or preached a good sermon? Send in the transcript to give others a model to follow.

“Preaching from the Choir”: Perspectives on music in the church. Beyond the old “worship wars,” we want to give people a way to think about the music we sing in formal worship contexts and in our private worship. Draw attention to the resources that matter.

“Family Matters”: Resources for home. Catechism resources, ways of teaching theology to children, help with holiday themes: this is the place to direct others to resources you’ve found helpful in your efforts to be faithful at home.

“Borrowed Capital”: Witnessing to Christ in our age. Where do you start in your witness for Christ?

How do apologetics play a role in your evangelism? Got a story or a helpful idea? Share it with others in this space.

“Common Grace”: God’s truth in art and culture. God gives gifts to both believer and unbeliever. How do we see those gifts expressed in the art and culture surrounding the church? In this space, we want to hear from artists and cultural observers looking for glimpses of grace in life.

Intrigued? Ready to write? Send your 650-word essay (Ex Auditu sermons can be longer) to editor@modernreformation.org.

Be sure to tell us in which department you think your essay belongs and send all your contact information. If we decide to run your work, we’ll extend your subscription by one year.

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 9

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Culture and Calling: The Open Question

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number of titles have recently come out revisiting the huge topic of faith and

perhaps, is from the Old English coulter and its variculture. A couple of them really stand out. Christ and Culture Revisited (Eerdmans, ants (culter, colter), meaning the “edge of the plough.”

2008) by D. A. Carson is a careful study based on insights into the nature of this Thus, to cultivate the land was a primary act of culture discussion using both the biblical and anthropological perand so many connotations revolved around the agricultural spectives. His starting point is the 1951 classic Christ and Culture metaphor. Then in modern times the term became a figure of

by H. Richard Niebuhr. A lovely series of studies, Culture Matspeech for developing the mind and improving the human race. ters (Brazos, 2007) by T. M. Moore, takes us into Augustine, Milton used the term interchangeably with civility or govCalvin, Kuyper, but also Celtic art and the music of Phil Keagernment. By the nineteenth century, an evolutionary model gy. And Roger Scruton has recently given us Culture Counts (Enwas common whereby culture referred to the development counter, 2007), a forceful defense of Western high culture. There of human civilization from the so-called primitive societies. Toare hundreds more. Besides general theological or sociologiday, when we speak of a cultured person we mean someone cal volumes, there are intriguing books examining specific iswho is well versed in the arts or in other civilizational repossues. A challenging book by Albert Mohler, Culture Shift itories. Matthew Arnold reckoned that a society without culture is liable to barbarism.2 The word can also signify “to in(Multnomah, 2008), looks at various trends including politics, terrorism, education, and so on, from a generally conservative habit,” from the related word colonus. Finally, it can mean “to viewpoint. Richard Mouw has a number of titles stressing the honor,” even “to worship,” from the related term cultus. importance of engaging culture from the Christian standpoint.

Thus, the word “culture” may carry several of these meanParticularly powerful are When Kings Come Marching In (Eerdings at once. The word indeed contains various arguments for mans, 2002) and the wonderful collection of essays, Praying at what human life is all about. Not surprisingly, these arguments Burger King (Eerdmans, 2007). One of my favorite recent books are different, depending on who is using them and the disciis Everyday Theology (Baker, 2007), a wide-ranging analysis of plines they represent. If for Arnold culture was the defense of different cultural phenomena, from checkout counters to the the best of which mankind is capable, the “best” was often reblogosphere to Eminem and fantasy funerals. Marvin Olasky’s stricted to the arts or to values such as civility. The trend in anStanding for Christ in Modern Babylon (Crossway, 2003) is a susthropology and culture studies in the past few decades has been tained critique of contemporary media. Also challenging and to broaden the field to include “ordinary” things such as macreative is Andy Crouch’s Culture Making (InterVarsity, 2008). terial production, tools, kinship patterns, and the like. Culture So, “culture” is having a massive comeback among evanis thus signs and symbols, and the definition of culture has broadgelical circles. Not that they were ever altogether silent. One ened to include far more than just the arts. One reason is that can think of Klaas Schilder’s Christus en Cultuur (Wever, 1948), scholars began to realize that the arts were not the leading culthe works of Francis Schaeffer, Hans Rookmaaker, and their tural indicators that Arnold and others had claimed. As Terry followers, and also the missions anthropology of Charles Eagleton puts it, “Culture in this sense—language, inheritance, Kraft, Eugene Nida, and others. And we well remember identity, religion—has become important enough to kill for.

James Hunter’s Culture Wars (Basic Books, 1992), which deDante and Mozart may be elitist, but they have never blown scribes two embattled camps: the orthodox and the prothe limbs off small children.” gressives. Still, today’s revival is remarkable. For this we need Now, here is the question: Can we honestly work with this term without sidestepping important biblical and theological to be thankful. And yet, after reading so many of these books, categories? I believe we can, but we will need to address two it is my conviction that there is much work left to be done. large areas of concern. First, we need to be made aware of Principally, what I believe has not yet been accomplished is which concept of culture is meant by those Christians atthe difficult task of connecting culture as a term in use totempting to interact with it. And, second, we will want to do day and a biblical concept of calling. far more work on the biblical theology of God’s call to the hu“Culture” has been described as one of the two or three most man race. Only then will we be able to do the difficult work complex words in the English language.1 At least three meanings have evolved over the centuries. The most obvious, of bridging the gap between Scripture and culture studies. We 10 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

can be only brief and suggestive here.

Which concept of culture are our Christian authors working with and is it comprehensive enough? A couple of examples. Clearly there are authors who hold to a generally Arnoldian idea of civilization. Francis Schaeffer was in that tradition, writing as he did about the rise and fall of Western civilization, and using the arts and politics as his main evidence.

Roger Scruton and T. M. Moore are somewhat in this tradition as well, although Moore is willing to look into popular culture in a way that would have disturbed Arnold. Still, those in this tradition who admire popular culture will tend to use similar arguments for its worth. Folk music, for example, as opposed to pop music is good because it is produced by good people who cannot be bought out by bad marketers and so on.3 A second group looks at culture more functionally, though symbolically. Language, inheritance, identity, religion are their subject matter. Understanding these things helps evaluate them theologically. For example, Richard Mouw’s studies of the religious implications of ordinary institutions—or Everyday Theology’s look into such particular human experiences as blogging or checking out goods—enable us to understand how power works, what we value, and for what we will fight. D. A. Carson generally works with this broader definition, rejecting the elitist views of people such as T. S. Eliot. Citing the anthropologist Clifford Geertz—who likened culture to “patterns of meanings,” “developing knowledge about life,” and centering on symbols and signs—Carson explores postmodernism, democracy, secularism, and the like.4 Finally, a third group conflates the term “culture” with the biblical term “world.” Niebuhr does this in his classic study, where he tends to look at culture in a somewhat frozen fashion as something to reject (“Christ against culture”), to baptize (“Christ of culture”), to accept as preparation (“Christ above culture”), and so on. Niebuhr is clearly most favorable to what he calls the “Christ transformer of culture” position. Most people in this third group look at ways to avoid the world’s dangers and also to transform the world for Christ. This approach can take on many different forms. Though he has moved some from his original polar diagnosis, James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars model has had a wide impact. On issues such as abortion, homosexuality, education, and other key battlegrounds, there are two hostile armies seeking to occupy the land. Albert Mohler gives a similar thrust in his Culture Shift, where he looks at the U.S. Supreme Court, public schools, and the like. As a conservative he sees activism in the courts, dangers in the public schools, and so forth, although there is plenty of nuance. The same of Marvin Olasky and the media. On the more liberal side, Andy Crouch wants us to be “culture makers” and not systematically identify the Christian view with red state values.

Each of these groups, and there would be many more, buys into certain assumptions about the term “culture” that they then use for their theological purposes. Culture as civilization, culture as functional, dynamic symbolic reality, culture as world—each of these works its way into a Christian argument. Nothing wrong with that as long as we render full justice to truly biblical concerns. There’s the rub! How can we take today’s complex developments in culture studies and

mesh them with biblical-theological issues?

As space prohibits doing this in any detail, I will just point in a direction or two. Many theologians agree that something important about cultural development is asserted in the early chapters of Genesis. Being made as God’s image is tied in with the mandate to multiply, inhabit the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it. Is that what culture is about? In a most general manner, yes. But there is far more at stake in the teachings of these pregnant chapters. There is an eschatology. Where is mankind headed? The tree of life tells us we are moving, in history, from the beauty of the garden to a place of consummate bliss. When he gave the creation mandate, he blessed them and said, “Be fruitful…” (Gen. 1:28).

Despite the fall into sin, that calling is reasserted in Christ.

We are already living as new creatures active in spreading new life across the planet (2 Cor. 5:17), but we are not yet in the “spiritual bodies” of the resurrected state (1 Cor. 15:44).

Culture is terribly fallen. Again, in Genesis we learn of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, bringing the world under a curse. We learn of the spread of sin and violence to every area of life, and to the descendants of Cain, building cities and making music in a mixed cultural situation. Over and over again, the people of God fall into the same sins as the non-elect. Still, Christ, the Lord over all creation, is at work reconciling all things to himself (Col. 1:20).

So, biblically speaking, if it is appropriate to use the word “culture,” we might say it centers on God’s blessed call to the human race to move throughout history by enjoying and ruling over the earth, using all the tools and gifts given, overcoming the curse, for the sake of obtaining everlasting, blissful communion with him through Jesus Christ, in the fellowship of the Spirit.

In each of our three definitions of culture, we do have a portion of this grand scheme. But what is often left out is the central idea of calling. As in Arnold, we are called to a higher place, but it is centered in fellowship with God. As in the symbolic view, life does have meaning, but its fundamental meaning is in this historical purpose. As in the attribution of world, we do live in the world, without being of it, yet the culture war model is hopelessly over simple (to be technical, Manichaean).

If we are to profit from the insights of culture scholars today, we’ll have to do it with our eyes wide open to God’s greater purposes.

William Edgar is professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

WORKS CITED 1Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87ff.

2CultureandAnarchy (1869) warns of the dangers of Philistinism.

3Terry Eagleton, “Culture Conundrum,” The Guardian (21 May 2008).

4See Kenneth Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Wheaton: Crossway, 1989).

5D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 3, 85.

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Celebrating Calvin Ten Ways Modern Culture Is Different Because of John Calvin

by David W. Hall Education: The Academy

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Calvin broke with medieval pedagogy that limited education primarily to an aristocratic elite. His Academy, founded in 1559, was a pilot in broad-based education for Geneva. Although Genevans had sought for two centuries to establish a university, only after Calvin‘s settlement did a college finally succeed.1 By the time of Calvin’s arrival, city officials yearned for a premier educational institution, but in 1536 most Genevans thought this was a target too ambitious.

Regardless of the unsuccessful starts in education that had occurred between Geneva’s adoption of the Reformation in 1536 and Calvin’s return from his Strasbourg exile in 1541, it is clear that success in establishing a lasting university did not occur until Calvin set his hand to the educational plow after Geneva became settled in its Protestant identity in the 1550s.

Calvin’s Academy, which was adjacent to St. Pierre Cathedral, featured two levels of curricula: one for the public education of Geneva’s youth (the college or schola privata) and the other a seminary to train ministers (schola publica).2 One should hardly discount the impact that came from the public education of young people, especially in a day when education was normally reserved only for aristocratic scions or for members of Catholic societies. Begun in 1558,3 with Calvin and Theodore Beza chairing the theological faculty, the Academy building was dedicated on June 5, 1559, with 600 people in attendance in St. Pierre Cathedral. Calvin collected money for the school, and many expatriates donated to help its formation. The public school, which had seven grades, enrolled 280 students during its inaugural year,

and the Academy’s seminary expanded to 162 students in just three years. By Calvin’s death in 1564, there were 1,200 students in the college and 300 in the seminary. Both schools, as historians have observed, were tuition-free and “forerunners of modern public education.”4 Few European institutions ever saw such rapid growth.

To accommodate the flood of students, the Academy planned to add—in what would become characteristic of the Calvinistic view of Christian influence in all areas of life— departments of law and medicine. Beza requested prayer for the new medical department as early as 1567, by which time the law school was established. Following the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), Francis Hotman— and several other leading constitutional scholars—taught at the Genevan law school. The presence of two legal giants, Hotman (from 1573–78) and Denis Godefroy, gave Calvin’s Academy one of the earliest Swiss legal faculties. The medical school, attempted shortly after Calvin‘s death, was not successfully established until the 1700s.5 Calvin’s Academy became the standard bearer for education in all major fields.

Historically, education, as much as any other single factor, has fostered cultural and political advancement. One of Calvin’s most enduring contributions to society—a contribution that also secured the longevity of many of the Calvinistic reforms—was the establishment of the Academy in Geneva. Through his Academy, Calvin also succeeded where others had failed. Worth noting, none of the other major Protestant Reformers are credited with founding a university that would last for centuries, even becoming a sought-after property by some surprising suitors—like Thomas Jefferson.6

The very name of John Calvin stirs up controversy. For those who have been primarily on the negative side of the divide—and for those on the opposite ridge— Modern Reformation will feature a series in 2009 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Genevan Reformer’s birth (July 10, 1509). Rather than focus on biography or theology, this series will look briefly at ten areas of culture irrevocably transformed by the influence of Calvin and his band of brothers and sisters. Love him or hate him, he was a change agent. We think for the better.

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Care for the Poor: The Bourse Française

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Most people don’t associate Calvin with sympathy for the poor or indigent. However, a cursory review of his care for orphans, the indigent, and displaced refugees in a period of crisis not only shows otherwise but also provides enduring principles for societal aid for the truly needy.

Calvin thought that the church’s compassion could best be expressed through its ordained deacons, the epitome of private charity. The challenge for Calvin was to derive practical protocols that would care for the poor, using the diaconal mechanisms that God had already provided through the church’s ministry of mercy.

Jeannine Olson’s able historical volume Calvin and Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse Française is an eye-opening study of Calvin’s impact on Reformation culture, focusing particularly on the enduring effect of his thought on social welfare through the church’s diaconate. In her treatise, she noted that, contrary to some modern caricatures, the Reformers worked diligently to shelter refugees and to minister to the poor. The Bourse Française became a pillar of societal welfare in Geneva;7 in fact, this mercy ministry may have had nearly as much influence in Calvin’s Europe as his theology did in other areas.

The activities of the Bourse were numerous. Its diaconal agents were involved in housing orphans, the elderly, or those who were incapacitated. They sheltered the sick and dealt with those involved in immoralities. This ecclesiastical institution was a precursor to voluntary societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West. Calvin was so interested in seeing the diaconate flourish that he left part of his family inheritance in his will for the Boys School and poor strangers.8 Its initial design was to appease the suffering of French residents who, while fleeing sectarian persecution in France, settled in Geneva. It has been estimated that in a single decade alone (1550–60) some 60,000 refugees passed through Geneva, a number capable of producing significant social stress.

The deacons cared for a large range of needs, not wholly dissimilar to the strata of welfare needs in our own society. They provided interim subsidy and job training as needed; on occasion, they even provided the necessary tools or supplies so that an able-bodied person could engage in an honest vocation. Within a generation of this welfare work, Calvin’s diaconate discovered the need to communicate to recipients the goal that they were to return to work as soon as possible. They also cared for cases of abandonment, supported the terminally ill who, in turn, left their children to be supported, and also included a ministry to widows who often had dependent children and a variety of needs.

Naturally there were theological peculiarities, and these theological distinctives led to certain practical commitments. Modern leaders might be better off to see what they can learn from the past; in summary, the following list illustrates principles of Calvin’s influential welfare reform: 1. It was only for the truly disadvantaged.

