exit-interviews-march-april-2012 by Modern Reformation

Years of

Modern Reformation

vol.21 | no.2 | MARch-APRil 2012 | $6.50

The 5 Th An n uAl Mo ck i ng b i r d co nfe r e n c e

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts: Honesty, Humility and the Grace of God

April 19-21, 2012 St. Georgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Church New York City

Keynote SpeAKer: Michael Horton Additional Speakers include: Aaron Zimmerman and David Zahl of Mockingbird

For more details as they develop, or to pre-register, go to conference.mbird.com

n oW AVAilA b le!

The Merciful Impasse: The Sermon on the Mount for Those Whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve Crashed (and Burned) and This American Gospel: A Companion to the NPR Series.

MOCKINGBIRD MINISTRIES Mockingbird Ministries seeks to connect the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life in fresh and accessible ways. We do this primarily, but not exclusively, via publications, conferences, and online resources. www.mbird.com

features vol.21 | no.2 | march-april 2012

20 30 34 39 42

Exit Interviews

EXIT TO EASTERN ORTHODOXY BY alis on sailer bennett

exit to the emerging church by tim keel

exit to liberal epis copalianism by julianna gustafson

exit to cultural atheism by michael she rmer

exit to atheism/agnosticism by jeff lord

Common Objections

by LEON BROWN

Abandoning Evangelicalism?

By shane rosenthal

Jesus + Nothing = Everything

By tullian tchividjian

From the Hallway ››

When Your “Testimony” Is Boring

By MICHAEL S. HORTON

cover image: © Bill Hornstein / GETTY IMAGES

ModernReformation.org

visit the store Feed your inner theology geek. Be sure to check out White Horse Inn’s online store. In addition to books, you’ll find mp3s, study kits, and videos for sale— everything you need to keep the conversation going offline.

Visit W h iteHo r seInn.org/store

departments 06 08 14 15 49 58 60 63 Letter from the editor

By ryan glomsrud

interview ›› Exit Stage West

MichAEl S. Horton with christian smith

response ›› Some Things Just Never Change

by michAEl S. Horton

Interview ›› Exit Stage East

MichAEl S. Horton with peter gilquist

Book Reviews

S cott W. Hahn, Kay S . Hymowitz, Paul E. Miller,

and William B oekestein

Geek Squad ›› The Problem of Assurance

by Ryan Glomsrud

back story ›› Exit Interviews

by Michael s. horton

FINAL THOUGHTS

by Michael s. horton

Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Design Director José Reyes for Metaleap Creative, metaleapcreative.com Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud (Letter from the Editor & Reviews), Michael S. Horton Designers Joshua Baker, Tiffany Forrester Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith Modern Reformation © 2012 All rights reserved. ISSN-1076-7169 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido, CA 92027 (800) 890-7556 info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org Subscription Information US 1 YR $32 2 YR $58 Digital Only 1 YR $25 US Student 1 YR $26 Canada 1 YR $39 2 YR $70 Europe 1 YR $58 2 YR $104 Other 1 YR $65 2 YR $118

ModernReformation.org

letter from the editor

Ryan Glomsrud executive editor

efections from evangelical churches and parachurch organizations continue apace. Where it used to be mainline churches hemorrhaging worshippers, as discouraged congregants went in search of a faithful gospel ministry, now it is evangelicals facing the numbers crunch. “Doom, Boom, and Gloom” is the name of a popular financial report, but it could just as easily suffice for a potted history of American evangelicalism. This issue of Modern Reformation presents a series of “Exit Interviews” with those who have recently passed through the turnstile and weren’t shy about informing us of their departure. Why are they leaving? Where are they going? You’ll read firsthand what research and polling also confirms. Many leave-takers have stopped church shopping and are simply calling it quits. Some embrace another religion, or opt for their own make-shift spirituality. Others are turning to Roman Catholicism (Exit Stage West) or Eastern Orthodoxy (Exit Stage East). A few turn to some version of liberal Protestantism, but just as many leave for the so-called “New Atheism.” Subscribers beware: the lead interview with Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton and sociologist Christian

Smith is no breezy read, but will force you to recognize the importance and remarkable relevance of the sixteenth-century Reformation for evangelical theology today. Sharpen your pencils and prepare to follow a top-shelf debate about ecumenism and mainline Lutheran capitulation to Roman Catholicism, for that in fact played a major role in Smith’s recent exit from evangelicalism. The same caliber of discussion may be found in the review by Professor Bryan Estelle of Roman Catholic apologist Scott Hahn’s recent book on biblical theology. Theology should never be divorced from the real life drama of faith and repentance. Shane Rosenthal, producer of White Horse Inn, narrates his own conversion from nonpracticing Judaism to functional atheism, evangelicalism, and finally Reformation theology. However, not all conversion stories are very interesting, so Michael Horton reminds us that our own lives are ultimately bound up with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, more than our own sappy emotional soap operas. This is a deeply held conviction of Tullian Tchividjian, who writes about his experience of trial and testing in pastoral ministry. He exhorts us that the gospel is for Christians too, even pastors, and is the only genuine power unto salvation. The best kind of theology refuses to simply turn inward, which is why regular contributor Leon Brown presents a short series on personal evangelism. He addresses three common objections that he hears in the public square. The reality of apologetics in action confronts all of us with the importance of knowing what we believe and why we believe it. So read these interviews and press on to further biblical study and theological reflection. Explore with us the many reasons, the better reasons, to search out Reformation alternatives to generic evangelicalism instead of looking for the exit.

“our own lives are ultimately bound up with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.”

i n t e r v i e wS

EXIT interviewS with

CHRISTIAN SMITH & PETER GILQUIST

interview

E X IT STAGE W EST Michael S. Horton with christian smith

People grow weary of evangelicalism all the time, and in what follows we give ear to several ex-evangelicals as they tell their stories and give their reasons. Listening is an important aspect of apologetics. It’s important not to rush into a defense of the faith without knowing first what issues are at stake—not if we want our apologetics to be personal. That is our aim in these “Exit Interviews.”

hristian Smith is a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame and the author of numerous books on faith and cultural issues. He was the first to describe the religion of emerging American adults as “therapeutic moralistic deism.” In this interview, we discuss his more recent conversion to Roman Catholicism and his book, How to Go From Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in 95 Difficult Steps.

q The title of your new book itself suggests you may be writing “Ninety-Five Theses for a Counter-Reformation.” a. It’s kind of tongue in cheek. I wouldn’t

call it a “counter-reformation.” But the number of steps I think it roughly takes most people was in that ballpark, so I thought that was a convenient number. Obviously it does refer to Luther’s theses.

The first half of the book focuses on what you call “normal evangelicalism.” Could you explain what you mean by this?

First of all, the argument of the book is that I don’t think any evangelical becomes Catholic by looking at some new evidence and becoming convinced. It requires an entire paradigm shift, to have some fundamental questions about the general approach of the status quo, and this is something most American vanilla evangelicals will understand. It’s a certain subculture, a certain world with certain institutions and parachurch ministries: you go to a Bible study, you read Christian books, your kids go to a Christian college, and you’re a nice person. I try to spell out what that looks and feels like as the baseline from which a lot of people are quite content, but some people realize that there are problems here and feel the need for some kind of change. The paradigm is supported by a whole subculture then, so that you’re saying that evangelicals aren’t necessarily troubled by the challenges to that paradigm?

