pilgrims-problems-nov-dec-2017

MODERN REFORMATION CELEBRATING

25 YEARS

VOL.26 | NO.6 | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2017 | $6.95

PILGRIM’S PROBLEMS

THERE’S WORK TO BE DONE In a time when, according to pollsters, the “nones” (or those claiming no religious adherence) are growing, it is more important than ever to identify and celebrate the gospel: the glory of God manifested in the grace he shows to those who deserve the very opposite. Will you stand with us to inform the next generation of Reformers? As a thank you for your gift of $100 or more, you’ll receive a USB drive containing episodes of White Horse Inn focused on answering the question, “What is true worship?”

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FEATURES 14

Back to the Future: Faithful Presence in a Non-Christian World

BY BLAKE HARTUNG

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The Church in a Post-Christian Culture M I C H A E L H O R T O N I N T E RV I E W S JA M E S K . A . S M I T H

36 D I S C I P L E S H I P T O O L K I T PA R T 1

Out of the Race, Into the Pastures

BY MICHAEL G. BROWN

44 D I S C I P L E S H I P T O O L K I T PA R T 2

Establishing a Disciple-Making Culture B Y J UA N R . S A N C H E Z

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Faith and Law Society: 15 Propositions

BY DON E. EBERLY

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY JON HAN

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A GIFT THAT GIVES BACK With our special Christmas rate, you can give someone a year of Modern Reformation for just $20. Each gift subscription includes six issues delivered to your friend’s door, plus access to the online archive and a digital version of each issue.

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DEPARTMENTS

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BOOK REVIEWS

GEEK SQUAD

The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

Culture and the Christian

C H R I S T & C U LT U R E

Hail, Symbolism!

Spiritual Themes in the Coen Brothers’ Latest Film B Y J O S E P H W. S M I T H I I I

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B Y JA C K M . S C H U LT Z

REVIEWED BY T I M O T H Y W. M A S S A R O

T H E O LO GY

When We Fail at Family Worship B Y N I C H O L A S DAV I S

Herman Bavinck on Preaching & Preachers

72 B A C K PA G E

R E V I E W E D B Y G R E G PA R K E R J R .

“Wonder Woman”

12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

B Y M I C H A E L S. H O R T O N

R E V I E W E D B Y J O N D. PAY N E

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Associate Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Review Editor Ryan Glomsrud Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith Modern Reformation © 2017. All rights reserved.

ISSN-1076-7169

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LETTER from the EDITOR

Our editor-in-chief, Michael Horton, recently sat down to talk with James K. A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College. In their wide-ranging conversation, they discussed how the church is the first and most important resource given by God to weary pilgrims. The preached word and sacraments, the fellowship of the saints, the oversight of local shepherds— these are the tools we need (and every age needs) for a safe journey home.

To help illustrate that point, we asked two pastors—Michel Brown of Christ United Reformed Church and Juan Sanchez of High Pointe Baptist hat’s a pilgrim to do? The narrow Church—to talk about the ministry of the local way that leads to life has gotten a church and the gift of the Sabbath. An ordinary bit crowded recently. Merchants church and an ordinary day in the hands of have set up shop selling guideGod can become extraordinary places of divine books that promise the newest (and best) action and comfort for pilgrims on the way. option for reaching the Celestial City. Hearing We cap it all off with a classic article from our the sales pitch, one would be forgiven for thinkarchives by Don Eberly. Don is the director of ing that “our” stage of the pilgrimage is more the Civil Society Project. In his article, he lays dangerous than any before—that out fifteen propositions for how unique dangers lay in wait for us American Christians, especially, that no other previous Christian should approach this particular “GOD WILL has ever faced. It’s tempting to keep cultural moment. As American our family just a little closer, to walk Christians see our cultural SUSTAIN US... just a little faster, and to worry just prestige diminished, we may be ALL THE WAY a little more about whether God’s tempted to conflate the sacred HOME.” promises to us and our children will and the secular, Eberly argues, but come true. instead we must resist the desperWithout going too deeply into ate grab for power and influence the various options being hawked to modern that has too often characterized evangelical pilgrims, this issue of Modern Reformation is political engagement. In its place, a new way of intended to show us that there is truly nothengaging the culture can develop. ing new under the sun and that the resources So, what’s a pilgrim to do when faced with all we need for our pilgrimage have already of the problems that flood our television screens been given to us by Christ himself. First up is and Twitter feeds? What we have always done: Blake Hartung’s article “Back to the Future.”

Bear patient and prophetic witness of the rightHartung, a scholar whose work focuses on ful King who is coming to rescue and renew the early Christianity, reminds us that the earliest world. We can walk in the faithful footsteps of Christians had to make their way in a society those who have gone before us, knowing that God that was radically opposed to their new faith, will sustain us—like them—all the way home. and we can draw on their experience to help us navigate our own pilgrimage today, in an increasingly hostile culture.

ERIC LANDRY exec utive editor

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L E F T: I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y A R T H U R M O U N T; R I G H T: I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y C H R I S T O P H E R D E L O R E N Z O

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Hail, Symbolism!

Spiritual Themes in the Coen Brothers’ Latest Film

by Joseph W. Smith III

espite strong reviews and an impressive cast, Hail, Caesar!— the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo, True Grit, No Country for Old Men)—made only $30 million at the box office and hasn’t really scored with viewers. This is a shame, since it’s one of last year’s most fascinating films, par ticularly from a Christian standpoint. Set in the 1950s, the film centers around a major Hollywood studio making a Ben-Hur-style epic about the life of Christ, while scandal, crime, and chaos reign in the e v e r y d a y l i v e s o f i t s s t a r s a n d s t a f f— particularly one Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a studio fixer who works tirelessly to keep things on the rails.

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Filled with gorgeous set pieces paying tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood (films such as On the Town, North by Northwest, and Singin’ in the Rain), it’s colorful, clever, and comical. One of its funniest scenes involves Mannix meeting with several clergymen in order to ensure that the film’s depiction of Christ will satisfy Jews, Catholics, and Protestants alike. Because this sequence feels like a joke (“A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into Hollywood . . . ”), some viewers may conclude that Hail, Caesar! satirizes religious belief.

But a careful examination will show that the film is not a mockery of religion or Christianity, but a sly criticism of Hollywood’s tendency to think that it is religion—that it can somehow recreate and embody all the fullness of

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Christ and his teachings. Yet, at the same time, Hail, Caesar! acknowledges the appeal of Christianity’s truths by portraying Eddie Mannix as an admirable Christ-figure trying to do what’s right in a ridiculously artificial milieu.

Just look at his last name: MANnix. Combined with the word Behold on the studio’s water tower, this gives us Pilate’s “Behold the Man” and points to Eddie as an incarnation of, well, the Incarnation—hence the movie’s opening shot of a bloodied Christ on the cross, echoed in the subsequent scene when Eddie’s face is spattered with shadows of raindrops as he sits in his car. We see Eddie tempted (by the Lockheed Corporation) to an easier life, which he must resist for the sake of those he wants to go on saving from their own stupidity. Eddie redeems the lost when he pulls a bird-brained starlet out of a compromising photo shoot by insisting that she belongs to Capitol Pictures (his corporation—his body!) and that it has sole rights to her likeness. That’s the language of a king, and Eddie follows up by literally paying to keep her out of trouble. And of course, at the end, Eddie is able to resist Lockheed’s siren call after consulting with the priest and then wandering up the hill of Golgotha on the set of Capitol Pictures’ Roman epic Hail, Caesar! That film-within-afilm is subtitled A Tale of the Christ, solidifying the Coens’ framework movie as a story about Jesus—specifically, Eddie Mannix.

Yet, if both the framework story and the internal movie are about Christ, then why use “Caesar” in the title? Aren’t we supposed to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God

what is God’s? This is precisely the Coens’ point: Hollywood is not a place where anybody renders unto God, no matter what kind of lip service the studio might pay. How can a film studio handle the gospel accurately when, for example, it has to ask the actor on the cross how fancy a lunch he gets because they’re not sure if he’s a “principal”? He might be the key figure in Scripture, but in Hollywood that almighty dollar is the driving force. (This is true even for the film’s Communist writers, who exploit people—such as movie star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney—to “make a little dough”; that’s why their guidebook, Marx’s Das Kapital, has the same name as the studio they are supposedly fighting.)

The strictly secular nature of the whole Hollywood enterprise is highlighted in the biggest emotional moment of both the internal film and its framework story: a speech by the spiritually enlightened Roman centurion (Clooney) at the foot of the cross is wrecked because Clooney’s dim-witted character, Baird Whitlock (“wit-lack”), somehow forgets the last word of his monologue—which happens to be “faith.” Hollywood can’t remember that it ever had any! Hollywood is not a place where there is faith in anything you can’t actually see. Hence the assertion, repeated twice toward the end of the film, that cinema will give us a new version of the gospel, written not in words but in light. “Photography,” after all, literally means “writing with light.” They will try to present the truth, but they are working in a medium where everything is by nature fake—that is, not quite true. (Frequent references to “light” in the film,

“They will try to present the truth, but they are working in a medium where everything is by nature fake—that is, not quite true.”

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“The Coens have done the best they can to embody the way, the truth, and the life of Christ in a world that is, by nature, unable to receive or understand him.”

including sun and moon, play against the hymn we hear when the film begins—Fiat Lux—which is Latin for “Let there be light.”)

This is the one uniting factor that ties together the many disparate episodes in the movie: the notion that nothing really is what it seems. DeeAnna Moran (played by Scarlett Johansson) is not a smiling mermaid but a pregnant, trash-talking floozy who may have to “adopt her own child” just to make herself look respectable. Cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich)—perhaps the one genuine person in the movie—must learn to act like a sophisticated stage thespian so he can take on yet another persona in a non-Western film; his genuineness is undermined by his set of false teeth (though at least he’s honest about this!) and by the name of his date, Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio)—a moniker lifted from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which deals with mysterious and fake identities. Burt Gurney (played by Channing Tatum) pretends to be a navy sailor

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but is actually a Communist who winds up on a Russian submarine. Yet even as a Commie, Gurney is a fake—living in a lavish seaside home that is clearly intended as a tribute to a similar house in another Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest (itself a 136-minute meditation on fake identity). In addition to all this, there’s an extra layer of artifice in the way the Coens’ central characters are all thinly disguised versions of real actors: DeeAnna isn’t exactly Esther Williams; Hobie isn’t precisely Gene Autry or Roy Rogers; Gurney isn’t quite Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire; and Mannix certainly isn’t the real Eddie Mannix, who was an actual MGM “fixer” in 1950s Hollywood (though nowhere near as upright as Brolin’s character in Hail, Caesar!).

The whole simulated nature of everything in Hollywood is so severe and pervasive that Capitol needs a special employee (played by Jonah Hill) whose job is to be a “professional person”—a man who can pretend to be whatever person the studio needs at any given time. And, of course, this is a character in the framework film. It isn’t just Capitol movies that are fake; the very people who work for the studio are themselves, in a significant sense, fake as well.

That’s why the assertion about writing with light is presented in both versions of Hail, Caesar!—the one by Capitol Pictures and the one by the Coen brothers. It’s all fake. Which is also why the backgrounds, the performances, and sometimes even the dialogue in the framework film feel just as synthetic as those in the various films-within-the-film. Hail, Caesar! works to present us with truth, while acknowledging that its own medium is not well suited to this task. And yet—like Eddie Mannix, and perhaps like struggling Christians everywhere—the Coens have done the best they can to embody the way, the truth, and the life of Christ in a world that is, by nature, unable to receive or understand him.

JOSEPH W. SMITH III has been a teacher, writer, speaker, and OPC officer for more than twenty-five years. His latest book is Open Hearts: Recovering the Lost Christian Virtue of Transparency (forthcoming 2018).

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THEOLOGY

When We Fail at Family Worship

by Nicholas Davis

hile family worship may be one of the easiest biblical concepts to talk about, it’s also one the most difficult things to do. Some of us were raised in broken homes where we didn’t have both mom and dad around—and our single parent had so much to juggle, it would have been a heavy burden to throw catechesis on top of trying to survive and putting food on the table. Pew Research informs us that less than half (46 percent) of children in the United States grow up in a traditional family dynamic.1 Those who did grow up in a traditional family dynamic didn’t always have Christian parents, and even those who did didn’t necessarily grow up with regular family worship. In fact, it

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may seem strange for us to even talk about family worship, much less try to implement it!

CATECHISM IN A FALLEN, BUSY, POSTMODERN WORLD I am in no way stating that catechetical instruction is unimportant. As a minister of the gospel in Christ’s church and a father, I am called to catechize every member, starting with my children. But I’m confessing here that I’ve often failed at family devotions.

It’s not that I never do devotions—my wife and I have developed habits that help us teach our children in intentional ways. Before we put

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the kids to bed, we read, pray, sing, and recite together for about fifteen minutes. But as a whole, I fall far short of where I want to be and the kind of husband and father I want to be for my wife and children.

Family devotions are not difficult when we think about it—it’s really just praying and reading the Bible together (and if you have time, throw in a catechism question-and-answer). So who would argue with doing more of that, even if it cuts into some leisure time? Nevertheless, getting together as a family to read the Bible and pray together is one of the hardest things to do.

There’s the ongoing battle with the world—work, school, socializing, sports, and entertainment all compete for our attention. There’s the ongoing battle with our flesh—sometimes I just don’t want to do it. Then there’s the ongoing spiritual battle with the devil—the devil definitely doesn’t want us to worship God, and he especially doesn’t want us to pass our faith on to our children!

The increasing pressures and responsibilities of modern life mean that families have a hard enough time just eating together at the dinner table. Throw in the obligation to spiritually feed your family through corporate devotions and you have something that—for most people in the society in which we are called to labor—is going to be nearly impossible. And in some cases, it is impossible. The yoke can be too heavy. The goal can be too unrealistic given the circumstances some of us face. The failure to do it can make us feel like we are failures before God, our churches, and our children.