2. Moral prerequisites accompanied assistance.

3. Private or religious charity, not state largesse, was the vehicle for aid.

4. Ordained officers managed and brought accountability.

5. Theological underpinnings were normal.

6. Productive work ethic was sought.

7. Assistance was temporary.

8. History is valuable.

One of Calvin’s fellow Reformers, Martin Bucer, went so far as to say of the diaconate that “without it there can be no true communion of saints.”9 In a sermon on 1 Timothy 3:8–10, Calvin himself associated the early church’s compassion as the measure of our Christianity: “If we want to be considered Christians and want it to be believed that there is some church among us, this organization must be demonstrated and maintained.” On one occasion, Calvin rhetorically asserted, “Do we want to show that there is reformation among us? We must begin at this point, that is, there must be pastors who bear purely the doctrine of salvation, and then deacons who have the care of the poor.”

Works Cited 1The most recent history of the university recounts several abortive efforts, including one in 1420 under Roman Catholic authority and another in 1429 by Francois de Versonnex. See Marco Marcacci, Historie de L’Universite de Geneve 1558–1986 (Geneva: University of Geneva, 1987), 17. For a pre-history of the Genevan Academy, see also William G. Naphy, “The Reformation and the Evolution of Geneva’s Schools,” Beat Kumin, ed., Reformations Old and New (London: Scholar Press, 1996), 190–93. Until recently, Charles Borgeaud’s Historie de l’Universite de Geneve (Geneva, 1900) was the standard history.

2E. William Monter, Calvin’s Geneva (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), 112. The schola privata began classes in fall 1558 and the schola publica commenced in November 1558. Marcacci, 17.

3Public records for January 17, 1558, refer to the establishment of the college with three chairs (theology, philosophy, Greek). Notice was also given commending the college as a worthy recipient of inheritance proceeds. See Henry Martyn Baird, Theodore Beza (1899), 104.

4See Donald R. Kelley, Francois Hotman: A Revolutionary’s Ordeal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 270.

5Baird, 106, 113.

6See my summation in The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 2–4. I am indebted to Dr. James H. Hutson for this fascinating anecdote, which he presents in his The Sister Republics: Switzerland and the United States from 1776 to the Present, 2nd. ed. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1992), 68–76.

7Jeannine Olson, Calvin and Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse Française (Cranbury, NJ: Susquenhanna University Press), 11–12.

8Cited by Geoffrey Bromiley, “The English Reformers and Diaconate,” Service in Christ (London: Epworth Press, 1966), 113.

9Basil Hall, “Diaconia in Martin Butzer,” Service in Christ (London: Epworth Press, 1966), 94.

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C H R I S T I N A P O S T- C H R I S T I A N C U LT U R E

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? BY

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MICHAEL HORTON

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ontextualization is hot. Basically, it is the attempt to situate particular beliefs and practices in their concrete situation. Migrating from the rarified confines of secular sociology (especially socio-linguistics), hermeneutics, and missiological theory to practical theology departments and ministry, the imperative to contextualize the gospel has become something of a mantra among pastors, youth ministers, and evangelists. In an age of niche marketing, contextualizing refers not only to the need of aspiring missionaries to understand the culture to which they will be sent, but to the specialized demographics of our own consumer society.

I won’t mention names, but many evangelical seminaries offer a panoply of elective courses on contextualized ministry (i.e., urban, youth, sports, suburban, Emergent, African American, Latino/a, men’s and women’s ministry).

Obviously, something has to give; the seminary curriculum can handle only so many credit hours. Increasingly, at least from conversations with friends, it seems that it is the core courses in biblical languages, systematic and historical theology, church history, and more traditional courses in pastoral theology that are being pared down to make room.

As a result, many American pastors, missionaries, and evangelists today may know more about their target market than they do about the “one Lord, one faith, and one baptism” that they share with the prophets and the apostles, the church fathers and reformers, or their brothers and sisters in China, Malawi, and Russia. As recent events in the Anglican Communion have demonstrated, many bishops and pastors in Africa and Asia are more insistent than their British and American colleagues on being defined by this shared (“catholic”) faith rather than their own cultural context. It’s not difficult to determine whose witness right now is more “relevant.”

In the 1920s, Princeton New Testament professor (and founder of Westminster Seminary) J. Gresham Machen was already issuing the complaint that the obsession with “applied Christianity” was so pervasive that soon there would be little Christianity left to apply. Are we seeing the effects even in evangelical and Reformed circles of a pragmatic interest in the methods of ministry that downplays interest in the actual message? Do our pastors coming out of three or four years of seminary education really know the Bible as pastor-scholars, ready to proclaim, teach, and lead the sheep into the rich pastures of redemption? Are they becoming technicians, entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats who know the niche demographics of this passing age better than they know the Word by which the Spirit is introducing the age to come?

In some ways, the concern with contextualization has been an understandable response to a naive modern assumption that truth is simply universal, timeless, and changeless. Just as postmodern theory has reacted against the modern “textbook” approach to knowledge, and attempted to “situate” thinking in the lived experience of social practices in which we are embedded, contextualization can be a welcome dose of realism. We don’t just have ideas;

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our beliefs are shaped to a great extent by the cultural habits, language, customs, and practices of particular groups.

Covenant theology makes a lot more sense in feudal societies than in liberal democracies. Faith in a God who is King of kings and Lord of lords, who saves sinners by his gracious action rather than by putting himself on the ballot for a general election, may be less plausible to successful capitalists and politically empowered feminists than to prisoners or oppressed workers. “Christendom” was largely a secular construction of a particular empire borrowing Christian language, and we cannot understand the rise of revivalism apart from the Industrial Revolution or contemporary evangelicalism apart from the massive technological and social revolutions of recent history. It’s easier for American Christians to take contextualization seriously when we’re preparing for a mission trip to Africa; we are less sensitive to the ways in which our own faith and practice are shaped for good and for ill by our own location.

The most prevalent analogy in Christian calls to contextualization is the incarnation. Just as the Word became flesh, God-With-Us, individual believers and the church corporately must “incarnate” Christ’s life in the present, we are told. But is this a good analogy? In this article I want to offer some cautions about using it, as we launch our yearlong theme of “Christ in a Post-Christian Culture.”

A Savior, Not a Symbol ronically, a naive kind of contextualization can actually serve the interests of cultural hegemony, power, and pride.

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“This is just the way we are.”

“Young people are like that, you know.”

“You have to understand the social forces that have shaped that group.”

Of course, there is always some truth in these imperatives.

Ethnic churches, urban churches, and suburban churches, for example, can be impervious to the differences of those outside their circles and the ways in which their own cultural assumptions have made them seem alien even to fellow Christians. But is the answer simply to follow enculturation more deeply, to contextualize more broadly, to “incarnate” Jesus more fully by our activity? Or is it to allow the incarnate Savior and Lord himself to redefine our churches, to re-contextualize our churches around him and his kingdom as he reigns at his Father’s right hand by his Word and Spirit?

Jesus is a Savior, not a symbol. His incarnation is unique and unrepeatable. It cannot be extended, augmented, furthered, or realized by us. It happened; Jesus is God from Bethlehem to eternity. He did not come to show us how to incarnate ourselves, but to be our incarnate Redeemer.

Of course, there are a few places that indicate we are to follow the example of Jesus Christ, but not many. In fact, the most obvious one is Philippians 2, where we are told to follow the example of Christ’s humility demonstrated in his J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 15

observations that seem to count against the theory) until they gang up on the theotheir stubborn commitment to their reigning paradigms ry and overthrow the whole paradigm. Until then, the screened out the possibility of bodily resurrection and a community of scientists (not unlike a church or denomifinal judgment. nation) retains their confidence that the paradigm they incarnation. On the other hand, there are many New Tesnow hold makes the most sense of the data. But the partament passages on our union with Christ and the works adigm itself plays a large role in their interpretation of the that result. Christ does not stand at a distance, leading us data and the plausibility of that data in challenging their by his example; the Spirit has united us to Christ, so that broader system. Reformed apologist Cornelius Van Til unwe actually become one with him. But nowhere, even in derscored the importance and inescapability of presuppoPhilippians 2, are we told to imitate, repeat, or extend sitions in the way analogous to this notion of plausibility Christ’s incarnation. The redeeming work of Christ is finstructures. ished; our work is a response of gratitude to that completed Recognizing, however, that a particular culture’s worldwork. The qualitative difference between the person and view, paradigm, plausibility structure, and presuppositions work of Jesus Christ and the person and work of believare formative is different from the assumption that they are ers makes it impossible to see the incarnation as a paradigm determinative. As in the natural sciences, an entire system for our ministry. Rather, Christ’s incarnation is the reason can be overthrown even by a single anomaly—if that phethat a ministry exists at all in the first place. nomenon is significant enough to cause a paradigm-revolution. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is just such an Contextualizing Contextualization anomaly. It is significant that when Paul addressed the f we are going to understand our times—and how the philosophers in Athens (Acts 17), he knew his audience well gospel addresses us in them—contextualization itself will enough to connect with their reigning paradigms; but inhave to be “contextualized.” In other words, we have stead of showing how the gospel substantiated their to realize that this concept too belongs to a particular patworldview, he used the truth in their own confused systern of thinking and web of assumptions we have inhertem to unravel the system itself. His speech culminated in ited as denizens of a certain time and place. The gospel has the greatest anomaly of all: the resurrection of Jesus Christ, been around a lot longer than has the doctrine of contexwhich demonstrates the inevitability of the last judgment. tualizing. It has survived martyrdom, Christendom, heresy, The only responsible conclusion, he says, is to repent and and schism—even the myriad symptoms of the “American believe the gospel. To be sure, most of Paul’s auditors Religion”—and is no worse for the wear. Kingdoms and thought he was crazy; their stubborn commitment to their empires come and go, but this one endures from generareigning paradigms screened out the possibility of bodily tion to generation. resurrection and a final judgment. But some believed. That’s Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed that we use the way it goes. And it has gone that way ever since, belanguage to participate in a “form of life” that already excause the Spirit is at work opening blind eyes and deaf ears. ists before we arrived on the scene. From our earliest comThat’s where our confidence must be placed. munication in childhood, we use words to get things done, When we make a particular context normative, we esand in so doing eventually become part of the game already sentially concede that there is a captivity from which Jein progress. This idea that knowledge is social rather than sus Christ cannot liberate. This is the doctrine of historicism, simply the result of an individual’s apprehension of “clear which assumes that a particular belief can be explained adand distinct ideas” has led sociologists like Peter Berger to equately simply by defining the context in which it came speak of “plausibility structures.” It’s not that one cannot to be believed. Workers accept their lot in life because they escape the paradigm that has shaped his or her language assume the capitalistic paradigm as a given, Marx argued. and therefore beliefs and practices. However, conversion People hold certain convictions because of their context. from one paradigm to another is not simply an act of the Historicism became the dominant way of thinking in the will. If one shares the presuppositions of atheistic natuculture that produced Protestant liberalism. So, for example, ralism, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead will be imRudolf Bultmann accepted as a fate the supposed imposplausible, just as a sixth-century European peasant would sibility of people using electric lights and radios believing have found it implausible that a person struggling with in a world filled with angels and demons. Retired Episcopal epileptic seizures could be treated by medicine rather than bishop John Shelby Spong has repeated this refrain in reby exorcism. cent years, insisting that it is ridiculous to expect contemHistorians of science have followed this train of thinkporary people in highly developed societies to believe in ing in recent decades by showing how scientific paradigms the supernatural religion that is revealed Christianity. govern the progress of the sciences, resisting anomalies (i.e., While this trajectory of historicism has made us more

To be sure, most of Paul’s auditors thought he was crazy;

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aware of our contextualized existence, it has, ironically, become its own kind of dogmatic, universal, and totalizing claim. If people could only believe things that were determined by their context, there could be no revolutions in science, art, politics, and other fields of cultural endeavor.

As a “theory of everything,” historicism is manifestly false when applied to Christianity. Christ’s resurrection was not an idea whose time had come in the evolution of Second Temple Judaism. Although it grew out of Israel’s story, it was a radical anomaly even in the thinking of the disciples themselves. The resurrection—and the gospel to which it is attached—possessed sufficient power to overthrow the reigning paradigm of many, as the Spirit drew them to Christ through its proclamation. Since Jesus Christ has been raised, whatever paradigms have shaped us must be called into question. That is Paul’s point in Athens. Our context is not a fate to be accepted. The sociological “is” does not prescribe the theological “ought.” When Christian writers such as George Barna and many others assume that we must change our message, methods, or mission because of generation-whatever, we recall the words of the Great Commission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go into the whole world and preach the gospel, teaching everything I have commanded and baptizing the nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18–20).

Christ Confronts Culture ast year’s Modern Reformation theme focused on the problem of “Christless Christianity,” and one of our running arguments was that we have taken Christ and his gospel for granted, assuming it, but not focusing on it and living out our mission and our lives from that center. This year’s theme attempts to address more constructively how it is that we can proclaim Christ, witness to Christ, and serve Christ in a culture that may tolerate “Christianity” in some vague sense, but is increasingly hostile to the particular claims concerning Christ’s person and work.

So in a certain sense we are also trying to contextualize our witness. However, our assumption is not that our “postChristian culture” defines how we present Christ, but that Christ’s objective person and work define how we engage this culture or any other.

Whether we identify them as late modern or postmodern, our cultural assumptions should be studied and recognized not chiefly so that we can make the gospel more relevant and inviting to our neighbors, but so that we can recognize the particular ways in which they—and we—have become resistant to the gospel. In other words, by starting with God’s Word to us—assuming that it can create new worlds, rather than with us and our assumptions—we expect the gospel’s engagement with culture to produce more clashes than accommodations, more dissonance than resonance, more disorientation, confusion, and objections than stability, affirmation, and recognition. Whatever we discover over this year about our culture, at least one conclusion can

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be easily anticipated at the beginning: the gospel that has always been strange in every culture, for largely the same reasons, is still strange to us and to our neighbors. Its relevance lies not in its repetition of familiar platitudes of natural religion, sentiment and morality, but in its disturbing and liberating power to convert.

A contextualizing approach that assumes a basically affirmative relationship to a given cultural context will accommodate the message, methods, and mission. Throughout this year-long series, however, we will be looking for ways of understanding our time and place in order to find Archimedean points for prying open the cultural assumptions, habits, and practices that render the gospel especially unintelligible to us and to our neighbors. Paul recognized in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians that the Greeks of his day had particular trouble even understanding the gospel, because it was a solution to a problem they did not even consider. They were looking for philosophical and ethical wisdom, not for a Savior who could raise their bodies to immortal life. Similarly, his Jewish contemporaries were seeking life in their own righteousness rather than looking outside of themselves to the incarnate Redeemer.

In that sense, Paul “contextualized” the gospel. Nevertheless, he was convinced that the gospel itself had the power to do its own work (Rom. 1:16). Our goal in this series is to expose those points at which the gospel challenges rather than accommodates the dominant paradigms of our post-Christian context.

What Time Is It? asic to our working assumptions is the New Testament’s distinction between “this passing age” and “the age to come.” There is a legitimate place for dividing Western history according to obvious turning points: ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern.

However, the primary division for Christians is “this age” and “the age to come”: the era dominated by sin and death, leading to judgment; and the era dominated by the Spirit, righteousness, and life, leading to salvation in Christ. It is not Alexander the Great and Immanuel Kant or Jacques Derrida but Jesus Christ who defines history as “before” and “after.” His work represents the most significant turning point in history, as the law of sin and death is confronted with the gospel. That is why the New Testament identifies the whole era since Pentecost as “these last days.”

Wherever we are in our places and times, this is the most decisive context. We are either “in Adam,” sharing in the fading regime of death, or “in Christ,” with an unfading inheritance.

Protestant liberalism forgot what time it is, accommodating its message, methods, and mission to this passing age.

Evangelicalism is in the process of doing the same thing in its call to “contextualization.” The most dangerous context of mission may not be Paul’s: an era of perpetual threat of martyrdom. It is probably not the church in China today that is under the greatest threat, but the churches belonging to a “Christendom” that has turned sour on its up-

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like the rest, sets our coordinates as pilgrims in this fading age.