That’s right. It’s possible for many people to not have very many difficulties, or what I call Photo by JOSH MEISTER

in the book “anomalies”—things that just don’t fit or can’t be explained. And really, I think as long as people are comfortable in certain church settings or don’t think too hard about certain questions, it’s possible for them to continue on. In some sense the epitome of it for me is the Christian bookstore these days, where the theology section is paltry, and what’s in it you may not think is even theology; then there are whole other sections of kitsch and popular books on how to live your life successfully. In general, increasingly, I think that what’s demanded by Americans out of religion is moralism. They want help to live a moral life and have social control; they want help to cope and get their worst impulses under control. It’s kind of self-management, therapeutic stuff as we’ve talked about in the past. And the book publishing industry is highly responsive to that. That’s what sells, so that’s what’s out there on the Christian bookstore shelves. BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION I see the same problem. There are books on how Christ can help you live the spirit-filled life, but not a lot of books on who Christ is or the Holy Spirit.In step 25, you describe evangelical Bible studies that end up not focusing on the Bible at all.

I’m sure there are a lot of good Bible studies out there, and a lot of well-intentioned people, so I don’t want to go overboard. But it’s not only my opinion. There have been some recent academic studies by anthropologists who have examined evangelical Bible studies. They report that people don’t pay much attention to what the text a c t u a l l y s a y s . Pe o p l e search around in their heads, their memories, and their feelings for something that seems to connect to the text. And then they conclude, “Oh yeah, that makes me feel like…” or “What I think is that…” or “In my opinion, what it means is…” Usually the text is serving as a pretext to affirm something they already believe, rather than as an authoritative text to challenge what they already believe. There’s no other way to put it. There’s a lot of sharing of ignorance. You mention the passion for relevance, kitsch, bookstores that aren’t really bookstores but gift shops, scandals that undermine the integrity of the church, and subjective moralistic emphases in preaching, but aren’t all the things that frustrate you and me about evangelicalism also present in the Roman Catholic Church?

a. Actually, some of that isn’t present in the

Catholic Church, or it’s different the way it’s present. But let’s set that aside and focus on the part that is present. In the end, those things that annoy me about evangelicalism and annoy you shouldn’t finally adjudicate the matter. I present them in the book as the first steps of realizing that something doesn’t add up here, but they’re not really the reasons somebody would become Catholic. The real reason people would become Catholic is that they believe that after having worked through the anomalies and having a crisis of understanding, in the end the Catholic ModernReformation.org

i n t e r v i e w - E X IT ST A GE W EST

Church is the church in which the fullness of the gospel subsists, and that this is where one ought to cast one’s lot and do one’s best to help it out and move in the direction of faithfulness. In other words, I don’t think that in the end the question can be solved on empirical grounds such as, “Well, this works better.” That’s more of evangelicalism’s problem: “Find me a church that makes me happier.” I think it has to be resolved on theological grounds on which people disagree. Then, however, you have to acknowledge that the Catholic Church has a lot of problems, and there are reasons for that; but this is the place to be, to hang my hat, and to work toward greater faithfulness. I say in the book that one of the reasons the Catholic Church has so many problems is because all the Protestants have left. It’s like a body that’s been cut in half, and then half of the body has been mutilated into tiny little pieces. Do we really expect that to be a healthy body? Catholicism needs its Protestant brothers and sisters.

know there’s a difference between sola scriptura and solo scriptura, which is how most American evangelicals treat the Bible, and which I fully acknowledge is somewhat distinct from a more sophisticated Reformation approach. Nevertheless, that’s how it’s worked out. The idea is that ordinary people can read the Bible, and it tells them everything. In fact, that kind of approach generates unbelievable fragmentation and disagreement that’s irresolvable. So I finally concluded that the idea of “just appeal to the Bible” doesn’t fix anything; it doesn’t persuade anyone; it doesn’t resolve anything. THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION Over the years, I have been growing more and more convinced of the importance of catholicity, the unity of the church, which I know

Lutherans and Catholics Together?

I couldn’t agree with you more that the issues have got to be doctrinal and not just cultural, superficial, and pragmatic. Turning to theology then, why did you leave evangelicalism to become a Roman Catholic? What made it all unravel for you?

a. In retrospect, I

see that it was really a thirteen-year process of development. One of the key phases or moments in it for me was realizing that the Bible alone doesn’t settle any disputes. I

cumenism is the term applied to organized discussions between churches to build bridges and

encourage unity across Christian denominations and communions. Most date the beginnings of the modern ecumenical movement to the early twentieth century, especially after WWII with the rise of the World Council of Churches. Founded in 1947, the Lutheran World Federation began cooperating with the World Council of Churches as well as other Christian organizations. In 1999, the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Fed-

eration concluded lengthy discussions with a “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” signed, ironically, on Reformation Day, October 31, 1999. As is evident in the interview, this Joint Declaration continues to be cited by evangelicals and Catholics alike as reason to move beyond the Reformation. Interpretations are contested, but MR regards the Joint Declaration as a compromised and fatally flawed presentation of the gospel for the reasons given in the interview.

Rev. Ishmael Noko of the Lutheran World Federation and Bishop Kasper, Secretary, Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, two of the signers of the Joint Declaration on October 31, 1999.

is understood many different ways. But the increasing fragmentation, disunity, disagreement, inability to get together, even in evangelicalism where people say, “Well, we agree on the basics, but it’s just peripheral things that we don’t, and we can cooperate.” That’s not true. People fundamentally disagree on all sorts of core things, but the scandal of disunity and the scandal of conflict and fragmentation became huge for me. In 1999, I learned that the Catholic Church and most of the world’s Lutherans settled their disagreements about justification with a document not many people know about. Basically, they removed their anathemas from each other and said they essentially agree in substance on justification by faith, and I would say that essentially the Catholic Church moved toward the Lutheran position. In any case, you have the formal principle and the material principle of the Reformation—justification by faith—and I think the Catholic Church’s teaching on that is now orthodox. Do you think the “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” has really solved the issue of justification?

The Catholic Church says on record that salvation of any human being is absolutely and completely the result of Christ’s meriting salvation and justifying people and saving them from their sins. It has nothing to do in its source with human good works. Any good works are nothing but a working out of Christ’s good works that works through them. A lot of us grew up with poor caricatures of Roman Catholic teaching, and we didn’t realize there is a doctrine of grace, even a doctrine of justification in Roman theology. It’s just different from the doctrine the Reformers believed was taught in Scripture. I have

serious doubts about whether the Catholic catechism and the contemporary teaching of the Roman Catholic Church actually do agree with the Reformation understanding of salvation by grace, not just in its source but in the middle and at the end. It seems as if that’s one of the big rubs between our communions. Of course, we know that Rome teaches that initial grace, the first justification that occurs in baptism, is all of grace, but then after that it’s an increase of justification by cooperating with grace, and finally God’s grace and our merits together winning that final justification. All along grace is present, but it’s not grace alone.