GRACE FOR BURNED-OUT PARENTS There’s good news, however, for family devotional failures. Yes, good news. I want to tell you something that is going to remove the millstone around your neck: It’s okay if you fail at family devotions. Having your kids watch you live the Christian life with integrity is what makes the difference. Going to church weekly, asking for

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“Family devotions are not difficult when we think about it—it’s really just praying and reading the Bible together….

Nevertheless, getting together as a family to read the Bible and pray together is one of the hardest things to do.”

forgiveness from your children, and confessing your sins with them in the room will go further and reach them more deeply than simply running through the catechism or weekly Bible memorization. But don’t take my word for it.

According to a study published in the British Journal of Political Science, parents who insist that their children adopt their political views may actually be encouraging them to abandon those beliefs once they become adults.2 I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that if this is true in the realm of politics, the same can be true in the realm of religion.

If we treat rote memorization and doing the right things as the be-all and end-all of raising our children in the “fear and admonition of the

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Lord,” then we may end up alienating them from the Lord. But if we live the Christian life in a way that shows them we actually believe what we’re trying to teach them, we may more naturally pass on our faith to our children because we actually have it. In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton writes, “Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.” It’s those overlooked actions and a consistent manner of living that have the greatest impact.

The day-to-day practice of confession and absolution makes as much of an impression as your faithfulness in catechesis. The Christian faith is most often caught, not taught. As the Latin maxim goes: lex orandi, lex credendi (“the law of praying is the law of believing”). The grammar and logic of Christianity is passed onto us and to our children through the liturgical formation that takes place from Sunday to Sunday.

A PRACTICAL WAY FORWARD FOR TIRED AND ANXIOUS PARENTS I’m a bi-vocational pastor, so I work a normal day job. Then after work, I go on to care for the needs of my family and that of a local church.

I have church meetings to attend, sermons to prepare, calls and e-mails to take care of, and so on. This means we don’t have a lot of free time in our household. So how do we still have family worship throughout all the busyness?

We’ve made it really simple, and here are a few ways you can include family worship through your day—no matter how busy and chaotic it is.

Find a time when the whole family is together.

Before I go to my first job, I spend some time with my oldest boys. We also have a bedtime routine with our young children, so we carve out a short time for family worship before putting them to bed. Some families may find mealtime to be more appropriate. But since I’m not home at the same time every night, this ruined our consistency.

More often than not, our desire to have family worship together would never turn into a habit.

Simplify what you do in those daily moments.

In the morning, I read a short Bible story with my kids. We briefly talk about it, and then I’m off to work. In the evening before bedtime, we use the Gloria Patri, the Doxology, and the Trisagion for our routine songs, and then we finish with the Lord’s Prayer. If we have time, we pray for other needs and have our kids pray too—but sometimes we’re just in survival mode. Being a parent and working multiple jobs is hard work.

It’s those ordinary practices informed by the truths of Scripture and cultivated as a gathered people that stick with us and with our children the most. In her book Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren writes: For most of history the majority of believers could not read, so Christian worship intentionally taught the gospel in preliterate ways. But even now, each of us, whether first

“It’s those ordinary practices informed by the truths of Scripture and cultivated as a gathered people that stick with us and with our children the most.”

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“It’s the smallest things that matter in the long run. All of the knowledge in the world won’t make a difference if we have not love.”

graders or physics professors, still learn the gospel in preliterate ways. We absorb it. We learn what we believe, as James K. A. Smith says, from our “body up.” We have to taste and see that God is good if we are ever going to really believe it.3 Thankfully, God provides us with food and drink for both body and soul by bringing us into the divine service of word and sacrament, of hearing the gospel preached from the pulpit and feasting on a sacred meal that nourishes us; we truly taste and see that God is indeed good. When we sing in the public assembly, when we recite those old words found in the Apostles’ Creed, when we pray “Our Father, who art in heaven…,” we enter into a kind of discipleship in which we are sprinkled from head to toe in a covenant renewal ceremony of re-enchantment, where our belief is renewed and the Lord answers the

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prayers of his people, “Lord, help our unbelief!”

While family worship is an important aspect of the Christian life, it is not the only aspect.

God has promised to give us grace through the ordained, objective means he has provided for us through word and sacrament. It’s through those means that he enables parents to raise their children up in the faith, offering them the same “grace and peace” (Gal. 1:3) they have received from God the Father. That is essential. If we do not readily extend forgiveness and regularly show our children our own need for forgiveness in the home, then we will fail to pass on to them anything more than just words.

What I’m arguing for here is more than rote memorization. Raise your children in a safe place where they are exposed to parents who love and care—and who forgive and ask for forgiveness. Don’t be overly concerned with “getting it right” or running through a daily spiritual checklist. That would be to miss the freedom you have in Christ and the power we have in trusting in the very promise of God for us and our children (Acts 2:39).

Now, of course, if you are able to have the best of both worlds, by all means press on in catechizing and reading the Bible with your children.

But if this makes it so that you are unable to love and forgive your children (and yourself), and if you feel like you just can’t keep up with the Joneses, then maybe it would be better for you to simply focus on being a Christian with your children. It’s the smallest things that matter in the long run. All of the knowledge in the world won’t make a difference if we have not love.

NICHOLAS DAVIS is editor of content and curation at White Horse Inn and serves as pastor of Redemption Church (PCA) in San Diego, California. Nick and his wife, Gina, have three children and live in San Diego.

1 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/22/less-than-halfof-u-s-kids-today-live-in-a-traditional-family.

2 E. Dinas, “Why Does the Apple Fall Far from the Tree? How Early Political Socialization Prompts Parent-Child Dissimilarity,” British Journal of Political Science 44:4 (2014): 827–52.

3 Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2016), 133–34.

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Your stories encourage us in our work, and we’d love to hear them.

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The most revolutionary power that could be unleashed into the world today is that which comes from a lifestyle of love, forgiveness, and humility.”

— D O N E . E B E R LY

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BACK TO THE FUTURE: FAITHFUL PRESENCE IN A NON-CHRISTIAN WORLD

THE CHURCH IN A POSTCHRISTIAN CULTURE

OUT OF THE RACE, INTO THE PASTURES

ESTABLISHING A DISCIPLEMAKING CULTURE

FAITH AND LAW SOCIETY: 15 PROPOSITIONS

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BLAKE HARTUNG

Back to the Future Faithful Presence in a Non-Christian World illustration by MLC

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The current moment in the Western church is a watershed in our

history. Today, for the first time since antiquity, Western Christians inhabit a largely non-Christian society. For most of us, these changes take the form not of aggressive persecutions but of subtler social pressures. Regular church attendance is no longer a cultural expectation but, in many places, something of an oddity. In personal interactions, we have likely experienced questioning, misunderstanding, or even mockery of theological or moral beliefs once taken for granted in a notionally Christian polite society.

Perhaps we have been drawn into the abyss of social media debates, Thankfully, we are not the first generation of Christians to ask such questions. In this article, or seen a Thanksgiving dinner go I want to explore what lessons we might draw awry as the conversation turns from an era that was well aware of the challenges of faithful witness in a non-Christian toward Christianity. In these world: the early church. (I should say first that contexts, the question facing us is the modern American Christian experience is a difficult one: How do we maintain by no means a perfect analogy for that of the church in the Roman Empire—no exercise in a winsome engagement with our historical comparison ever is.) This particular friends and neighbors, and with historical analogy has been the subject of far too many hyperbolic essays, so my intention here is the intellectual currents of our age, to remain true to the historical record, drawing while maintaining faithfulness to application where there is commonality.

Most Christians in the first centuries of the our convictions? church never faced lions, pyres, or crosses, yet all of them had to constantly negotiate how to live and participate in a society that was by turns opposed to, perplexed by, or indifferent toward them. In what follows, I want to explore two ways in which early Christians navigated their cultural contexts, and offer some lessons we might draw from their experiences. First, I will highlight the ways that early Christians challenged the social expectations for religious practice and modeled an alternative vision of religion and community. I will then discuss the early Christian engagement with their pagan intellectual critics, an encounter that left the church forever transformed.

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RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION While most early Christians did not experience brazen, imperially sponsored persecution, Christians from all levels of society faced persistent opposition in subtler and potentially even more culturally potent forms. One of the primary reasons for this antagonism was Christianity’s defiance of social expectations for religious practice. In the ancient Mediterranean world, religio (the Latin ancestor of our word religion) was associated with a particular place or people group. The Jews had their religio, as did the people of Athens and the inhabitants of Rome. Traditional cultic practices offered a way to celebrate and honor one’s homeland and its representative deities. They provided timehonored means to petition the gods for aid in times of need. Temples and shrines functioned as economic engines by collecting offerings and spurring industries (e.g., the manufacture and sale of cultic objects). Ancient religions were not particularly exclusive—one could take part in the rites of the emperor, offer a sacrifice to a city god, and pray to a household deity in a single day. Finally, a moral code of conduct was not central to the practice of religio. Simply put, in the ancient Mediterranean world, religio was a collection of social practices that were thought to promote social cohesion and traditional values.

It was therefore inextricably bound up with social and political life. Participation in these rites was as essential for membership in the community as our own national rituals of reciting the pledge of allegiance and singing the national anthem.

When judged by these standards, it is easy to see why Greco-Roman elites did not dignify Christianity with the label of religio.

Instead, they viewed it as a dangerous superstitio, characterized by irrationality, a fervent and overzealous devotion to the divine, and a threatening exclusivism. By abstaining from participation in the civic religio, Christians showed their disdain for their city, their people, and the traditions of their ancestors. Rumors and insinuations spread that Christian superstitio took dangerously deviant forms—including cannibalism and incest. Harsh criticism and

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hostile public perception undoubtedly increased the social pressure on Christians to conceal or renounce their faith.

In his recent book Destroyer of the Gods, New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado makes the case that early Christianity challenged and fundamentally redefined the very idea of religion in the ancient world. He highlights several factors that contributed to Christianity’s “distinctiveness” in relation to other ancient religions. Two of these are particularly relevant here: early Christian 1 “exclusivism” and early Christian “ethics.”

Because of Christians’ refusal to participate in local, civic, or ethnic religio, their community was, by definition, exclusive and thereby offensive to the pagan pluralism that bound the Roman Empire together. Yet it also promised any willing convert access to a community that was purposefully translocal, transcivic, and transethnic. Their exclusivism set them apart, the heterodox Syrian Christian Bardaisan argued, as a “new race” spread among the nations. Even as their stubborn abstinence from pagan religio earned the scorn of others, their moral convictions and radical generosity impressed even the most contemptuous of their critics.

Sometime in the late second century, Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata (ca. AD 120–180) composed a satirical biography of Peregrinus, a roving Cynic philosopher best known for his public self-immolation at the Olympic Games in AD 165. In Lucian’s telling, Peregrinus feigned a conversion to Christianity, using his position among them to take advantage of their generosity and credulousness. Lucian writes that when Peregrinus was imprisoned, the Christians leapt to his defense: In some of the Asiatic cities, too, the Christian communities put themselves to the expense of sending deputations, with offers of sympathy, assistance, and legal advice. The activity of these people, in dealing with any matter that affects their community, is something extraordinary; they spare no trouble, no expense.

Peregrinus, all this time, was making quite an income on the strength of his bondage;

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money came pouring in. . . . Now an adroit, unscrupulous fellow, who has seen the world, has only to get among these simple souls, and his fortune is pretty soon made; 2 he plays with them. (De Morte Peregrini 13)

“One of the greatest attractions of conversion to Christianity, it seems, was the love shown by Christians.”

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While we do not know Peregrinus’s motivations (his time among the Christians could have been part of a sincere search for truth), Lucian clearly wishes to portray him as a con man who easily fooled the irrational and gullible Christians. While his account drips with mockery, Lucian nevertheless marvels at the Christians’ quick defense and support of a man they viewed as one of their own. The deep solidarity of the Christian community shines through Lucian’s narrative.

In the face of such opposition, however, the early church continued to grow. One of the greatest attractions of conversion to Christianity, it seems, was the love shown by Christians. In his Plea for the Christians, second-century apologist Athenagoras of Athens praised the faithful witness of those everyday Christians “unable in words to prove the benefit of our doctrine,” who nevertheless bore witness to the truth through their love and good deeds (Leg. 11). As churches grew bigger and more organized, charitable activities (in the forms of food distribution, care for the sick, and protection of orphans) became large-scale enterprises. These sorts of activities were foreign to Greco-Roman religio. By the fourth century, the devoutly pagan emperor Julian “the Apostate” (ruled AD 361) sought to establish pagan high priesthoods in cities that would be tasked with the mission of overseeing charitable work, in a conscious imitation of Christianity (Letter 84). Julian believed that if pagans were to win back converts, they must “Christianize” their religion, thus making it more attractive to the masses.

The religious landscape of twenty-firstcentury America is obviously radically different from that of the ancient Mediterranean world.

For example, our notions of distinct “secular” and “religious” spheres and our constitutional separation of religion and state would be incomprehensible to an ancient observer.

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Despite these differences, there is much we could learn from the experiences of early Christians.

Today, several forms of modern religio vie for the adherence of Americans. Like ancient Greco-Roman religio, these cultural forces do not particularly care what Christians believe, nor are they particularly interested in morality. They want to see demonstrations of allegiance. For all its diversity, ancient Mediterranean society was deeply tribal. In such a context, the practices of religio served as public demonstrations of loyalty to family, city, or empire. The tribal fault lines in our society are quite different, increasingly drawn in terms of party, political ideology, or identification with a particular interest group.

The more these factions divide our society, the more loyalty they demand from Christians.

Early Christians tried to walk a fine line: to declare their obedience to the emperor and their earthly citizenship in their place of residence, while resisting the daily public pressure to show support to those powers through sacrifices, libations, and festivals. Faced with these social demands, who knows how many early Christians poured out an occasional libation in the name of Athena or made some other small compromise? Today, American Christians face subtle (or overt) pressures to compromise in various ways—to blend in with the crowd, to show our allegiance to particular political or ideological factions and our contempt for those on the other side. In other words, we are tempted to trade the generous exclusivism of the church for a hostile exclusivism based on party, movement, or cultural identity.