We must recover our context, we recognize that it is the age to come— confidence in the truth that the gospel creates its own breaking into this fading age through the gospel— paradigm, its own “sociology of knowledge,” its own form that is normative. of life, language game, and plausibility structure from the bringing, like a wayward adolescent who reacts viscerally Word and the sacraments. We must learn to speak our own against everything that reminds him or her of home. In this language again and take our cues from the practices God case, however, Christendom never was home; it was always has instituted for his own work among us as he creates the an illusion created by a confusion of Christ and culture. kind of community that is as strange as its gospel. ■ God’s Word tells us what time it is. Paul to Timothy: “In the last days, people will be lovers of themselves,” with all of the characteristics of narcissism, materialism, pride, and Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology and reckless disregard for authority. People “will not put up with Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido). sound doctrine, but will gather to themselves teachers who will say whatever their itching ears want to hear.” Paul’s prescription is not to accommodate the gospel to this context, but to confront the context with the gospel: “Timothy, preach the Word, in season [i.e., when it is popular] and out of season [i.e., when it’s not], teaching, rebuking, and exhorting” (2 Tim. 4:2).

American evangelicals are increasingly aware that we are living in a post-Christian culture. Our brothers and sisters in Europe have known for some time now that this is their lot, as churches are turned into mosques or civic cenModern Reformation magazine ters—but now it is our turn. In vain will we spend our eninvites you to submit a book review ergies on last-ditch efforts to “take America back,” strugfor publication in the Reviews section gling to hang onto some last vestiges of a Judeo-Christian morality even while biblical doctrine, worship, and pracof an upcoming issue. tice increasingly vanish from our churches. It is time to acBeginning this January, we would like cept the fact that our neighbors are not “unchurched,” but to give you the opportunity to critique, pagans, even though many were raised in at least nominal Christian backgrounds. In some ways, our post-Chrisevaluate, and consider books both tian context makes mission a little clearer. Instead of the good and bad from your Reformational bland moralism of a pseudo-Christian culture, which disperspective. Thoughtful Christians torted the gospel in myriad ways, a faithful proclamation of the gospel and lives shaped will lead to a more explicwill examine the most important it, if smaller, Christian witness. We need to reflect more books of the day, and we want to deeply, wisely, and biblically on how our churches can beencourage interaction with books come theaters of grace, nurseries of faith, and engines of mission again. Taking the gospel more seriously than we that inspire and instruct, take our context, we recognize that it is the age to or maybe frustrate and concern. come—breaking into this fading age through the gospel— Submit your review of 1,000 words that is normative. The covenant of grace is the definitive context—“in Christ” the normative location—of every beor less in an email to liever, whether in ancient Thessalonica or contemporary reviews@modernreformation.org.

Shanghai, Nairobi, or Omaha.

Please reference the guidelines This is what we mean when we confess our belief in “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” It is catholic because and suggestions available at it is in Christ. Those who are united to Jesus Christ through www.modernreformation.org/ faith in the gospel are knit together more intimately than submissions. any generation, consumer niche, ethnic group, gender, or other demographic generated by this present age. The age that endures, after the American empire has come and gone

Taking the gospel more seriously than we take our

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n 1996, Samuel Huntington’s highly influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order appeared. The old lines of conflict between Marxist ideology and Western, democratic capitalism, he argued, were receding. They were being replaced by a new and different set of tension points. These would not be ideological any longer but, rather, civilizational. Central to these conflicts would be religion.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Huntington’s words seemed to have been eerily prescient. Islamic fanatics did indeed declare war on the “Christian” West, taking aim at its symbolic sources of power. But while his thesis seemed to be prescient from one angle, it was strangely out of touch from another. The West is “Christian”? That is hardly the case, regardless of how elastically we understand the word Christian. Today, most of Europe has been denuded of any Christian presence.

It is only the empty churches and cathedrals that remind us of what was once there. Much the same is true of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In all of these countries, church attendance of any kind, on any given Sunday, hovers only between 2 percent and 5 percent of the population.

It is, in fact, outside the West that Christian faith is growing, at least numerically, not inside the West. It is burgeoning in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia.

In the United States, attendance at church is better than in other Western countries. It is not in the 40 percent to 50 percent range that Gallup and other pollsters have rou-

tinely reported over the years, but somewhere closer to 20 percent when we find out who actually attended rather than how many told the pollsters that they attend. But even if, in this respect, Christian faith is doing a little better in the United States than in Europe, it is still struggling to sustain itself in the midst of this highly complex, modernized culture, one which is technological and affluent in its form and postmodern in its mood.

The church is part of this culture and yet it must stand apart from its culture. It is rooted in what never changes, Christ, and yet it must live in a world that is constantly changing, and it has no hiding place from that change. This is simple to state but, as we all know, complex to work out.

Nevertheless, let me try to make a start here.

Culture t used to be that when people spoke of culture, they were thinking about Shakespeare, Bach, and Michelangelo.

High culture was what was in view, the kind that has the power to elevate the mind and satisfy the aesthetic senses. But today, we are not thinking along these lines at all, at least not when we are thinking about culture. In fact, when some speak of culture, they are thinking only about the surface ripples in our society, the fashions and fads that are commercially driven and that come and go with breathtaking rapidity. This is what fascinates Barna and many of

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This, in fact, is what we are hearing today, many years later, from the “New Atheunwittingly given support to those who wish to banish ists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, all religious ideas from the public square as being and Christopher Hitchens—all authors of runaway best-sellpotentially divisive. ers. We know enough now, they say, to be able to kill off his fellow pollsters, not to mention quite a few of our hipthe gods and to live free from the tyranny and ignorance ster pastors. If culture is no longer about what is high, howof religious authority. Why these books have struck such ever, we should also say rather emphatically that it is not a responsive cord is curious since the percentage of atheabout trivia, either. ists in America, at least, remains static at 4 percent.

No, we should be thinking about it as an alternative unHowever, the actual situation may be too subtle for pollderstanding of reality, the way of construing the meaning sters to get, and more nuanced questions that are able to of life, one that takes on the status of being “normal” for include different kinds of agnosticism as forms of functional people living in this context. It is not a meaning that is alatheism might bring the number closer to what we have ways spelled out for us, but one that is communicated more in Europe, which is 18 percent. often by assumptions than stated ideas. It is communicated But, like most philosophies in the modern period, once as much by contact as by conversation. It is encountered these ideas leave their incubators in the minds of the West’s in the images that enfold us in movies, DVDs, and adverelite, intellectual circles, and when they spill out into the tisements. It is what forms a network of fabricated unwider society, they lose some of their hard edges. But they derstanding in the workplace, in our neighborhood, and also gather new followers. in the nether-reality into which the Internet takes us. It is Today, these ideas are ensconced in important pockets the Matrix. It is pervasive and it is intrusive. And it is inof our society—Hollywood, the elite press, academia— creasingly global, looking about the same whether we enand they have spawned a whole set of attitudes at the cencounter it in New York, Paris, Bombay, or Shanghai. ter of which is the thought that God and the supernatuA few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit a Masai ral must be marginalized for the good of society. God, or village on the plains beneath Mt. Kilimanjaro. Those who the supernatural, are entirely irrelevant to what is imporlived there had no electricity, no running water, no newstant to our society and they are alike harmful to our aupapers, no television, and no supermarkets. They lived tonomy. This secular-humanist impulse, though, continamong their cattle and the predators that preyed on the ues to evolve. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, it was herds of wild game that roam the plains. Our guide, at one effective in making the argument that religion belongs only point, showed us a root that he said was found in the upin the private sphere and that our public life must be govper reaches of the mountain. “This,” he said, “is our Viaerned by nonreligious ideas. This is a very appealing argra.” How accurate this was I don’t know. But one thing gument in all Western societies because immigration, lewas unmistakable: the power of a brand-name in this ingal and otherwise, has brought into all of them a multitude creasingly worldwide, commercialized culture—one that of different religions with the new immigrants. Indeed, this has the power to reach into places far removed from its own is the reason that America now appears to be the most recenters of power. ligiously diverse nation in the world. By what religious ideas, While it is the case that all over the world we encounter then, are we to order our common life? Those from Islam? the same products—the same fast food, the same blue jeans Buddhism? Christianity? Our growing religious diversity, and t-shirts, the same movies, the same consumer impulses, ironically, has unwittingly given support to those who wish and the same culture of television, advertising, asphalt, and to banish all religious ideas from the public square as bewaste—it is also the case that to all of this there is given ing potentially divisive. some local coloration. In the West, this has come, first, from During the 1970s and 1980s, Christians obsessed over the the long dominance of the Enlightenment and now, sectriumph of secular-humanism but, quite unexpectedly, the ond, from the falling debris of its collapse. This collapse has tide began to turn and this had very little to do with Chrisbrought about some stunning reversals in the way we are tian apologetic efforts. In fact, in 2006, a Pew poll indicatnow thinking. ed that 69 percent believed that “liberals” had gone too far The hard center in the Enlightenment’s thinking, at least in excluding God from schools and from government, but in America, was heard in the Humanist Manifesto published this attitude paled in comparison to the sudden upsurge in in 1933. The universe, it declared, is self-existent, the suthe importance of the spiritualities that began to flood the pernatural is a myth, social well-being is the goal of life, airwaves, bookstores, and the workplace. The truth is that and human nature contains within it everything we need the flat, horizontal, secularized worldview of the Enlightto reach this goal. In its later revision, it took on a more enment had exhausted itself. It had ended up in obvious militant attitude toward religions and religious authority. bankruptcy. It was now set aside by the human spirit that

Our growing religious diversity, ironically, has

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quested upwards, naked, empty, and alone, searching for a meaning larger than life, a reality other than that of malls, asphalt, buying and selling, and the unremitting pablum of television, all of which are the stuff—the only stuff—of our daily life in this highly modernized world.

In 2000, Gallup reported that 80 percent of Americans now saw themselves as being spiritual, which was a stunning finding. All Western countries, according to Enlightenment dogma, should now have progressed beyond such infantile notions. This figure, of course, included those who were also religious, but within this 80 percent were many who were not. So it was that the mantra, “spiritual but not religious,” became a part of our language. We hear it on television, from our next-door neighbors, and from Hollywood starlets. What is being rejected by these newly aware spiritual people are truths that are divinely revealed, doctrines that put those truths into cogent formulation, ethical rules that are not self-originated, and expectations that spirituality should go hand in hand with some kind of corporate involvement, such as in a local church. If one is really serious about being spiritual, the new wisdom says, one will not be “religious” in these old ways because they inhibit the discovery and expression of the self. When this shift in mentality took place, the game changed.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that this turn to spirituality has left many Christians baffled. They are still thinking in terms of set battles with atheists and secularists, identifiable enemies arrayed against Christianity. But now, all of a sudden, they find themselves up against something entirely different—urban guerillas, dressed in civvies, who often pose as friends and allies. This has left many evangelicals quite befuddled.

And that is what probably explains the almost audible sigh of relief when the New Atheists hit the headlines in the 1990s. Here, at least, was an enemy who could be identified, who clearly was willing to fight, and who therefore could be fought.

Yet even here the ground was shifting. With respect to the gospel, how different are the New Atheists when compared with those in Islam or Hinduism? In 2008, Robert Schuller said that Islamic imams were actually serving Christ unbeknownst. He had, of course, let the cat out of the bag.

His self-focused religious understanding has always been incipiently liberal. It turned out to be a straw blowing in the wind. The evangelical world as a whole is now adrift when it comes to other religions—the recent Pew study found that 57 percent thought that salvation could be had in other religions—but it is especially adrift when it comes to the whole range of spiritualities it is now encountering.

The old secular humanists were anti-religious, anti-spiritual, overt enemies. The newly spiritual are not anti-anything except a God who is transcendent and objective to them, before whom they are accountable. They are more chameleon-like and so it has been tempting, especially to evangelicals whose own faith has lost much of its doctri-

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nal scaffolding, to see them as friends, as potential allies, in the fight against unbelief, however different is the language they are speaking. And that, in fact, has been the intuitive strategy of many of the marketing megachurches.

They are trolling in these new, spiritual waters to attract takers for a message of spirituality, one that is non-doctrinal, non-church, one in which ethical standards are apparently negotiable, and all of this, Christian though it is said to be, is little different from our diffuse cultural spirituality. And the Emergents, who are themselves marketing but to a younger generational niche than the innovators who followed Hybels, are becoming far more “generous” in their thinking than they are orthodox in this regard. They are often indignant about those who are “judgmental” with respect to those in other religions and spiritualities—is there not an irony here?—and who think that salvation is found uniquely in Christ.

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ur cultural situation in the West today, remarkably, brings us much closer to the New Testament period than we have been throughout the years when this aberrational Enlightenment ideology was virtually unchallengeable. Yet in the apostolic churches, we see none of the fumbling, none of the equivocating, that now characterizes many evangelicals as they come face to face with the New Spirituality.

Christian faith was born into a world quite as religiously diverse as our own and one suffused with spiritualities of all kinds. And yet nowhere in the early churches do we see what was typical of the spiritual then or of the spiritual now in our postmodern setting. Then as now, the spiritual is thought of in terms of gradations, a scale with the really spiritual on one end and the not so spiritual on the other.

The apostles thought in categories of in or out, light or darkness, knowing God or not knowing him. This is nowhere stated more plainly, more bluntly as I have suggested in Above All Earthly Pow’rs, than in the Johannines. Here the contrast is “above” and “below.”

There is a line drawn between God and ourselves. It clearly is invisible to us as sinners, otherwise we would not imagine that the sacred can be accessed on our terms and when we want. The reverse is, in fact, true. It is that God hides himself from us. His salvation is not within our grasp, it is not on the market as another product, nor is it emerging from deep within the self. God is inaccessible to us. We are locked out. It was he who had to cross that boundary line that separates us from himself because, no matter how urgently and earnestly we reach upward, no matter how spiritual we want to be, we cannot connect. This line is crossed only from his side, not from ours. It is crossed only by him and never by us because in crossing it he must do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. That is why repeatedly in the New Testament we read that Christ came from “above” (e.g., John 6:33, 8:42, 10:36) and we should infer from this that he is therefore never a discovery from “within,” as if self-exploration is a religious quest, nor can J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 21

he be accessed by our reaching upward toward him. No, he was “sent” into the world (e.g., John 3:31, 8:42, 13:3, 16:27–28, 17:8) and came to us who are “below.” At the cross, he did for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He bore our sin in substitutionary atonement and in so doing he instructed us on how we must understand our spirituality. At its heart, spirituality is moral because at the center of all reality is God who is holy. That is why there is no authentic, saving spirituality without Christ’s atonement.

The Church he church stands between these two coordinates in our mind, Christ and culture, but it is important to see exactly how we should resolve their relation. Our culture is constantly contesting the validity of the biblical view of life, and we experience that discomfort in our minds. At the same time, biblical faith is constantly invalidating the worldview of our culture and we are always aware of that tension. It is at this psychological nexus, this inner clearing house for two contradictory impulses, that so many of the issues arise today as to what the church is, what ministry is about, how to “do church,” and how to reach out evangelistically.

Modernized, Western culture has two central, driving impulses. They are freedom from the past and freedom for the self. The first of these comes from our incredibly inventive, fecund, and innovative world that has filled our malls with products, expanded our choices, improved our circumstances and, because of so many medical breakthroughs, greatly lengthened our lives. At its core is the assumption that whatever has been done in the past is now obsolete and can be improved. How many times have we seen products advertised on television as “new” and “improved”! All of this creates a mentality that looks askance at the past and is positively averse to tradition in any form.

The second impulse, freedom for the self, is one of the threads of continuity linking the modern to the postmodern. It is an impulse that was at the heart of the Enlightenment world and it is at the heart of the postmodern.