I don’t think that this characterizes the teaching as I understand it. For example, in the Catholic Church we use the word “merit,” and it means human merit, but that human merit is completely participating in or enjoying the fruits that Christ won in his obedience. Essentially, what I argue in the book is that even when we get past the absolutely false or only half-true understandings that many Protestants have of Catholicism, there are tricky issues around how language gets used, nuances of meaning. The Catholic tradition is not exactly how John Calvin would put things, but I really don’t find it at all unorthodox. Clearly, to me, the only two potentially reasonable possibilities for sustaining orthodox Christian faith into the future in the West are Catholicism or historic confessional Protestantism. Once Protestantism starts to move away from the confessional approach and a self-conscious embracing of history, then I think it’s all over in the long run. In my view, the Joint Declaration is far from getting the ModernReformation.org

i n t e r v i e w - E X IT ST A GE W EST

Roman Catholic partner in the dialogue to move in a Reformation direction, and actually represents more of a capitulation on the Lutheran side, as evidenced when it says that “the justification of sinners is forgiveness and being made righteous.” That’s all the medieval church ever said. The Reformation would never have happened if being made righteous was something that the Reformers thought justification was. That was the whole point of the debate. Even if the Joint Declaration “solved” the differences between the Vatican and the World Lutheran Federation, what about the Vatican newspaper citing the Council of Trent, the official statement, reminding Roman Catholics that they must hold as dogma that “eternal life is at one and the same time grace and the reward given by God for good works and merits,” and adding that the Joint Declaration does not represent a consensus on justification from the Vatican’s point of view.

a. Obviously, the Catholic

what they mean, we would realize there’s a central agreement on the crucial core doctrines.

What Rome Teaches

f anyone says that the sinner is justified by

faith alone, let him be anathema. If anyone says that men are justified either by the sole imputation of Christ’s righteousness, or by the sole remission of sins, let him be anathema. . . . If anyone says that this righteousness received is not preserved and also not increased before God through good works, but that those works are merely the fruits and signs of justification, but not the cause of the increase, let him be anathema. If anyone

I agree wholeheartedly that you have to account for the fact that the truths we’re trying to state are full of mystery and wonder, and they can only approximate the truth. But it does seem that the sixteenth-century opponents in the Reformation debate realized what the other party was saying and disagreed, and the Roman Catholic Church today continues to say they still hold to the Council of Trent. That’s not a newsflash; it’s not as if we believe that dogma can be reformed. We can state things differently, but we can’t disavow the canons of the Council of Trent. I’d love to hear your response to these canons. Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest, would say that he holds to the canons of the Council of Trent. But we don’t have to necessarily interpret those canons the way you’re interpreting them. And I wonder, at some point, don’t our words mean what we say? And didn’t the conversation partners in the Reformation at least have the merit—no pun intended—of understanding each other and not obfuscating?

says that the good works Church is a complicated instiof the one justified are tution, and there are different gifts of God in such a points of view. There were way that they are not some people in the church who also the good merits of were not happy with the Joint the one justified, let him Declaration. I guess I would say be anathema. that the Joint Declaration has THE COUNCIL OF TRENT I would say that there was unauthority over an article in the derstanding and misunderstandnewspaper. I would argue that ing. When Erasmus and Luther it’s necessary to make a discould not agree on the clarity of tinction between the truth that Scripture, I argue they actually had different words express and the fallible words we have to things in mind. So in the Joint Declaration, the express those truths. I think if we had the time to Catholic Church renounced all of its anathemas really sit down and parse out all of these stateagainst Lutheranism. ments, if we would ask Catholics to spell out

My question, though, is when it comes to something like the Joint Declaration, it actually does not say, “We renounce our excommunication of those who hold the views that Lutherans held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” but that “we no longer regard our conversation partner to be the group excommunicated by the anathemas of the Council of Trent.” This is because the Lutheran World Federation moved and accepted the definition of justification that Rome has always had, namely, that it involves not just imputation but actual renovation. We should mention that the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Synod, and a whole host of confessional Lutheran bodies did not sign on to this. In the case of the Lutheran World Federation, however, if the Lutherans give up Lutheranism and the mainline more liberal branches of Lutheranism are no longer Lutheran, of course the Vatican can say we no longer condemn you, because you no longer hold contemptible views. It says that our conversation partner no longer is that person we condemned in the sixteenth century.

a. To understand what words mean, one has to

put them into the larger context and understand the development, the larger language that’s being used, and so on. I think that the Catholic Church doesn’t come out and say, “We were wrong,” but I think that it is rethinking, in light of a new understanding, a way to express its doctrine of justification that is itself, in that sense, moving toward the Lutheran, and not just the Lutherans becoming Catholic. Let me put it to you this way: if this agreement of 1999 had been presented to Luther in 1520, do you think he would have started the Reformation?

Yes, because this is exactly what was presented to him in 1520, and this is exactly the view the Joint Declaration holds: that justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man. That view was exactly the view of the Roman Catholic Church, and exactly the position that Martin Luther and John Calvin said was anathema.

So when you read multiple pages in my book quoting from various Catholic sources about justification and grace and such from the catechism

“In some sense the epitome of it for me is the Christian bookstore these days, where the theology section is paltry, and what’s in it you may not think is even theology; then there are whole other sections of kitsch and popular books on how to live your life successfully.” and a lot of other official documents, this doesn’t all add up to a satisfactory doctrine to the point where it’s worth remaining separate? I’ve read the whole Catholic catechism, been involved in ecumenical discussions, and I have great respect for the heritage we both share. But I have to say that I really don’t see a renunciation of the principle of our merit contributing to the merits of Christ as an issue that has been taken off the table. I think we still disagree over the sola part of sola gratia, sola fide, solo Christo. I think it’s that participle that’s still the sticking point. No Reformer thought that the medieval church didn’t believe in Christ, faith, or grace. The whole Reformation was over whether it was Christ alone and his merits alone that justified sinners. Thank you for taking the time to interview with us. One thing I do appreciate is the spirit of the conversation, and I think we can both agree and encourage others that these are issues worth talking about. ModernReformation.org