The experience of the early Christians reminds us that the church must always transcend these divisions. In the first centuries of the church, it was the love and charity of Christians that first drew many to hear the gospel. When faced with pressure to show devotion to the religio of the age, our communities must welcome the native-born and the foreigner, the liberal and the conservative, the weak and the powerful. As the fault lines grow deeper, we must show more unity and a greater willingness to challenge social divisions in the name of Christ. Our greatest ambition should be

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“When faced with pressure to show devotion to the religio of the age, our communities must welcome the nativeborn and the foreigner, the liberal and the conservative, the weak and the powerful.�

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for our non-Christian critics to echo the words of Tertullian of Carthage (ca. AD 155–240): “Look how they love one another!” (Apol. 39.7).

In addition to the cultural and social pressures of everyday life in the ancient world, early Christians faced derision and condemnation from intellectual circles. Just as in our own time, intellectual elites had an outsized clout among the richest and most powerful members of society. Ancient critiques of Christianity drew upon a very different set of cultural values and beliefs than modern critiques. Despite the common hostility to Christianity, Celsus was no ancient Richard Dawkins. Nevertheless, the early Christian experience in navigating and responding to these challenges is instructive for our own time. As Robert Wilken argues, these critics “performed an enormous service to the developing Christian tradition. They helped Christian thinkers to see the difficulties of the positions they adopted, to grasp the implications of Christian belief earlier than would have been possible if they had talked only 3 among themselves.” In other words, a thorough engagement between early Christians and their opponents laid the groundwork for the development of Christian theology.

THE KERYGMATIC CHURCH No ancient intellectual critiques of Christianity were more influential than Celsus’s True Doctrine (late second century) and Porphyry of Tyre’s Against the Christians (late third century). In both of these texts, we find many of the most common features of ancient antiChristian polemic: assertions of the superiority of Greek culture over “barbarian” cultures such as Judaism, critiques of Christian Scripture, and a strong dependence on traditional Greek authorities (especially Plato). Neither writer was opposed to the notion that the divine had inspired authoritative truth to draw people to salvation. Rather, they argued that Christians had utilized the wrong sources. In their view, Christian Scriptures had no claim to the antiquity of the tradition of the inspired Homer,

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Plato, and Aristotle. As such, Celsus argued, they could easily be refuted by “an ancient doctrine which has existed from the beginning, which has always been maintained by the wisest nations and cities and wise men” (Contra Celsum 1.14). The deep respect accorded to the classics in the Greco-Roman world meant that Christians had to take these criticisms seriously. The fact that significant fragments of Porphyry’s and Celsus’s works have survived is an indication that many of them did. These fragments live on in the writings of Christian authors, most notably Origen of Alexandria (AD 185–254), author of Against Celsus.

Some early Christians took a more adversarial position toward the Greco-Roman intellectual tradition, positioning it as an opponent of the Christian gospel. Tertullian’s question “What has At hens to do w it h Jerusalem?” is a well-known example of this viewpoint (De praescr. haer. 7.9). Even critics took the opportunity to demonstrate points of agreement between Christianity and popular ideas of the time. Tertullian elsewhere acknowledges, “Of course we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the same things as ourselves” (De anima 2).

Justin Martyr (ca. AD 100–165) exemplifies a more positive assessment of Greco-Roman thought. Borrowing the language of the Stoic school, he claims that the authorities and teachers of the Greek intellectual tradition “all spoke well in proportion to the share [they] had of the seminal Logos” (2 Apol. 13.2). Whatever truth they possessed came from Reason/the Word—Jesus Christ. In the ancient tradition of philosophy, Justin saw a way to connect with Christianity’s critics and explain its odd moral system and exclusivist practices to an uncomprehending audience. “I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable,” he recounts. “Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher” (Dial. 8).

It is a mistake to think of ancient philosophy as an ivory-tower endeavor disconnected from the realities of everyday life. Philosophical traditions (Greek: bioi, “lifestyles”) like Stoicism and Platonism revered their founding teachers,

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“In the ancien philosophy, Justin s with Christianity’s c odd moral system an to an uncomprehe

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taught ethical living, and actively sought disciples. They were well-known fixtures of ancient cities—Wilken even compares them to travel4 ing evangelists! It is unsurprising that, faced with accusations of superstitio and impiety for their rejection of traditional religio, Christian apologists such as Justin would have sought to portray themselves in these familiar terms.

Even an outsider like the pagan physician Galen seems to have understood Christianity in this way, describing it as a philosophical “school” (Greek: bios). The ethical focus of philosophical traditions explains how Justin and Augustine both viewed Greco-Roman philosophy as a crucial stepping-stone in their journeys toward Christianity.

Yet early Christianity was never just a system of ethics. It was first and foremost a proclamation (Greek: kerygma) of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Reading the writers of the second and third centuries, one has the impression that a commitment to this kerygma drives their interactions with Greco-Roman thought. They borrow traditional philosophical categories, ideas, and terminology, but they tend to put them at the service of their own idiosyncratic faith in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus. While non-Christian critics of Christianity sometimes admired the Christian way of life, the Christian kerygma was a frequent stumbling block.

As much as Christians sought to explain and defend themselves to pagan critics, the exclusivity and offensiveness of the kerygma formed a wall between most Christian thinkers and non-Christian intellectuals. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have spoken of the “Hellenization of Christianity.” While there may be germs of truth to the notion—some early Christians surrendered too much to the intellectual currents of their time—ancient Greco-Roman critics recognized a greater danger: the “Christianization of Hellenism.”

With their kerygma Christians would not hesitate to reject, appropriate, or completely refashion the revered teachings of the ancients.

When the bishops at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) looked for language to describe the

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“When the bishops at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) looked for language to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son, they turned to terminology familiar to Greek philosophy—ousia (‘being’)—a term some Christians decried as unbiblical!”

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relationship between the Father and the Son, they turned to terminology familiar to Greek philosophy—ousia (“being”)—a term some Christians decried as unbiblical! Ultimately, the Christian engagement with Greco-Roman critics shaped the articulation of doctrine.

Again, there are some clear differences between the situation of the early church and the church in modern America. Pagan critics attacked Christianity as untraditional, a novel innovation on the teachings of antiquity. Such an argument carries far less weight today, when novelty is typically a virtue and tradition is often suspect. There are, however, some important lessons to draw from the engagement between early Christians and their intellectual critics.

The first is rather straightforward. Although frequently misunderstood and even suspect, Christians did not retreat into their own communities. Rather, they defended themselves and engaged their critics on their own terms. Every generation of Christians faces criticisms and encounters new questions, both from within and without. It is incumbent upon theologians, pastors, and thinking people to rise to the moment and engage with those critiques. The experience of the early Christians reminds us that there is always a tension in this engagement between accommodation and rejection of external criticisms.

Nevertheless, in the first centuries of the church, this engagement was the impetus for some of the earliest Christian attempts to bring their Scripture, their kerygma, and their moral convictions into a comprehensive theological system. We cannot know how well Christian apologists and theologians managed to persuade any of their critics. It is possible (and perhaps likely) that non-Christian intellectuals paid little attention to these rebuttals. Christians, however, paid attention, as leaders among them rose to speak on their behalf. These leaders offered a vision of Christian faith that was rational and all-encompassing, distinctly Christian, yet culturally engaged.

I recently watched a video of a debate held several years ago between scientist and “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins and the former

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archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

Although Williams is an admirable and learned spokesman for the Christian faith, I had little reason to believe that Dawkins left the debate convinced by his arguments. The debate was more beneficial for those who watched it, particularly Christians, reminding us that our faith is intellectually defensible and that the arguments of critics, while often compelling and worth addressing, are not foolproof. Nevertheless, those rival claims push us to give a response and to do so in a manner that is comprehensible in our time and context.

History never provides perfect analogies for the present. It is always tempting to use history selectively, to make it say what we want in the present moment. A vast gulf of history, culture, technology, language, and countless other differences separate the modern American church from the early church. Yet wherever the church catholic exists, it participates in a story that began in the Roman Empire, along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. It is part of our calling to listen to this past and try to let it speak into the present. We have much to learn if we are to live without presuming a moral and cultural power we no longer possess. The early church reminds us that to remain winsomely engaged with a non-Christian world, while remaining faithful to the gospel, requires resistance to the religios that seek our allegiance. It involves an ever-deeper commitment to and love for one another. It also demands that we answer the challenges of our critics and seek common ground in light of our kerygma. We would do well to read the fathers of the church.

BLAKE HARTUNG recently earned a PhD in historical

theology from Saint Louis University. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, Sarah, and teaches theology, history, and language courses.

1 Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016).

2 Ancient sources cited in this article can be found in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 10 vols., ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994).

3 Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 200.

4 Wilken, 74.

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Michael Horton Interviews

JAMES K. A . SMITH

THE CHURCH

IN A

POST-CHRISTIAN

CULTURE illustration by

JON HAN

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hile few will argue that Christendom was a glorious era of gospel proclamation and liberation from pagan superstition, it did have its occasional advantages—most notably the right (or the obligation) to worship without fear of molestation by either man or state. The Christian narrative of redemptive history was generally accepted as a rational position, rather than an opiate for the masses, and membership in a church was a prerequisite for participation in society, not a hindrance to it. The world has changed greatly over the ensuing centuries—for better and for worse—and Christians must now think carefully about what exactly it means to be a disciple of Christ and how they engage this brave new world.

Our friend James K. A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College and editor-in-chief of Comment, has been at the forefront of this discussion with his books Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009), Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Baker, 2013), and a popular version of those two titles, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016). The third book in this set, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology was just published by Baker Academic in November, so editor-in-chief Michael Horton rang up Jamie for a friendly chat about living as a Christian in a post-Christian world—what really happens at a football stadium—and about Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option (see page 62 for a review of this book).

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MSH: Even though these are academic-sounding titles, I encourage readers to dig in and start with You Are What You Love.

JKAS: Yes, the first two books were written

with a university or seminary conversation in mind, but we found that all kinds of people were reading and wrestling with the ideas discussed in them, so You Are What You Love is kind of the gateway book that sets the groundwork for the more detailed articulation you see in the Desiring the Kingdom trilogy.

MSH: Desiring the Kingdom is actually quite acces-

sible, particularly the way you talk about cultural formation—the idea that, as embodied beings, culture forms us. Is the Christian culture—namely, the church—forming us, or are we being formed more by the culture around us? Is it fair to say that’s one of your great concerns?

JKAS: The way you’ve framed it is absolutely

right. We tend to analyze culture as if it is mostly a collection of messages, ideas, and alternative doctrines. Of course, that’s important; but if you’re only doing cultural discernment that way, you’ll miss all of the powerful deformative practices—the rituals of a culture—that are sort of hoodwinking us, covertly capturing our loves, our longings, and our fundamental orientation to the world.

So, on the one hand, we want to use a new mode of cultural critique when engaging with culture; but on the other hand—the positive, constructive hand—we need to ask if the body of Christ, the church, is adequately and faithfully embodying the gospel and inviting us into Christ’s life in ways that can counter the culture’s deformation. I think I cite an earlier book of yours, A Better Way, every time I write on these matters. It’s funny how much even Reformed and Presbyterian people forget what worship is and what it’s supposed to do. We think of it as this expressive endeavor that shows something, when in fact it’s the answer to a call to be a body that encounters God, who’s going to do something to us.

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MSH: You start out by challenging the idea of worldview, which I don’t know how you can possibly do in Grand Rapids—the very heart of Christian worldview development! Much good in the evangelical world has come from Christian engagement with movies and literature, but the “worldview” approach puts us as human beings, as you say, as brains on a stick.

Can you unpack that?

JKAS: Right. It’s funny how there are certain

theological tendencies we mesh with certain modern cultural tendencies that prioritize and privilege thinking, which results in this mistaken notion that we’re just cognitive information processors. I’ve seen in my own tradition the tendency of this notion of worldview to take Christianity and reduce it to a sort of intellectual system or perspectival grid. I’m challenging that. We are always more than thinking things; we are more than brains on a stick; we are holistic persons God has created— body, soul, and spirit—and is redeeming. We need an encounter with Christ and an ongoing life with Christ that honors our embodiment.

What also worries me is the way that “worldview-ism” is a slice of the Reformed tradition that gets picked up in broader evangelicalism, without the other distinctives of Reformed Christianity that account for other aspects of our being as image-bearers.

MSH: It’s not just that our minds are being transformed, but that we’re presenting our bodies to the Lord as well.

JKAS: Yes, and there’s a reason why Scripture comes time and again to this language of the heart. I don’t pretend to be a biblical studies scholar, but in some ways, the language of “the heart” is like biblical shorthand for the intersection of mind and body; it’s this visceral core of who we are. It’s one of the reasons why Saint Augustine says that what you love is really what motivates and defines you. What we need is a more nuanced, more holistic, more comprehensive sense of who we are in Christ—to realize that our body is the site of habits that shape

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“We don’t become consumers because somebody argues us to that conclusion; we become consumers when our hearts are captured by these cultural liturgies that pull us into a rival story of the world.”

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and incline us in certain ways, which God also wants to redeem.

MSH: Transitioning from our discussion of world-

view, could you explain some examples of what you refer to as “cultural liturgies”—social habits and customs that shape our bodies as well as our minds?

JKAS: Instead of just discerning culture in terms of the messages and worldviews that are out there—the competing ideas to the gospel—what we have to do is learn to read the rituals of our culture: the places and sites of these rhythms and routines and practices that aren’t just something we do but are themselves things that, in turn, actually do something to us. When you bring that kind of lens to our everyday life, you start to see that there’s more at stake than you would have realized, and things that you might have thought were benign and neutral are really loaded and kind of dangerous.

