Revisiting The Shack

After over a year, The Shack remains on the New York Times bestseller list. As of this writing it is still number #2 under the heading of trade fiction. An impressive achievement from an author who never set out to have his work published in the first place. I addressed some issues around the book in a blog last fall. I continue to see reviews that either love or hate it. There seems to be very little middle ground. The book has obviously hit a raw nerve in American culture. It is communicating something about God that people are hungry to hear. The question is, “is the message feel-good New-Age Oprah style vacuous spirituality, or is the message more substantive?” And if it is more substantive is it orthodox? Or heretical? (Note here: heresy to have any meaning must mean something more than, “I don’t like it.” Or “I’ve never heard this before.” See my discussion of heresy in The Survivor’s Guide to Theology, 33-35; 145-151; 190-195.)

This second blog on the topic is prompted by a recent critique published in the Spiritual Counterfeits Project newsletter (spring 2009), and written by an old seminary classmate and former colleague of mine. The counterpoint here is the critique given by several members of the Regent College (Vancouver B.C.) faculty in a book discussion in 2008. http://www.regentaudio.com/product_details.php?item_id=801 (I highly recommend this discussion!)

As he introduced Paul Young at a Regent College faculty discussion Dr. Darrell Johnson, of Regent said, “‘All theology is autobiography,’ that is a saying you will hear a lot around Regent College. All theology is autobiography: by this is meant that everyone develops his or her theology out of one’s own experience of life with God.”

Paul Young clearly articulates that The Shack is a metaphor or parable. “It is a fiction story. . . The Shack is not a systematic theology, it is not the Bible. It is a fiction story. But inside that story I wrote my pain. And I wrote my process. And I wrote the conversations I had over the years as I unwound all the junk. And I wrote God as good as I know how. And all I can tell you is He is better than I wrote Him.”

I suspect that It is the sometimes brutal honesty of the telling of the story that has resonated with audiences all over the country and the English speaking world. Paul Young gives voice to the questions, pain and anger that we are afraid to voice. Afraid that God will banish us for questioning. Afraid that our Christian friends will look down on us for saying out loud what we all fear. Afraid to look unspiritual. Afraid to be seen as imperfect.

I don’t want to plow the same ground of my earlier blog. But I do believe that it needs to be repeated at the outset that (William) Paul Young (like me he goes by his middle name) calls this book a parable, a parable of his own spiritual journey, a journey that includes a childhood of incredible abuse and damage that was left unaddressed until Young was thirty-eight years old. As a parable, any critique must take into account the genre. Any legitimate critique must also understand the context and the intended audience (his own children).

One of the repeated criticisms is that of the portrayal of the Godhead. Critiques have charged the book as teaching modalism/Sabellianism, the ancient heresy that God is single and unitary and does not exist in three persons but reveals himself historically in succession as Father (in the OT) as Son (in the Gospels) and as Spirit (beginning with Pentecost). To illustrate this, I am son, husband, and father. These are three aspects of my being, but I am one undifferentiated person. This heresy was prominent particularly during the third century and was roundly rejected by the early church a generation before the council of Nicea. Some critics of The Shack charge that this heresy is portrayed in The Shack through the author’s portrayal of Papa as having scars that mirror the crucifixion scars of Jesus. In the critique by the faculty of Regent, two of the theologians mention discomfort with this imagery suggesting that a more appropriate image might be a wound to the heart of Papa, rather than the nail prints in the hands. (Significantly they do not accuse him of heresy!) Young’s response to this was he was trying to give an image of the Apostle’s imagery in 2 Cor 5:19. “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. . .” As I hear what Young was saying here is that he was trying to illustrate in concrete form the doctrine of the perichoresis of the persons of the trinity, i.e. each member indwells the other, shares in the experiences of the other, and participates in some sense in all the activities of the other two persons. The members of the trinity share a unity of life that is unparalleled by human beings. Whether this was the best image to try to convey this understanding can be debated.

Other critiques have suggested that instead of operating from an orthodox Trinitarian framework , the book falls into tri-theism. This heresy is on the other end of the scale from modalism/Sabellianism. (Note: there is an old saying that if you are being attacked by both sides of an issue you are probably somewhere close to the correct position.) The Spiritual Counterfeits Project review says, “God is presented as The Three Musketeers with shades of Tritheism, the ancient heresy that He is actually three deities.” (p. 5) The critique goes on to say that “in the Bible no one ever sees the Father because God dwells in inaccessible light.—no one can see Him and live.” While the reviewer is accurate in his comment about anyone seeing the Father in the Bible, the criticism is irrelevant at this point. The portrayal of the Father and the Spirit in the book are accommodations rather than images of who the Father is in himself. No one believes that the Father is a large black woman and despite the images on the Sistine Chapel, anyone familiar with Christianity knows that the Father is not an old gray-haired man with a flowing beard). I find it interesting that in his parables Jesus has no hesitation in portraying characters clearly identified with God the Father in human form.

Paul Young has become a close associate of C. Baxter Kruger, Ph.D. (This might be characterized by an orthodoxy by association defense.) Kruger (perichoresis.org) obtained his degree at Aberdeen University under J.B. Torrance and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on T.F. Torrance, one of the premier English speaking theologians of the 20^th century. These theologians are adamant about the centrality of historic orthodox trinitarianism as defined by the councils of Nicea and Constantinople. They rightly, I believe, decry the way that western trinitarianism (both Catholic and Protestant) has lost the personalistic and relational focus that the Eastern Orthodox tradition has been able to keep at the center of its worship and theology. In the west, the doctrine of God has become abstract and focused upon the divine attributes especially transcendent majesty/holiness, at the expense of personal relationship characterizing the members of the trinity. But the Torrance brothers go further, focusing on the presentation in John’s gospel (particularly John 15-17) they insist that there is a personal indwelling of both the Father and the Son within the believer that is the basis of intimate personal communion of the believer not only with the Spirit but with the triune God. This is a spiritual reality that cannot be pictured literally, it must be pictured analogically. This is the approach Young has chosen in The Shack, despite the inherent difficulties/dangers. Again, remember the genre.

Hand in hand with the above critique is the “cheekiness” and lack of reverence in Mack’s interchange with the members of the Godhead. All we need do is read the Psalms to see a repeated “lack of reverence” in the Psalmist’s addresses to God particularly in the lament Psalms. Tremper Longman and Dan Allender have discussed these at length their The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God. Significantly, we find that God hears us in our anger and our pain. He is looking for honesty in us, rather than being worried that we do not respect Him by raising questions and issues even in anger. If this is true in the OT, how much more so in the NT where we have the example of Jesus who according to Hebrews 4:14-16 understands our weakness because he has been tempted in all ways like we are.