R e s p o n s e - E X IT ST A GE W EST

SO M E THINGS JUST NEVE R CH A NGE

by MICHAEL S. HORTON

here are all sorts of absurdities in every church, in every tradition. In Roman Catholicism, for example, one still finds the sale of indulgences. It wasn’t just Tetzel five hundred years ago; in 2008 to 2009 Pope Benedict XVI issued indulgences again. In fact, it’s interesting to note that he did so for the “Year of Saint Paul.” The Vatican website reported the following: The gift of indulgences which the Roman pontiff offers to the universal church truly smoothes the way to attaining a supreme degree of inner purification. Supplicants who do this will be granted the full indulgence from temporal punishments for his or her sins, once sacramental forgiveness and pardon for any shortcomings has been obtained. The Christian faithful may benefit from the plenary indulgence, both for themselves and for the deceased, as many times as they fulfill the required conditions, but without prejudice to the norm stipulating that the plenary indulgence may be attained only once a day. The statement then discusses the conditions that include: penance, Communion, making a pilgrimage to the papal Basilica of St. Paul, devoutly reciting the Our Father and the creed, adding pious invocations in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and prayers for the supreme pontiff’s intentions. According to the papal decree, if Roman Catholics do this, “in a spirit of total detachment from any inclination to sin, they may receive time off in purgatory up to a full plenary exoneration.” In five hundred years, what has changed? This is exactly why the Reformation took place. There are indeed remnants of truly orthodox Catholic with genuinely biblical faith and practice in the Roman Catholic Church, but as a total structure the flaws go right to the foundation. In terms of authority, Rome teaches that Scripture and tradition are two

Exit to Roman Catholicism Follow-Up

tributaries of a single source of revelation. That’s why the Magisterium—the teaching office of the church—can invent sacraments, forms of worship, and even dogmas that it acknowledges aren’t found in the Bible. In terms of the gospel, Rome teaches that salvation is by grace alone, at the first, at least. And from then on, it’s a cooperative venture. As you cooperate more and more with this grace, doing good works, you hope to merit your final justification. And the merit of Mary and the saints will help too, Rome says, in this process of justification. It’s amazing, all the effort that Rome spends to reject the possibility of Christ’s righteousness being imputed to us through faith alone, while it teaches that Mary’s righteousness can be imputed to us. Regardless, you’ll still need some finishing touches on your sanctification before entering Paradise, so the fires of purgatory will be your way station depending on your merits and temporal offenses. There’s not a shred of biblical evidence for this either, of course; but as I said, none is needed. The church has the authority to create its own dogmas. Until there is an agreement on the gospel— which requires the Roman Catholic Church to repent of its errors as defined at the Council of Trent and many councils since—we can only say with the apostle Paul that if he or anyone else preaches another gospel other than the one he preached concerning the free justification of sinners through the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, let him be eternally condemned. “If I,” Paul says, “or an angel,” and we can only add, “or a pope.”

interview

E X IT STAGE E A ST

Michael S. Horton with peter gilquist

ather Peter Gilquist is chair of the Department of Missions and Evangelism for the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, a branch of the worldwide Orthodox Church. He also publishes Again magazine, a periodical for Orthodox concern, and has written an interesting book entitled Becoming Orthodox. He also was involved with the production of the Orthodox Study Bible, published by Thomas Nelson publishers. Back in the 1960s, I was involved in Campus Crusade leadership, along with a group of others who have become lifelong friends. I was the regional director in the Midwest, working out of Chicago, and John Braun was our national field coordinator. Around 1967, during our closing years in Crusade, we began to see that just doing evangelism as divorced from the church was not making a lasting impact. The more we read Scripture, the more we were convinced that we needed to be in a church. And, of course, that begs the question, which one? In the early 1970s, we began a detailed study of the early church. Our goal was to start at the end of the New Testament and try to see where the church went in history. In the process of that we discovered the ancient understanding of worship and the sacraments, and the sense of consensus in terms of interpreting the Scriptures, and we found the government or the hierarchy of the church in place at the end of the first century. Through peeling off layers, we went century by century; when we got to that split in 1054, we were forced to take sides. We studied those issues that had split the church and said, “Wait a minute. Whoever these people are, the East has kept this faith intact as it was from the beginning.”

How do you respond to people who say that this doesn’t take into account the Reformation and the Protestant side of things because the Reformation was really an attempt to recover that kind of apostolic purity? q

The Reformers went back to the Greek and Latin fathers, as well as to Scriptures, to make their arguments against Rome’s excesses. The legal character of salvation, original sin as the imputation of Adam’s guilt, and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in justification seem to be missing, and in some instances the Eastern Church outright rejected them.

a. Although there’s a huge wing of Protestantism

now that has essentially just lapsed into unbelief, my contention all along is that there are modern Protestants who take Scripture seriously and who love God; it will be a great joy for the Orthodox when they discover that wing of Protestantism and vice versa. Among the other things we have in common, one is our disdain for the power moves that Rome has pulled over the centuries. I like to say to my Protestant friends, “We called their bluff five hundred years before you did.” That’s partly funny and partly true. The East simply refused to put up with those unilateral innovations that Rome introduced back at the end of the first millennium. Then another five hundred years go by, and Martin Luther and Calvin finally yell enough. So in that sense, at least we have the mutual disdain for a common foe, although I hate to put it in those terms. As far as the doctrinal differences go, what I try to do is encourage my Protestant friends to read, for example, the commentary on the book of Romans by St. John Chrysostom that was written over a thousand years before the Reformation. My heart sings when I read that, and that sense of the juridical view of salvation, of course, is not nearly as strong as the view that came out of the Reformation. In other words, salvation was seen as far more ModernReformation.org

i n t e r v i e w - E X IT ST A GE E A ST

dynamic a process than simply a fiat. And honestly, as a former Protestant, this view has put some things together that I was never able to handle. For example, I ended up pitting faith against works, so fearful that I would lapse into any kind of a good works understanding of salvation that good works almost became an enemy for me. As you look at the writings of the early fathers, those polarities that came out of the Reformation simply weren’t there, because the excess of the West wasn’t there at that time.

Do you think that it’s easier for an evangelical to come to terms with the Eastern Orthodox view because there is less of a juridical influence in evangelicalism today than there was three or four hundred years ago? There’s more emphasis on the spirit in the life of the believer, sanctification, growth in holiness, rather than a once-and-for-all declaration in a courtroom. Does that make it easier for evangelicals today than it would have been in earlier days?

a. That’s hard to answer, because there’s no

way I can astral-project myself back to that time. I will say, speaking for the two thousand of us former Campus Crusade, Billy Graham, Young Life, Youth for Christ types who made that journey in 1987, that what was overwhelming for us was just the issue of truth, that the early church really did keep the faith. I was taught at Dallas Seminary that the minute John the Apostle drew his last breath it all began slowly heading downhill, but we just could not find that in history. And in speaking to the issue of truth, for us it was Christology, the doctrine of Christ, where men and women gave their lives to combat those who would say that there was a time when the Son of God didn’t exist, or that his divine nature swallowed up his human nature—those kinds of heresies.

I could imagine how attractive Eastern Orthodoxy could be to many evangelicals who are tired of the constant accommodation to the culture that the Roman

Catholic Church and the Protestant churches have been making over the last two hundred years.

a. It was like a harbor that we sailed into, not

that there aren’t sometimes choppy waters or sharks. The Scriptures tell us that all who live godly lives in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. It’s not a spiritual Shangri La. But there is that settled sense of belief. One of the bishops of the Orthodox Church, a former Southern Baptist, said to me one day, “Father Peter, you just have to understand that regarding the foundations of the faith in Orthodoxy, absolutely nothing is up for renegotiation.” I’ve been looking for that for years. The world will renegotiate, but as you say, when the church starts buying into that, that’s our death knell.