The example I have often used since I started thinking about this was when my kids were teenagers and they would ask me if I would take them to the mall. They would say, “Dad, will you take us to the temple?” They were sort of mocking me, because we had had this conversation where I tried to get them to see that the mall is actually an intensely religious site. I don’t mean it’s a Christian site; I mean it’s this cathedral of consumerism that’s trying to capture their loves and desires. It’s not that when they walked into the mall, it would say, “This is what you should believe!” or “Here’s what we think!” The last thing the mall wants you to do is think. It’s because it invites you into this very sensible, visceral, visual set of routines and rituals that at their root, in all kinds of covert ways, are trying to tell you that happiness is found in stuff and meaning is found in acquisition. We don’t become consumers because somebody argues us to that conclusion; we become consumers when our hearts are captured by these cultural liturgies that pull us into a rival story of the world.

You can bring that kind of liturgical lens, then, to a stadium. I actually think stadiums

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are where we learn to be nationalists; there is a very potent, visual display of symbol and narrative about the nation. Because we’re immersed in this over and over again, before you realize it, this whole mythology of “the nation” has seeped into you at an unconscious level and then you act accordingly. I think you could analyze the university, social media, and even our smartphones in this way; but the point is to understand that a more comprehensive method of cultural analysis—reading the rituals of our culture—is necessary.

MSH: This is really the idea that the violation of

the first commandment is that we love or trust someone or something other than God. JKAS: Yes, that’s a great way of putting it. You could run with an entire analysis about how faith, hope, and love are all postures of a relationship in submission to God, that they’re the condition for thinking well about God.

MSH: That helps to explain if somebody comes

along and asks, “How important is it that you read the Bible regularly?” I’ll say, “It’s absolutely essential.” It’s easy for us to say, for example, “Scripture is revelation of all that we need for salvation and godliness,” while our bodies more easily take a break in a movie seat than reading the Bible and praying. Do you think that’s something that’s deep in our culture and especially in orthodox Christian culture where we’re trying hard to challenge rival beliefs?

JKAS: I think that’s a helpful analysis. There can be two consequences of that. On one hand, it can turn into a form of antinomianism, where it doesn’t matter what I’m doing because I believe the right things. On the other hand, I think it can turn into a kind of spiritual frustration and even despair, where you’re so passionately devoted to learning more and more and yet you’re not seeing that realized in your daily walk. That’s the consequence that worries me.

I think that’s because we haven’t appreciated the

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power of habit, in the sense that you can’t think your way out of the deformed habits that you’re wrestling with.

MSH: Would you say that a good example is the

Lord’s Day? A lot of people would say it’s important to believe the right doctrines, but they aren’t too concerned about attending Sunday worship, and then they are shocked when their children are unchurched by their sophomore year in college?

JKAS: Yes, and it’s so interestingly tied to people having an informational notion of what sanctification is as opposed to a formational one. Someone might say, “I can always listen to a White Horse Inn podcast on Tuesday, so really, why is Sunday morning important?” It completely misses the reason why the people of God are called to gather around word and table—not just so we get another interjection of informational content, but because communally the Spirit is forming us at this deep and embodied level. That’s not the sort of thing you can stream.

MSH: If we don’t have the liturgies of the gospel culture in the church, primarily word and sacrament, what other liturgies are going to capture our hearts? You mentioned the mall. How does it work? How do our hearts get captured? Is there a difference between the stoical notion that says cravings are sinful and Augustine’s idea that cravings are good as long as they’re directed to the right object?

JKAS: That’s a great way of framing it. I’m

trying to argue that instead of viewing desire and craving as the problem, it’s what we’ve learned to desire and the orientations of our cravings that we have acquired through our immersion in disordered liturgies that have covertly trained us to be a kind of people who want some rival kingdom. A lot of contemporary Protestant Christians in North America are quite allergic to the notion of repetition in their spiritual lives. In my account, there is

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no formation without repetition. If you’re fixated on novelty in your spiritual experiences, that means all the formative power of repetition will be directed into the cultural liturgies you don’t see as problematic. You’ll always go to the tailgating ritual at the USC game; you’ll always go to Starbucks. What happens, then, is that the counter-formative power of the gospel that can be embodied in the church’s faithful repetition of the story is sort of lost, because it’s not a habit that shapes you—it’s a one-off experience you encounter.

MSH: I think you do a great job of unmasking the

assumption that all the things we routinely do in our daily life are not liturgies. Some are better, some are worse, but what we’re doing every day is going through a series of liturgies we often don’t bother to think about. We basically say, “This is the real world,” and then when we go to church, we say somehow, “This is a liturgy.”

JKAS: I’ve been doing a lot more work with

Augustine’s City of God over the last few years, and that’s how I think he reads Rome and the empire. On the one hand, what you get is a stinging antithetical criticism of all the ways Rome fails to be the city of God; but on the other hand, you see him have a kind of nuanced, ad hoc, almost relative analysis, where he says, “But if you compare it to the barbarian horde, not all is lost.” It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Sometimes I worry that there’s a certain kind of Anabaptist sympathy within evangelicalism that sets up this stark either-or contrast, and I’m trying to negotiate between those two.

MSH: As my students and I went through the

book, it seemed there was this notion of the head always following the heart. Isn’t there more of a two-way highway here—that our hearts inform our heads, and our heads inform our hearts? Does the Bible show more of an integrated picture, rather than the intellect over the will or the will over the intellect?

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“There is absolut Christian on your o body of Christ you congregation. The our practice is abs

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JKAS: Yes, this has been an ongoing correction

to the way I keep trying to articulate it. I think it mostly stems from the fact that the foil that I’m working against is an overwhelmingly intellectualist account, so it’s not surprising if my emphases look like they’re setting up a dichotomy. I really didn’t want to do that. The way I would frame it is that, yes, there is a dialectical relationship—there is a constructive feedback loop that can happen, using our God-given powers of intellect and reflection to discern and name our failures and disorders.

The irony is that I write books about why you can’t think your way to holiness. Obviously, practically, I do think there’s a constructive role for reflection; I just don’t think it’s sustainable on its own, because I don’t actually just think my way through my day. Ideally, I use my God-given powers of knowledge, intellect, and reflection to come to my practices with renewed intentionality.

I’m trying to push back on a tendency in American evangelicalism that still imagines you can be a lone ranger in the Christian life— this kind of rugged individualist who can figure it all out with the intellect and doesn’t need a congregation. What I’m saying is that there is absolutely no way to be a Christian on your own, apart from the body of Christ you worship with in a congregation. The communal aspect of our practice is absolutely necessary.

MSH: How do you respond to someone who says, “In all these projects, you’re basically choosing Aristotle over Paul: faith comes by hearing”? This was the problem with the medieval church—they borrowed Aristotle’s idea that if you just have laws, tradition, and a culture of virtuous practices, you’ll end up with virtuous people.

JKAS: I don’t agree with that, so I intentionally try to resist any kind of liturgical determinism. However, I don’t want to think of Paul and Aristotle as non-overlapping Venn diagrams.

I think there are ways in which Aristotle gives us common-grace insight into the human that I see confirmed in Paul. In Colossians 3, Paul

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pays close attention to the virtues. There’s a great book on Paul’s epistemology by Ian W. Scott called Paul’s Way of Knowing, where he argues that even Paul’s epistemology has a kind of narrative structure behind it. We not only see positive descriptions of both vice and virtue, but we also see an instruction that invites Christians to find themselves in the story of God in Christ redeeming the world. I don’t want to turn this into a spiritual self-management program; I’m saying that these are the means of grace from a God who knows we are creatures of habit.

Probably a lot of this also is a methodological starting point. I’m a philosopher by training, and my conversation partners come out of that philosophical canon; it can get a bit tricky when I look for the points of contact within Scripture.

I’m hoping to give insight into the nature of the human as we can know it through Scripture and attentiveness to nature.

MSH: Can you give some examples that illustrate this point about our being creatures of story and habit? Maybe some examples from Christian worship?

JKAS: I was a late convert to Christian faith

and then came through dispensational, nondenominational evangelicalism and from there to the Reformed tradition. Later, I realized that being Reformed comes with this whole ecclesiology, and that the Reformers had this incredibly rich theology of worship— of what being called into God’s presence looks like. What has made this meaningful to me is my own experience of Christian worship now, where I see that from the moment God calls us to worship, we are called into this encounter that has a narrative arc and logic to what we do, when we do it, and why.

The logic of that script is formative even on the days I don’t feel it, even on the days I’m not thinking about it—I know that God is doing something to me in the midst of it. My experience is often starkest around the liturgical rehearsal of confession and assurance of pardon. When you’re on the road, you have

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“In this narrative rehearsal of my relationship with God, I’m called by a gracious, forgiving, electing, creating God into his presence.”

opportunities to worship in different kinds of Christian contexts; and I have to say, whenever I’m in churches where they don’t do confession, which is surprisingly common, it’s almost like I don’t know what we’re doing there. I feel like there’s a different story that’s being enacted, and I lose my orientation—I don’t know where I am in this encounter. In my experience of Reformed worship, in this narrative rehearsal of my relationship with God, I’m called by a gracious, forgiving, electing, creating God into his presence; and when I’m in that presence, exposed for who I am, how I have failed, and what I’ve done and left undone, I am then assured with the mercy and grace and forgiveness of God. In some contexts, we will have confessed our sins on our knees, and then we are raised by Christ to hear his forgiveness—that’s when I feel like I’m learning that story in my body. It’s almost like my knees get something about humility before God, and my feet learn something about standing in Christ. To do that week in and week out is to participate in that story—to let it seep into you and become absorbed in the visceral core of who you are so that it becomes the story you are sent out with.

MSH: You mentioned the importance of this habit in worship for those times when you don’t experience it or don’t feel it. Doesn’t that bring up an important point about habits? From my observations, it appears that evangelical circles generally believe that rote habit is intrinsically bad because it contradicts the deep conviction that in order for something to be real, it has be spontaneous or immediate; and that if we don’t get that sense of reality on the first go, then it “doesn’t work.” It’s not a practice you submit yourself to in faith and trust where, possibly, you don’t feel anything eight out of ten times; but every time, you are being shaped right down to your toes by what God is doing in that divine service—speaking to you, rebuking you, forgiving you, and blessing you. It has to be an immediate experience.

JKAS: Yes, exactly. In some sense, it’s also real-

izing that God is a participant in worship, and

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it’s not just us showing up to show God something. This is crucial in thinking about the formation of young people in the faith. The cult of novelty and spontaneity has made us think that the most important thing we can do for young people is make sure that they’re not bored and that they’re entertained in church.

I think this has been a colossal failure for deep formation in the Christian faith. One of the best things we can do for our children is commit ourselves to congregations where this story of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself is told and enacted over and over again in such a way that it seeps into them, even on the days they’re slouched in the pew and not at all excited to be there. Even on those days, they’re learning the creed and being rooted at a level deeper than they feel.

As parents, my wife and I are absolutely committed to that. When you start to appreciate the formative power of virtue and habit, it engenders a profound patience in God’s work.

You’re not going to get quarterly reports on the re-formation of your habits. This is a lifetime adventure. There has to be a deep trust and patience about that.

MSH: Deep trust and patience is exactly what’s

“When you start to appreciate the formative power of virtue and habit, it engenders a profound patience in God’s work.”

difficult for us as Americans in general, but especially for the younger generations who are addicted to immediate gratification, clicking their way to happiness.

JKAS: We older generations as parents get suckered into that, because we get fearful if we don’t immediately see the kind of moral conformity we want to see. This is a tougher conversation, but I think it’s important that Christian parents not confuse moral conformity with formation of Christ-like virtues. I’ve taught enough eighteen- to twenty-year-olds who come from good Christian homes to realize that while some kids are good at playing the game you want them to play, as soon as they’re out, they play a different one. Sometimes it’s actually the kids who are kind of resistant who more deeply appreciate what’s at stake. When you meet them later at

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twenty-seven, they’re the ones pursuing Christ in the ways you had hoped. Whereas the kids who looked like they were doing everything exactly what you wanted them to do, at nineteen are in a completely different story.

MSH: It’s come to the attention of a number of us that you’ve been critical of The Benedict Option.

First of all, can you explain what it is, and second, can you give us a bit of insight on how you approach this question of how we should be faithful disciples in our day?

JKAS: Every time I think I understand what the Benedict Option is, Rod Dreher tells us it’s wrong, so it feels a bit like a moving target.

Essentially, it’s a strategy by which Christians can continue to live faithfully in this contemporary cultural moment. Dreher says that Christians should bring their energies back into creating alternative communities of formation and schooling and so on, sort of focusing on tending the household of God while they wait for a cultural opportunity in some not-clear future in which we will be able to come out of the ark again, to use his metaphor.

I’m sympathetic to the Benedict Option in the sense that it reprioritizes ecclesiology and encourages Christians to be intentional about Christian formation. There has to be something countercultural about that, so I’m completely on board. My reservations about it are, first, that its cultural analysis is fairly ham-fisted and fearful in ways that aren’t constructive from a Christian standpoint; and, second, I’m a bit worried about it replaying tropes that will sound familiar to those of us who know anything about Protestant fundamentalism. Despite all the protests to the contrary, there’s almost a quasidispensationalist carving up of the world here that concerns me.

In the third book of my trilogy, Awaiting the King, I sketch out what I hope is a biblical and Augustinian account of our citizenship being centered in the city of God, and what it looks like for us to lean out and work alongside other citizens of the earthly city in ways that are rooted

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in the faithfulness of God, and not determined by the vagaries of a particular cultural moment.

MSH: I think of the Anabaptists of the sixteenth

century and how the first generation of leaders were actually violent, wanting to create the city of God then and there in a couple of German cities.

When that failed, they pulled back and basically said, “Okay, why don’t we separate completely from the world.” Do you think there’s that pendulum tendency in American religious history, where we keep trying to take over (or take back) America, and when that fails, we retreat into our self-imposed enclaves? It seems to indicate a kind of Manichaean relationship of the church to the culture.

JKAS: I think you’ve nailed it, and I would add a certain Pelagian kind of cultural strategy.

Effectively, we imagine that we are the ones who will bring about the kingdom. To me, the Benedict Option sounds exactly like the strategy you would come up with if you were a failed culture warrior. It’s almost like an ecclesial strategy of Dunkirk—we need to retreat so we can fight another day. What I want to refute is the entire culture war agenda; I think it is so misbegotten, partly because it lacks an adequate, biblical, and Augustinian eschatology. My book is called Awaiting the King because we don’t bring it about; Jesus ushers it in. This is not a license for Christian activism, but it’s not quietism either.