It is not difficult to discern the work of the first of these impulses, freedom from the past, in the contempt with which the traditional church is now being assailed by many today. Not everything from the past, of course, is worthy of preservation. Yet, at the center of this dismissal is really a distaste not only for old hymns, liturgies, pews, and pulpits, but for traditional ideas of authority, especially of religious authority. That is why church marketers conceal the doctrinal beliefs of their churches. These beliefs limit how novel the church can be, link it to the past, diminish its appeal as a cutting-edge product, and call into question the freedom of the self that is so cherished by both moderns and postmoderns. The situation is a little different among the Emergents. They have tasted the emptiness of this kind of marketed faith and are now reaching out for something with greater depth. And yet the casual blending of different belief systems in their churchly experimenting—a bit of Catholicism here, a bit of Greek Ortho-

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doxy there, a hip rendition somewhere else—has also come about because of a rejection of traditional ideas of authority and because the self is exercising its autonomy to shape its spiritual context the way in which it wants.

It is tempting to think that in order to be successful we must recast the church in the form that culture is taking but, actually, success lies in doing exactly the opposite. I know this is counterintuitive, but it is nevertheless true.

We can experience no greater freedom than to be free from the tyranny of the self and free from the whole matrix of cultural expectation about what we should be. It is entirely appropriate for the church to be inventive in the ways it gives expression to these twin freedoms—from self and from culture—but let us understand that it is not its inventiveness that secures these freedoms. These are freedoms won in the death of Christ, declared in his gospel, central to our worship, celebrated in his Supper, and lived out in our service of others. Nothing is more beautiful, or more invigorating, than these truths. This is a message, contradicted as it may be by our culture, about which we should not be confused but, rather, joyfully and confidently declaring. Are we, in short, going to take seriously the message given to the church, a message as distinctive as is the Christ who is its center and substance? ■

Dr. David F. Wells is Distinguished Research Professor at GordonConwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and the author of several books, including The Courage to Be Protestant (Eerdmans, 2008).

Speaking Of…

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arfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my “chronological snobbery,” the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

—C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

C H R I S T I N A P O S T- C H R I S T I A N C U LT U R E

Culture and the Christian BY

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ulture is one of those pesky, paradoxical concepts that everyone knows what it means as long as they don’t have to define it. Once the task commences, what appeared apparent suddenly becomes elusive. Culture is a difficult word to define because it is multi-vocal. It labels many divergent phenomena and suggests relationships among seemingly unrelated items. We know intuitively what culture is, live within its bounds every moment, yet never see clearly the morphing reality the word identifies. Anthropologists, whose primary field is culture, continue to wrestle with the concept.

Already in 1952, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn1 compiled a list of more than 150 definitions of culture. One that many anthropologists and even more anthropology texts still use as a starting point is E. B. Tylor’s from 1871. He defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”2 This provides a helpful, albeit vague, scope. Taken in tandem with Geertz’s later definition, a picture begins to focus: “Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters—as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’)—for the governing of behavior.”3 In the same work, Geertz develops the definition and includes his famous observation that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance which he himself has created. I take culture to be those webs.”4 Having worked with such notions, it became clear to anthropologists that “culture” and “cultures” are not things in the sense that they are discretely defined, bordered, and unchanging. We can’t point to an artifact and say “there is culture.” The artifact is, rather, a part of culture, meaningful only within the context of the whole. As much as analytical concepts “culture” and “cultures” are helpful, they are still abstractions—ideas in our heads. More recent definitions allow for messiness: “Cultures are, after all, col-

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lective, untidy assemblages, authenticated by belief and agreement, focused only in crisis, systematized after the fact.”5 Culture “then is not something given but something to be gradually and gropingly discovered.”6 For anthropologists, culture flows out of the “needs of common humanity.”7 It is an adaptive response to the tasks of living.

Culture is then a complex, dynamic system of patterns of action and interactions that a loosely bounded group of people share in a particular environment. Culture is a system of symbols and their meanings are shared by a group of people that allows them to interpret experience. Neither the system nor the meanings are fixed, yet they are patterned.

The boundaries are not clear, yet they are binding. The components of the system and the people who embody them interact and compete with one another within that system. Meanings and patterns are negotiated, contested, and constantly yet subtly in flux. Culture is both the product of and, in many ways, the producer of people.

The term “culture” as used in vernacular is not very helpful analytically. For the nonspecialist, culture serves as an explanation (in effect, “that’s just their culture”). But for the anthropologist, culture is the thing that needs to be explained.

Throughout history, there has been a complex relationship between believers and their societies. Even in the West, the relationship between the Christian and culture is full of ambivalence. Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture (Harper & Row, 1956) explores the varying relationships.

Cultures may be thought of as “Christian” in some sense (in that they are neither Muslim nor Buddhist, for example). But this is misleading. Not cultures but people are Christians—individual believers in relationship with the living God in Christ Jesus. America may be usefully described as Christian, yet much of our American culture runs counter to biblical ideals. It is arguable just how beneficial it is for the individual in faith-relationship with the Creator to be living in a tepid Christian milieu such as ours.

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activities. Research has consistently shown that while only about 20 to 30 percent of Americans are in church on any given Sunday, close to 60 percent of Americans claim to have been.8 This reminds us of the powerful influence cultural expectations exerts on its members. We are naive to believe that people attend such activities purely as a “faith response.”

Our churches are products of place and time. Today, with their impressive buildings, elaborate programs, and swelling budgets, our churches look very unlike the Christian church of the first centuries. Our church institutions are “cultural,” situated in a context. Neither the context nor the church has looked this way before, and we may quickly find ourselves in a much different context.

We should expect our church institutions to look much different in the future. But these institutions are not our faith. We serve the One who transcends our space and time (our culture). Perhaps the church on earth will no longer be a potent force within our cultural context. And that is not inherently a spiritual tragedy. We have no guarantees that our church institutions will continue on. The church, to be sure, will. The Christian church will continue with or without the sanction of culture. For the church is not an institution. It is a community of believers, called and gathered by the Spirit of God. Culture is made up of people. We create it, maintain it, justify it, and modify it. Each time you follow the expectations of your culture, you are maintaining it. Each time you challenge it, stray to the fringes, or go against the expected moray, you are modifying it. We remain in a kind of dialogue with our cultures (a dialectal relationship) in which we are both producer and product of culture. At times, we feel it is a one-sided conversation, but the social processes are such that voices, even minority voices, impact the trajectory.

Our culture seems to be getting more hostile (less sympathetic, or less defaulted) toward Christianity. As the church becomes “less useful” to our culture, we should expect it to become more marginalized. But do we want it to be useful to the culture? Do we want it to be used? There has never been a comfortable relationship between Christianity and culture. It seems the church has as much to lose as to gain by any of these cultural endorsements. Power structures within specific cultures have readily and often co-opted religion for their own nefarious purposes. The Christian church on earth has, at different times, been oblivious to this, has cooperated with it, and has even instigated it.

We don’t, however, need our culture’s blessing to be Christian. In the United States, we should not expect our neighbors to be like us nor to worship like us. Our nation is built upon the fundamental disconnect between our constitutionally protected religious pluralism and the exclusionary claims of Christianity. We should always view our greater culture with skepticism.

As Christians discuss culture changes—for example, a response to our culture’s movement toward legalizing homosexual marriage—we need to remember that just a generation ago the sin of divorce and remarriage was a cultural taboo.

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It has now moved to the acceptable. Society’s tolerance for sin should not be near as much concern for the Christian as his own tolerance for the sin his culture has sanctioned.

Regardless of the cultural context, we must continue to do the work God has given us to do. For some of us, that means organizing to influence culture by pressing for public policies, voting against propositions, and protesting bad politics. For others of us, it means remembering that our interaction with the antagonistic, non-Christian fellow citizen is with “our neighbor” whom we are called to serve.

There is no “contextless” Christian faith. The Christian faith is lived within a cultural milieu with its idiosyncrasies, biases, opportunities, and limitations. Christians can fight against it or succumb to its constraints, but the Christian is never free from its bounds. It is easy to mistake the comfortable claims and assumptions of our own culture for universal truths. We do well to not trust our culture, but rather to test it, to become aware of those local features that would claim to be ultimate. For our faith is ultimately a connection between individuals and the Living God. Our cultures provide a framework, a language, a location for living that relationship, but we must not confuse one for the other. ■

Jack M. Schultz, Ph.D., is professor of anthropology at Concordia University in Irvine, California. Author of Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma: Maintaining a Traditional Community (University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), he has conducted field research among a variety of other Native American groups including Pawnee, Comanche, Kaw, Creek, and Navajo. Schultz continues to research the complex relationship between culture and religion: most recently, Lutheranism in Germany.

Works Cited 1Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions; Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Volume XLVII, No. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1952).

2Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (Gordon Press: New York 1974 [1871]), 1.

3Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 44.

4Geertz, 5.

5Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 10. vi Edward Sapir, Philip Sapir, Regna Darnell, and Judith T. Irvine, The Collected Works of Edward Sapir. 4. Ethnology (The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 310.

7Sapir, 204.

8See for example, “Weaker Faith,” 6-09-08 Sightings, published online by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Text, Church, and World:

A Theology of Expository Preaching

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ll over the world, every Sunday, countless sermons are delivered. What is happening—or should be happening—when a human preacher stands to proclaim God’s Word? There are many forms of pulpit address that might go under the name of preaching. In the best of them, the Bible is always present in some defining way; but a preacher with an open Bible is simply a necessary, not sufficient, requirement. Although plenty of sermons take their starting point from the biblical text, the shape and aim of the sermon end up far removed from the purpose of the passage used. It is possible to do as much damage with the Bible as good.

In this essay, I want to suggest that it is expository preaching that should be the standard issue of the pulpit and the staple diet of the congregation. To advance this claim, I will offer a brief working definition of expository preaching as the interaction between three main domains, and then try to probe more deeply by thinking theologically about each of the three areas.

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Three Horizons: Toward a Definition of Expository Preaching ohn Stott has suggested that the task of any preacher is to fuse the “two horizons” of the biblical text and the contemporary world in the experience of the listener.

This provides a fundamental orientation to expository preaching. Here preachers understand their task as being first to exegete the meaning of the biblical text, but then also to bring this text into contact with the contemporary world, showing how the text both illumines and challenges the world. Stott argues that expository preaching is marked by two convictions (the biblical text is both inspired and in need of being explained), two obligations (faithfulness to the text and sensitivity to the world), and two expectations (that God will speak and his people will respond).1 Arguably, however, the two horizons suggested by Stott need to be complemented by a third equally necessary horizon—the church. In this way, expository preaching is not simply fusing text and world but also text, church, and

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from the biblical text, the second highlights that it comes from the biblical text. future new creation given in advance to the old creation, Expository preaching is forced to reckon with Scripture’s a sign of the world to come where everything is brought multifaceted collection of writings, diverse genres, and together under the unending reign of Jesus the King. vastly different homiletical challenges: the text ensures world2; and the preacher’s task is to travel along Scripture’s that expository sermons on Lamentations will not be idenhistorical timeline, recognizing the biblical drama as pritical to expository sermons on Romans. The form of the text marily the story of God’s relationship with his covenant peosets the agenda for the content of the sermon. Good preachple. Expository preaching seeks to apply the gospel mesing wrestles with, for instance, the issues of whether narsage as much to believers as to the watching world. rative texts demand narrative sermons, and how best to exThe three horizons of text, church, and world work topress poetry and lament, tragedy and satire in exposition. gether as dialogue partners in the act of expository The text exercises a constraining influence on the preachpreaching. The text provides the key content for the preacher: these words, spoken at this particular time in salvationer’s address, restricting a use of the Bible as merely the history, in this particular way, demand to be re-spoken so springboard for a few personal thoughts from the preachthat they can be heard, felt, and acted on anew. er. The church provides the context of believing reception Second, expository preaching from the biblical text is for of the Word, and reminds preachers that their task is not the church. Our thinking about the church—and thus about to harangue the “outsider” but to comfort and instruct the preaching in the church—can go astray if we locate the “insider.” The world provides the stage of history that is govchurch at the wrong point in history. Let me explain. Many erned by God and as such provides the points of contemdiscussions about what the church should look like take their porary connection for the Word. This point of contact exfundamental bearings from where the church currently is ists due to the doctrine of creation—the world is owned by in history: post-Christian, Western, postmodern, relativisGod and derives its being from him, and as such is capatic, pluralistic, and so on. This ensures that the dominant ble of hearing an address from God. If text, church, and factors in our conception of what the church actually is, or world are the vital ingredients of expository preaching, then what it should be, are descriptions of the church drawn from what role does each of them play in the act of exposition? the cultural framework of our present location. We look at We can get at this question by considering the three horiwhere we are in the world and so debate whether we should zons and the sermon, and then the three horizons and the be “traditional” or “seeker-sensitive” or “Emergent” or “postpreacher. conservative,” and so on. But the Bible actually uses the world to come to define the church. A key strand of New The Three Horizons and the Sermon Testament thinking views the church as the eschatological xpository preaching comes from the text. This outpost of God’s bringing everything in heaven and earth point is so obvious that it is easy not to give it much together under the headship of Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:10). thought. But consider the following two points. First, With the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile deonly the Bible in the lectern distinguishes a pulpit from a stroyed through Christ, God is now working out his mansoapbox. The Bible provides the authority base required to ifold wisdom by bringing Jew and Gentile together in the speak for God in the act of preaching. Expository preachchurch as a sign to the rulers and authorities in the heaving engages in a genuine dialogue among text, church, and enly realms of what God will one day do to the whole cosworld, but it does not assume that the act of preaching is mos (Eph. 3:10). The church is God’s new humanity, an exmerely a dialogue, as if the three horizons are equal conample of the future new creation given in advance to the versation partners. They are not. God himself speaks in the old creation, a sign of the world to come where everything words of the Bible and the aim of the sermon is an enis brought together under the unending reign of Jesus the counter with him. For this reason, a repentant believer, King. a comforted congregation, or a worshipping convert are all This means that expository preaching, because it is adlegitimate goals of a sermon, and none could be realized dressed to people whose very existence is defined by the without the conviction that what the text says, God says. world to come, constantly draws on the reality of the next This conviction also ensures a clear distinction between the world to help make sense of the present world. The docauthoritative Scripture and an authoritarian preacher. The trine of the church ensures that preaching is addressed to former is theologically warranted by Scripture’s ontology “strangers in the world” (1 Pet. 1:1) and provides the chaland gives preaching its cutting edge; the latter denies the lenge to “live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this very definition of expository preaching by substituting the present age while we wait for the blessed hope—the glomessenger for the message. rious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus If this first point stresses that expository preaching comes Christ” (Titus 2:12–13). Preaching for the church roots its

The church is God’s new humanity, an example of the

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ethical imperatives in the eschatological reality of both coming judgment and promised reward (2 Pet. 3:11–14). It interprets suffering as a participation in the frustrated groans of a cosmos waiting for its liberation, and holds out the comfort that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18– 21). It also means that the proclamation of the gospel does not offer a dualistic “saving of the soul” or merely a “ticket to heaven.” Instead, ecclesiology ensures that expository preaching heralds a whole new way of being human in the world—reconciliation to God and to others by participating in the first-fruits of the new creation.

The doctrine of creation is vital here. Creation also underpins the third horizon of the world. Made by God and owned by God, the world provides the structures of thought, language, and rationality that are needed to process and understand the divine address that comes in preaching. There is a sense in which expository preaching is not just to the world but actually comes from the world. As Francis Watson shows, the church is not an “enclosed, self sufficient sphere, for its members can never leave behind the broader socio-linguistic formation that continues to permeate every aspect of their lives,” and therefore any expression of the church’s faith in the world through its preaching “will occur only within and through the medium of contemporary discourse.” Indeed, the gospel message can “only be proclaimed through the mediation of a language normally employed by a broad socio-linguistic group for quite other purposes.”3 This amounts to the simple claim that it is the doctrine of creation that requires the Bible to be translated into the languages of the world. It also demands that the preacher’s speech belong to the twenty-first century and not to the seventeenth.