This leads to the next major critique; that The Shack denies hierarchy within the Trinity. This critique comes from several different sources and is one brought up by the Spiritual Counterfeits critique. “The root of all authority, hierarchy and relationships is the Godhead. Paul Young crafts his godhead after the image of the rebellion-driven counterculture.” (p. 5) What is fascinating is that this very issue has become a hot button within the very conservative Evangelical Theological Society. Several prominent Evangelical theologians, including Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware, are vociferously asserting an eternal hierarchy of authority within the trinity, a hierarchy that inheres in the very being of God, while asserting at the same time that all three persons share equally of a single divine essence. (Sorry if this is getting a little technical.) On the other side is another group, whose most visible spokesman is the Australian Kevin Giles, arguing that within the trinity there is no hierarchy. What makes this issue more heated is that this issue is used by each side to bolster its position on gender relationships. (This makes the whole discussion agenda driven in what I consider to be an improper way, but the question of the intra-Trinitarian personal relationships remains.) Within the past two weeks I have finished reading Evangelical theologian Millard Erickson’s latest work: Who’s Tampering With The Trinity? What makes this work significant is that Erickson does not have a horse in the race with reference to gender relationships. His analysis is careful and dispassionate. He presents each position descriptively and often in the words of the proponents of each position. He lays out the criteria for evaluation of the two positions then examines the evidence, biblical, historical, philosophical, theological and practical. He presents criticisms of argumentation on both sides and ends up addressing the question “So Who’s Right?” While he sees some problems with the articulation of each position, he concludes that each position falls within the boundaries of historic orthodoxy. However, in the last three pages he clearly concludes that those who are advocating eternal hierarchy have serious problems in maintaining their position. That is

“that it contains elements that logically imply an unorthodox dimension of the doctrine of the Trinity . . . the idea of ontological equality [i.e. equality of essence or being] combined with the eternal and necessary supremacy of authority of the Father over the Son and the Holy Spirit. . . I believe this is an unstable position. For if one member is always and everywhere functionally superior to the others, there must be an ontological basis for the difference. In other words, while explicitly rejecting the idea of ontological subordination, this view actually implies it and thus contains an implicit ontological subordination. (257)

He goes on to note that the historic pattern is for succeeding generations to work out the implicit propositions of their professors, and cites numerous examples of this phenomenon. Having just stated this he says, “I therefore echo Giles plea to the gradationists [i.e. those who are advocating eternal hierarchical authority], ‘Go back. You are going the wrong way’.” (258)

He continues:

Please think through the implications of your view, observe the body of evidence against it, and reconsider the idea of the eternal functional superiority of the Father over the Son and the Holy Spirit. There is no shame in modifying one’s view when confronted with considerations one may have overlooked. In fact, it is a mark of strength to possess a continuing open mind. (259)

This is getting long, so I will cut it short recognizing that I will revisit the topic with more observations in the coming weeks. To summarize what we have here looked at briefly. The basic issue of the nature of Trinitarian reality has been addressed. I believe that much of the criticism arises from a lack of historical understanding in breadth of explanation of Trinitarian relationships within the tradition of historic orthodoxy (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant). The second major critique again with reference to Trinitarian relationships objects that the denial of hierarchy within the intra-Trinitarian relationships is grounded in counter-culture rebellion. This is patently false . In fact Millard Erickson has demonstrated that those arguing for intra-trinnitarian hierarchy have implicitly endorsed the type of subordinationism that gave rise to the Arian heresy in the fourth century and has been revived by the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the past century and one-half. Third we have looked very briefly at the difficulty arising out of trying to portray in concrete terms the reality of the intimate spiritual relationship that the believer is to have with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

God and the Ordinary

My wife, Kay, was born in the jungles of the Amazon in Peru, her parents were missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators where she lived on a compound with nearly 100 missionary families. Everything that was done there was somehow related to translation of the Bible into the many as yet unwritten languages of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. What has been accomplished among the tribal peoples of the jungles in Peru is nothing short of miraculous. But, transferring a missionary kid who's whole life has been immersed in an environment where the dominant value of life is the visible furtherance of the gospel among those who have never had even an opportunity to hear, to the secular environment of Western culture is a recipe for crisis, or if not crisis at least for ongoing tension.

When we first got married over 35 years ago, this tension was not immediately obvious. I was involved in full-time ministry with Youth for Christ in Orange County, California. During that time, Kay assisted me in ministering to the high school kids of Costa Mesa and Irvine. When I left Youth for Christ, we packed up our trailer, and headed to Dallas Texas, where for the next 10 years I was involved in ThM and PhD study. In 1984, ten years and one month later we left Dallas. We set our sights on the San Francisco Bay area, where I had been hired as Asst. Prof. of Theology at Simpson College. Her life was focused on the home, raising the children. As the children grew and got off to school. It became necessary for her to venture out into the workplace. Feeding four voraciously hungry boys on a professor's salary became more than a challenge. It became an impossibility (at one point our food bill was regularly larger than our monthly rent!).

As she moved out into the workplace, the tension of the secular versus sacred raised its ugly head. It wasn't that she objected to working, but if she had to work outside the home, she wanted to be involved in something that counted for the Kingdom, to be in some kind of ministry work. Many, many nights when she would come home, she would share her frustration. She was working in an office for an electrical contracting company and although there were several Christian friends who worked in the office with her it was still a secular job. It wasn't involved in building the Kingdom. Several years later, she changed jobs. She was now an executive assistant and office manager in a small financial planning firm. But in some cases, this was even worse. She was faced day-to-day with the pursuit of money and felt the tension between God and mammon. About 2 ½ years ago, she changed jobs again. She is working at a small startup company that manufactures a medical device to deal with chronic back pain. Again, it is a secular environment, although in this job she loves the environment and the people, even though she is the only Christian in the office. However, she continued to feel the sacred-secular tension.

As a student of the Reformation, I have been convinced for decades that the sacred-secular tension that my wife feels and that many who have grown up in the evangelical community feel, arises from a misreading of Scripture, and a misunderstanding of the nature of God and his relationship to creation. Beginning in the ancient church there was a wedge driven between the material and the spiritual with a corresponding wedge drawn between the secular and the sacred. During the medieval period, this wedge became a veritable wall. Anyone who was serious about his or her own salvation became a priest, monk or a nun (speaking in broad brushstrokes here). Also during this period the incarnation of Christ and his full participation in the same type of life that we share faded into the background and He became progressively viewed as the divine judge who condemned humanity for its failure to achieve the standard of perfect legal righteousness. (By the way, it was during this period that the we see the rise of Marion devotion as well as the cult of the saints in an attempt to find a sympathetic intercessor who would get the ear of the righteous judge.) This was the issue that tortured Luther—he hated the righteousness of God for it was the basis on which he damned sinful humanity. Ultimately, Luther discovered the true nature of divine righteousness. It was this discovery that kicked off the Reformation.

Luther and the other first generation Reformers went further—much further. They rejected the idea that matter was tainted. The creation had been blessed by the Creator and declared to be “very good.” With this understanding, the sacred-secular dichotomy had been healed. But over the generations the rift appeared again. In the nineteenth century it opened again with a vengeance and infected and still afflicts many evangelicals to this day. (The development here is a bit complex so I won’t get into it now. Suffice it to say that the rise of Liberal Theology with its emphasis on the Social Gospel played a major part here, as did the apocalyptic pre-millennialism that advocated radical separation from the world and dedication to missions and evangelism. Involvement with the world is, after all, like polishing brass on a sinking ship.)

In all this we have lost sight of the nature and implications of the most basic and foundational doctrines of Christianity—the trinity and the incarnation: that God is three eternal persons who live in constant and perfect loving relationship, and that the eternal Son of the Father has joined himself to the totality of human nature, not just for thirty-three years, but for eternity. To stop and reflect, really reflect upon these two truths staggers the mind.

C. Baxter Kruger, in his work The Great Dance, does just this. At one point he reflects:

What are we to make of the fact that as the son of God lived out his sonship, his divine life, he did so as a carpenter? Think of the hours and hours spent in the shop, the years of apprenticeship, the days and months and years hammering and cutting and carving and sanding. What are we to make of the fact that the vast majority of God's time on earth was spent in such ordinary, mundane activity? Have you ever thought about that? Most of God's time on Earth was not spent in what people call "full-time ministry." The incarnate son spent more time making things with his hands than he did preaching.