How we actively wait for the coming kingdom, which is God’s initiative and prerogative, is something I talk about at length in that book.

Another significant part of my project is to engage the work of Oliver O’Donovan, the British ethicist and theologian, who has written a remarkable history of democracy in the West and all of the ways that it bears what he calls the “crater marks” of the gospel. I suppose that’s another point of disagreement with Dreher. I don’t think we can just antithetically write off liberal democracy. I think that the institutions of democracy and political liberalism are, in some sense, the fruit of the gospel’s impact on Western political institutions. I want to articulate a much more nuanced account of that.

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MICHAEL G. BROWN

DISCIPLESHIP TO OLKIT PART

Out of the Race, Into the Pastures

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THOMAS HED GER

Many years ago, an article appearing in the United Airlines inflight magazine addressed a common problem among Americans today.

“Not so long ago,” the author wrote, “I was just another harried mom, rushing through the day with one thought always in my mind: Why isn’t there any time?” After describing her crazy-busy life of managing too many commitments and pursuing too many goals, she revealed the unlikely solution she found in Sabbath-keeping: Now, if someone told you there was a way to stop the onslaught of everyday obligations, improve your social life, keep the house clean, revive your tired marriage, elevate spiritual awareness, and improve productivity at work—all overnight and without cost—you’d probably say the claim was absurd. I certainly did. But I was willing to see if some cosmic miracle cure might really work, and after a year of earnest research, I’ve discovered that adherence to a seemingly arcane set of Sabbath rules yields a precious gift of time. . . . My personal life, my professional life, and my family life have all improved, and I plan to 1 go on celebrating the Sabbath.

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As far as any reader can tell, the author did not keep the Sabbath because of religious convictions. Yet she found something in the practice of Sabbath-keeping that God intended for humans from the beginning: a rhythm of life that is good for the body and the soul.

The Hebrew word for Sabbath (Shabbat) means to cease or stop. Like pressing the pause button on a video, the Sabbath brings our ordinary labors of the week to a halt, giving us a pause from the rat race so we can find rest for our weary souls.

As Christians, we ought to know this.

Observing the Lord’s Day not only has a rich history in Christianity, but it is also an essential part of our discipleship. It is the weekly holiday when we rest from our labors and feast at God’s table. Sadly, though, Sabbath-keeping has fallen on hard times in the American church.

It is common today for Christians to think of Sunday the way the world does: as merely half of our personal weekend and another opportunity to shop, play sports, or run errands. By crowding out the Lord’s Day with more activity, we look for our spiritual nourishment and refreshment through means other than those God appointed. More and more, evangelical churches offer Saturday night services as a convenience to consumers who have other commitments on Sunday morning. Others simply opt out of word and sacrament in the local church altogether.

Why bother with the Sabbath when one can find spiritual benefits elsewhere? Let’s look at a few reasons why Christians should see the Lord’s Day as a gift to be enjoyed and a necessary part of our growth as disciples.

THE SABBATH IS ROOTED IN CREATION any Christians think of the Sabbath as something unique to the nation of Israel under the old covenant, with little application to believers in the new covenant.

It is important for us to understand, however, that the Sabbath predates the Ten Commandments. It did not originate at Mount Sinai when God gave

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his law to Israel, but in creation. The Lord made that very point in the fourth commandment: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exod. 20:11).

In creation, God instituted a six-and-one pattern by which human beings would live.

The rhythm of a weekly Sabbath is part of the way that we, as God’s image-bearers, reflect our Creator’s holy nature. The opening chapters of Genesis reveal three primary ways in which God designed us to imitate him.

The first way is in our rule over creation. As the Ruler of the universe, God has designated humans to be his vice-rulers over the earth: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. (Gen. 1:28; cf. Ps. 8) The second way we imitate God is in our work in the world. Genesis 1–2 tells us that God worked in the beginning, creating the heavens and the earth and filling them with good things. Likewise, he has called his image-bearers to work. He “took man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). Adam was to be a gardener and guardian of the garden, and Eve was to be his helper. Our vocations provide us with the opportunity to imitate God to his glory.

The third way we reflect God is in a weekly sabbatical rest. Just as the Bible tells us that God worked in what are described as six days, it also tells us that he rested: And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

(Gen. 2:2–3) This beautiful rhythm of six-and-one is built into creation. Like ruling over (CONTINUED ON PAGE 41)

VOL.26 NO.6 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017

TEN SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO GET MORE OUT OF WORSHIP

1. REMEMBER THAT WORSHIP

2. EXPECT TO HEAR FROM

Too often, we are preoccupied with how we feel about worship. If we enjoy worship, then we’re more prone to go. If we think it’s dull and boring, then we find it easier to stay home or do something else. The problem with that attitude is that it is self-centered— it begins with me and how I feel about worship, rather than with God and what pleases him. Start by remembering that God commands his people to “come into his presence with singing” and “enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise” (Ps. 100). We go to worship because it pleases the Lord.

Come ready to receive food for your soul.

Word and sacrament are God’s chosen means to persevere in the Christian life. God says, “Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live” (Isa. 55:3). It is through the preaching of Christ that our faith is strengthened (Rom. 10:14–17), and it is through the Lord’s Supper that we commune with the body and blood of Jesus (1 Cor. 10:16). We go to worship to be served by the living God.

PLEASES THE LORD.

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GOD.

3. LAY OUT YOUR THINGS THE NIGHT BEFORE. We do this when we need to be somewhere important the next morning (work, school, and so on). Why not do the

same for the most important event of the week?

This is especially wise for families with small children.

Who needs the stress on Sunday morning of searching frantically for matching socks or clean clothes?

4. GET A GOOD NIGHT’S REST. A full eight hours (or something close to it) will help us come to church feeling refreshed and ready to worship. Of course, some of us can’t remember the last time we had a full eight, right? Indeed, some things we can’t control.

But others we can, such as not staying up too late on Saturday night. It comes down to setting straight our priorities.

BY MICHAEL G. BROWN

5. READ THE TEXT BEFOREHAND. If you have time on Sunday morning, try reading the passage that will be preached in the morning service. On Sunday afternoons, read the evening text. (This is also a great way to help children prepare for worship.)

Doing so might help you be more engaged with the Scripture as it’s being read and explained during the service. You can often find the whole liturgy for both services on your church’s website.

6. PRAY FOR YOUR PASTOR.

The apostle Paul asked the church at Colossae to pray for him so he might make the word clear to the people of God (Col. 4:3–4).

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TEN SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO GET MORE OUT OF WORSHIP

(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39)

How much more does your pastor need your prayers to do the same? Pray that the Lord will grant him profitable hours of study during the week, free from distractions. Pray that he will have insight into the Scriptures, rightly applying the text to our lives, and faithfully pointing us to the person and work of Christ.

Pray that he will have clarity of speech in the pulpit and boldness to preach both the law and the gospel. Pray that he will seek to apply the message to himself.

7. PRAY FOR YOURSELF. Pray that God will grant you a humble heart to receive what God has to say to

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you in the preaching of his word. Pray that the Holy Spirit will convict you of your sin, assure you of your salvation in Christ, and motivate you to live in joyful obedience to God. Pray that you will not harden your heart to the word, or be a mere hearer and not a doer (James 1:22). Pray that the word will transform you by the renewal of your mind (Rom. 12:2).

8. TALK ABOUT THE SERMON AFTERWARDS. Start a conversation with your family or friends by asking questions. Avoid broad and subjective questions, such as if they liked the sermon or what they got out of it. Instead, try asking the following: What was

the sermon about? What particular problem of the human heart did the sermon expose? How did it convict us of our sin? How did it reveal Christ as the solution to this particular problem of the heart? How did it teach us the way in which we are to live?

Engage children by asking them about the basic elements of the sermon: Who wrote the letter/book the pastor preached from?

Who/what was the sermon mainly about?

9. ATTEND BOTH SERVICES.

Attending both services allows us to hear more of the word and enjoy further fellowship with God’s people. Attending both services also helps us sanctify

the Lord’s Day. The Lord’s Day is not merely the Lord’s “morning” or “evening,” but a whole day given to us for worship and rest. Your pastor has prepared two meals for your soul. Why not benefit from both of them?

10. JUST SHOW UP. So, you stayed up too late on Saturday night, forgot to lay out your things, didn’t read the text or pray for your pastor or for yourself?

You haven’t given much thought about worship this past week, and you feel like a big loser? Just come to church anyway. God knows what we need, far better than we do, and God has something good for us every time.

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(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 38) creation and working in the world, resting on the Sabbath is an important part of being human.

THE SABBATH PROVIDES US WITH A “MARKET DAY OF THE SOUL” arket day of the soul” was a term for the Sabbath used by some Reformed Christians in the seventeenth century. It describes well the weekly gift God gives us. God provides us with six days every week to labor and fulfill our vocations in the world: six days to go to market, so to speak, for the body.

The Sabbath is a blessed pause from all that.

Each week, we receive a whole day to care for our souls, withdrawing from the noise and buzz of the culture and assembling as the covenant community. It is a day of rest, worship, and fellowship with the saints.

This is why God commanded Israel to collect manna for six days but not on the Sabbath, for it was “a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord” (Exod. 16:23; note that this was before he gave his law at Sinai). After four hundred years of slavery in Egypt, they needed to be reshaped in their thinking and redirected in their paths.

Rather than filling up the Sabbath with more work and frenzied activity, Israel was to come beside the still waters for a day of rest.

The same is true for us in the new covenant.

We need to be reshaped in our thinking. We need to be catechized by God’s word, not the spirit of the age in which we live. The world says to us, “It’s your weekend. Do what you want.” Our sinful hearts say, “It’s my life. I’ll do as I please.”

But God says to us, “You are mine. I bought you with a price. I love you and will give you what is best for you.” When we surrender the Sabbath to the forces of entertainment, consumerism, and ambition, we not only miss out on this gift God has given us to enjoy, but we also conform ourselves to this present evil age and fail to be salt and light to the world.

God knows what is best for us far better than we do. He has given us a day to refrain from our busy schedules and hectic lives to find refreshment in

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“ GOD KNOWS WHAT IS BEST FOR US FAR BETTER THAN WE DO. HE HAS GIVEN US A DAY TO REFRAIN FROM OUR BUSY SCHEDULES AND HECTIC LIVES TO FIND REFRESHMENT IN HIS GREEN PASTURES.” 41

“THE SABBATH WAS GIVEN TO ADAM IN ORDER TO POINT HIM TO THE ETERNAL, HEAVENLY REST THAT WOULD BE HIS IF HE REMAINED FAITHFUL TO THE COVENANT IN WHICH GOD PLACED HIM.”

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his green pastures. He leads us beside still waters as he brings us to his means of grace, opening his hand to give us his good gifts. He restores our soul with his word and sacraments. In the midst of this pilgrim journey, he prepares a table before us every week. He blesses us with the communion of saints, providing us with family members within his house. Why would we want to crowd out this weekly holiday with more activity?

THE SABBATH POINTS US TO OUR HEAVENLY GOAL y commanding Israel to keep that Sabbath, the Lord was (in cer tain ways) republishing his commands to Adam. The Sabbath was given to Adam in order to point him to the eternal, heavenly rest that would be his if he remained faithful to the covenant in which God placed him. From the very beginning, human existence was moving toward the consummation—that is, glorified life in a glorified world, free from the possibility of sin and death. While we do not know how many weeks Adam lived in the garden, we do know that every seventh day was a reminder of something greater that would be his if he obeyed the conditions of the covenant of works. Every seventh day pointed him to the glorious eternal Sabbath of heaven.

Israel was to learn this lesson by keeping the Sabbath. Although Adam had failed in the garden as our federal representative, making it impossible for any human (including the nation of Israel) to obtain glorified life through obedience, the Sabbath remained a weekly reminder that something greater was on the horizon.

Every Sabbath in the wilderness pointed Israel to the Promised Land of Canaan, which was a type and picture of that glorious eternal Sabbath of heaven. That is the interpretation the writer to the Hebrews places on the Sabbath: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Heb. 4:9).

In the fullness of time, Christ came as the second Adam and succeeded where Adam

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had failed. He came as the true Israel, never neglecting or disobeying any of God’s commands. He fulfilled all the demands of the law for his people through his active obedience, earning for us the righteousness we needed to be acceptable to God. He removed the curse from us by becoming a curse for us as our sins were laid upon him and he suffered the wrath of God in our place.

Being raised from the dead on the first day of the week, Christ’s resurrection reversed the curse and inaugurated the new creation. The first day of the week now represents the birthday of the new creation, signaling the beginning of God’s everlasting week. It was on the first day of the week that God poured out his Spirit upon the new covenant church at Pentecost, announcing to us that we do not live in a world with a plotless narrative, droning on without meaning, but in the inaugurated new creation that will be fully consummated at Christ’s return. So decisive were the redemptive-historical events of Christ’s resurrection and Pentecost that the Sabbath shifted from Saturday to Sunday. The Sabbath is recognized in the new covenant as “the Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10) and no longer part of a law covenant.

As Old Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield put it, “Christ took the Sabbath into the grave with him and brought out the Lord’s Day with the 2 resurrection.”

Rather than viewing the Sabbath as a dreary checklist of what we may or may not do, we should see this day as a delight and blessing.

It is a weekly holiday to be enjoyed with God’s people as we receive his good gifts from his open hand. Keeping it does not guarantee that your personal, professional, or family life will improve, but it does provide the Christian with a host of benefits as it breaks into our busy week, declaring to us that we do not belong to this present evil age, but to Christ and the age to come.

MICHAEL G. BROWN is pastor of Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California.

1 Nan Chase, “Ancient Wisdom,” Hemispheres (July 1997), 118.

2 B. B. Warfield, “The Foundations of the Sabbath in the Word of God,” in Selected Shorter Writings, vol. 1, ed. John E. Meeter (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 319.