Why do you think so many evangelicals these days are attracted to Orthodoxy?

a. First, that unchanging truth. Second, there

is a great hunger for worship. Back in the 1950s, Tozer gave that landmark sermon at Moody called, “The Missing Jewel of Evangelicalism,” which was so good they made a booklet out of it that’s still in print. The missing jewel is worship. We find both evangelicals and charismatics come and experience that historic liturgy and they say, “Where have we been all our lives?”

Is part of it transcendence that we don’t experience in evangelicalism these days?

I think that’s a part of it, which is what attracted me years ago to the charismatic movement. I don’t build a theology on warm fuzzies, but they don’t hurt now and then. I learned to worship, maybe as primitive or, in some cases, excessive as it might have been, in the charismatic movement. We would lift our hands and sing, and that was more than I’d ever done as a dispensationalist. That was an attraction for me, although there were things in the worship that I didn’t understand at first.

So the history, that the church existed before Billy Graham, and the worship, that there was a sense of transcendence, that this wasn’t just a lecture, that this wasn’t all cerebral, that there was an emotional sort of attachment—all of this is attractive. One thing I’ve wondered with our history in America of restorationism, especially as it was revived by the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s—the idea of getting back to the apostles and a church in continuity with the ancient apostolic church. Do you think that there’s any validity to that?

a. Speaking for the group of people we were

associated with and still are, it’s as if we were never satisfied. Accepting Christ and starting out with him, you’re on a cloud for about two years, and I look back at those years with a great sense of gratitude. But when it comes to really digging into the meat and potatoes of the thing, it always seemed that the church and worship eluded us. In the West, where there was a Reformation, the children of that Reformation are still looking at what they left behind that was valid but that somewhere along the line they rejected. I think specifically of worship and the early creeds and the consensus of those councils, that sense of being connected to history I certainly never had in dispensationalism. The mind-set for us was restorationism—let’s get back. You say that to an Orthodox, and it’s Earth calling Mars. Because for the Orthodox, he says, “We never had a reformation.” There was nothing to reform, because we have kept the faith intact as it was from the start. So I say to my friends who are into the restoration movement (I went through a phase of that, which I think was one step that ultimately brought us back to Orthodoxy): How about the church that never changed? I spoke at Westminster College in Pennsylvania last May, and the reason they invited me was that the students had seen a video on Orthodoxy, and they asked the faculty why they had never told them about this. They told them that Rome was wrong and that Calvin was right, but here was twenty-five percent of Christendom that they’ve never been introduced to. They were blown away that a church exists that confesses that Jesus is the eternal son of God who assumed our humanity; that believes in the death, the

“We find both evangelicals and charismatics come and experience that historic liturgy and they say, ‘Where have we been all our lives?’” burial, the resurrection, the ascension, and the second and glorious coming; that believes the Scriptures and all of those things that we are taught to hold dear, and that never did go through this tumultuous thing called the Reformation.

Do you think that contemporary evangelicalism really stands in line with the Reformation, or do you think that contemporary evangelicalism—the evangelicalism you left—really has become its own American thing?

I very much believe that it has become its own thing. There are days I wonder if all of evangelicalism isn’t parachurch. Not just Campus Crusade and YFC, but there is so much that we’ve sidestepped. If you and I get mad at each other, we just go out and form two new churches.

That’s one place where I think in spite of the different views of the church we might have, we still confess with Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic folks the creedal affirmation: we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church, and we really mean that along with you, even though we might differ on the definition of that. Our sense is that really in evangelicalism, it doesn’t matter whether you’re even a member of a particular church.

It’s an invisible one holy catholic and apostolic church.

There’s a visible church that people actually belonged to in the New Testament. ModernReformation.org

i n t e r v i e w - E X IT ST A GE E A ST

a. Even the church in heaven is visible, if

you’ve got the eyes to see, as John did. We’ve just made it this thing that everybody who loves Christ is in the church. But there’s way more flesh and blood to it as you read the Bible. It’s like saying that Israel was an invisible community. You’d be a rock pile if you said that in 1500 b.c.

know what you believe There seem to be a number of predictable destinations for burned-out evangelicals, oftentimes the mirror-image of what the individual thought was lacking in their previous evangelical experience.

Do you think part of that, too, is the outbreak of Gnosticism we have in the church today?

a. For me, it was because I rejected Rome;

there was really nothing else to do, and it seems in evangelicalism that the more you go on from the Reformation, the less and less churchy it is. I’m here at my son’s house, and just down the street is a “church” called Family Christian Center. They don’t even confess the word “church.” You stack that up against the New Testament and see that we’ve come light years from even the Reformers. You have your dental center, your sports center, and your Christian center—but don’t say church.

In search of a “tradition” with historical depth, many leave for Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Losing spiritual intensity and rigor, the most recent phenomenon has been the rise of the “new monasticism.” Others don’t make it quite that far and settle for Anglo-Catholicism or one of its kin. If Roman Catholicism is a so-called “conservative” option on moral issues, the liberalism of the Protestant mainlines is a broader and much-traveled path. Some abandon Christianity altogether and seek

We are watching Eastern Orthodoxy because many people are moving over to it, and we think for a lot of the same reasons that people are interested in delving into the Reformation—anything to get out of contemporary evangelical shallowness.

a. I just want to say that I’ll always be thank-

ful to the evangelicals for bringing me to Christ. Frankly, that was the crowd out there for me. Rome never showed up, the East didn’t show up, and my own Lutheran background never showed. So I owe a great debt of gratitude to those who cared enough and loved me enough to bring me the gospel. But it was like the first introduction, and from then on you see that there’s more than just that initial step of commitment to Christ, that there’s a whole kingdom out there that becomes a reality through the church.

out other spiritual options such as New Age, Buddhism, or Hinduism. Those who pride themselves on rational thinking end up agnostic or atheist. It must be said that some evangelicals betray their dissatisfaction without heading for the exit. It has always been the case that many move to the outer reaches of the evangelical circle by emphasizing some peculiarity or hobbyhorse, making it the mainstay of their Christian experience. In this way, some search for more of the Spirit, becoming charismatic; others try theonomy or perhaps Masculine Christianity. The options are myriad. In evangelicalism, tomorrow’s trend was yesterday’s deficiency.

features

ModernReformation.org

Photo by JOSH MEISTER

Exit to EASTERN ORTHODOXY by alison sailer bennett

grew up in a fundamentalist “Bible church” that loved God and had a clear desire to serve him, but I questioned why my church was so isolated from other Christians. By the time I graduated from high school I found something in the more historical faith of Reformed Presbyterianism, but I still wondered what exactly transpired between the first century a.d. and 1517.