When you stop to think about it, when the Trinitarian life of God worked its way out in human existence, it was all very ordinary. I am aware of the supernatural things that happened in Jesus. I am aware of the astonishing miracles. But I would hazard a guess that the Son of God, ate more meals than he performed miracles. I know that the incarnate Son healed the sick, but I also know that he made a lot of tables. He had a lot of conversations with regular people, grew up in a family of brothers and sisters and cousins, celebrated birthdays and went to parties.

For at least a moment in history, human laughter, human sharing, human compassion, human love, human fellowship and camaraderie and togetherness were all more than human. For at least a moment of history, carpentry and the delight of making things and helping others, human excellence and the pride and joy of creativity in design and moving from design to completed product, were all more than merely human. They were the living expression of the humanity of God, the living expression of the incarnate Son, living out his divine sonship, the living expression of a man utterly baptized in the Holy Spirit. (62)

Certainly the fact that the Incarnate God worked at a secular and ordinary job, gives the lie to the idea that it is only “the spiritual” that matters. The eternal Son of God, by, through and for whom the entire universe was created, out of love and compassion for His creation, united himself eternally to humanity in its ordinariness and its physicality. This is the basis for meaning in everything we do: the heroic, the “spiritual” and the ordinary. All are important because God himself has, out of his overflowing and gracious love, joined himself to us as human and in the process brought humanity into eternal relationship and participation with God. Peace and joy have come to my wife as she has accepted and embraced participation with God in the ordinary.

Shortly after I posted my recent blog entitled “The Coming Evangelical Collapse?” Time Magazine featured as its cover story an article entitled “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” (Number three on Time’s list, was “The New Calvinism.”) On the surface, this appears to be a blatant contradiction to the thesis of The Christian Science Monitor article concerning “The Coming Evangelical Collapse.” As strange as it may seem I would suggest is that it is not.

The reasons for this are several-fold. Evangelicalism as it has manifested itself in America, and as a subculture has historically been a tradition that is “heavenly minded.” Its roots are sunk deeply into pietistic spirituality arising from a post-Reformation reaction to cold doctrinal orthodoxy within confessional Lutheranism in Germany, as opposed to what can legitimately be called a Reformed or Puritan spirituality/worldview.

As such, evangelicalism has historically had a tremendous problem in being involved in “the world.” During the 19^th century as revivalism was institutionalized in America, spiritual life was privatized and became unrelated to other areas of life. (What mattered was “my personal relationship with God/Jesus.” etc., gone were larger senses of responsibility to community and society.) In a real sense what happened in 19th century American Protestantism mirrored the emerging liberal theology in Germany which saw truth as derived from the feelings (German: Gefeuhl) as opposed to having a rational undergirding.

The divide between the sacred and the secular realm of existence that had characterized Roman Catholic Christianity throughout the Medieval period and, which had been rejected by the Reformers of the 16^th century was reintroduced into the larger American evangelical psyche.

In the Reformation and the following Puritan era there had been a very healthy integration of the spiritual with all other areas of life, because God the Reformed/Calvinistic tradition had pronounced creation/ material order very good. (Leland Ryken has demonstrated the vital embrace of the created order by the Puritans in his excellent and very accessible study work Worldly Saints: the Puritans as They Really Were). As the nineteenth century progressed, Protestantism, which at this point was in some sense evangelical, progressively withdrew from cultural engagement in the world and society and abandoned that realm to the rising tide of secular studies and perspectives. American historian Richard Hofstadter notes that 19^th century American evangelicals

"withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone." (Anti-Intellectualism in America, 87)

What we see happening among evangelicals during this period is a slipping into a dualism characteristic of Plato, and adopted by later Gnostic teaching: “Spirit(ual) is good; Material is evil (or at best bad or something to be put up with and distracting from the really important- the spiritual). Added to this was the rise of Dispensational theology with its imminent apocalyptic expectation that involvement in the world, politics, and even society at large was “like polishing brass on a sinking ship.” Lest you think that this attitude has changed, one of my former colleagues preached a sermon on ecology about a dozen years ago in which he concluded that we don’t need to be involved in these issues because it’s all going to burn anyway! (I must admit that I find these attitudes theologically and exegetically bankrupt as well as crazy-making.)

Evangelicalism is a “big tent” description for early twenty-first century Protestantism. But such has not always been the case. As used in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the U.S., the term referred to the mildly Calvinistic theological descendents of the New School Presbyterians in the mid-nineteenth century; it incorporated the arising dispensational movement in the early days of the twentieth century during the era of the “Fundamentalist-Modernist debates. The key doctrine for Evangelical identity during the decades of the early to mid- twentieth century was that of the inerrancy of Scripture. This was the sole doctrinal plank of the Evangelical Theological Society when it was founded in 1948. A central mark of the Fundamentalist/Evangelical tradition was its devotion to and knowledge of the Bible, not only by pastors and scholars, but also on the lay level. Originally the designation did not include those of the Holiness tradition nor of the emerging Pentecostal tradition nor the Southern Baptists. Each of these traditions maintained their own separate identities.

While there was some movement in the ensuing decades, “The Jesus Movement” of the late 60s and 70s with its Pentecostal roots was the catalyst that broke down the barriers between the traditions just mentioned. By the mid-1970’s Evangelicalism was in the process of shedding its fundamentalist-separatist roots and begun to think about engaging society on the scholarly level as well as embracing culture on a popular level.. While as I mentioned in the previous blog the scholarly engagement has been fairly successful, on the popular level the engaging of culture as been a disaster. Knowledge of scripture and theology has ceased to be an identifying factor of our tradition. In seeking to embrace culture evangelicalism was squeezed into the contemporary cultural ethos.

Today theological and biblical knowledge is at a nadir (at least I hope it won’t get any worse!). The upshot of this is that contemporary evangelicalism is intellectually vacuous and largely impotent. Hence the predicted collapse.

But what does this have to do with Calvinism? Much in every way—but I will get to this in a moment. First I quote a couple of paragraphs out of The Survivor’s Guide to Theology.

We can illustrate the importance of theology by means of the skeleton and the jellyfish. When we look at a skeleton, we can be reasonably sure it is dead. The life that once held these bones together is gone, and these bones are now held together with pins and wires. This is how many people view theology: lifeless and a collection of ideas that are held together by the artificial means of complex rationalizations and arguments. Then there is the jellyfish. A jellyfish can live for a time on the beach but cannot do anything. It lies on the sand in a pulsating blob, unable to do anything except possibly sting a passerby. The jellyfish, like the skeleton, has a problem. While the skeleton has structure without life, the jellyfish has life without structure. The lack of structure, or a skeletal system, causes it to be ineffective at doing anything on land.

A structure such as a skeleton will allow us to accomplish the task of living life, but this does not mean that just any structure will do, that one structure is as good as another. Years ago I worked with a person who as a child had fallen from a tree and broken his arm. The physician who attended to him was drunk and set the arm improperly so that in the healing process a deformity developed. My colleague could still use his arm, but it was not fully functional because the structure that supported his arm inhibited his movement. (18)

When I gave this illustration in class a number of years ago, one of my students who was a chiropractor became so excited he blurted out excitedly, “That’s right! Function follows form!” Function follows form.