Approaching the world theologically will allow the preacher to connect the text with culture and affirm its Godgiven goodness, as well as to address the world in its rebellion and alienation from God. The world is neither a value-neutral entity to be affirmed by the preacher, nor an irrelevant distraction to the other-worldly spiritual concerns of the sermon. The preacher needs to listen to the world and fuse the biblical text with its joys, aspirations, and agonies; the preacher needs to understand the way the world feels, argues, and thinks, what plausibility structures it erects, and its primary objections to the gospel. Careful listening to the world may even have a significant bearing on the form and structure of the sermon. For instance, due to the suspicions, many in a post-Christian culture will feel toward an authoritarian preacher or, in light of the problems created by epistemic relativism, a winsome approach may require the preacher to take time to explain to the congregation not only what the text means but also how they have come to that conclusion. There is a need to show the “working out” behind the sermon. In this way, any postmodern fears about authority and abusive power paradigms are totally disarmed through the preacher’s constant clear call to examine the text—listeners are invited to engage the Bible with their minds. Sermons structured

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like this begin to untie folded arms and help prevent a congregation made up of merely passive recipients being told what to think.

It is also this kind of approach to the world that must govern the issues of illustration and application in the sermon. They are not optional bolt-ons to the important issue of theology in the sermon. Rather, expository preaching loses the right to adopt that name where application surfaces only as an appended after-thought. Neither is it the correct approach, however, to pepper the sermon with references to contemporary culture and current affairs in an attempt to show that the preacher is “with it.” What is required is not anecdotal reference to the world, but penetrating engagement with the world to show that only the God and gospel of the Bible make sense of the world and can bring comfort and clarity to its pains and confusions.

A congregation quickly discerns whether their preacher really lives in the same world they inhabit outside of the few hours of pew dwelling on Sundays.

At least two negative reactions set in where the preacher operates without a strong doctrine of the world. First, the congregation begins to stagnate spiritually by losing connection from a gospel capable of connecting with every area of their lives. Sermons become a half-hour journey through an increasingly alien world of theology-speak. Second, the congregation will associate this alien theological world with what it means to be truly spiritual and, because they cannot survive in it, some will conclude that theology is only for certain types of people who are more spiritual (or clever) than they are. In such cases, where other-worldliness is implicitly communicated from the pulpit, not only do believers never learn how to engage with this world but they simultaneously grow bored at the prospect of the next. When believers begin to find their present physicality a distraction from the task of being “really spiritual,” then the hope of a future physicality becomes something hard to relate to or look forward to.

The Three Horizons and the Preacher xpository sermons are formed and delivered by persons. The relationship of the preacher to the three horizons has a vital bearing on the act of preaching.

Expository preaching requires the preacher to adopt a range of theologically necessary relational stances toward the text, the church, and the world.

First, excellent expository preaching is nurtured by preachers whose foundational relation to the text is a selfabased humility that issues in patient willingness to listen and be addressed by someone other than themselves. Anthony Thiselton has shown the value of the concept of the “hermeneutical circle” for appropriating the meaning of texts, although the sense of Thiselton’s term is perhaps better explained in Grant Osborne’s depiction of a “hermeneutical spiral.”4 In coming to the text, preachers bring a preunderstanding-horizon that shapes their perception of the text-horizon. However, the text is capable of reshaping the preacher’s understanding so that repeated exposure to the

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text results in a closer approximation of its message. Much like conversation with a good friend deepens understanding, so constant listening to the text allows the exegete to “spiral in” on its meaning.

For the Christian preacher, this is a moral and theological issue as much as a hermeneutical one. Luke 1:2 portrays the first eyewitnesses of the Christ-event as “servants of the word”—the stance is that of humility in the presence of something greater. Expository preaching demands that preachers allow their pre-understanding of the text to be confronted by the text, lest they serve only themselves in their preaching. Similarly, Paul presents his own ministry as one that has renounced secret and shameful ways, that does not use deception, and that does not “distort the word of God” (2 Cor. 4:2). The implication is that distorting the Word is a real possibility. The preacher is required to be a listener before being a speaker, for only a clear grasp of the text’s other-ness will prevent distorting it into the preacher’s mold.

Theological principles such as these must impact praxis at the deepest level, even right down to issues of how preachers structure their week and organize their priorities. To listen and to listen well takes time. A lot of time.

This means that where preachers do not protect sermon preparation time with prosecuting zeal, the end result of the sermon will be the work of those who speak before they listen. The sermon will reveal the kind of people who think they know best before they’ve heard both sides of an argument—the text will be handled in ways that ignore its details and nuances and miss its structure or surprises. One of the clearest signs of a sermon not born out of sensitive listening is that the congregation actually gets more Bible, not less, as the preacher draws on a reservoir of knowledge to speak about the text, expanding it, but does not explain the text, expounding it. (It is said that Winston Churchill once remarked after a lengthy address that he hadn’t had time to prepare a short talk.) It is conceivable that the preacher’s approach to the sermon text will go hand in hand with the approach to other facets of the ministry. Where the sermons are under-prepared and ill-conceived, so too pastoral relationships will often be underdeveloped and stunted, because genuine listening as a moral imperative is not being adopted as intrinsic to the theological task. The minister will very likely be hurried and busy, an activist, and on the fast-track to becoming a church manager doing God’s work rather than a preacher speaking God’s Word.

Second, expository preaching demands of the preacher a particular set of relational stances toward the church that are mandated by the biblical text. Stott has provided a telling outline of some of the pastoral metaphors enjoined on the preacher. To give two examples, there is the domestic metaphor of the “steward” (1 Cor. 4:1; Titus 1:7), entrusted with goods for the well-being of others, and the familial metaphor of the father (1 Cor. 4:15), a position of responsibility and loving leadership.5 Within the context of a ministry that is constantly appealing to the people of God, these relational stances are to shape and mold the manner 28 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

of the preacher’s appeal—it must be neither self-interested nor overbearing, but rather faithful and affectionate. In this way, pastoral practice becomes married to the pulpit address so that the preacher sees the task as being not just to deliver a sermon but to help form Christian character in line with the gospel.

One of the most powerful sermons I have heard in recent years was from 1 Thessalonians 2:17–3:13. In this passage, Paul reveals the nature of his care while absent from the church he planted and deeply loves. With insightful handling of the text and a rich capturing of the intensity of Paul’s emotion, the sermon urged us to see Paul’s concern as an example for us to follow—the preacher gently asked us if we sometimes settle for second best when it comes to our love for other believers and to what we hope for them. But it was not these things in themselves that made the sermon so moving and effective. It was the fact that they came from a preacher who clearly knew what it was like to long for people in this way. Without drawing attention to himself, the preacher’s own life functioned as a testifying partner to all that we were hearing because of the nature and reality of his pastoral care outside the pulpit. The result was that more than any application “telling us what to do” in the sermon, we knew as we listened what it would look like to love in the way we were being asked to because the preacher’s own life showed it to us. Here, eschatology was not doctrine that simply impacted the sermon’s orientation in an abstract way; it actually became the content of the preacher’s heartfelt pastoral longing that this flock, these individuals, these people he loves and cares for will be there on the last day, “blameless and holy before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1 Thess. 3:13). Visiting preachers can certainly be effective and powerful because it is always God’s Word and not their own; some in the kingdom are so gifted by God that their ministry should be national or global, not merely local. But pity the pastor who feels more comfortable in an itinerant pulpit than he does speaking to the same people week after week. Pity the congregation whose preacher is more drawn to the conference platform than he is to loving them as his hope, his crown, his glory, and joy (1 Thess. 3:19–20).

There are other relational stances too that the minister of the gospel needs to adopt, at different times and in varying circumstances. Derek Tidball outlines these as ambassador, athlete, builder, fool, pilot, scum, and shepherd.6 Such metaphors emerge out of relationships with new converts and articulate the biblical pattern of Christian growth and maturity. To take just one more example, consider the injunction in 1 Peter 5:2 to elders: “Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care.” Note how the imperative is followed immediately with a hierarchized conception of the office.

Peter does not say, “Be shepherds of your flock,” but rather of God’s flock. They do not belong to us. They are not ours to treat as we like. Any authority the preacher possesses in the church is necessarily delegated authority, exercised in view of the Chief Shepherd and his appearing (1 Pet. 5:4).

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Rather like the way a babysitter cares for children while the parents are out for the evening, so the pastor lovingly cares for what does not belong to him and for those who are unspeakably precious to whom they do belong. Richard Baxter expresses the profound weight of this fact: Oh, then, let us hear these arguments of Christ, whenever we feel ourselves grow dull and careless; ‘Did I die for these souls, and will you not look after them?

Were they worth my blood, and they are not worth your labour?…How small is your condescension and labour compared to mine!’…Every time we look on our congregations, let us believingly remember that they are the purchase of Christ’s blood, and therefore should be regarded by us with the deepest interest and the most tender affection.7 What does this “deepest interest and the most tender affection” actually look like? It might mean more time carefully weeding my heart of the frustrations my people cause me—this increases my love for them as I preach to them.

It may mean less time blogging (or reading the blogs of people we will never meet) and more time spent in the homes of people under our care—this increases the depth and range of our pastoral application when we preach.

Finally, a particular set of relational stances toward the world, mandated by the biblical text, are also required for expository preaching. Again, Stott provides two metaphors that illustrate this: first, the political metaphor of “herald”; and second, the legal metaphor of “witness.” To consider just the first of these, Paul states that “we preach Christ crucified” and makes it clear that it is through this heralded proclamation that God is pleased to save those who believe (1 Cor. 1:21–23). As Stott states, “Whereas the task of the steward is to feed the household of God, the herald has good news to proclaim to the whole world.”8 If expository preaching comes from the world, in that it uses the language of the world, it also demands a functional “distance” from the world. The distance is not that of moral superiority, but simply urgent necessity—the preacher is the bearer of a message, a go-between, and as such carries the authority of the sender and entreats on their behalf.

Stott shows that the stance of being a herald means that the preacher must neither appeal to the world without proclamation, nor proclaim to the world without appeal.9 The former runs the risk of manipulating and browbeating a congregation into a crisis of faith that has not been provoked by the gospel. It also ignores the varied stress on the intellectual endeavor of expository preaching—preaching must teach, argue, dispute, confound, and prove, and to seek a response without this prior engagement is deceptive.10 The latter approach to preaching ignores another of the relational metaphors used to describe the preacher, that of the ambassador: “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). The appeal is necessary simply because the

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preacher is not in the pulpit to communicate information, but rather to call for a relationship between the listener and God. Conclusion do not mean to give the impression that the theology of expository preaching is the last word on the matter, nor suggest that many practical issues such as diction, style, or presentation are inconsequential. On the contrary, it is possible to have a solid grasp of all of this and still to bore a congregation half to death! However, I have argued that the horizons of text, church, and world provide the big picture of preaching, even if they do not fill in all the details. They place into the preacher’s hands a framework for good preaching that orients preachers away from themselves to the other-ness of words from God, to people redeemed by God, and to a world owned by God. These convictions are capable of creating excellent expository preaching. ■

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David Gibson (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) is assistant minister at High Church, Hilton, Aberdeen, Scotland. He is the author of Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin & Barth (London/New York: T&T Clark, forthcoming 2009), and co-editor with Daniel Strange of Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (Nottingham: Apollos, 2008; London/New York: T&T Clark, forthcoming 2009).

Works Cited 1John Stott, The Contemporary Christian: An Urgent Plea for Double Listening (Leicester: IVP, 1992), 362, 512–15.

2This vision of the theological (and hence homiletical) task is suggested by Francis Watson, Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994).

3Watson, 9.

4Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 221–36; Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1991).

5John Stott, The Preacher’s Portrait (Leicester: IVP, 1961).

6Derek J. Tidball, Builders and Fools: Leadership the Bible Way (Leicester: IVP, 1999).

7Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (The Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 131–32.

8Stott, The Preacher’s Portrait, 29.

9Stott, The Preacher’s Portrait, 48–52.

10Stott, The Preacher’s Portrait, 49.

J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 29

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Flying for Jesus I

n February 2004, American Airlines pilot Captain Roger Findiesen asked Christian passengers on his Los Angeles to New York flight to identify themselves to the nonChristian passengers so that everyone could use the time on the flight to discuss religion.

He had just returned from a mission trip to Costa Rica and felt that the cross-country flight was the right place to encourage evangelism. Passengers, frightened that the pilot had lost his mind, began placing calls to their loved ones.

Many complained to the media.

Perhaps most evangelicals don’t go as far as Findiesen, but the 1980s and 1990s saw similar confusion about vocation, such as the increase in Christian Yellow Pages, directories for people looking for Christian plumbers, florists, and attorneys. The implication was that Christian vocation is about having a better work product.

Take Atlanta’s accounting firm, HIS CPA: “Serving HIM by serving you...one tax return at a time.” Founder John Dillard explains why he left a secular CPA practice to start his own Christianized accounting firm: Although I was willing to share my Christian faith with people to whom I came in contact with, God was calling and he wanted me to be much move overt, but

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loving, to share the love of God. Having practiced the Golden Rule in my CPA firm for years, God was calling to be the true center of my life and not just a major player.1 This model seems increasingly out of place in our post-Christian culture.

On the other hand, you have Christians in the workplace whose ethical and moral framework makes them utterly indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. Under pressure to succeed, it’s not unheard of for Christians to inflate their resumes, use inferior materials to complete a job, or gossip about colleagues.

How does a Christian operate in the business world without becoming either totally worldly, or subsuming vocation to faith and turning off colleagues and clients with proselytizing pietism?

Bringing a Reformation understanding of vocation to modern circumstances is in order. In medieval Christianity, the church taught that only priests, nuns, and others with holy orders had vocations. The more cloistered from the nitty-gritty of life, the church taught, the better. Reformers Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–64) considerably broadened the meaning of vocation to include all

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states of life as well as all work in society.

Luther wrote that every Christian has been called to his station in life—not just the occupation by which he serves his neighbor, but all of his relationships, situations, and involvements. Luther was clear that even the most mundane of secular stations are places where a Christian lives out his or her faith and through which God works to govern and care for his created order.

Rather than a focus on work output, Luther’s understanding was about what God accomplishes through human callings. It is by our being a husband or wife, father or mother, manager or employee that God serves his people. In his sermon in the Castle Church at Weimar, Luther said, The prince should think: Christ has served me and made everything to follow him; therefore, I should also serve my neighbor, protect him and everything that belongs to him. That is why God has given me this office, and I have it that I might serve him. That would be a good prince and ruler. When a prince sees his neighbor oppressed, he should think: That concerns me! I must protect and shield my neighbor....The same is true for shoemaker, tailor, scribe, or reader. If he is a Christian tailor, he will say: I make these clothes because God has bidden me do so, so that I can earn a living, so that I can help and serve my neighbor. When a Christian does not serve the other, God is not present; that is not Christian living.2 God works through means. In the heavenly kingdom, God works through the means of Word and sacrament. In the secular world, God works through the order of creation and through human vocations. In the same way that we receive blessings through other people, God works through us to bless others.

A pilot who safely brings his passengers from Los Angeles to New York doesn’t need to evangelize to be fulfilling his Christian vocation. God works through pilots, accountants, and bakers to bless those who use their services.

There is no need to hide in the pious ghetto of the Christian Yellow Pages to express one’s faith. The Reformers showed that Christians can and do serve God by fully engaging the real world in whatever station they find themselves. In the same way that we are not saved by taking holy orders, we are not justified by trying to drag our menial or mundane tasks into special Christianized occupations of car salesman, banker, or journalist.

There is freedom in our vocations as well. A mother must feed her children, but she can choose how to do it. She might slave over a hot stove to cook a gourmet meal or she might order a pizza. She might earn money to pay someone else to cook.

Of course, we sin in our vocations as well. We don’t use our time or skills as well as we should. We act outside of our proper callings, misuse our gifts, and struggle to fulfill our responsibilities. When we confess our sins, what do

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we do other than consider our vocational failings?

Luther’s Small Catechism, first published in 1529, instructs the Christian to “consider your place in life according to the Ten Commandments: Are you a father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, or worker? Have you been disobedient, unfaithful, or lazy? Have you been hot-tempered, rude, or quarrelsome? Have you hurt someone by your words or deeds? Have you stolen, been negligent, wasted anything, or done any harm?”