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JUAN R. SANCHEZ

DISCIPLESHIP TO OLKIT PART

Establishing a DiscipleMaking Culture

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THOMAS HED GER

VOL.26 NO.6 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017

For many evangelicals, Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago was the benchmark for successful ministry in the latter decades of the twentieth century. But in 2007, after a survey of over thirty churches in the Willow Creek network, founding pastor Bill Hybels and Willow Creek leadership publicly admitted the failure of their approach to making disciples.

They had assumed that church attendance and participation in ministry events and programs 1 would “produce disciples of Christ.” Instead, Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek, acknowledged that “increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does

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NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love 2 people more.” Unfortunately, while Willow Creek exposed a glaring deficiency of megachurch ministry, their solution led them to another extreme. They proposed to resolve their discipleship deficit by providing individual plans for their members so each could 3 become a “self-feeder.”

The Willow Creek discipleship dilemma exposes two extremes in disciple-making.

At one end is the belief that attendance and participation in church, ministry events, and church programs produce disciples. At the other end is the belief that individual discipleship plans and personal Bible studies produce disciples. Disciple-making is a command given to the church by the risen Lord; it’s our mission. If a church is to be faithful in fulfilling this mission, then it must develop a culture where appropriate gospel relationships (husbands and wives, parents and children, family members, men with men, women with women) may emerge in which members help one 4 another grow in Christlikeness. The question, of course, is how? Once we understand from Scripture what it means to make disciples, we’ll be able to understand the why, where, and how of disciple-making.

THE WHAT OF DISCIPLE-MAKING he prophets looked forward to the restoration of Israel and the consequent military conquest over all nations (Isa. 54:1–3). We learn in the New Testament, however, that this military conquest is actually a missionary endeavor. In the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20), these Old Testament hopes are realized. David’s tent is repaired, rebuilt, and raised up as in former days, and Israel is restored on the basis of a new covenant “that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name declares the Lord who does this”

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(Amos 9:12). As King of kings and Lord of lords (Matt. 28:18), Jesus commands his disciples to conquer the nations—not through military might but through missionary effort, making disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19).

Jesus explains the “how” of our disciplemaking mission using two imperatives and two participles: “go and make” (while or through) and “baptizing and teaching” (Matt. 28:19– 5 20). Disciple-making begins by going into the world, announcing the good news of the king and his kingdom, and calling all people everywhere to repent and bow down to King Jesus. All who declare allegiance to the king, who cast off all other kingdoms and authorities, are incorporated into the king’s community through baptism. But disciple-making involves the lifelong process of teaching and learning to obey all the king has commanded. For too long, evangelicals have emphasized the “going” part of the mission to the neglect of “teaching,” but there is a reason Jesus includes that aspect in the making of disciples.

THE WHY OF DISCIPLE-MAKING nder the old covenant, Israel’s mission as a royal priesthood and holy nation was to display the rule of God to the surrounding nations. They lived in the land of Canaan, maintaining religious, moral, and civil distinctions from their unbelieving neighbors to show the surrounding nations what God was like and what it was like to live under his rule. Anyone who embraced Israel’s God and became an exclusive Yahweh worshiper could be incorporated into their covenant community; but the prophets also awaited a time of eschatological ingathering when, under a Davidic king, God would gather the nations to Zion (Isa. 56:6–8; 66:18–24).

The Great Commission reminds us that the church is the instrument of God’s eschatological ingathering. Jesus calls all his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and the glory of our king.

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But it’s not as if old Israel’s mission is now obsolete—the church retains old Israel’s display mission as a royal priesthood and holy nation (1 Pet. 2:9). It is, however, no longer limited to a singular geographical location. Each true local church is a manifestation on earth—an embassy, if you will—of the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb. 12:18–24), and each Christian is an ambassador of King Jesus. In disciple-making, Christians help one another follow Jesus, teaching one another all he has commanded in order that we may faithfully represent our king and his rule to the unbelieving world, beginning with our unbelieving children, family, neighbors, friends, and coworkers, to the uttermost parts of the world (1 Pet. 2:11). Why make disciples? Because the church is the instrument of God’s eschatological ingathering. Our mission is one of attraction and proclamation.

THE WHERE OF DISCIPLE-MAKING

“ WHY MAKE DISCIPLES? BECAUSE THE CHURCH IS THE INSTRUMENT OF GOD’S ESCHATOLOGICAL INGATHERING. OUR MISSION IS ONE OF ATTRACTION AND PROCLAMATION.” MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

he local church is the primary context of disciple-making.

As God saves a diverse people t hr o ugh go s p el p r o cl am ation, bringing Jew and Gentile together as one (Eph. 2), we are witnesses to the fact that “the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10). In other words, we glorify God as we live together as a church in unified diversity—diversity of ethnicities, socioeconomic classes, and gender—living together as a family.

But unified diversity does not come easily.

As members of local churches, we must continually speak the truth of the gospel to one another in love, helping each other grow to look more like Jesus (Eph. 4:15–16). The goal of disciple-making is Christlikeness. And the local church is the context where we help one another grow in that Christlikeness, so we may walk in a manner worthy of our calling (Eph. 4:1): in unity (4:1–16), in holiness (4:17–32; 5:2–14), and in love (5:1). So how may we help one another walk in such wisdom (5:15–21)?

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“As God saves a dive gospel proclamat and Gentile togeth we are witnesses t manifold wisdom o made known to the r in the heavenly pl 48

rse people through ion, bringing Jew er as one (Eph. 2), o the fact that ‘the f God might now be ulers and authorities aces’ (Eph. 3:10).”

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THE HOW OF DISCIPLE-MAKING f we are to be faithful to the mission that King Jesus gave his church, then we must establish a church culture in which disciple-making is normal and natural, a culture where every member is involved in relationships to help one another grow in Christlikeness. While admittedly not having all the answers, I offer here some observations on what has proven helpful in establishing such a culture in the church I serve.

In a culture of discipleship, pastors/elders 6 practice expositional preaching. While preaching alone does not produce disciples, faithful, consecutive, applicable biblical exposition sets the direction for the church and lays a foundation for a culture in which Christ is exalted, the gospel is proclaimed, and Scripture is obeyed. Such preaching teaches the congregation how to read, interpret, and apply the Bible for themselves and for one another. From such preaching, church leaders may prepare discussion questions that will help members apply the weekly sermon to themselves in small groups or in one-to-one study.

In a culture of discipleship, pastors/elders model disciple-making. Elders should be spending time with men in the church to help them grow in Christlikeness. They should keep a list of men, particularly younger men, who should be on their “radar.” And they should add to this list the names of men on an “elder trajectory”—men the church should observe for possible future eldership. Are they discipling their family or others? Are they sharing the gospel with unbelievers? Are they taking advantage of opportunities to teach in the church and proving themselves apt to teach?

The goal is that the men the elders disciple begin to disciple others.

In a culture of discipleship, pastors/elders encourage disciple-making. Church leaders must continually talk about disciple-making.

If you have a membership process, begin there. Help new members understand how

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your church fulfills the Great Commission.

Explain the what, why, where, and how of disciple-making, then encourage them to involve themselves in this mission. And remind the church about your disciple-making mission in corporate prayer. Pray regularly for every member to involve themselves in appropriate gospel relationships where they may help one another grow in Christlikeness. Invite the church to pray for such a culture and celebrate with one another, encouraging disciple-making stories. It’s important that we regularly talk about disciple-making.

In a culture of discipleship, the church provides venues where members may build appropriately intimate gospel relationships. As Christians, we begin dealing with one another in brother/sister relationships. It is then from these brother/sister relationships that deeply rooted gospel friendships emerge. And if disciple-making is contingent on relationships, we need to make it as easy as possible for our members to get to know one another. The Sunday gatherings are the largest and least intimidating venue for most members. Take time before and after the service, not only to greet visitors, but to get to know those members you don’t have relationships with.

If your church has a church directory, use that to learn members’ names and pray for them. Be intentional in pursuing appropriate gospel friendships out of which discipleship relationships may emerge.

Many churches utilize Sunday school classes or small groups as venues for members to fellowship, study God’s word, and pray together.

While such venues are helpful, disciple-making is not about getting everyone in a small group or on a personal plan; it’s about members loving one another and living together as a church, helping one another follow Jesus and grow in Christlikeness. So, it’s more important to encourage every member to be involved in a discipleship relationship where they are meeting together with one or two other members.

But be sure to establish clear goals for meeting together. It’s good to get together as brothers and sisters in Christ to talk about

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theology, issues in the world, or just to have fun together, but the goal of disciple-making is to grow in Christlikeness. When you come together for mutual encouragement, read Scripture and pray together, encourage and rebuke one another as necessary, and bear one another’s burdens to the degree that you’re able.

WORKING TOGETHER IN CHRIST e could say a lot more about dis7 ciple-making in a local church.

The point, however, is that pastors and members, elders and other church leaders must work together to establish a church culture where members are engaged in appropriate gospel relationships in which they are continually speaking the truth of the gospel to one another in love, so that together we may grow in Christlikeness. To be sure, this is easier said than done, but together we can begin to take steps to cultivate a culture of disciple-making in the church.

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JUAN R. SANCHEZ is senior pastor of High Pointe Baptist Church in Austin, Texas.

1 “Willow Creek Repents? Why the most influential church in America now says, ‘We made a mistake,’” CT Pastors, http://www .christianitytoday.com/pastors/2007/october-online-only /willow-creek-repents.html.

2 “Willow Creek Repents?”

3 “Willow Creek Repents?”

4 I don’t mean to imply that there may never be a context in which men and women can encourage one another toward Christlikeness. For example, pastors are to shepherd the entire congregation, including women. So, hopefully, men who serve as pastors have a responsibility to shepherd the women in the church in an appropriate manner.

That includes public preaching and teaching. In addition, within family relationships, we have great opportunities to encourage one another in Christlikeness, both males and females. However, as a general rule, it is wise to encourage gospel relationships in which discipleship can happen at levels of appropriate, brotherly intimacy: men with men, women with women.

5 These participles carry the force of imperatives, but the main command is to “make disciples.”

6 By expositional preaching, I mean preaching in which the point of a biblical text is the point of the sermon, faithfully applied to the congregation.

7 There are helpful resources that go into greater detail in how to establish a culture of discipleship in the local church. See Mark Dever, Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016); and Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Vine Project: Shaping Your Ministry Culture Around Disciple-Making (Sydney, Australia: Matthias Media, 2016).

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P R O P O S I T I O N S

1. A merica (and indeed, the entire world) is in the midst of momentous change.

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FAITH

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LAW SOCIETY

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I don’t mean that as a political slogan. It is change we must understand, because it will profoundly affect America’s prospects for renewal. The entire West is in the midst of deep convulsions relating to the death of East-West polarization and to the profound structural shifts taking place in our society and economy due to the transition from the industrial to the information age. The disconnect between technological prowess and economic might on the one hand, and America’s deepening social and personal disorder on the other, will produce increasingly painful paradoxes.

2. A merica is in grave danger at present.

I say grave, because ours is predominantly a cultural crisis, and one we have little experience with and even less understanding of. In talking about culture, I want to be clear that I am not talking about culture wars or cultural politics.

Culture is not a subsidiary of politics; it is more the case that politics is shaped by the culture than that it shapes the culture.

There are two levels of culture: the visible and invisible. On the surface, it is the enveloping adversarial culture that offends our senses every day; it is the palpable tension and visible disorder we see in our streets, the collapsing institutions. On the deeper and more important level, it is personal disorder rooted in a weakening of the basic ideas and values by which we order our lives. The purpose of culture is to create personal and social order through institutions like the family and community. Much of that sense of purpose is no longer “in the air” of our culture.

We live in a culture that has essentially become anti-culture. It is a culture that has been driving toward revolutionary nihilism. We have witnessed a relentless rage against the content and symbols of personal meaning and order. The results: despair, hopelessness, alienation, and widespread destruction of connectedness that springs from community. Cultural radicalism has one aim: Destroy all human boundaries and all restraints that operate upon man’s passions and wants.

This is not the civilized freedom of Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Jay. It is the insanity of Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. Man was created for society—for community—and when the disorder produced by a false freedom reaches an intolerable scale, man has always sought liberation from liberty and its burdens. Once completely free from the shackles of religion and tradition, man searches for a new emancipation—this time from the resulting tyrannical disorder around him.

3. We must understand the culture, not just invent a new politics of culture.

Our response to the cultured despisers of religion must not be to become the religious despisers of culture. Our cultural conflicts will not be resolved by culture wars; our disagreements will not be settled by ballots or bullets (I include the latter because some seem willing to contemplate its eventuality). I don’t believe the America we know would ever again be reborn out of that kind of domestic conflict. These battles will have to be fought predominantly in the value-shaping institutions of culture—media, entertainment, academia, the arts, philosophy, law, and so on— because they are battles over ideas and values, not simply battles between politicians.

4. T he answer to today’s social and political fragmentation is not advancing an alternative ideology.

Ideology is the problem, not the answer. One cannot fight fire with fire. True conservatism is

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the negation of ideology. It is the patient, painstaking attempt to nourish the kinds of things that politics cannot supply. Ideology does not explain reality, and it does not inspire a broad following today. People simply do not believe sweeping theories about anything. They’ve heard them all, and none of them have changed social reality, nor can they.

5. P ublic policy will be known more for its limitations than for its accomplishments.

Public policy cannot touch the deeper roots of American disorder. Politics serves a vital function, but it is mostly defensive. The greatest need of our time is to contain the state, which has subsumed all too many of the functions of civil society, and to struggle to repair our weakened mediating structures: the family, the neighborhood, and the voluntary associations of all kinds that mediate between the individual and the state. This is primarily where our positive vision and contribution must come, not in competing political programs.

6. T he greatest need in politics is to restore the legitimacy of our institutions in the eyes of the public (lest we wake up some day and realize they are only empty shells).