Improper [or inadequate] theological structures may give the illusion of being intellectually and spiritually harmonious and in line with Scripture, but the reality shows otherwise. In the pilot episode of the original Star Trek series, broadcast as “The Menagerie,” Captain Christopher Pike (Captain Kirk’s predecessor) is imprisoned on the planet Talos 4. The inhabitants of the planet exhibit him and a beautiful young woman in their zoo. The plan is for them to mate and ultimately populate the planet. Pike learns that the Talosians are experts at illusion and that this is why his escape attempts keep failing. When he is finally successful and is about to leave the planet, he tries to take the young woman as well, but she refuses to leave. He discovers that she, like everything else he has experienced, is not as she appears. She is human, but she is not young and beautiful. She is the sole survivor of a scientific expedition stranded on the planet years before. Badly injured in the crash of her spaceship, she had been nursed back to health by the Talosians. But they had never seen a human before and consequently did not properly set her broken bones, and she ended up hunched over with twisted limbs. In this ugly condition, she could not face other humans. She could live a functional life, but the underlying structure of her body could not support normal existence. Her twisted structure cut her off from contact with normal humans. (19)

Evangelicalism has become a movement without a true underlying structure or true worldview. Those of the true Reformed theological persuasion have never been an integral part of Evangelicalism. While numerous Reformed scholars and theologians contributed to The Fundamentals which were published in the second decade of the twentieth century in opposition to the rising tide of Liberal Theology which was crashing like a Tsunami over the Protestant theological landscape, they declined to identify themselves with the movement because they viewed it as reductionistic and a compromise not only of Calvinism but of Historic Christian Orthodoxy.

The theological and intellectual poverty and vacuity of evangelicalism was vividly pointed out to me many years ago by Dr. Dan Allender (now President of Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle) in a presentation he was giving. Dan, as an aside in his lecture pointed out that the Evangelical tradition has never been able to produce great works of art or literature. Other Christian traditions, the Orthodox, the Catholic, the Anglican, the Reformed have all produced great masterpieces but you can not name one great Evangelical artist or author of literature—our worldview does not allow us to. (neither Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins nor William P. Young (The Shack) nor even Thomas Kincade qualify here!)

The great late nineteenth and early twentieth century Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper demonstrates the sweeping vision of the Reformed faith in his Lectures on Calvinism, delivered at Princeton Seminary in 1898. He delivered six lectures that demonstrated the intellectual, theological and spiritual vigor of world and life view of the Reformed faith:

Lecture 1: Calvinism as a Life System
Lecture 2: Calvinism and Religion
Lecture 3: Calvinism and Politics
Lecture 4: Calvinism and Science
Lecture 5: Calvinism and Art
Lecture 6: Calvinism and the Future

Those unfamiliar with Kuper will need an introduction to him to appreciate the power of his position. He was not just an academic theologian who built castles in the clouds. Throughout his career he edited a daily newspaper. He was the founder of Amsterdam Free University. He was a member of the Dutch Parliament, and served for four years Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Last, but not least he was one of the two the leading Dutch theologians of his generation. (The other was Herman Bavinck.) Kupyer stridently advocated the Reformed concept of bringing all things under the Lordship of Christ and backed up that insistence in his own life story.

To most within our circles when someone mentions Calvinism, the image that comes to mine is the TULIP, or the doctrine of divine sovereignty, or of predestination. Such thoughts betray our profound ignorance of the vitality of its theocentric worldview and all encompassing vision of reality.

In the midst of an age of anthropocentric theology and postmodern abdication of truth, it makes perfect sense to me to see the reemergence of historic Reformed Theology/Calvinism (not simply the popular bumper sticker caricature Calvinism as the TULIP).

If Evangelicalism collapses as the sociologists and pollsters are predicting, will a new incarnation of Reformed theology arise out of the ashes?

Under Cover: Authority, Obedience (& Abuse?)

A couple of weeks ago I was asked by a friend from out of state to look at a book, Under Cover by John Bevere, although the book is not new it is just now making the rounds among the leadership of his church. This friend is a layman who has been a Christian for many years and has seen many fads and movements come and go, as have I. He reacted quite strongly to the teaching as it is being explained around his church noting that those who are reading the book are insisting that God speaks to our pastor and our pastor speaks to us. We have no right to question what the pastor says. We are bound to submit and obey. He saw great similarity between this teaching, on spiritual authority and covering=spiritual protection with the Shepherding Movement/Discipleship Movement of the 1970’s and 80’s which was founded by Bob Mumford, Derek Prince, Charles Simpson and Don Basham as a result of moral failure in a charismatic ministry in South Florida.

The teachings of the movement focused upon accountability, obedience and submission to spiritual authority. From the idea of submission to authority, to the equating of the authority of the leader to the authority of God, has proven historically to be a short step. What happens is that the leader’s voice is equated with the voice of God and those who disagree are seen as in rebellion. In the Shepherding Movement, this step was taken and the movement became controlling and abusive. Ultimately both Mumford and Prince repented of their errors in teaching and left the movement.

Another movement with similar practices founded in 1979 was the Boston Movement. (renamed :International Churches of Christ (ICC)). New members are required to meet with older members daily. New members who disagree with older members are told they are rebelling against God. Submission to church leaders is demanded. New members are told whom to date, how to spend their money and how to spend their free time. In 2003 Kip McKean founder of the Boston Movement resigned confessing that the church leaders “[had] engaged in financial mismanagement, legalism, dishonest statistical reporting, and abusive teachings, and have ignored critics.”

Last week I talked to my pastor, who although he is solidly Reformed in his theology now, comes out of a Pentecostal background. He shared that this type of teaching is common in Pentecostal circles noting that within Pentecostalism there is a love of invoking OT imagery and drawing theological conclusions from that imagery without taking into account a substantial discontinuity between the ways God established for Israel and the fact that there has been a tremendous change under the New Covenant inaugurated by the “Christ Event” (the death, resurrection & ascension) followed by the inauguration of the church at Pentecost. Drawing upon OT imagery Pentecostalism stresses particularly the authority/power/rights of the minister as God’s anointed one.

Bevere’s thesis is that submission to spiritual authority gives covering and protection. Conversly, to disobey spiritual authority is to place oneself in the arena of Satan with the clear implication that one who disobeys by failing to submit to spiritual authority is open to demonic attack. The same is true if the spiritual authority is challenged. He says:

“If those under authority take the yoke of judgment upon themselves as judges over their established leaders, they no longer are submitted to established authority, but have elevated themselves as judges over their leaders. Their hearts are lifted up in pride above the ones God placed over them. They have exalted themselves over the ordinance and counsel of God.” (116)

Bevere makes many good, right and true points. We do not live in a spiritual democracy and authority is something with which we as twenty-first century Americans have great problems with. Living less than 20 miles from UC Berkeley I regularly see bumper stickers with the slogan “Question Authority” boldly emblazoned on them. But although I recognize this as a problem I have serious problems with Bevere’s approach and his whole thesis on several different levels, some methodological, some exegetical, some theological.

What follows are more or less disconnected observations and specific examples of problems and issues that jumped out at me as I read. These criticisms are by no means exhaustive, and the weightiest are at the end.

· Intended or not, and despite all the claims to humility, I sense an underlying arrogance. The first time I ever sensed this type of arrogance in an author was many years ago when I first read The Light and The Glory by Peter Marshall and David Manuel. That book is a reinterpretation of American history that makes the argument that America is the new covenant nation akin to ancient Israel. As one reviewer said, “It is not good history. It is not even good fiction.” Nevertheless it has become a favorite among the homeschoolers in the US. (But I digress.) What absolutely drove me crazy was that the authors’ repeatedly invoked the leading of the Holy Spirit to substantiate their claims that theirs was the right interpretation. Likewise, Bevere invokes the voice of God throughout the book telling him in words that his teaching is the truth. These claims place an author above criticism, because to take issue with these claims is to reject divine revelation. While I don’t want to get sidetracked about prophecies and words of knowledge I do want to mention that in 1 Thess. 5 Paul tells (or as Bevere might say: commands) his readers to:

not treat prophecies with contempt.