By considering vocational responsibilities, the penitent sees not some general failing but specific examples of disobedience when he receives forgiveness from God. And the penitent’s faith in Christ—the only man who perfectly fulfilled his vocation—is strengthened.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C. Works Cited 1See HISCPA.com at http://www.hiscpa.com/christianCPA.html (1 October 2008).

2Martin Luther, “Sermon in the Castle Church at Weimar” (25 October 1522, Saturday after the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity) in D. Martin Luther’s Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, trans. Frederick J. Gaiser (Weimar: Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–1980) 10/3:382.

Speaking Of…

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esus Christ, our blessèd Savior, Turned away God’s wrath forever;

By His bitter grief and woe He saved us from the evil Foe.

As His pledge of love undying He, this precious food supplying, Gives His body with the bread And with the wine the blood He shed.

Praise the Father, who from heaven Unto us such food hath given And, to mend what we have done, Gave into death His only Son. Let this food your faith nourish That by love its fruits may flourish And your neighbor learn from you How much God’s wondrous love can do.

—John Hus, “Jesus Christ, Our Blessèd Savior” J A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 31

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n October 8, 2008, the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin sponsored a debate on the motion that “this house finds it irrational to believe in God.” In the nineteenth century, philosopher and lay theologian Søren Kierkegaard warned against such occasions; in his Concluding Scientific Postscript, he asked whether raising such a question was not like standing in the presence of a mighty king and demanding evidence that he exists.

Nonetheless, I accepted the Society’s invitation to head the “God side” in this debate. Why? For one thing, because of the prestige of the Literary & Historical Society. It was founded in 1855—before University College itself—and by no less a personage than the great Christian apologist John Henry Newman. The Society remains the largest and most distinguished university society in Ireland—comparable to the Oxford Union and Cambridge Union debating societies in England. Among notables who have been invited to speak at the Literary & Historical Society: W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, every president and Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland since the founding of the Republic, Noam Chomsky, John Mortimer (of Rumpole fame), J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter), and Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne. It seemed to me that in this context God deserved a proper hearing—particularly in light of the secular reactions to a legalistic Roman Catholicism that have driven many Irish (for example, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett) to radical unbelief.

Three invitees were to be on either side of the debate. Supporting the proposition: Dr. Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist, currently senior research associate in the physics department at the California Institute of Technology; Fred Edwords, executive secretary of the American Humanist Association; and Dr. Lewis Wolpert, English developmental biologist and Fellow of the Royal Society (who canceled the day of the debate for reasons of health and was replaced by a substitute from University College).

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I chose in support of the opposition Dr. Angus Menuge, professor of philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin and fellow and diplomate of the International Academy of Apologetics, Strasbourg, France; and Dr Alistair Noble, chemist and intelligent design expert from Scotland.

The debate took place in a University College auditorium seating 400; roughly 350 students and faculty members attended. Each speaker was given seven minutes to present his case, which was followed by questions to the speakers from the audience, and, finally, the audience vote. The order was: Edwords followed by Menuge; Carroll followed by Noble; and the Wolpert substitute followed by Montgomery.

Edwords’ argument was simply that humanity is the highest value and that the notion of God is hopelessly confused (theism? pantheism? polytheism?) and thus irrational.

Carroll, in line with his published article “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” declared that there was no reason why the universe needed to have a beginning; indeed, when he had taught an undergraduate course on the history of atheism at the University of Chicago, he had found that reason had little or nothing to do with whether students were believers in God or atheists. As a typical Californian, Carroll dressed informally and quipped that a good reason to disbelieve in God was the presence of Sarah Palin as Republican vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 election! The Wolpert stand-in presented the argument of Wolpert’s latest book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief: “Religious beliefs...all had their origin in the evolution of causal beliefs, which in turn had its origins in tool use.”

How did our “God team” counter these arguments?

Edwords’ claim that human values are enough left aside the critical need for an absolute ethic and inalienable rights.

Water doesn’t rise above its own level—and standards deriving only from the human condition are inevitably limited and tainted by the human beings and societies formulating them. The humanist has no rational way of condemning, for example, the atrocities of the Hitler or Stalinist régimes, since the disvalues at the root of them were also human products. As Ludwig Wittgenstein declared in his Tractatus, “Ethics is transcendental,” meaning that values, to be absolute, would have to arise from outside the human situation. Moreover, as is well documented, atheistic régimes in modern times have committed vastly more atrocities and violations of human rights than can be attributed to believers in prior centuries—and the reason is clear: if there is no God, people have no inherent worth and can be manipulated (indeed, eliminated) with impunity to serve any political or ideological end. “Without God,” Dostoyevsky observed, “all things are permissible.”

Carroll’s claim that the universe can rationally be regarded as infinite—as all there is—runs into gigantic difficulties, and we pointed them out. First, on the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Olbers’ paradox, and so forth, most cosmologists consider the universe as finite. The Big Bang, supported by the Hubble/Doppler red-shift, is seen as the beginning of matter, energy, space, and time, and thus requires

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an explanation (which God does not, since he is by definition self-existent, having no beginning). Einstein himself moved from a belief in an eternal universe to an acceptance of Big Bang cosmology—viewing his own effort to correct his General Theory of Relativity to support an eternal, nonexpanding universe as his “biggest blunder.” Indeed, an actual infinite constitutes an irrational notion (as mathematician Georg Cantor and logician David Hilbert have shown); it follows that the universe cannot have this property, whereas God, as a spirit, is not subject to such a restriction. Further, cosmologist Alan Guth in an important article has shown that “inflationary space-times are not past-complete”; i.e., that “inflationary models require physics other than inflation to describe the past boundary of the inflating region of space-times.” So, even if the universe is perpetually “inflating,” it still had a beginning—which can be accounted for only by the existence of a transcendent God not bound by space-time considerations.

Moreover, as Martin J. Rees and others have so effectively shown, the universe is finely tuned, requiring an intelligent creator. The so-called Anthropic-principle argument that this may only seem to be the case in our universe, as compared with the infinite possibility of “multiverses,” is little more than (as convert from atheism Antony Flew has well put it) an example of “escape routes...to preserve the nontheist status quo.” Why? Because the existence of universes other than our own has zero empirical evidence supporting their facticity; and even if they existed, we would have no grounds for asserting that they would not be finely tuned; and, finally, were there to be a multiplicity of universes, we would need a “multiverse generator” to explain them—which would simply push the need to assert God’s existence a step backward, in no sense eliminating it.

Fascinatingly, in private discussion, Carroll said that he was now trying to find a way to show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was not necessarily applicable universally—thus allowing for an eternal universe. This, to be sure, revealed Carroll’s underlying metaphysical bias—his commitment to reductionistic naturalism—and the great gulf lying between his atheism and scientific objectivity. Naturally, we are waiting with bated breath for his repeal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics!

My presentation came at the very end. My object was briefly to deal with Wolpert’s thesis and, more importantly, to pull together the arguments of the God-side.

The notion that toolmaking led to an understanding of causation, which in turn led to belief in God, suffers from two appalling logical fallacies: post hoc, ergo propter hoc (the fact that two things—here, causation and religious belief— happen together does not in any way show that the one produces the other), and the genetic fallacy (the idea that the origin of something determines its ultimate value). In the latter case, we should remember such examples as the discovery of ammonia by the alchemist Brandt whilst he was boiling toads in urine: the value of ammonia is not (fortunately) dependent on the circumstances of its origin. And suppose we found that mathematical ability had a strictJ A N U A RY / F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 33

ly genetic basis: would that mean that mathematics was invalid? It follows that even if religious beliefs had their source in toolmaking cum realization of causation, this would say nothing as to whether those religious beliefs might in fact be true. One must determine whether the object of religious belief (God) is a reality—and that is an entirely separate question from the determination as to how beliefs come about psychologically or developmentally.

As for Wolpert’s reductionist-materialist account of the human mind and its beliefs, two further points were worth making. First, such scholars as psychologist Paul Vitz (Faith of the Fatherless) have argued that God-denial is a psychological aberration, explicable by the unfortunate experiences of the atheists holding that viewpoint. Secondly, there is powerful evidence that the mind and personality cannot be accounted for by the genetic uniqueness of the brain. Nobel Prize winner in physiology Sir John Eccles, in dialogue with Karl Popper, declared: “I am constrained to believe that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or my unique selfhood or soul.” The same point has been made

by Mario Beauregard in his recent book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul.

I then endeavored to point up the common element in all the atheist arguments presented by the other side. They all were in fact variants on the celebrated comment of Laplace when Napoleon, having read Laplace’s groundbreaking L’Exposition du système du monde (1796), commented: “Your work is excellent but there is no trace of God in it.” Laplace: “Sire, je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse” (“I had no need of that hypothesis”). The issue of God’s existence is, at root, whether his existence is or is not needed to account for our world, our history, and our needs.

Fascinatingly (and this came up in the audience question time), the same point was made in the famous FlewWisdom parable: “Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot.’ The other disagrees: ‘There is no gardener.’ So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock.

No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber.

The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Skeptic despairs, ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?’”

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thors, Antony Flew—probably the most influential philosophical atheist of the twentieth century—became a believer in God in 2004. Flew’s sea change was due to the force of the evidence for intelligent design, especially for the finetuning of the universe. The “eternally elusive gardener” was not at all as elusive as the parable suggested!

I concluded with what I see as the most fundamental and most relevant reason for the God hypothesis: the impossibility otherwise of successfully accounting for Jesus Christ. I observed that Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich (another scientist giving the lie to Carroll’s claim that “cosmologist” is virtually synonymous with “atheist”) noted in the conclusion to his book, God’s Universe: “Jesus is the supreme example of personal communication from God. When the apostle Philip requested, ‘Show us the Father,’ Jesus responded, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.’”

Jesus’ words and acts were reported by reliable, primarysource eyewitnesses in the New Testament records—documents “far better attested than that of any other work of ancient literature,” according to Sir Frederick Kenyon and other preeminent textual critics. In these solid historical sources, Jesus rises from the dead, attesting his claim to be God incarnate, come to earth to die for the sins of the world.

Humean arguments against the miraculous fall by the wayside in the face of an open, Einsteinian universe, and have been exploded even by secular philosophers such as John Earman (Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles). Indeed, Archbishop Richard Whately—of Dublin fame—produced his wonderful satire, “Historic Doubts Concerning Napoleon Buonaparte,” having the theme that if the Humean arguments against the reliability of the Gospel accounts of Jesus were applied to Napoleon, one would have to deny his existence.

One is reminded of John Stuart Mill’s sage observation in his Three Essays on Religion: It is of no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been super-added by the tradition of his followers. Who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings of Jesus or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source.

I emphasized that proof depends largely on what is to be proved and that there are conditions connected with a given object of proof. If someone in the audience were to deny the fact of electricity, I could of course provide abstract and theoretical arguments in behalf of its reality; but it (continued on page 43)

REQUIRED READING FOR 21ST CENTURY CHRISTIANS mode r n reformation must-re a ds

Witnessing to Christ in a Post-Christian Culture Christianity Explored Good Book Company, 2005

by Rico Tice and Barry Cooper In this book and evangelism program that emerged from his work at Stott’s All Souls Langham Place, Tice uses the Gospel of Mark to witness to Jesus’ saving work. Originally developed for the postChristian culture of the United Kingdom, this book and program are finding sadly fertile ground in an increasingly secularized America.

The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World Crossway Books, 2007

by John Piper and Justin Taylor These messages from the 2006 Desiring God National Conference provide a practical and biblical perspective on the place of Jesus’ gospel in our current cultural context for the purpose of evangelism and worship.

Chameleon Christianity: Moving Beyond Safety and Conformity Wipf & Stock, 2003

by Dick Keyes How can Christians be in the world but not of it, challenging the claims of our culture and not caving in? Keyes returns to the foundation of biblical Christianity, and then charts a practical way forward through evangelism and community-building to make a case for Christianity to a cynical society.

Critique www.ransomfellowship.org This “occasional” publication’s stated purpose is to help Christians “develop skill in discernment.” They do this by exploring movies, books, music, and ideas that engage our culture. This creative interaction with postChristian culture enables readers to not only understand but participate wisely outside their usual spheres.

SEE ALSO: Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized

by William H. Willimon (Wm. B. Eerdmans)

Loving God with All Your Mind: Thinking as a Christian in the Postmodern World

by Gene E. Veith (Crossway Books)

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller (Dutton)

Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey (Crossway Books)

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 5

REVIEWS w h a t ’ s

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“Tinker, Tailor”—The New Generation of Christians

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hile American evangelical leaders pay attention to sociological data,

As the major contribution to such research, Wuthnow observes they more typically read George Barna or Thom Rainer, church that “the single word that best describes young adults’ approach to growth experts who utilize social trends to chart the way forward religion and spirituality—indeed life—is tinkering” (13; emphasis for churches. But the his). This tinkering approach was clearest in the chapter on person to whom these spirituality: there Wuthnow helpfully breaks down the leaders should pay atyounger generation’s tendency both to “church shop” tention is Robert Wuth(which “involves tinkering with one’s religious loyalties by now. Wuthnow, who looking for a congregation to attend” and eventually join) and holds a chair in sociolo“church hop” (which “involves going from one congregation gy and is director of the to another, rather than settling into a single congregation”; Center for the Study of 114–5). He suggests that this generation of young adults is Religion at Princeton more likely to shop for a church home or hop from church University, has conto church because of greater mobility, higher social class of tributed seminal books parents, and generally higher education levels than previous that have set the terms generations. of the conversation for Young adults also seem to tinker with their beliefs. understanding AmeriWhile opinion polls suggest that young adults are neither less can religion, particularorthodox nor more secular than previous generations, ly The Restructuring of Wuthnow notices that these young people are more likely American Religion (1988). to engage in “pick-and-choose orthodoxy,” which suggests What sets him apart a hedging that allows them to honor traditional beliefs while from both professional making their way through the modern world. For example, a young adult may affirm both that the Bible is without erAfter the Baby Boomers: sociologists and evanHow Twenty- and Thirty- gelical church growth ror and literally true and that other religions provide pathSomethings Are Shaping gurus is his coupling toways of salvation; or he or she may affirm both the biblical the Future of American gether of sociological account of creation and scientific evolution, without worrying Religion rigor with a deep love about how to harmonize the two accounts.

by Robert Wuthnow for Christianity and the All this raises the issue of choice, which is seen as an AmerPrinceton University Press, 2008 church. ican cultural good and a key value for young adults. Em298 pages (hardback), $29.95 This combination powered to make determinations about work, schooling, marmakes After the Baby Boomers important reading for all those riage, beliefs, and values in ways that are fairly unprecedented who desire to reach and teach our current generation of in world history, this generation of young people utilizes its young adults. Wuthnow suggests that most sociologists of repower to choose in ways that are creative at times and baligion as well as congregational leaders still remain overly fonal at others. Creativity comes in approaches to belief: while cused on the Baby Boomer generation (those born between a young person may be raised in a Christian congregation, 1946 and 1964), both as a subject of study and for their pohe or she may couple Christianity with thoughts from the tential influence on American religion. Against this, he notes Qur’an, The Celestine Prophecy, New Age, and Buddhism (cf. that the current generation of young adults (those born be113–4). On the other hand, it appears that young people valtween 1965 and 1981) represent a significant share of the popue popular culture—and particular streams of it—as meanulation and demand appropriate research that demoningful for their spiritual journeys. For example, one of the strates continuities and discontinuities with the ways their most important spiritual contexts for prayer or meditation— parents approached Christianity. more important than reading the Bible—is listening to mu-

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sic. And the music these young people prefer is overwhelmingly contemporary pop or rock music; far from being musical omnivores, this generation speaks the language of (generally trite) pop music.

That said, surprisingly, this generation does not want contemporary Christian or gospel music in their worship services. While Baby Boomers overwhelmingly prefer that kind of music for worship, the younger generation does not. In fact, only 12 percent of those in their twenties whom Wuthnow surveyed said “they would like to see their congregation have a service featuring contemporary music” (224).