During my first year of college, I attended a Reformed Church on Sunday mornings and a Roman Catholic Church on Sunday evenings. My theology was still Reformed, but I longed for rich, liturgical worship saturated in Scripture. A year later, I encountered Eastern Orthodoxy and knew immedia t e l y t h a t wa s w h e re I b e l o n g e d . G e n e ra l dissatisfaction with evangelicalism led me to search for the historic church of liturgy and sacraments. And while Reformed Christianity sometimes has these elements, I found the fullness of them only within the Orthodox Church. Protestantism’s narrative of church history left me dissatisfied. In particular, what happened between the first-century church and the dawn of the Reformation? Evangelicals essentially told me that the Christian church fell into heresy right away and did not recover until years later when Martin Luther rescued the faith from the hands of Roman Catholicism. Reformed thinking is more generous to the early church but still takes significant pause at what transpired between Jerusalem and Geneva. Orthodoxy claims that the church has been here all along, unchanged, and still relevant. Orthodoxy is both “right belief” and “right worship” in the context of apostolic succession. In other words, someone has to preserve the faith (duly ordained bishops), and the right faith must be preserved (Orthodoxy). Christ promised to build his church (singular), “and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Evangelical and Reformed Christianity left

me dissatisfied by their liturgy. All churches inescapably have a liturgy, but many evangelicals say that formal liturgical worship is “canned,” “dry,” or pharisaical. The Orthodox Church worships together in beauty and holiness, and I was drawn to it. Because liturgy is rooted in the Incarnation, we worship God with our whole being: body, mind, and soul. Anyone who has attended an Orthodox service can speak of the holistic worship: incense, icons, vestments, chants, and prostrations. Finally, evangelicalism left me dissatisfied by its sacraments where there is little to no recognition of the elements as physical vehicles of grace, and Communion is celebrated more as a memorial service than as the life-giving bread and wine. Orthodoxy understands that all of life is a sacrament in Christ who fills life itself with the Holy Spirit. Orthodoxy is centered on one sacrament—the Eucharist—which is the “sacrament of sacraments” and the heavenly banquet of the kingdom of God. In Holy Communion we partake of the body and blood of Christ, the Eternal Passover Lamb who makes us alive and holy with himself. This is why we worship, and this is why I transitioned from evangelicalism into the fullness of the faith— Christian Orthodoxy.

Alison Sailer Bennett is a student of music therapy and philosophy at Temple University in Philadelphia. She and her husband attend St. Michael the Archangel Russian Orthodox Church.

ModernReformation.org

Exit to THE EMERGING CHURCH by TIM KEEL

hen trying to understand something, knowing its context is critical. This is true of the Bible. It is also true for leaders. Thus, as a person connected to the phenomenon of the emerging church, I would like to tell a little bit of my story and make some observations from it as a way of providing some context and insight into how one such community developed and grew. I have a broad ecclesiological background. I grew up attending different kinds of churches and participating in various parachurch ministries: United Methodist, Southern Baptist, an Episcopal youth group, an Evangelical Presbyterian church, and an internship at a PC(USA) college ministry, Young Life, and K-Life. But it was during my senior year of high school that Christ became the primary reality I based my life around—and it was the church that ultimately fostered that. In fact, at that point in my life, the church rescued me, becoming my family when my biological family fell apart through divorce. As a result, I have a passion for the church. I love the body of Christ. It saved my life and continues to be the primary way through which I connect to and serve God. I think that’s how we are meant to experience the reality of who God is—through communities who live out their faith in real ways. As my family was dissolving, I left home to attend college at the University of Kansas. I was a brandnew Christian. Though I had grown up in church, I had been totally out of control and self-destructive. This meant that the temptations many Christian kids struggle with at college were not that tempting for me. I had done it all already and had seen the result of that kind of life. Instead, I got involved in a campus ministry called Ichthus Christian Fellowship, sponsored by a church in Kansas City. When I started attending, there were about a hundred students involved. It was completely student led, operating with a core group of peer leaders. After being

involved for one year, I was asked to be the male leader of the campus ministry, which I co-led with the woman leader and a team of ten. Together, we had a profound experience of Christianity; the only problem was that we didn’t know it was profound! We thought that what we were experiencing was the normal Christian life. The way we lived our lives together flowed from our understanding of the Bible and a set of practices that facilitated a way of life. We hosted a weekly gathering on Thursday nights to worship, learn, and fellowship. It also seemed that if we were Christians, we should pray together. So we met at the campus chapel three mornings a week and prayed. Once a quarter we’d have Friday night worship services and work at the Salvation Army shelter. The University of Kansas campus is obviously a secular environment. While there, I was an art major and lived in a fraternity. This world was messy, and it was never difficult to figure out whether you had a mission. Opportunities were everywhere, and all of these experiences created opportunities to serve God and learn. None of this is all that exceptional, but critical to it was a sense that we were a community working out our faith as a way of life. It wasn’t perfect, but it was deeply good. Then something terrible happened: we graduated. We left this integrated and community-oriented world and dispersed into segmented, disintegrated, suburban American life. After graduating, I went into the ministry as a youth pastor, working part time for Young Life and part time for a church that was a Young Life Photo by JOSH MEISTER

Photo by JOSH MEISTER

ModernReformation.org

“I decided I was not going to go through the motions anymore. If there was no life, if the Spirit was not animating something, I had no time for it.” partner. In some ways, that helped my transition. But I watched as many of my friends functionally began to lose their faith. They all still “believed,” but increasingly their faith in God was disconnected from a way of life lived intentionally in community. As a result, faith for many became just one of a number of compartments in their lives. Even though I was in ministry, I began to feel the same way. It felt as if I were always practicing for a game I never played in. That was my experience of faith in the church. That is not to say it wasn’t a great church; it just seemed that the way faith got framed took something vital away. I continued like this for three years, deeply unsatisfied. What do you do when you’re in ministry and you don’t know what to do? Go to seminary! So I uprooted my family and we moved to Denver. But after four years and $30,000, I found I was even further from this profound experience of life in Christ, of experiencing the gospel in community and the mission that naturally arose from the life we shared. When we were in college, the ministry of Ichthus had exploded—people’s lives had been transformed, we were a community, it was missional. But none of this happened because we were trying to do “outreach” per se. Rather, it was the overflow of a healthy community trying to faithfully abide in Christ. Preparing to graduate from seminary, I looked back on my experience as I tried to decide what to do next. By then, I had been involved in three church plants and had restarted a Young Life campus ministry. Through those experiences and the

counsel of people who knew me, we discerned an entrepreneurial pattern. As I prayed, I reached a crisis point. In prayer, I cried out to God, “I cannot believe that the best years of my life as a Christian are behind me.” I decided that I could not spend the rest of my life living off the fumes of that experience. I made a commitment to do whatever it took to figure out where God was at work and to join him in it. For me, I believed that this meant being involved in the church and not a parachurch. So we decided to move back to Kansas City to plant a church. The first task of the church would be to seek out the places where we sensed God’s life and work in and around us and then join God there. I decided I was not going to go through the motions anymore. If there was no life, if the Spirit was not animating something, I had no time for it. I mentioned earlier that I grew up within the evangelical subculture and that my background is in Fine Arts. I have an intuitive, creative personality, so the life of the soul and what cultivates it is significant to me. At the beginning, our new church was looking for ways to access God’s life, so we might abide in Christ as John records Jesus instructing his disciples to do (John 15). After quickly exhausting my meager devotional resources, I began to look for more spiritual formation resources within evangelicalism. First, I found Richard Foster, who in turn led me to Dallas Willard. Those men were tremendously helpful, but there had to be more. I thought that they couldn’t be the extent of the treasury of life in God literature. But in my context, they were! In the Reformed tradition, there’s a lot of theology, but not much else. One of the resources I found emerged from a relationship I made while on retreat at a Benedictine monastery outside of Kansas City. When I made the decision to plant a church, this place became a haven for me to rest, pray, study, and receive direction. I connected with a monk who has since become my spiritual director and a very good friend. For over twelve years, his mentoring has made an enormous impact on me and, through me, on our community. It’s important to realize that as Christians we have access to more than one hundred years of evangelical history and four hundred fifty years of Protestant history. We have access to the thought and practices of the whole church across time and space. I think this recognition is an integral component of the emerging church phenomenon. We have