But examine all things;

Paul is apparently telling his hearers not to reject prophecies, but to examine them, and hold fast to those which pass muster but reject those that are evil.[1] To put this another way, what the Lord says to one individual must be verified by the church as a whole. It is not a case of “God speaks to the pastor and the pastor speaks to us.” We are all sinful, and depraved and prone to interpret our own deep desires as the word or will of God. (As a parenthetical note: this issue with central authority is particularly rooted in the mindset of the Western [Roman Catholic and Protestant] churches. Authority in the Eastern Orthodox Church is and has always been communal.)

My wife tells the story of when she was first in college one of her classmates told her that God had told him that she was to marry him. Her response? “God has not told that to me.” (I have heard this from numerous female college students over the years that young men whom they hardly knew were told by God that the particular girl in question was to be their wife. Apparently young men (with raging hormones) are sensitive to the voice of God and the young women are not!

Years ago when I first taught at Simpson College, I had a student who was so “in tune with God” that as he was walking down the corridors of the college he would carry on a conversation with God. This was not normal prayer. He was hearing God’s responses to what he verbalized within the hearing of all. (He was one of the first students I met at Simpson and I wondered what I had gotten myself into.) Over the next two years he matured quite a bit and decided to go to my alma mater Dallas Seminary.

He graduated and became a pastor in Hayward, the next city over from where I have lived for 25 years. I haven’t seen him since he returned to the Bay Area but I recently found out some of what had gone on in recent years. He was convinced that God had told him to move his inner city blue collar church to the suburbs about 15-20 miles away. The church dutifully followed his lead as the will of God. The congregation however did not fit in the suburbs. Things went from bad to worse and the church fired him as their pastor and called another pastor. But since God had called him to this church he wouldn’t leave. It got so bad that finally the church had to call in the police and have him arrested for trespassing.

· As an exegete and a theologian I have a tremendous problem with the way Bevere handles the text of scripture. He nowhere builds a case with solid exegesis and theological thinking/ reflection that his thesis is valid. Instead he assumes from the first paragraph that he is right and mixes stories, prooftexts and examples drawn out of context from the breadth of scripture and from his experiences. His prooftexts are often pulled totally out of context and treated as timeless aphorisms rather than time-bound, culture-bound and context-bound statements that cannot simply be lifted out of their contexts without doing violence to their meaning. Likewise, he regularly leverages one biblical story against another and bridges them with anecdotes that tie the parts together artificially to make them serve his agenda.

As one who teaches Hermeneutics (biblical interpretation) on the seminary level I must say that if one of my students submited an assignment that applied such interpretive practices, I would give the paper a failing grade and instruct the student to rework the assignment using proper hermeneutical method.

· With reference to exegesis, he occasionally appeals to the meaning of Greek terms but employs sources that are out of date, and even these he uses improperly, building cases from lexical definitions and forcing those lexical definitions into contexts in which they do not fit. He seems to have little to no grasp of the universally understood hermeneutical principle that meaning is determined by context.

On other occasions he redefines terms to fit the point he is hammering, e.g. in James 2 he redefines works as “obedient actions” and quotes James 2:20-24, 26 substituting “obedient actions” for works throughout. (217)

In his exposition of the verse “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (1 Sam 15:23) Bevere attempts to retranslate the verse as “rebellion is witchcraft” since the Hebrew text infers the “is .” Again, he plays fast and loose with the meaning of the text as understood by the translators who are expert in Hebrew, to make points homiletically.

He then continues to build a case that since rebellion is witchcraft those in rebellion fall under the curse placed upon those who practice witchcraft. In this context he takes Paul’s rhetorical question to the Galatian churches, “O foolish Galatians, Who has bewitched you . . .? He states: “The bewitchment involved in disobeying God’s word, not any curses that sorcerers conjured up, Why? Because rebellion is witchcraft! In essence the church in Galatia came under a witchcraft curse because of disobedience.” (76)

· Years ago, I wrote my Th.M. thesis on the book of Galatians (for those who are interested, I applied the method of Discourse Analysis to the entire books of Galatians. It is posted at: http://www.bible.org/series.php?series_id=73 ) This was a slow and painstaking analysis that took more than four hundred hours to complete. The point was to trace the argument (the case Paul was building) of Galatians. I discovered something remarkable. Everything stated in Galatians leads up to or flows from Galatians 5:1: "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not be subject to the yoke of slavery.” In chapter 1 he calls down imprecations from heaven on anyone who would corrupt the simple gospel of Christ: “. . . If we (or an angel from heaven) should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be condemned to hell! As we have said before, and now I say again, “if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let him be condemned to hell!”

Paul was here talking about the simplicity of the gospel which was being compromised by those who wanted to add the Torah (Jewish law with all its ceremonies and particularly circumcision as its sign) but the application is wider. Many teachings have arisen over the centuries that promise protection, provision, perfection and the like. They sound good at the front end, but the results are bondage.

The phenomenon of spiritual abuse is not new. In 3 John 9 the apostle recounts spiritual abuse under the guise of authority in the person of Diotrophes.[2]

· There is a radically different ministry of the Holy Spirit in the OT as opposed to the NT. In the OT the priest was truly that, a priest who stood between the worshiper and God. In the OT not even the priests were regularly indwelt with the Holy Spirit, and the High Priest was only allowed into the actual presence of God once per year, on Yom Kippur. At the death of Christ the veil of the temple was rent top to bottom signifying that access to the very presence of God was now available to all. This leads directly into the New Testament concept of the priesthood of all believers and the reality that all believers partake equally of the Holy Spirit. Each is indwelt personally. Paul goes so far on one occasion as to identify each believer as a temple of God through the presence of the Spirit. Each believer has direct access to God without having to go through a priest or a minister. We are members of one another. A dominant image is the church is that of the body. It is not that of a spiritual aristocracy that is responsible only to God and not to the rest of the believers. There are different roles, clearly, but they are roles of service, not the authority of a dictator.

· While perhaps less problematic than some of the other weaknesses underlying the book I find a strain of ethical absolutistism that denies that there are any gray areas in moral judgments. Every situation has a right and a wrong. I believe that this position, while on the surface is attractive it is not ultimately defensible. This feeds into his thesis that we must be under cover, submitted to our spiritual authorities so as not to sin and incur divine judgment.

· In the second section of Under Cover “God’s Direct Covering,” Bevere discusses the nature of sin claiming a definitive understanding from 1 John 3:4, “Sin is lawlessness.” This claim is utterly reductionistic. I hear in the background John Wesley’s definition of sin as “a conscious act of willful disobedience (to a known law) .” While this approach on the surface claims to treat sin seriously, in reality it utterly trivializes sin, reducing it to an act of the will, a choice.

In fact in the Old Testament these sins (of willful disobedience) could not be atoned for by sacrifice. Both biblically and theologically sin is radical (from the Latin radix meaning root). If sin were merely an act of the will all we would need is strong wills to defeat it. In reality sin goes to the depth of our being. There is no part of our existence that has not been touched by its tentacles. Radical fallenness calls not for reformation, but radical redemption.

· More problematic yet is the framework in which Bevere builds his teaching. This framework is legal rather than relational. As I noted earlier, much of what Bevere has to say is true and right, but the framework in which something is presented has a profound effect on the way it is taken in. Merely having all the right pieces is not enough.