We should be sobered by the disillusionment of the public toward the institutions in which we serve, and where necessary, we should repent of our culpability of turning an honorable profession into an expensive game of calculation and exploitation. We must restore citizenship, not shrink it by expanding our representative function. (This is the definition of empowerment, by the way, whether it is a person’s political or economic efficacy you have in mind to improve.) Leadership must be restored by adopting a policy of total-integrity politics: servant leadership, complete accountability, and doing away with anything that undermines public trust. Modern

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leadership must summon forth solutions from the people, not just from those who represent them under the Capitol dome.

7. In politics, we need to recognize that we do not live in a Christian nation (if there ever was such a thing in the truest sense).

We live in a decidedly post-Christian America and must picture ourselves as working in Athens, not Jerusalem. We should not assume that vast majorities currently accept our presuppositions or, even more importantly, that shared assumptions will automatically convert to our legislative positions on everything. Contrary to all the talk about America being incorrigibly religious, the percentage of Americans who have fixed and firm religious beliefs—who believe in notions of absolute truth, and who are prepared to live and act accordingly—is probably closer to 10 percent.

8. There are serious deficiencies in the model of politics that has become called the “Christian Right” (a term used by its leaders, not just secular critics).

For one, as an organizing model, it is divisive even within the philosophical house in which it occupies a room. Second, it fundamentally lacks moral and cultural capital, because its agenda aims to change a society from which it has spent the better part of a century withdrawing. We cannot make up on politics what we’ve lost in the broader society. Third, it has proven to be out of step with a public that, though concerned about values, is also concerned about polarization and gridlock. Fourth, it needlessly polarizes every debate over values against believers, making it harder, not easier, to get an honest debate going about values. Fifth, it paradoxically makes it harder, not easier, for believers to become elected, because they are seen as agents of some religious conspiracy to take over parties and the government.

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9. M any of the tactics and attitudes of Christian political activism have not been in accordance with the activist’s own stated beliefs.

The believer has a solemn duty to judge his conduct by his own transcendent claims. If you are a Christian, then you have given up many of your liberties; you are not free to confuse ends and means, because they are one and the same.

10. W e must understand the difference between church and state and civil society.

Here I do not mean to echo the distorted case that has been made for church-state separation. I am suggesting we engage the faith more effectively in all aspects of public life, including politics. Many have come to see society and culture as subsidaries of the state. This is potentially dangerous to both the church and the state. It positions faith on the political playing field as just another interest, another faction, another clamoring mob joining the cacophony of demands for expanded rights. This is a profoundly important theological point—much of the confusion in the arena of religion and public life has emanated from this particular area of theological poverty. Bringing clarity to confusion will come in resurrecting older theological and philosophical truths, such as common grace, natural law and natural justice, and the concept developed so carefully by the Catholics termed “subsidiarity.”

11. W e must view the world the way God views the world: It is lost, but it is loved.

God’s love embraces all of Creation: the redeemed and unredeemed. Do not have an attitude toward your neighbor that God himself does not share. We are to view the world God’s way and do battle with it God’s way, not our way. There is no scriptural basis for a politics of paranoia, suspicion, resentment, anger, or

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“God’s love embra the redeemed an We are to view the wo battle with it God’ There is no scriptur of paranoia, suspi anger, or v 56

ces all of Creation: d unredeemed.... rld God’s way and do s way, not our way. al basis for a politics cion, resentment, engeance.�

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vengeance. There is no scriptural suggestion anywhere that Christian duty includes taking over secular systems in Christ’s name. As servants of Jesus Christ, believers represent another order, another master, another claim. When they make their decision to follow Christ, they sacrifice forever their freedom to do or say anything that would conflict with their Lord’s character. As the late Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray explained it, we should be careful to separate our religious faith from our patriotic faith, and not submerge one into the other, so that people are free to accept our faith without having to accept our politics and vice versa.

These issues predate the rise of secularism in America. Read Tocqueville’s section on the role of religion in America, as he observed it in the 1830s. The religious leaders of the day avoided certain forms of political affairs because they feared that the bitter animosities that political conflict engendered would be directed against the church and its gospel. Protecting the gospel must be our primary aim, and sadly there are many in America who don’t seem to know the difference between the gospel of Christ and American political ideology and patriotic causes. No one has ever explained it better than T. S. Eliot: The church risks losing its spiritual power and authenticity when it uncritically and unreservedly aligns itself with temporal partisan movements. To confuse these realms is to confuse the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent.

“SADLY THERE ARE MANY IN AMERICA WHO DON’T SEEM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST AND AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND PATRIOTIC CAUSES.”

12. We must replace the tribal mentality that unavoidably implies that it is our rights, our interests, or our demands that are the issue (which suggests that we have some special dispensation to rule over others).

When believers are organized into Christian interest groups, they suggest to a watchi n g w o r ld t h a t t h e g o s p e l o f C h r i s t i s

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interchangeable with temporal politics, morality, and cultural attitudes. The church has increasingly been seen as a peddler of ideology, not a source of personal redemption and social restoration. Jesus did not call his disciples in either the first or the twenty-first century to build civilizations or win culture wars. He called his disciples to a radical commitment to the kingdom within—one of whose side effects, from time to time and place to place in history, has been strong civilizations.

13. W e must develop a new public philosophy that advances a vision for the common good and discourages an “us against them” mentality.

This society is one that many would dream of living in, including most unbelievers. A public philosophy is committed to justice for all, not “just us”; it is committed to improving, not destroying, America’s heritage of democratic pluralism; it is committed to preserving America’s basic creed, without substituting the cause of America for the cause of Christ.

14. W e must develop a new common language to talk about basic values, language more rooted in America’s civic tradition.

America’s biblical tradition is an important one to preserve, but we must keep in mind the great limitations of arguing from the standpoint of revealed truth. The cultural elite remains in open rebellion against religious authority and belief, because they are driven by a radical desire to build a society in which man is free to escape any limits on human will and expression. It does very little good to battle these cultural elites on terms that only reinforce their prejudices and confirm their stereotypes. The better approach is to simply attempt to force them to confront the consequences of their own philosophy. It is they, not you, who should be the issue. Language makes a big, big difference here.

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15. T he greatest need today in public life is to simply restore transcendent foundations.

The answer to secularism is not sectarianism; the answer to reason without God is not God without reason, and the answer to coercive utopianism is not coercive traditionalism. The answer lies in discovering the profound truth of the founding fathers embodied particularly in the Declaration of Independence. The framing produced a Puritan-Lockean synthesis that adopted neither secularism nor sectarianism, but settled for a basic acceptance of the higher law rooted in God, to whom we are all ultimately accountable. Christianizing America is the work of the church; laying foundations in transcendent reality is the work of all concerned Americans. Many around us share our concern over the collapse of our legal structures due to a political and legal theory that locates morality in nothing higher than majority rule.

Richard John Neuhaus said that “the first thing to recognize about public life is that public life is not the first thing.” There may be a greater hunger today for our spiritual answers than for our political proposals. The most revolutionary power that could be unleashed into the world today is that which comes from a lifestyle of love, forgiveness, and humility. Recognize —as any number of courageous champions of freedom in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc recognized—that ultimately the lines of good and evil flow not through classes, political parties, or ideologies, but down through each and every human heart.

DON E. EBERLY is the director of the Civil Society Project, a national initiative advancing ideas to strengthen America’s social institutions and community life. He is the editor of many books, including The Content of America’s Character: The Recovery of Civic Virtue. Eberly is an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, and cofounder of the National Fatherhood Initiative.

This article was originally published in the September/ October 1994 issue of Modern Reformation.

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ROOTED IN WISDOM With over twenty-five years of radio broadcasting and magazine publishing, and our new online Bible studies, our mission is to help Christians “know what they believe and why they believe it.”

Create a free account at whitehorseinn.org to access free content.

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BOOK REVIEWS

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y C H R I S T O P H E R D E L O R E N Z O

Book Reviews 62

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The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a PostChristian Nation

Herman Bavinck on Preaching & Preachers

12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by James P. Eglinton

by Tony Reinke

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

Timothy W. Massaro

Greg Parker Jr.

Jon D. Payne

by Rod Dreher

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The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

By Rod Dreher Sentinel, 2017 272 pages (hardcover), $25.00 he cultural crisis that engulfs the West is not something Christians should take lightly—it’s not something we are prepared for. Much of what is called Christianity today has little of the gospel to offer the world, so a clarion call shouldn’t come as any great surprise. But for some reason, this kind of declaration has been met with hostility on several fronts. The Benedict Option has received a lot of heat—initial claims of it being alarmist, reactionary, retreatist, and supremacist made it seem unworthy of my time. Instead, what I found was a project that seeks to bring Christians back to the basics of discipline. Dreher hedges his bets—he doesn’t make grandiose claims or lament any bygone golden age of Christendom. He calls out Christians for failing on numerous fronts and is self-critical. The focus of this work attempts to revitalize engagement in the world in a fruitful, Christian way.

His tone can sound alarmist, but Dreher is simply repackaging many of the concerns that Christians have had for some time:

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The reality of our situation is indeed alarming, but we do not have the luxury of doom-and-gloom hysteria. There is a hidden blessing in this crisis, if we will open our eyes to it. Just as God used chastisement in the Old Testament to call His people back to Himself, so He may be delivering a like judgment onto a church and a people grown cold from selfishness, hedonism, and materialism. The coming storm may be the means through which God delivers us. (19) Christians need to regain many of the disciplines that formed the early church—and the

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“Life is an opportunity to make the goodness of God known, and this means putting others before ourselves and learning to see the happiness of our neighbors as our eternal good.”

Reformation (177). If our hearts are not trained to desire the good, how can we show the beauty of the gospel to others? If we don’t have time to pray and rest in the presence of God, how can we speak words of peace to those around us? If we are to bring a light into this dark world, we must have something worth giving. We must retrain our hearts and minds in the truth our churches have forgotten—that is the main point of this book.

To understand how to reach our culture, we must know where our culture is and where we are. Christians often throw around this idea of “relativism” as the core problem facing us today, but it’s more the case that truth (indeed, reality itself) is now based on individual feelings.

Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s work After Virtue, Dreher makes the excellent point that our culture is driven by emotivism. Feelings liberate the individual’s will according to what one feels is right (16), and if anything seeks to constrain those feelings, that constraint is unjust and evil.

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If feeling defines reality, then contemplation is useless, and so is resistance. If we live as if boredom were the root of all evil, we will not be able to fight back, and if we do not fight back we will find that our machines have mastered us. (235) This vision of life is a new kind of barbarism that cares little for the devastation it brings to existing societies or to the human spirit. What we find is that “we don’t see reality then; we only see ourselves” (234).

If we are to bring the gospel to our neighbors, we must understand why truth has such a hard time in an age of emotivism. We must learn what practices and virtues are necessary to bring our own feelings in check and know how to bring the gospel to those around us. Vibrant countercultures in a “culture of death” must exist for Christians if they are to flourish. Flourishing means being fruitful and not merely faithful or simply getting by. This takes work that will cost us “nothing less than everything” (77). The wisdom Dreher offers is not merely to “hold firm through the new Dark Age but actually to flourish in it” (77). That can happen only when we remember Calvin’s words that the death of “self” is the first step to new life and walking in faithfulness.

If Christians are to give anything to the world, Christ must become the center and end of our existence.

God’s promises speak into our present lives through daily prayer and Scripture reading. His presence is seen when we use our work to glorify God, connecting it to our spiritual duty to our neighbors, as Martin Luther taught us. Life is an opportunity to make the goodness of God known, and this means putting others before ourselves and learning to see the happiness of

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our neighbors as our eternal good. If we aren’t willing to die for our neighbors, we might not have their good in mind. When we tell them that they need the good news of the gospel, how will they believe us if we don’t seek their good?

Dreher emphasizes that politics cannot be a substitute for holiness or for reaching our neighbors with the gospel. But this doesn’t mean we should disengage from culture or society to form communes or monasteries; rather, we need to rethink how we educate ourselves and live together for the common good before engaging in the public square. To do that, we must reconsider what politics and education are. “The real question facing us,” Dreher argues, “is not whether to quit politics entirely but how to exercise power prudently” (83).

Classical liberalism cannot be self-sustaining.

It cannot produce the societies or virtues necessary to sustain individual freedom without becoming tyrannical. Without some transcendent order to bring a society together around a vision of “the good life,” the West cannot justify its own existence. This is the breakdown we see and feel.

Education is no different.

We must see people as spiritual beings who need formative practices to exercise control of their own desires and to seek a good that includes their neighbors. Currently, no mechanism in Western democracy exists to overcome our politics of resentment—it is descending toward something that cannot protect the conscience or respect individual freedom.

Christians need to relearn how to create better lives within the current culture so that a better system can develop from within. Providing a Christian education for children is critical.

Working in vocations that do not call for violation of conscience will be necessary. Buying

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goods in a way that supports other Christians will aid our neighbors. Christians must live as Christians in community. This assessment shouldn’t be controversial.

As one pastor said, for every no in the Bible, we are also given a resounding yes to a way of life God has designed for us. To our detriment, the church hasn’t always shown the beauty and goodness of the Christian belief system or ethic—there is sometimes a stifling, legalistic spirit in our churches that hinders people from believing in the God of the Bible (118, 198–200).

Most people who are drawn to Christianity are attracted because of the goodness of God that leads them to repentance (Rom. 2:4). Truth, goodness, and beauty must come together as the gifts of God. “If Christianity is a true story, then the story the world tells about sexual freedom is a grand deception. It’s fake. . . . Christians are going to have to become better story tellers of our own story” (210). If we are to draw people away from their distorted desires and feelings, we must show the surpassing worth and beauty of knowing Christ. “Beauty and goodness, embodied in great art and fiction, and in the lives of ordinary Christians, married and single, is the only thing that stands a chance” (210).

TIMOTHY W. MASSARO is a graduate of Westminster Seminary California and a staff writer for Modern Reformation.