However, young adults see culture as providing important means for answering the deeper questions of life and desire their congregations to engage with contemporary music, movies, and the arts as important for spirituality.

In the end, the most important factor for involving young people in congregations resides with young people themselves: marriage and children. Wuthnow’s study shows that the least represented age group within congregations are twenty-somethings; these young people come back to the church in their thirties as they marry and have children. Wuthnow points out, however, that what should give congregational leaders pause is that this generation is either marrying later and having children later or not even marrying or reproducing at all.

In addition, this generation is more committed than their parents to the type of lifestyle that demands two incomes in the household. As a result, churches must be creative in figuring out how to minister to single adults in their twenties while preparing to assist them as they marry and have children in their thirties.

Often witty, always insightful, I found Wuthnow’s book to be a rich feast for thinking about the generation of students I teach. But I also found it interesting to read about my own generation; as a Gen Xer (born 1970), it was fascinating to see attitudes I shared as well as ways in which I differed. There were so many places that I said to myself, “Yes, he’s got that right.” As a result, those who care about this rising generation of young people cannot afford to miss this book.

Sean Michael Lucas is associate professor of church history at Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life

by Alan Jacobs Eerdmans, 2008 124 pages (paperback), $14.00 Alan Jacobs lifts the title of his book from Hamlet, but it could just as easily be a description of the Roman god Janus, whom Ovid invokes in his poem “Fasti”: “Two-formed Janus what god shall I say you are,/ Since Greece has no divinity

to compare with you?/ Tell me the reason, too, why you alone of all the gods/ Look both at what’s behind you and what’s in front.” Unacquainted with his neighbors to the east, Ovid thought a retrospective and prospective god was peculiar to the Romans. Jacobs is intimately acquainted with Yahweh, the God of the Bible whom we might regard as the Judeo-Christian analogue of the pagan Janus.

Like Ovid, Jacobs invokes his allseeing God in a book that explores how Christians—avoiding the dangers of presumption and despair—can discern a shape and meaning in their lives to tell stories with both comeliness and counsel.

Looking Before and After is drawn from the Stob Lectures that Jacobs delivered in 2006 at Calvin Theological Seminary.

Who better than a trained literary critic, in possession of a storied imagination, should exhort the church to think narratively about individual lives? Indebted to the narrative turn in theology of the last twenty years, Jacobs worries that “in serious Christian reflection, questions about the shape and fate of community have come to displace the language of personal conversion, transformation, and development from the central place such language held in Christian discourse in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century” (3).

There is a disconnect between the academic trend of communalism—articulated by Lesslie Newbigin, Stanley Hauerwas, and Alasdair MacIntrye—and American Christian culture, which remains fixated on personal spirituality, as the popular movement of “journaling” indicates. Underneath “the layers of narcissism and sentimentality,” Jacobs excavates the salutary technique of “writing as a means of spiritual self-monitoring” (4). From the early church (Augustine, Antony, and John Chrysostom) to the Puritans (John Beadle and Richard Rogers), the spiritual journal framed the discrete events of life in order “to plot the graph of God’s work in our lives” (6).

While Jacobs bemoans “the triviality, even fatuousness, of many current ways of talking about ‘our stories,’” he does not support an abandonment of “the traditions of personal narrative or testimony as tokens of misbegotten ‘individualism’” (8). Instead, he argues that “what we need is better and more responsible and more coherent personal stories, not the complete subsumption of all personal narratives into group narratives” (8).

Jacobs is a skilled diagnostician of irony, observing that increased storytelling has coincided with decreased communicability of experience: “We tell our stories, all right, but we don’t think of them as offering counsel in wisdom” (9). Why? His answer is surprising, especially because it comes from a literary critic. In the past, the locus of storytelling was the home, neighborhood, and church. Now the locus of storytelling is the theater, cinema, and novel. Moreover, “technical advice has superseded counsel” (9). “Formulaic ‘testimonies’ J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 7

of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity” survive from a bygone culture (10). Jacobs calls for an expansion beyond “testimonies of conversion” to “testimonies of imitation and vocation” (10). Agnostic on the question of whether human beings are “natural” storytellers, he does believe that Christian discipleship obligates proper storytelling, marked by honesty and humility for the purpose of edifying the church and evangelizing the unchurched.

By sharing his own testimony, Jacobs points to the difficulties of communicating experience and offering counsel.

Like many of his students at Wheaton College, he lacks the decisive moment that typifies the conversions of Saul on the road to Damascus, Augustine in the Milanese garden, and Dwight Moody in the Boston shoe store. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, a twentieth-century Russian thinker, Jacobs finds relief in knowing that all Christian testimonies, however divergent, belong to the same “speech genre” that the apostle Paul describes as a movement from the life of Adam to the life of Christ. Testimony differs from the genres of autobiography, biography, and memoir because it does more than detail “one damned thing after another”; it alone “commits its user to making a full account of her life’s course and direction, of its shape and form” (24).

Skeptics of “narrative wholeness” assume that “life as it is lived is not storylike” (25). English novelist Martin Amis sighs: “The trouble with life…is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending” (25). More alarmingly, British theologian Paul Helm despairs: “The Bible does not, it seems, promise that a person’s life will form a discernible pattern with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Many lives are completely patternless or marked by tragedy….It would be completely false to Scripture to suppose that in order for people to be assured that the events of their lives are ordered by providence for a good end, they should be able to discern some overall pattern or ‘story’ in their lives” (64).

With the skeptics, Jacobs admits that “lived experience” should not be confused with “composed narratives” (26).

Against the skeptics, he argues: “The inner logic of the testimony contains not only the claim that we can narrate our lives but also the claim that we should be able to do so….‘Always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you’ (1 Peter 3:15b)” (28). Jacobs brilliantly employs the Pauline metaphor of the body to assure the Christian of narrative wholeness: just as there are different members that belong to one body, so too there are different Christian stories that belong to the “One Story” of Christ himself. If the disciple has trouble recognizing the pattern in her life, she should look to the One who gives the supreme pattern of crucifixion and resurrection. The disciple is invited to become what C. S. Lewis calls a “little Christ”—dying and living with Jesus.

While Jacobs assures the reader of narrative integrity, he also disabuses the reader of narrative uniformity. Continu3 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

ing the body metaphor, the arm is not the same as the leg.

We should expect “an extensive repertoire of Christian life genres,” otherwise our testimonies are “inadequate” to the manifold workings of the Holy Spirit in our lives (29). With impassioned rhetoric, Jacobs says, “If the church cannot cultivate the ‘fundamental and dynamic’ discipline of analogical discernment—the discovery of how different lives in different times and places belong nonetheless to the same genre—it has no hope of making disciples of Christ and therefore no hope of survival” (35). His example of the analogical imagination is worth citing: “The ability to see that when Mother Teresa of Calcutta speaks to the graduating students at Harvard she is doing something very like what Paul did when he spoke in the Areopagus of Athens, and that, when she returns to Calcutta to resume her ministry among the dying, she is doing something very like what St. Francis of Assisi did among the lepers of northern Italy” (34). When imagination is in short supply, Christians testify with vapid uniformity instead of vigorous heterogeneity, thereby diminishing “the roster of saints” (30).

Much of this review has focused on the first half of Jacobs’ book, which lays the foundation for the second half where the author explores the role of memory in testifying, distinguishing between false and true forms of hindsight; the strong belief in providential care, avoiding the finalizing interpretations of despair and presumption; and how the One Story of Christ confers meaning and dignity upon all human stories.

Like other writings from Jacobs, Living Before and After elicits admiration for its creative inquiry, winning prose, and prudential wisdom. The library of his mind is wide open, making use of literary narratives from Augustine, Livy, George Eliot, Søren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, W. H. Auden, William Cowper, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Henri Nouwen. In a work of practical theology, he justifies the use of literary narratives because the post-Reformation “belief in the possibility of the formal integrity of human lives, though often expressed in novels, is largely a product of Christian anthropology that finds its origin in Scripture, its full flowering in Augustine, and its rediscovery in the Protestant autobiographical genres….It is only appropriate that this mode of narration be reconnected to its moral and intellectual source: Christian theology” (10–11).

If I may hazard some constructive criticism in an otherwise praiseworthy book, the reader will likely accept Jacobs’ charge to develop “a stronger, deeper consciousness of the many life genres of the Christian faith,” but feel ill-equipped because he does not provide any instruction on how to develop this consciousness. Familiarity with literary and historical narratives would help, but they are not sufficient. Presumably, Jacobs would exhort us to create an ethos in church where testimonies of conversion, imitation, and vocation are told. Guidance here would be appreciated. Additionally, the reader may wish that Jacobs would go even further to explain the purpose of thinking narratively about individual lives. He claims the purpose relates to “the health of the church” but seldom elaborates (39). Readers will forgive the author for these shortcomings because, substantively, he has given us much to pon-

der and, stylistically, he chose a “terse and suggestive” treatment instead of “expansive and detailed” (ix).

Christopher Benson is a freelance writer in Denver, Colorado.

The Gospel According to Jesus: What is Authentic Faith?

by John MacArthur Zondervan, 2008 300 pages (hardback), $19.99 This book was originally written during the late 1980s when the “Lordship Salvation” controversy was brewing. The controversy was no mere kerfuffle, but centered upon the question of whether a professing Christian could live in sinful conduct unabated. Prominent dispensational leaders such as Zane Hodges and Charles Ryrie claimed that a person could be a “carnal Christian.” A carnal Christian, according to MacArthur, is one who has accepted Christ’s offer of eternal life but has been totally unchanged in his heart and lifestyle (11). On the other hand, MacArthur explains that when a person is saved he cannot merely receive the offer of eternal life, but must also surrender to Christ’s lordship, which becomes evident in the his obedient conduct (15, 43).

Overall, there are many positive qualities to the book.

MacArthur covers a wide number of passages largely from the Gospel of Matthew. He surveys key texts that show how Jesus evangelized. Jesus did not approach his auditors in the ways of many contemporary evangelists, but confronted them with their sinfulness and need for repentance (91).

MacArthur’s coverage of the many Gospel passages certainly gives the reader much to consider. The weight of the call of the gospel is evident in a number of chapters such as MacArthur’s treatment of Matthew 10 and the cost of discipleship (219–25), or his chapter on the parable of the treasure hidden in a field (Matt. 13.44–46; 143–50). For many who have sat in the church but have never heard the gospel, such detailed treatment of Christ’s teaching undoubtedly comes as a shock. Those who imbibe from the evangelistic cup of the health-and-wealth gospel, or the gospel of easy believism, will quickly discover that it is impossible to put sugar on the lip of the bitter cup of salvation. Christ bids the world to come and die to itself. MacArthur captures this important element of the gospel.

However, there are a number of weaknesses in the book that likely pester the reader who is looking for a thorough

treatment of this important subject. At many points, it seems that MacArthur has simply sprinkled his sermons with a few footnotes and placed them in his book. As helpful and important as sermons can be, they are no substitute for thorough research and engagement with an opposing view. There is little exploration of the “carnal Christian” position. Important unanswered questions lie below the surface such as, What theological commitments lead proponents of this heresy to their conclusions? Why does MacArthur not treat important issues such as the human nature? Are human beings dichotomous (i.e., body and soul) or trichotomous (i.e., body, soul, and spirit)? This is a crucial driving presupposition that goes untreated. Historically, a trichotomous view of man has led to all sorts of gnostic heresy, such as saying that a man’s soul can be saved but not his body. Similarly, it is troublesome that the author originally did not have a chapter on the doctrine of justification or the atonement until the second edition (14). Along these lines, the book does address the importance of the doctrine of sanctification in places (e.g., 38– 39, 196), but there is no separate chapter on this subject.

Beyond these weaknesses, there are two others that merit attention. First, antinomianism is not new; it has plagued the church since its inception when Cain slew Abel. Yet, MacArthur makes little effort to show how the church has historically rejected antinomianism. There is an appendix in the back of the book called, “The Gospel According to Historic Christianity” (253–71), but by definition, an appendix is nonessential. How many people actually read appendices?

There is little space devoted to the historic Protestant confessions and creeds in the body of his book to show how MacArthur’s own case has precedence. Doctrine must stand on Scripture alone, but the church must always stand on the shoulders of giants when they are faithful to God’s Word.

Second, MacArthur pays little attention to the doctrine of union with Christ. In places, he emphasizes the importance of the inseparability of justification and sanctification (196– 97, 210), but only inferentially mentions that both are connected with union with Christ (200). When he does refer to the doctrine, it is only partially stated: “Believers are united by faith to the beloved Son of God” (169). Faith not only unites believers to Christ, but so does the indwelling presence of the Spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9). MacArthur devotes a whole chapter to John 15, the vine and the branches, but does not develop the implications of union with Christ (165– 74) with greater rigor. Like a treasure seeker who finds a gold doubloon on the sand, picks it up, and walks away, he fails to dig a little deeper and discover a treasure chest of gold. Perhaps if the author had done in-depth research he would have discovered Walter Marshall’s book The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. Marshall (1628–80) expounds the source of the believer’s holiness—union with Christ. Marshall wrote in the context of his own lordship salvation controversy but, unlike MacArthur, plumbed the depths of union with Christ.

Given these aforementioned weaknesses, MacArthur’s book is a helpful but a wanting response to present dispensational antinomianism. MacArthur scratches the surface by drawing attention to points the contemporary church desJ A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 9

perately needs to hear. But he does not dig deep enough to show what theology beats in the hearts of the proponents of “carnal Christianity,” nor does he unearth some of the Scriptures’ richest treasures. MacArthur’s book is helpful, but one can do better with Marshall’s book on union with Christ.

J. V. Fesko is pastor of Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Woodstock, Georgia.

Pagan Christianity?

Exploring the Roots of our Church Practices

by Frank Viola and George Barna BarnaBooks, 2008 336 pages (hardback), $17.99 If the following scene never happened in any low-budget 1950s science fiction movie, it should have. A flying saucer lands on the White House lawn.

All the leaders and media of the world quickly assemble for earth’s first close encounter with advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. Cameras are aimed and microphones extended, ready to capture what wisdom or offer of knowledge unprecedented might come from the intergalactic traveler. With a hiss and a hum, the door of the UFO swings down and the man from space emerges. Having learned English from our TV transmissions, the visitor asserts, “People of earth, everything you know is wrong.”

Something similar seems to be the mission and message of house church guru Frank Viola and evangelical numbers cruncher George Barna in Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of our Church Practices. According to this intentionally provocative book (“Warning: If you are unwilling to have your Christianity seriously examined...give this book to Goodwill immediately!”), nearly everything the Christian church has called “church” since the end of the first century has been wrong.

Worse actually—it has all been outright pagan. (The reader is left wondering why the authors bothered with the question mark in the title.)

No pew is left unturned. In fact, pews themselves are overturned (34–5). Viola and Barna breathlessly unveil the allegedly pagan origins of church buildings, orders of worship, sermons, pastors, music ministers, tithing, baptismal and communion rites, and Sunday schools. Even Sunday-best clothing is pagan, a product of the rising middle class (a group no better than the Babylonians, one would surmise). Their alternative? The authors call for an “organic” church, repro4 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

ducing their image of the early first-century church. In this book and his other writings, Viola makes clear that this means small house churches with minimal leadership and “everymember” participation. No seminaries, no denominations, no buildings, no professionally trained clergy, no order of worship. Just “folks” gathered around the coffee table sharing their Bible-inspired thoughts, like an Oprah book club with folk guitars.

All this is not to fault Viola and Barna for asking why we do what we do when we “do church.” By reason of their name alone, Reformed Christians should and have asked the same questions. The founding Reformers examined every practice of the then-dominant Roman Catholic Church in the light of Scripture, and were famously ruthless for casting aside any tradition that failed the test. Pagan Christianity’s writers claim to be applying the same criteria, sola scriptura. How is it then that they come to the conclusion that Wittenberg and Geneva were just as wrong as Rome? If you’re insisting that the baby is as fit for the drainpipe as the bathwater, you had better be able to provide solid reasons. Upon examination, Viola and Barna are no Calvin and Luther.