In the late second century Irenaeus, the great bishop of Lyons and opponent of Gnosticism wrote:

“Their manner of acting is just as if one, when a beautiful image of a king has been constructed by some skilful artist out of precious jewels, should then take this likeness of the man all to pieces, should rearrange the gems, and so fit them together as to make them into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed; and should then maintain and declare that this was the beautiful image of the king which the skilful artist constructed, pointing to the jewels which had been admirably fitted together by the first artist to form the image of the king, but have been with bad effect transferred by the latter one to the shape of a dog, and by thus exhibiting the jewels, should deceive the ignorant who had no conception what a king's form was like, and persuade them that that miserable likeness of the fox was, in fact, the beautiful image of the king” Against Heresies 1:8:1 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103108.htm)

Another example of framework affecting the way a doctrine is taken in can be seen in the difference in presentation of the doctrine of predestination between Calvin and Theodore Beza, his successor at Geneva. Calvin does not discuss the topic of predestination until book three of the Institutes of the Christian Religion after he has discussed at length the grace of God and the experience of that grace when the believer is incorporated into Christ. With that context having been set, he discusses predestination in the context of the love and acceptance of the believer vouchsafed by both the witness of the Spirit in the heart of the believer and the promise of Scripture. Beza, on the other hand, moves the discussion of the concept of predestination from the doctrine of salvation and places it under the doctrine and attributes of God. While not changing the teaching, this repositioning of the doctrine of predestination changed the whole tenor of its truth. In Calvin it functioned as a comfort, under Beza and the later Reformers it gave the feel that God was distant and arbitrary and that man (oops—I need to be politically correct) human beings were but marionettes whose strings were being pulled. It was a cold I-it relationship rather than a warm personal I-thou relationship (to use Martin Buber’s terminology).

My point here is that Bevere places his discussion within the framework of performance, the framework of slaves not sons and in so doing existentially compromises the transforming effect of the gospel in the life of the believer.

· Bevere quotes Romans 13:1ff as an absolute command, and then broadens it from the context of civil authorities/rulers to the sphere of spiritual authority.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except by God’s appointment, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by God. So the person who resists such authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will incur judgment. (NET)

In its context judgment refers clearly to the police and court system. In the shift to spiritual authority Bevere turns this judgment into a direct spiritual judgment from God—something nowhere even suggested in the passage.

Quoting these verses alone make them sound absolute, however if we are even to look at the book of Acts and Galatians, we get quite a different picture.

Early in the book of Acts the apostles are arrested in the temple and ordered not to preach about Christ and the resurrection. The response was not one of obedience and submission—remember the Sanhedrin were both political and religious authorities in Israel (under the higher authority of Rome)—instead there was a challenge (Acts 4:19ff) on the occasion of their first arrest, and flat out defiance on their second appearance before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:27ff).

Paul too, on the basis of his Roman citizenship regularly challenged the Roman authorities when they overstepped their bounds and attempted to have him flogged without trial.

Even more telling is Paul’s confrontation with Peter in Antioch (Gal. 2:11ff). While Paul had received his call directly from the Lord, Peter had acted as his mentor in some fashion (Gal. 1:18) [3]. What is remarkable is not only that Paul had the audacity to confront Peter publicly (Peter was the preeminent apostle in the early church and one of the inner circle of three that accompanied Jesus during his earthly ministry) but he did it without a private meeting first. (Horrors—he did not follow Jesus’ teaching in Matt 18:15ff). When the truth of the Gospel was at stake normal protocol did not apply!

· This brings us to the rule of conscience. Keeping rules is a much easier way to live one’s life than being informed by a conscience. Rule keeping does not call for moral acumen and judgment. One just has to know the appropriate rule/law and apply it in a given situation. Conscience is a complex part of our being. It is that aspect of our being which serves as our moral compass, but it does not come from the factory “pre-programmed.” We might say that we are hard-wired for moral judgment; the software is slowly programmed over the years of our childhood. The context in which our conscience is programmed makes all the difference in the world. Is that context one of love, condemnation, or conditional acceptance? As has been noted:

. . . where the inevitable demands in child training are involved without first establishing a relationship of trust, moral training becomes a punitive, fear-ridden, process in which “goodness” is reduced to the avoidance of evil rather than the attainment of positive virtue. The child feels he must earn parental affection through external righteousness in this context of conditional love. His conscience then becomes negative, inflexible, and unreflective and his sense of guilt an unhealthy one. This is the conscience of the moralists who “tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law” (Matt 23:23). Just as acceptance of the positional doctrines frees the Christian to fellowship with Christ and these doctrines mature him, so the experience of trust prior to the invoking of demand lays a foundation of grace under moral instruction which frees the child to grow morally and spiritually. What is taught is important. The emotional climate in which it is taught is equally important. Either it is infused with the spirit of Christ or the Spirit of the Pharisee. Neglect of either right content or right spirit in moral instruction is detrimental. (ZPBE, s.v conscience)

Conscience forms a vital part of the Christian’s spiritual life. In the vision of the Apostle Paul conscience plays a supreme place, more important than law itself. We find that to violate one’s conscience is a supremely serious affair (even if one’s conscience has qualms about things that are objectively permissible), and to induce another to violate his conscience even more serious. We are above all called upon to do what we think is right, and under no conditions are we to violate our conscience even if told to do so by someone we respect as a spiritually mature individual or a spiritual authority. To follow the example or instruction of a more mature believer or spiritual authority when we are not convinced of the rightness of the action brings upon us condemnation. In the words of Paul it leads us to “destroy ourselves.” (1 Cor 8:11) (Time does not permit me to develop this further but read both Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8. Note here how the contemporary church has inverted the definitions of weak and strong!)

· The issue of legalism: As noted above the teaching of obedience to spiritual authority leads naturally (and I do not think that it is too much to say) inevitably to legalism. Paul Morris, Ph.D. a pastor and theologian and one of the co-workers with Chuck Colson in the early days of Prison Fellowship has written a magnificent article entitled “Legalism—the original sin?” (http://reform-network.net/?p=1462) What follows are excerpts from that article:

In the rabbinical teachings, it is called the Mishna, the first section of the Talmud, and sets forth early oral interpretations of the Scriptures compiled about 200 A.D. If Judaism has turned the interpretation of Scripture into a prodigious legal elaboration of its rules and sanctions, we Christians have turned it into an art form. We have made legalism the primordial philosophy of the practice of faith. This leads us to this definition of legalism:

Legalism is a philosophy of religious practice wherein faith is expressed by

adherence to a command and obedience infrastructure.

Of course, it is only attempted adherence, and it is more sophistry than philosophy. But we define it so owing to the fact that legalism represents a point of view. A philosophical stance of perspective. That perspective is to view relationship with God through the lens of obedience. A distinctive of this view is that short of obedience, relationship is severely fractured at best and does not exist at worst.

To the extent that a believer perceives God (and his representatives: e.g., any human religious authority) as a Commander and himself as an obeyer; to that extent, he is a legalist. If the foundational structure of his faith is built on this legal paradigm, then by definition, he is a legalist. Or perhaps it would be kinder to say that his faith is suffering from the disease of legalism.

Morris takes Bill Gothard and his Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts as a prime example of the mind of the legalist.

Gothard and others like him preach faith as form; structure. People flock to it because they see such form as the "answer" to their dysfunctional lives. They have not discovered the core and foundational being of love and how it affects behavior. They have not discovered it or they do not believe it. In either case, they have succumbed to the paralyzing disease of legalism.