Herman Bavinck on Preaching & Preachers

by James P. Eglinton Hendrickson Publishers, 2017 150 pages (paperback), $16.95 ames Eglinton, the Meldrum Lecturer of Reformed Theology at the University of Edinburgh, has given the church a muchneeded translation of Herman Bavinck’s thoughts on preaching and of his only published sermon, “The World-Conquering

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Power of Faith.” Eglinton, whose dissertation, Trinity and Organism (T&T Clark, 2012), reinvigorated Bavinck studies, opens the door in this volume for new and old Bavinck readers alike to profit from Bavinck’s “organic motif”— an archetypal/ectypal unity-in-diversity scheme that Bavinck (1854–1921) wields profitably to facilitate a comprehensive worldview. Many in the Reformed world have benefitted from his “glorious theology” in Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 2003–08), but the connection between the pulpit and theology has not always been recognized. This book is an attempt to close this “curious gap” and initiate readers to Bavinck the theologian-preacher. The introduction fittingly establishes Bavinck within his historical context, enabling the reader to perceive Bavinck as one successfully striving to be at once orthodox and modern.

Following Eglinton’s introduction is Bavinck’s foreword to his address on Eloquence. I am thankful for the inclusion of historical artifacts such as this that allow Bavinck’s voice to speak even in the details, helping readers to find themselves immersed in the context and thus facilitating future scholarship. Furthermore, Eglinton enables readers to engage the original Dutch by frequently providing (in parentheses or endnotes) the original language for readers to reference. For those unacquainted with Bavinck, his lecture Eloquence will be an absolute treat. Here he romantically wrestles with the act of preaching, bouncing from Cicero to Dutch and German poets, “eloquently” engaging the audience on the importance of preaching with eloquence. By this Bavinck does not mean verbosity, but rather a fluid connection between one’s knowledge of God and an ability to describe these truths concretely and persuasively, which Bavinck roots in the Trinity. In preaching, then, one finds an opportunity to image God in a unique way through participating in the act of language.

Thus Bavinck indicates that our preaching should not be full of “ χενοι λογοι [empty words],” for “we must give an account for

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every idle word” (25). Bavinck laments in “The Sermon and the Service” that the time of the powerful pulpit is in the past, with congregants no longer desiring to listen to preaching. Nonetheless, he reminds us that “all believers are priests” and that “Jesus wishes to rule only through his Word and Spirit . . . and particularly so through the means of the preached word: not the word read or sung, but rather the spoken word. Faith is by hearing” (61). Bavinck reminds the church that it is this very practice, along with the signs and seals of the covenant, that keeps congregations strengthened and healthy. Though written in 1883, one finds here timely truth freed from the shackles of our own cultural milieu: Through preaching, the congregation is protected in its purity, encouraged in its battle, healed in its sufferings, established in its confession. Through preaching, the flock remains with the church, and the church with the flock in increasing authority and respect and worship. It is by this preaching that the congregation remains strong and has done so throughout history. (62)

The next chapter is Bavinck’s only available sermon, which is also found in John Bolt’s Herman Bavinck on the Christian Life: Following Jesus in Faithful Service (Crossway, 2015). Bolt’s and Eglinton’s translations differ in places, but the variances are minor.

Eglinton does, however, provide the Dutch in one place where the translation isn’t straightforward, and he places in the footnotes Bavinck’s Scripture references, which are absent from Bolt’s. Both translations offer the reader an opportunity to taste what the faithful of yesteryears called his “glorious preaching.”

The last chapter, “On Preaching in America,” is a particular treat. What did Bavinck think of American preaching? In 1892, when he visited the United States (with a trip also to Canada), his enduring view of our pulpits was that “preaching is not the unfolding and ministering of the word of God; rather it is a speech, and the text is simply a hook” (85).

The Netherlands was not much different, as we see in his laments over the “mottopreaching” that had invaded his country, a phrase that criticizes the declaration of mere opinions under the guise of the word of God.

“In preaching, then, one finds an opportunity to image God in a unique way through participating in the act of language.”

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Bavinck, therefore, charged preachers on both continents not to fill the congregants “with the shifting opinions and novelties of the day” but rather to proclaim to them “the healthy, fresh, strengthening food of the word of God” (64). In the appendix, “On Language,” Bavinck grounds language in the “one Logos who created all things” (93). While not directly on preaching, this essay brings completeness to the book and intimately links with the previous chapters, giving a holistic picture of language.

For those who enter pulpits on a regular basis, this is an essential read, especially for those familiar with Bavinck. This book reveals further the great unity of the man’s mind. In his Reformed Dogmatics, he states, “Theology is the task of thinking God’s thoughts after him and tracing their unity” (RD 2003:10); and i n E lo q ue nce , h e a ll u de s to preaching as the act of declaring God’s thoughts in his name. Thus preaching and theology mirror each other in their prophetic task of making God known.

Readers will find themselves refreshed by Bavinck’s pastoral and fecund thoughts on preaching. I would not be surprised if, like Martin Lloyd-Jones’s P reaching and P reachers (Zondervan, 2012), this book makes its way to a fortieth anniversary edition. I thoroughly recommend this book. Even down to the details, such as the typesetting and cover— which capture Bavinck as at once orthodox and modern—the book is a wonderful addition to any Reformed library.

GREG PARKER JR. is currently a ThM student at Gordon-

Conwell Theological Seminary after recently earning his MDiv from GCTS.

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12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke Crossway, 2017 224 pages (paperback), $14.99 ike it nor not, the smartphone is changing everything. Only a decade old, it is the most dominant culture-and-life-shaping technology in the world. With its myriad practical and compelling functions— Internet, phone, e-mail, texting, GPS, camera, photos, video, podcasts, music, social media, alarm clock, and so on—it has become virtually impossible to live without. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if there were not also a darker side to its use: with all of its positive functions, the small device may also be used to access an unspeakable world of wickedness.

That’s what makes Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You such a marvelous, timely, and indispensable resource. It is a book written not only to provide significant information and research on the use and impact of smartphones in our day, but also to challenge modern Christians to be honest and self-critical about our smartphone habits, “to evaluate the place of smartphones—the pros as well as the cons—in the trajectory of our eternal lives” (27). The challenge, according to Reinke, is how to use our smartphones with biblical wisdom and for the glory of God. In his introduction, Reinke provides a helpful summary of the history of technology, as well as how it should be understood in the light of God’s word. He explains that “technology is not inherently evil, but it tends to become the platform of

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choice to express the fantasy of human autonomy” (34). Our innovation for good can easily turn into idolatry. If we are not careful, we will not own our technology—our technology will own us.

He helpfully demonstrates that Christians haven’t spent much time thinking about the cultural, familial, or personal impact of the ubiquitous smartphone. This is partly because smartphone use has become an essential part of our everyday lives. It is also because the technology is so new and ever-changing. Indeed, the first iPhone was introduced at the Macworld Expo only ten years ago! Even so, it is important that Christians not become unwittingly swept up in the strong current of smartphone use and all the modern technological advances associated with it. We are called to live circumspectly as God’s people, not least in the way we employ a device found in the pockets and purses of nearly everyone in the industrialized world. It’s time we stop and think about the impact of the smartphone on our lives, in our families, and on our relationship with Christ.

Reinke writes that in the coming year smartphone users will grab their devices once every 4.3 minutes—over eighty-five thousand times.

He maintains that many are addicted to their smartphones and asserts that the consequences are alarming. Because we are always distracted by our phones, it is affecting us at a deeper emotional level than we realize.

“It’s time we stop and think about the impact of the smartphone on our lives, in our families, and on our relationship with Christ.”

As digital distractions intrude into our lives at an unprecedented rate, behavioral scientists and psychologists offer statistical proof in study after study: the more addicted you are to your phone, the more prone you are to depression and anxiety, and the less able you are to concentrate at work and sleep at night. Digital distractions are no game. (43)

Distracted from God, we lose our priorities and sense of purpose. Distracted from each other, we foster superficiality and loneliness in our relationships. 12 Ways explores how, if we are not vigilant, the smartphone and its myriad apps can lead us down a dark path of isolation, narcissism, consumerism, worldliness, and sexual perversion (134–35). Social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram devour time and dehumanize relationships. It’s a great irony that the more connected we are online, the less connected we feel toward others (120). Reinke helps us understand that there is a cost to undisciplined and unwise smartphone use.

In case you were wondering, 12 Ways is no jeremiad and the author is no self-righteous Luddite. On the contrary, Reinke markedly appreciates digital technology and brings out many positive aspects of its proper use. It is a well-researched, theologically adept, and winsomely written treatise that asks honest and searching questions about the “impact of our phones on ourselves, on our creation, on our neighbors, and on our relationships to God” (37).

The book is profoundly balanced in its critique and should be read by every Christian with a smartphone. I cannot recommend it enough.

Moreover, this level of distraction profoundly hinders communion with God. Reinke states that “God feels distant because we are distracted” (48).

JON D. PAYNE is the church planting pastor of Christ Church Presbyterian (PCA) in Charleston, South Carolina. He is also a visiting lecturer in practical theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta.

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04

GEEK SQUAD

Culture and the Christian

by Jack M. Schultz

ulture” is one of those pesky, paradoxical concepts. Everyone knows what it means as long as they don’t have to define it. It’s a difficult word to define because it is multivocal—it labels many divergent phenomena and suggests relationships among seemingly unrelated items. We know intuitively what “culture” is, and we live within its bounds every moment; yet we never see clearly the morphing reality the word identifies.

One definition 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

“C

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1 acquired by man as a member of society.” This provides a helpful, albeit vague, scope. Taken in tandem with Clifford Geertz’s later definition, a picture begins to emerge:

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 govern2 ing of behavior.

In the same work, Geertz develops the definition and includes his famous observation that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance

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which he himself has created. I take culture to be those webs.”3 Having worked with such notions, anthropologists understood 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 the analytical concepts of “culture” and “cultures” are helpful, they are still abstractions—ideas in our heads. More recent definitions allow for messiness: “Cultures are, after all, collective, untidy assemblages, authenticated by belief and agreement, focused only 4 in crisis, systematized after the fact.” Culture “then is not something given but something to 5 be gradually and gropingly discovered.”

For anthropologists, culture flows out of the 6 “needs of common humanity.” It is an adaptive response to the task 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 and, in many ways, the producer of people.

The term “culture” as used in the 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. Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic Christ

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“People, not cultures, are Christian—individual believers in relationship with the living God in Christ Jesus.”

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.

People, not cultures, are Christian—individual believers in relationship with the living God in Christ Jesus. America may be described as “Christian” (though this is less and less accurate), yet much of our American culture runs counter to biblical ideals. It is arguable just how beneficial it is for the individual in a faithrelationship with the Creator to be living in a tenuously tepid Christian milieu such as ours.

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 also 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. That is not inherently a spiritual tragedy—we have no guarantees that our church institutions will continue on. The church, to be sure, will continue with or without the sanction of culture. The church is not an institution. It is a community of believers, called and gathered by the Spirit of God.

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GEEK SQUAD

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 mores, 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 onesided 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 coopted religion for their own nefarious purposes. The Christian church on earth, at different times, has 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, the legalization of homosexual marriage and the push for LGBTQ affirmation—we need to remember that just a generation ago the sin of divorce and remarriage was a cultural taboo. It has now moved to the acceptable.

Society’s tolerance for sin should not be near as much concern for Christians as their own tolerance for the sin their culture has sanctioned. Regardless of the cultural context, we

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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, nonChristian fellow citizen is with “our neighbor” whom we are called to serve.

There is no “context-less” 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. 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 with the other.

JACK M. SCHULTZ (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is a lifelong Lutheran and professor of anthropology at Concordia University, Irvine, where he continues to research the interplay of religion and culture. An active member of the American Anthropological Association, he has multiple publications in the field of anthropology of religion, including The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma: Maintaining a Traditional Community (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008).

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2009 issue of Modern Reformation.

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

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

3 Geertz, 5.

4 Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 10.

5 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.

6 Sapir et al., 204.

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05

B AC K PAG E

“Wonder Woman”

by Michael S. Horton

s the father of three boys and a girl, I’m aware of how different it is growing up today in terms of gender roles. When I hit puberty during the feminist revolution of the seventies, it was tough enough. Raised to open the door for a lady, I discovered that (at least in L.A.) this was a no-no. Confusing, to say the least. Today, kids are encouraged to experiment not only with roles but with gender itself.

We’re more confused than ever about the role of women. It’s a lot easier if you’re in either a neoAmish type of conservative church or a mainline “more-gender-bending-than-thou” church. On one hand, women are expected to be Proverbs 31 wives and mothers; on the other hand, there is the cultural expectation for women to do it all.

Schizophrenic ourselves on these questions, we unwittingly place these contradictory and unlivable expectations on our sisters in Christ.

The demands of the work world and the trajectory of biological clocks also pit both desires against one another. Women are expected to spend their prime childbearing years building their careers, although some decide at the outset to be a wife and a mother. The women who do balance work and family feel subtle yet significant pressure (often from other women) to “work at home” (Titus 2:5).

As much as we lament the breakdown of the traditional family (fueled in part by pressure for a two-income household) and gender confusion, we don’t want to turn the clock back to past cultural norms that oppressed women. I couldn’t

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have gone to college without my mom working outside the home, and many men couldn’t attend seminary without their wives’ tireless labors both outside and inside the home. And since churches don’t offer the support they once did for those training to be pastors, they’re hardly in a position to make their dedicated spouses feel guilty for picking up the slack.

What I want to challenge is the particular stress of being “Wonder Woman.” The issues of ambition and restlessness pressure both men and women to make work an idol. In addition to being a driver and housekeeper, Mom has to be a pastor, teacher, volunteer, social worker, and chef. More than men, Christian women are being squeezed by both ends of the culture wars. I’m not saying anything pro or con about women working outside the home; I’m suggesting that the burdens we place on women can make them anxious and drive them to expect dissatisfaction with the normal aspects crucial for the development of wisdom and nurture for the whole family.

Women do have callings outside the home— they’re not only wives and mothers, but also friends and neighbors cultivating culture in countless ways. Many also have additional callings for which they have been educated and trained. Avoiding legalism and antinomianism, we need wisdom. Each case will differ, and single women and couples should decide for themselves what is best for them, drawing on biblical principles and their own situations.

MICHAEL S. HORTON is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

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