a rich history and tapestry of experience, thought, and resources to help us be faithful to God and participate in his work in the world. Of course, it is important we don’t cherry-pick from, misrepresent, or prostitute a tradition for our own use. But it is also important to recognize that often our experience of life in God is too limited. One of the legacies of the Protestant tradition is that we define ourselves by who we disagree with. When we disagree, we break fellowship and treat those with whom we differ with suspicion or antagonism. I am not sure that is the way it must be. I have learned that in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the greatest sin is not heresy but rather schism—that is, breaking fellowship with one another. In the West, we have decided that heresy is the bigger sin. I don’t know that I can say which one is the more damaging of the two. Looking back at all of this, I see how the diversity of my ecclesial background and my experiences

of community in college and afterwards profoundly impacted my development and formation as a leader. It also helped shape a context out of which our community could practice our faith in robust and creative ways for the glory of God. The context of today’s world is one increasingly characterized by complexity, diversity, and pluralism. In order to respond well to such challenges, I believe it is critical to develop an awareness of and connection to our rich heritage—so that we might be faithful in our context in the same way that others sought to be in theirs. Such engagement may help us begin to converse with people or traditions we have been taught to view suspiciously.

Tim Keel is the founding pastor of Jacob’s Well Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and is the author of Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos (Baker, 2007).

Exit to LIBERAL EPISCOPALIANism

by JULIANnA GUSTAFSON

came out of fundamentalism and am now a very liberal Episcopalian, but am also still interested in Emergent evangelicalism. What personally intrigues me about Emergents is their ability to question, and the open communities of people who can authentically struggle in a way that we couldn’t in my fundamentalist church.

I had questions about women being kept out of leadership and about homosexuality being this big ultimate sin, and all these things that just didn’t feel true to what I was experiencing in life around me. You know, intelligent, insightful, brilliant women I know who should be leading a lot more men, and homosexuals who are loving and wonderful and fabulous holy people. My Episcopal Church acknowledges all of that. But the Emergent community is one of those places where people don’t have to agree; they can struggle with theological complexities and move toward a way of living together that acknowledges their differences and

knits them together in community more. In my Episcopal Church we have a lot of tradition, and we have a lot of ritual and rigid rules that can keep people marching down one theological path; but we also have a lot of limits to that hierarchy that can inhibit the people who feel a call from God who want to be active but feel confined by structure. And the reverse is true when I look at the Emergent world, or really any evangelical church that doesn’t have some kind of structure imposed on it. I think the question about boundaries for what you believe and how you live your life is a big one for people. Personally, I’m more ModernReformation.org

comfortable seeing people live together in love, and be maybe a little bit heretical and not have all the right beliefs, because I think love is what should define Christians, and to err on the side of love is erring on the side of God. Since I came out of the fundamentalist tradition, which had no theological rooting at all, I think that humans are always trying to make sense of God. And whether they come out of something that’s heavily liturgical—I think there’s a failing there too—people can see it as ritual and not get the theological teaching out of it. At least in the Emergent community, at least as far as I can see, people are trying to be intentional about what they’re incorporating and why; they’re digging into the theological richness and symbolism of what they’re doing. So even if it might not be a complete system, the intentionality behind it is really rich. I think if you look at any tradition, they all have their failings.

“So even if it might not be a complete system, the intentionality behind it is really rich. I think if you look at any tradition, they all have their failings.” Julianna Gustafson is an editor for Jossey-Bass publishers.

Exit to CULTURAL ATHEISM

by MICHAEL SHERMER

wasn’t raised in a religious home at all; my folks were what you would call a-religious. In the early 1970s when I was in high school, the whole born-again Jesus movement was going, and I got swept up into that. I was hardcore. I went to Bible study classes, I led Bible study classes, and I went to Pepperdine University to major in theology. I took courses in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the life of Jesus, the writings of C. S. Lewis, and so forth. Pepperdine was a very conservative Church of Christ school. We weren’t allowed in the girls’ dorms, there was no dancing on campus, and we had President Ford come speak. It was a bastion of conservatism—I think sort of the start of the conservative Christian movement. In any case, I switched my major to science because I was better in science than I was in philosophy and theology. I adopted a scientific worldview, and when I looked at religious claims through the perspective

of a scientific worldview, it just didn’t make sense for me. I didn’t think there was evidence for a deity, and I was bothered by a number of problems, including and especially the problem of evil and the fact that there are still some unexplained gaps. That’s pretty normal in science. In any case, that didn’t bother me in terms of a worldview, such as how you explain the origins of the universe. Well, the Big Bang. Where did the Big Bang come from? It’s okay to have an infinite regress, because

Photo by JOSH MEISTER

ModernReformation.org

“Take Moore’s Law and carry it out for 50,000 years, and you get essentially what is a deity. God could be defined as an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent supercomputer.” theologians have the same problem with asking where God came from. I was comfortable with just leaving it open, having the scientific worldview, and being, I guess, an agnostic. “Skeptic” is what I prefer, since I have a magazine called that, which I began in the 1990s along with Skeptic Society as a hobby. It took off and became my full-time job as writer/editor, and I’m something of a spokesman for atheism, although it’s sort of a weird thing because I’m just really pro-science. I’m not anti-God or anything like that. There were some personal things as well. My college sweetheart was in a bad car accident and broke her back. At the time, I was kind of fading from my religion and had largely given it up. I turned to prayer one last time, because if anybody deserved to be healed from a broken back and paralysis, it was my sweetheart. She was a great lady, and there was no reason why this should happen to her. It wasn’t due to human evil or human free will or anything like that; it was just a fluke accident. Of course, nothing happened; she’s still paralyzed today. That was not the defining moment, but it was just one more straw that broke the camel’s back. I do still think the problem of evil is a serious problem for believers, like the tsunami and earthquake in Japan. What possible moral homily, story, or value is that supposed to have for humans if God allows that to happen? Why does he allow it to happen? I’d have to say I’d be pretty surprised if it turned out there was a God. But in any case, what does that even mean? Just some sort of a higher power

that’s capable of genetic engineering and creating planets and universes? That’s really an engineering problem. It’s just something like us that’s scaled up considerably. Take Moore’s Law and carry it out for 50,000 years, and you get essentially what is a deity. God could be defined as an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent supercomputer. We’re on our way to becoming that anyway. So what would it mean to discover that there is a God? It really wouldn’t mean anything to me. But in any case, I’m not particularly worried about it, because why would a deity care one way or the other whether I believed or not? Isn’t it more important how you comport yourself in life, how you treat other people, how you behave? It’s the classic debate about how you get to heaven: works instead of words. And even if there isn’t a God, shouldn’t we be doing these nice things to help other people, be moral and honor our word and our commitments and truth-telling and all that stuff ? I think everybody would answer, “Well, yeah, of course.” So what difference does it make whether there’s a God or not?