When religious addicts create a toxic faith system, God is lost in the process. In God's place, rules are implemented that serve only to further the empire of religious addiction. As new people come into the toxic faith system, they are indoctrinated into the rules rather than strengthened in a relationship with God. The rules reinforce addiction, not faith. Addiction leads to conformity to a predictable pattern of behavior, often blocking faithful following of God. It is hard for these toxic faith practitioners to realize that Christ put down the rigid, legalistic system of the religion of His day. They become even more dysfunctional.

It is not long before they learn that consistent application of the formulistic, sequential steps they were taught in the seminars do not work. They are far too simplistic to apply uniformly to life's multitude of complexities. And sadly, their faith becomes so deformed and twisted by the mountains of rules, formulas and "answers," that if it were possible, they would abandon it altogether. They drown in their mishnas.

It is appalling that the one thing Jesus said sets believers apart from non-believers is so profoundly discounted. The quintessential irony is that believers wish to become like non-believers: governed by law instead of love and grace. It is painfully obvious that if people learned to love and respect one another; if people perceived one another through the eyes of compassion; if people actually followed the "golden rule," there would be no need for the making of laws. Plainly, there is a compelling need for civil and criminal law. But the people of God should not philosophically identify with this secular ethic. Believers should lead the way and help the spiritually impoverished to know that we are "Christians" by our love. A love demonstrated by acts of love toward them and toward our relationships with each other.

The Law has served abundantly well to demonstrate that we need the redemption that belief in the death, burial and resurrection in Jesus Christ brings. The Law has indeed brought us to Christ. Without it, we might have missed him. With it, we see how evil we are and how desperately we need his love, forgiveness and grace. In this the Law has succeeded beyond our ability to imagine.

Now having been accepted by God in this grace, the Law no longer functions as a standard by which believers are measured. When faced with a moral choice, the force of love compels us to choose right instead of wrong. But if we do not, the Law will not crush us because it has already crushed Christ. We are forgiven. We are picked up, brushed off and encouraged to go and sin no more. If we do, we are picked up again and told the same thing. And again. And again, ad infinitum.

Relaxing with Depravity:

St. Francis of Assisi [this is an incorrect attribution—it is from the “Serenity Prayer” written by Reinhold Niebuhr] was prayed, "Lord grant that I may accept the things I cannot change . . . " Acceptance of reality may seem the obvious and logical thing to do. Yet why is it so difficult? Why should Francis pray such a prayer?

That we are a sinful people, that I am a sinful man is a fait accompli -- an established fact. Francis Schaeffer observes: "In the area of morality, . . . man cannot escape the fact of the motions of a true right and wrong in himself; not just a sociological or hedonistic morality, but true morality, true right and true wrong. And yet beginning with himself he cannot bring forth absolute standards and cannot even keep the poor relative ones he has set up. Thus in the area of morality, as in rationality, trying to be what he is not, as he was made to be in relationship to God, he is crushed and damned by what he is."

Why do we as believers "try to be what we are not?" Why do we struggle? Why do we fight this fight? It is a lost cause. We will never win it. We cannot be anything other than what we are. If that is true, then we must accept it if we are ever going to transcend it. Paul the apostle observed, "By the grace of God, I am what I am." In this remark he was not boasting of his person or position. He was not boasting at all for it follows upon these words, "For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God." This man who could never do what he wanted to do and often did what he did not want to do came to rest only in his relationship with Christ. He learned this, ostensibly from God. He told the Corinthian believers of his struggle:

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

We will not debate the identity of Paul's thorn, but we can describe it: It was evil! He perceived its origin as coming from Satan. Three times he pleaded with God to remove this evil thing. Three times he was refused. "My grace is sufficient," said the Father. "You must learn to relax in my grace, Paul." is the message behind these words. The apostle was no different than any of the rest of us. He too, was an evil man. When faced with a moral choice, out of love for his Savior he chose right -- most of the time -- perhaps. But there were times he chose wrong. There were times in which the beloved apostle was a jerk. Does that surprise us? It shouldn't. It should comfort the rest of us jerks. The benefits of such rest become obvious: "For when I am weak, then I am strong." With convincing erudition and acumen Feuerbach notes, "But I cannot have the idea of moral perfection without at the same time being conscious of it as a law for me. Moral perfection depends, at least for the moral consciousness, not on the nature, but on the will -- it is a perfection of will, perfect will. I cannot conceive perfect will, the will which is in unison with law, which is itself law, without at the same time regarding it as an object of will, i.e., as an obligation for myself. The conception of the morally perfect being is no merely theoretical, inert, conception, but a practical one, calling me to action, to imitation, throwing me into strife, into disunion with myself; for while it proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not."

We are indeed, what we are -- and that by the grace of God. We will never be any different because of our weak attempts to observe perfect standards. If a choice is to be made between Law and Love, we must choose Love. That is what Jesus did repeatedly. We can only do what sinful people do who in some measure allow the Holy Spirit to empower them.

"We can say personality is shown by that which thinks, acts, and feels. Let us think of acting. Here is will and action -- but everything cuts across my will. I would do a certain thing, but I cannot put my will into infinite action, unlimited action. Even in the small area of a painter's canvas, I cannot do it. I cannot have an unlimited action in the smallest things of life, let alone the largest. And so if I am demanding infinite freedom, whether it is in the whole of life, or in a small area of life, I cannot have it; I cannot be God in action and practice. So again I fall to the earth, crushed with natural tensions in myself, and I lie there like a butterfly that someone has touched, with all the lovely things gone from its wings."

To learn to relax in grace means to release the burden of responsibility in keeping the Law to God. What are God's expectations of us? God demands perfection. We cannot meet that demand. That is why Christ died. Only in Christ are we made perfect. God expects us to sin. "He knows our frame, that we are but dust." notes the psalmist. God is relaxed with the fact that we are sinful because he has cared for it in the death of his Son. There is nothing left for us to do but to understand this basic truth from the Old Testament:

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. "When a frightened or injured child gives himself over to his mother, comes to her and is wrapped in her loving arms, he possesses greater security than he will ever know as an adult. There may be a very ferocious storm and gale-like winds pounding against the walls of the house, lightning turning the sky to moments of fire and thunder shaking every bone in his body, but the child will not fear. He is safe, he is secure. He has surrendered himself to his loving mother and places all his confidence and trust in her." -- Fr. Franklyn McAfee.

For whatever the terrible thorns or storms in our lives, we too will find great rest and comfort in the loving acceptance and forgiveness from the One to whom we surrender ourselves.

Conclusion

I want to wind this up by saying that while I find Bevere’s position as taken particularly in the early portion of Under Cover utterly problematic on many levels, and truly dangerous to the spiritual health of the church, in the latter part of the book he tries to qualify some of the positions he has taken early in the book. The problem I see is the qualifications, which are well stated and carefully articulated, cut against the larger broad brush strokes that he has painted from the beginning.

As I said earlier, much of what he says is good. But the framework he uses is one that is the cyanide in the Kool-Aid. While he may not go down this path himself, working out the implicit presuppositions of his teaching, I don’t have to be a prophet to foresee that his followers will. And when they do they will unleash a new torrent of spiritual abuse that effectively undermines the freedom produced by the gospel and enslaves God’s children in chains of bondage. In so doing they will come under the same curse that Paul pronounced upon those who were adding to the gospel Paul proclaimed to the Galatian church.

[1] “The Christian must not uncritically accept—or reject—spiritual teaching but must be careful in all matters to distinguish the good and hold on to it. He will thus avoid ‘evil in any form’ (Phillips).” NIV Bible Commentary on 1 Thess 5:20-21, Pradis Edition (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1994).