Pagan Christianity comes to bad conclusions from good questions down a two-lane highway of poor historiography and fantastic leaps of logic. The authors tout their many tiny footnotes and overflowing bibliography as evidence that they have done their homework and proved their case. They are, however, heavily dependent upon secondary sources. The majority of citations for their most crucial and controversial points are from very few sources, not surprisingly those that agree with their conclusions. They almost completely ignore the many good sources that would refute the book’s assertions.

On the book’s website, the authors respond to this criticism (noted by many reviewers) by insisting that they didn’t interact with all sources because Pagan Christianity was intended to be a popular-level book. Ben Witherington III, a scholar knowledgeable in Christian origins, has stated on his blog that he had extensive critical interactions with Viola before the book was published, none of which seemed to have had any effect on the final product.

Viola and Barna also lean heavily on older sources that did not have access to the huge amount of information uncovered only in the last fifty years or so about the first century.

There seems to be little awareness of the possible agendas beneath some of these sources. In a number of places, the authors take statements of agnostic historian Will Durant about early Christianity at face value. While they favorably quote Durant’s assertion that “Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it,” they neglect to tell their readers that on the same page in Caesar and Christ Durant claims that the idea of a divine Trinity was stolen from ancient Egypt.

Most readers of a popular-level book will not be aware of how highly selective Viola and Barna are with their sources.

This, however, is not the only pitfall they face. The writers repeatedly overstate their case to the point of absurdity or make assertions without proof or documentation. For example, they assert that most churches today consider two candlesticks on the communion table to be “the sign of ortho-

doxy.” Steeples symbolize rejection of grace and man’s efforts to reach God by his own efforts. There is little real difference between a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister. Calvin was wrong to rely on any of the early church fathers because they were “proto-Catholics.” Jesus despised the Nicolaitans (Rev. 2:6) because their name might mean “conquering the people” and therefore must refer to professional clergy. Such examples could be easily multiplied.

A particularly glaring omission shows up in the authors’ apparent ignorance of the Jewishness of early Christianity.

We are told that hierarchical leadership was brought into the church by Constantine and was the “leadership style of the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans.” Memo to Moses: your “leadership style” had its origins in pagans born centuries after you! Again and again, practices of the early (postNew Testament) church are attributed to pagan origins, when they could in many cases be better explained by the Jewish roots of the first Christians.

This brings us to an underlying assumption of the book one hopes would be apparent to most Reformed readers: Pagan Christianity presupposes a discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants so deep it would make Scofield cringe.

Without any supporting arguments, Viola and Barna assert that the New Testament church and its worship and practices were radical rejections of all Old Testament counterparts. Furthermore, they out-regulate the regulative principle in their assumption that the small house meetings to whom Paul wrote were intended to be the permanent and only form of the church. This ignores not only how social structures of that time were different from ours, but the fact that the first-century church was a persecuted, minority religion—not a state the New Testament establishes as necessarily normative. Many of the earliest believers met in Jewish synagogues.

Despite these and many other weaknesses of Pagan Christianity, this reviewer hopes the Reformed community never rejects the necessity to continually assess why we do what we do when we “do church.” The fact that Frank Viola and George Barna leap to many unwarranted conclusions does not justify us sitting back with smug pride, sure that we have it all down right. One of the great lessons displayed in the lives of Reformers like Calvin and Luther was their insistence on questioning their own beliefs and practices before they stood up to challenge Rome. Semper reformanda begins in our own hearts, our own willingness to be corrected wherever and whenever the Spirit shows us we have erred from Christ’s plan for his church. We are aided in that task by good and faithful scholars who both know how to use well the tools of their trade and have a solid commitment to follow wherever those tools, by the Spirit’s work, shed light from the Word of God on the church’s path.

Mark Traphagen is manager of wtsbooks.com and an M.Div. student at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth

by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. Multnomah, 2008 176 pages (hardback), $14.99 No stranger to Modern Reformation readers, Dr. Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, is a wellknown conference circuit speaker, frequent guest on the Larry King show, and one of the few bloggers worth reading. He is also a key leader of conservative evangelicalism in America and an articulate spokesman for the cause. Thus, it is a delight to have a collection of his thoughts on a variety of topics conveniently put together in this small but densely packed collection.

While much of Mohler’s book is occupied with criticism of contemporary culture, it is worth noting at the outset that the book itself is something of a useful accommodation to that culture. Small in physical size, with twenty brief essays, I would suggest that it is ideally suited to the commuter/iPod lifestyle—you can carry it without inconvenience; and on a twenty-minute train journey or while waiting for a bus, you can read just one or two of the pieces and still find yourself intellectually and spiritually challenged. Books like this make reading palatable—and beneficial—to those who cannot face the full 1,000 pages of, say, Augustine’s City of God. An accommodation to the culture of which Mohler is suspicious, perhaps; but a useful and indeed subversive one at that.

The essays cover a wide variety of topics, from the relationship of faith and politics, to Supreme Court rulings on religion to abortion to Martin Luther King, Jr. Given the distinctive role each of these plays in American culture, this book will be of limited immediate interest to those outside of the United States; although, of course, it is always useful to see how Christians in different cultures relate their faith to the wider social and moral context.

In commenting on specifics, I will confine myself to some of the more provocative essays (I say more because Mohler is rarely less than provocative!). The essay on the use of torture in the war on terror is brilliant. Mohler understands the world is fallen; he also understands the pragmatic nature of much that goes on in politics, particularly during times of conflict and fear; yet he makes a good case for a categorical ban on the use of torture, even as he concedes that, in extreme cases, such a ban might have to be transgressed. We will inevitably have dirty hands, he says; but we should not compound that fact by adopting dirty rules, as advocated by legal thinkers such as Alan Dershowitz. Rules express aspiraJ A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 1

tions and shape society; they speak of the deepest values; to break rules in extremes is one thing, but to institutionalize dirt is quite another. While Mohler does not make further applications, what he says here could clearly be applied to a number of pressing issues in modern society.

I confess that the essay where I found myself most in disagreement with the author was that on public schooling.

Mohler is committed to the position that sees it as important for Christians to withdraw from the public school system, which he regards as under the control of secularists with a clear agenda for subverting the minds and morality of the nation’s youth. He supports this with various examples: the impact of Dewey’s pragmatic secularism on educational philosophy and policy, and a number of cases involving sex education in school. As one committed to the public school system, all I can say is that the picture painted here has not been my experience as a parent; and as for shocking headlines of discipline breakdown—the most notorious near-massacre in my area was planned by a homeschooled child. The bottom line is that one could trade anecdotes about education all day long: the situation is simply too complicated and too variegated across the country to allow for sweeping generalizations. But even here, as I found myself in strong disagreement with the author, I confess that his approach challenged me to think more deeply about my own commitments.

Perhaps the most moving essay is the final one: a reflection on the famous 1963 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington. Here, Mohler reflects not simply on the aspirations of King but on his own Southern childhood and on the changes he has witnessed in his own life, vis-à-vis race relations in the United States. He also points to the special and unhappy role that Southern conservatives historically played in matters of race. He closes with an appeal to acknowledge that only the transforming power of Christ can bring about true and ultimate reconciliation of the races.

This is a great little book. As a card-carrying European, I do not share Dr. Mohler’s conservative politics, which do undergird much of what he says at points; but I do share his belief in the authority of Scripture, in a Pauline understanding of humanity, in the transforming power of Christ, and in the need for Christians to engage thoughtfully with the pressing needs of the day. This book has helped me immensely in the way it has stimulated me to think—even or perhaps especially at those points where I disagree with the author.

Every thoughtful Christian should buy it and read it—even if the only time you have in your day is the twenty minutes when you are waiting for a train.

Carl R. Trueman is professor of historical theology and church history at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

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POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING The Last Lecture

by Randy Pausch Hyperion, 2008 224 pages (hardback), $21.95 Before dying of pancreatic cancer in July 2008, Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch lit the world on fire by talking about death. During his “Last Lecture” on campus, he implored friends and colleagues to follow their childhood dreams as he intimately shared his life, which had but a few months remaining.

Through the best-selling book of the same name, America became fascinated with the smart, articulate, and empathetic young man who spoke of his impending demise with an openness and honesty rarely seen.

Indeed, Pausch gives voice to something we all know and try to avoid: death is coming for us all. Though the advice given in The Last Lecture can be overly simplistic, the book has many charms, as certainly Pausch had himself. In Pausch, you discover someone who desperately wanted to live without getting caught in the minutia and trivialities of life. And it is here that a reader trying to do the same can find encouragement.

At 46, Pausch was a star in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon, and was looking forward to many more bright days in academia. He was married to the woman of his dreams and had three lovely children, all under the age of five. He then learns of his cancer—an aggressive form that offered little chance of a natural life span.

As the book begins, we learn that Pausch doesn’t always play by the rules—and that he believed in facing challenges head on. While waiting in the doctor’s office, he and his wife Jai sneak a look at his latest health records: “Shall we have a look-see,” I said to Jai. I felt no qualms at all about what I was about to do. After all, these were my records. I clicked around and found my blood-work report. There were 30 obscure blood values, but I knew the one I was looking for: CA 19–9—the tumor marker. When I found it, the number was a horrifying 208.

A normal value is under 37. I studied it for just a second.

“It’s over,” I said to Jai. “My goose is cooked.” (59–60)

The Last Lecture is comprised of many short chapters— basic snapshots of key moments in Pausch’s life he hopes will provide insight into our own. As he tells about growing up with parents who encouraged him to dream, you get a picture of a man who knew himself and wanted others to follow their goals.

He tells about how he fulfilled his childhood dream of being an astronaut when he arranged for his students to conduct experiments on NASA’s “Weightless Wonder” airplane—and then, through persistence and a bit of harmless chicanery, got himself on the plane as well.

Indeed, Pausch tells of many dreams he fulfilled, from writing an article for World Book Encyclopedia to working with Imagineers at Disneyland to building a virtual reality Starship Enterprise, complete with a real William Shatner. Sometimes, it is tempting to view these stories as braggadocio, but it is clear Pausch tells them to inspire others.

At times, though, The Last Lecture can be tiring, as his cheerleading threatens to become a series of clichés. He writes, for example, “Brick walls are there for a reason: They give us a chance to show how badly we want something” (79); “Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things?”

(108); “Complaining does not work as a strategy” (139); “Don’t obsess over what people think” (141); “Am I a funloving Tigger or a sad-sack Eeyore?” (180).

At other points, however, Pausch comes close to lessons found within Scripture. He writes prophetically on the healing power of truth, as well as forgiveness: If you’ve done something wrong in your dealings with another person, it’s as if there’s an infection in your relationships. A good apology is like an antibiotic; a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound. (161) But it is the final few chapters of The Last Lecture that are the most poignant. Pausch lets us know how painful it is to die as he leaves behind his wife and children. For a reader evaluating one’s own close relationships, this will likely be one of the more emotional sections of the book.

When I cry in the shower, I’m not usually thinking, “I won’t get to see them do this.” Or “I won’t get to see them do that.” I’m thinking about the kids not having a father. (191) Jai and I work hard at our marriage. We’ve gotten so much better at communicating, at sensing each other’s needs and strengths, and at finding more things to love about each other. So it saddens us that we won’t get to experience this richness in our marriage for the next thirty or forty years. (202) In the end, while The Last Lecture does indeed contain many good life lessons and can be very moving, it may also leave the discerning reader with a sense of wanting. After getting to know, enjoy, and cheer for Randy Pausch, there is little in the book that directly speaks to the ultimate meaning of

life. What happens after you die? Why are we on this earth?

Even if you live perfectly, following your dreams, what difference does it make from an eternal perspective?

Pausch, a Unitarian Universalist, notes that he intentionally avoided a discussion of religious matters because he wanted to dwell on the “universal principles that apply to all faiths.”

For the purposes of the book, this is a useful strategy, though at times an unfortunate one. We do get a clear view of what Pausch thinks can make this particular life a success. Christians, however, will want to recall Paul’s words to the church in Corinth, considering that life is more than just a succession of days on this planet: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.”

Jay Lemke attends Risen Christ Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minnesota.

God at University College Dublin cont. (continued from page 34) would be more effective if I stuck his or her finger into a light socket! By the same token, the biblical accounts of Jesus claim that these texts are the very word of God—constituting the “power/dynamic (Greek, dynamis) of God unto salvation.” New Testament scholar J. B. Phillips said that translating those documents was like “wiring a house without turning the mains off.” And J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, said of the Gospel story: “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.”

Are you the audience willing to go to those documents?

I asked. No more than a “suspension of disbelief” is required.

If you do, you will not be able to account for Jesus apart from God—apart from his in fact being God. Some years ago André Frossard, a French journalist, published his autobiography with the title Dieu existe, je l’ai rencontré (God exists: I’ve met him). That can be your story as well.

Ponder two unsettling quotations. Pascal: “There is enough light for those who really want to see—and enough darkness for those with a contrary disposition.” And (inevitably) John Henry Newman: “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”

The audience voted to defeat the proposition. For them, it was not the case that “this house finds it irrational to believe in God.” ■

John Warwick Montgomery (Ph.D., Chicago; D.Théol., Strasbourg: LL.D., Cardiff) is professor emeritus of law and humanities, University of Bedfordshire, U.K.; distinguished professor of philosophy and Christian thought, Patrick Henry College, Virginia; director, International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights, Strasbourg, France; barrister-at-law, England and Wales; and member of the Bar of the United States Supreme Court.

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A Kingdom That Cannot Be Shaken

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new year, with a new president and Congress, evokes a wide spectrum of emo-

not meant to be a subculture, creating its own altertions and expectations from Modern Reformation readers. Regardless, we are unit- native novels, movies, hangouts, political action comed as Christians under a more decisive turning point in history than all of the mittees, and clubs. Rather, as it focuses particularly on its unique calling to fulfill the Great Commission, it shapes the significant transitions in our nation and in our own lives. way we live as Christians in our worldly callings with unbeIn the year 33, a Jewish rabbi was raised from the dead in lievers and believers alike.

Roman-occupied Palestine. Vindicating his claim as God inUnpacking the implications of this liberating Word in our carnate, Savior and Lord of the world, Jesus of Nazareth day will be our focus in 2009. So join us for the journey— proved that these titles—traditionally invoked by Caesar— and bring others along! belonged exclusively to him. This turning point is not only celebrated but deepened and widened in its effects every Lord’s Day. This new year also marks a transition in the focus of the Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation from examining the crisis of “Christless Christianity” to offering constructive engagement with the challenges and opportunities of bearing witness to Christ in a post-Christian culture.

As this introductory issue has suggested, the church is its own distinct culture. In one sense, it is a counterculture.

After all, we belong to the new creation, where already we have tasted the powers of the age to come. We have already ut you have come to Mount Zion, to the received God’s verdict of the Last Judgment: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jeheavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living sus” (Rom. 8:1). We have already been transferred from the reign of sin and death to the reign of righteousness and God. You have come to thousands upon life; once “no-people,” we are “the people of God” (1 Pet. 2:9–10). thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the Yet the church too is simultaneously justified and sinful; church of the firstborn, whose names are written definitively claimed by the triune God in grace, but still far from arriving at its destination in the City of God. In this presin heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all ent age, the church becomes visible, not to the extent that it is a counterculture, but to the extent that it points away men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, from itself to Christ—who has arrived as our forerunner in heaven. With this gospel and by his Holy Spirit, Christ is buildto Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to ing “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Heb. 12:28). In rethe sprinkled blood that speaks a better word ceiving and witnessing to this gospel, the transformation that issues in a truly different way of thinking, feeling, and actthan the blood of Abel. ing becomes partially realized in our time and place.

At the same time, we are also citizens of secular culture.

Here, we are guided by biblical truth, to be sure, but also by godly prudence, reflected in a variety of cultural styles, pref— Hebrews 12:22–24 erences, social-political views and associations. The church is

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