[2] Diotrephes appears to be an influential person (perhaps the leader) in a local church known to Gaius, but to which Gaius himself does not belong. The description of Diotrephes as one who loves to be firstacknowledge the written communication mentioned by the author at the beginning of v. 9 (and thus did not recognize the author’s apostolic authority), and furthermore (v. 10) refuses to show any hospitality to the traveling missionaries (welcome the brothers) already mentioned by the author. It has been suggested that the description “loves to be first” only indicates that Diotrephes sought prominence or position in this church, and had not yet attained any real authority. But his actions here suggest otherwise: He is able to refuse or ignore the author’s previous written instructions (v. 9), and he is able to have other people put out of the church for showing hospitality to the traveling missionaries (v. 10) suggests he is arrogant, and his behavior displays this: He refuses to

[3] See the note http://net.bible.org/bible.php?book=Gal&chapter=1#v41

The Coming Evangelical Collapse?

This reflection is a response to "The Coming Evangelical Collapse"

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html

by Michael Spencer published in The Christian Science Monitor (March 10 2009)

I have for years believed that American Evangelicalism (not Christianity) was skating on thin ice, spiritually and intellectually. As a movement we (not all of us individually) have suffered from a host of problems that began generations ago, as early as the origin of the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century.

We have viewed Christianity individualistically—“am I right with God?” (not that this is unimportant) And in so doing have privatized the faith and  have lost in large measure the larger vision of the redemption not just of individuals but society and the world.

While Christianity was founded in America by those of Puritan stock who had a high regard for scholarship and the intellectual study of both theology and creation, the heirs of the Second Great Awakening have exchanged intellect for feeling in exactly the same way as did the developing liberalism.  When Pentecostalism came on the scene beginning in 1906, it pushed the envelope of anti-intellectualism to the point that you had to "check your brains as the door" when you entered church. To this day as a tradition, it still decries formal study and questioning as damaging to faith.

In the late nineteenth century and continuing through the 20th century we have withdrawn from American society which was founded on Christian/biblical ideals and principles (although many of the founding fathers were either deists or unorthodox they still shared a Christian worldview) and turned the seats of power over to secularism.

The Enlightenment, (c. 1650- 1800) made reason as opposed to divine revelation the final arbiter of truth. Through the 19th century, this assumption increasingly transformed all Western society. By the early 20th century, this presupposition was seen not only in society but also in a large part of the Church. Fundamentalism arose in opposition to this shift. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the first three decades of the twentieth century saw mainstream denominations capitulate to the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) and abandon their historic orthodox moorings with reference to the sinfulness of man, and the person and work of Christ. and even God as trinity. From a cultural perspective, the Scopes Trial (1925) served to nail the lid on the coffin of historic conservative Protestant Christianity in America.

In the wake of this defeat, the Fundamentalists withdrew from society as a whole and became inwardly focused, anti-intellectual, and other worldly--focusing on the imminent expectation of the rapture and using this as an excuse not to act as salt and light in society, claiming that to do so was like polishing brass on a sinking ship ("It's all going to burn anyway").

Modern evangelicalism was born in the late 1940's when Carl Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry advocated a departure from the "Come out from among them" mentality of fundamentalism and a re-engagement with culture and the life of the mind. At that time in our history, the term "American Evangelical Scholar" was an oxymoron. To be an Evangelical was to be anti-intellectual. On an intellectual level, this re-engagement has met with considerable success. Although it took about a half a century, true Evangelical Scholarship is now a reality.

However, on the popular level the engagement with culture has been something close to disaster.Theologically and intellectually unequipped to deal with the change in worldview, Evangelicalism capitulated to cultural values and lost its distinction from “the world.” It adopted the very same type of political aspirations and tactics that a generation previously it had decried in Liberal Christianity. Evangelicalism identified itself with conservative (largely Republican) politics and became just another special interest group on the horizon that wanted a seat at the political table.

Over the past two generations, we have become so immersed in our national culture that our lifestyle is indistinguishable from that of the non-Christian and secular society. The divorce rate among Evangelicals in the country is at a level that corresponds to that of society as a whole. In the Bible Belt, it is even greater than the divorce rate of the surrounding culture.

We as a movement decry abortion, yet about 40% of the abortions performed in the US are performed on self-proclaimed evangelical women. It is easier for these women to commit what they believe to be murder than to live with the shame and ostracism of the community that was supposed to love them. We, as a group, have lost our moral authority to speak on this issue.

The ethical reputation of evangelicals in business is so notorious as to make the term Evangelical Ethics an oxymoron. Many Christians let alone non-Christians will not do business with those who make public their evangelical commitment.

Twenty years ago when I was on the Student Life committee at a small Christian College we saw the same behavior among our students (promiscuity, abortion, alcohol abuse and drug abuse and homosexuality) that was prevalent among the broader society. (This was one of the school’s dirty little secrets that it tried not to let be known to the constituency for fear of harm to the college’s image.) What I saw was that in many cases parents who had failed to pass on the faith to their children sent them to a Christian college to make up for their failure.

In 1986 Francis Schaeffer published The Great Evangelical Disaster, addressing the question of the church’s abdication of its responsibility to truth. Ten years later in 1996 Mike Regele and Mark Schultz published The Death of the Church in which they argued, based on generational analysis, cultural trends and several other factors, that within a 20-40 year time frame the Church in America would look like the church in Europe—small, and marginalized within a sea of secularism. Michael Spenser’s article in the Christian Science Monitor echoes these same themes, but from some additional perspectives.

In our tradition, we have been committed to evangelism, but we have generally viewed evangelism strictly in terms of conversion, i.e. praying to receive Christ as savior. However, the call of the Lord in the Great Commission (Matt. 28: 18-19) is not to MAKE DECISIONS, it is to MAKE DISCIPLES. This I suspect is near the heart of our failure. Forty-five years ago as I entered my teenage years fundamentalists/evangelicals knew and believed the Bible. (Admittedly, some of that belief was shallow and hermeneutically suspect but that is a topic for another discussion.) Today, the knowledge of the Bible in Evangelicalism is abysmal. One noted Evangelical New Testament scholar has observed that while Evangelical Scholarship has never been at a higher point—for the first time in about a century we can go toe to toe with liberal scholarship and hold our own—in the Churches we have entered a new Dark Ages with reference to Bible knowledge. As a theologian, I would argue that in the area of theology the situation is parallel but maybe even more bleak.

A bit over a decade ago, Evangelical pollster and sociologist George Barna concluded based on numerous surveys that nearly 40% of the individuals sitting in the pews in Evangelical Churches do not cognitively know enough theology even to be saved. Salvation was an experience rather than a belief in concrete facts. (I am not suggesting that experience is not involved-but that we by our failure to teach theology and the whole counsel of God, have emptied the faith of content and opened the door for Christians to commit idolatry whereby we create God out of our own desires and experience rather than who He has revealed himself to be.)

To me this is a sign of not only failure but of doom.

The parable of the Sower and the Seeds is telling. It would appear to me that American evangelicalism has become like the rocky soil on which the seed was sown. It rapidly germinates and grows impressively, but withers quickly because there is no root.

The Church as the Church will survive. But I fear that American evangelicalism is spiritually and theologically and intellectually bankrupt, having spent its intellectual capital and failing to heed the warnings of those who saw its headlong rush toward the cliff.

I may be overly pessimistic. But as a student of history I have in history repeatedly seen trends that lead to collapses. It is possible that God will intervene with another Awakening akin to the First Great Awakening. If He does "all bets are off." But given current trends I don't see much cause for optimism for long-term transformation in our tradition.