Michael Shermer is the editor of Skeptic magazine, adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University, and the author of numerous books including, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, Why People Believe Weird Things, and most recently, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and God to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.

Exit to ATHEISM/AGNOSTICISM I was raised in a Christian home and, apart from my high school years, was a serious Christian until I was about thirty-four. I graduated from a small Bible college, was a youth pastor, and taught many Bible studies and classes at churches I attended. I was always interested in Christian apologetics and sharing my faith with people who were not Christians. On one occasion, a friend challenged me about how it was I could really be sure that the Bible was the Word of God. I shared with him why I believed this and gave him the standard arguments of how we can know this to be true, but for some reason I found myself feeling uncomfortable with my answers. They did not seem to be as strong as I once thought they were. He pointed out that I was making some big assumptions about how the Bible had come together that I had not proven, for which I should have a better answer since I was so dogmatic about the Bible being the Word of God. So I decided to study these things more thoroughly to find better answers. I read many books and talked to my pastor and to any other Christian leader I could find who would talk to me. I studied as much as I could about the origins of the New Testament and how the Bible was formed and of the history of the early Christian church. The more I read the more questions I had. It seemed like the history of how the Bible came together was very “messy,” and there were many assumptions piled upon more assumptions that were far from being proven. This was a major problem for me, and I remember thinking, “If we can’t be sure about which books are inspired by God, how can we be sure about anything regarding our faith?” So I read more and more books by Christian scholars to try to understand why we trusted the Bible. It seemed there was significant confusion about who wrote many of the books of the Bible and where they got their information. Even the Gospels are anonymous! Now that I was examining the Bible more closely, there also seemed to be many errors in the Bible that were not explained very well by Christian apologists. If I was going to be honest about the problems I was seeing, I

by jeff lord

had to deal with this. Surely God would want me to be honest. The more I read, and the more I talked to pastors and heard their answers, the more disillusioned I became. It seemed that either nobody was asking these questions or those who were familiar with these problems didn’t think they were a big deal. Many people I talked to just thought I was being contentious and that I should simply have faith and stop trying to analyze things so much. I decided to take a year off from studying these things to focus on my faith and to try to strengthen my relationship with God. I tried not to question the Bible and to accept God’s grace toward me and to meditate on the Scriptures. I focused more on prayer and read more “devotional” literature to try to ignite the spiritual flame inside me that I felt was dying out. In time I realized, however, that if I was going to be honest with God and with myself, I couldn’t pretend any longer. I couldn’t get around the historical inaccuracies, the doctrinal contradictions, or the haphazard way the Bible came together. I felt I wasn’t being logically consistent with the way I looked at my own faith compared to other faith claims. I found other faiths to be false because of problems I found in them, but these seemed to be the same problems I was seeing in Christianity. It seemed that Christianity held together only if you already assumed it to be true. If you looked at it from the outside, it looked like any other natural religion. Over time I gradually moved further away from my strict view of the Bible. I started visiting other churches that were not as strict about the Bible and doctrine. Eventually I made a decision to stop going to church all together. The community aspect was nice, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go through the motions of faith any longer. Today I live a happy, meaningful life as an atheist/agnostic. I am still open to searching out the truth of this world and will hopefully follow that truth wherever it may lead me.

Jeff Lord is the operations director for an Internet web-hosting company in Phoenix, Arizona. He blogs about his thoughts on religion, philosophy, politics, etc., at www.consciencebound.com. ModernReformation.org

COMMON OBJECTIONS by leon brown | illustrations by JESSE LEFKOWITZ

COMMON OBJECTION

“I’m a Good Person”

ow good are you really? Many people will answer this question by unloading their laundry lists of volunteer activities, 501 (c) (3) donations, parenting skills, or anything else that presents them as a good person. In Christian terms, we might call this outwardly following God’s law. When Jesus was asked about the law, he summarized it this way: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37– 39). While someone might think he does these things

well, any honest person will recognize that he fails miserably. Yet interestingly enough, if you ask someone what it takes to merit heaven, many unreservedly say, “You have to be a good person.” And, of course, they are that “good person.” This is why many say they don’t

need Jesus or, more particularly, Christianity. In their minds, Christianity is meant to make someone good and since they are already good, what’s the use? When you are confronted with something like this, you have two tasks on your hands: 1) you need to help them see that they are not “good people,” and 2) you need to provide them with a correct understanding of what Christianity is. Usually, when people say they are good, they are comparing themselves to others; they conclude that since they do not do any of the “big” sins—murder, cheat, steal, or commit adultery—they must be good. Your first task is to help them see that their standard of good is not the standard by which God will judge them. God does not grade on a scale. “No one does good, not even one,” says the apostle Paul. He can say this not because people do not do good deeds, but because no one has a good heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and test the mind” (Jer. 17:9–10). God is not merely satisfied with what we do outwardly but with matters of the heart. That is why hatred is considered murder (1 John 3:15), lust is considered adultery (Matt. 5:28), and so forth. Hopefully, in light of God’s holy law, these “good people” will soon realize they are not good. But where does this leave them? In an ideal world, they will soon become downtrodden and hopeless, as they realize they cannot stand on their own merits before a righteous God (cf. Gal. 3:22, 24). Then and only then will they see the benefit and worth of Christ who was, indeed, a perfect and righteous man. And since they are not good, by God’s grace, they will look to the one who is—the Son of God incarnate, Jesus Christ— who came down from heaven to merit salvation for those who are not good people (cf. Mark 2:17).

“Your first task is to help them see that their standard of good is not the standard by which God will judge them. ”

COMMON OBJECTION

“ I’m Spiritual, Not Religious”

n 2001, a Gallup poll reported that 40 percent of U.S. respondents feared public speaking. In fact, the only thing that frightened Americans more was snakes! Amid all the potential fears, why is public speaking such a dreaded task? Probably because there are too many variables, many of which we can’t control.

Clammy hands, dry mouth, and anxiety are just a few physiological and psychological manifestations of our discomfort with speech-making. Add to this the task of presenting the exclusivity of Christ, heaven, hell, repentance, and faith, and all of sudden you are no longer in a mere public speaking situation. While these things may be somewhat intimidating, there is another factor that increases the dread: how others respond to you. With a population of over 6 billion people in the world and an ever-growing diversity of religions, you ModernReformation.org

can imagine that there are many reasons why people do not identify themselves as Christian. Among the top reasons is, “I’m spiritual, not religious.” Often when people say this, they’re associating religion with something formal, or “organized religion”—massive church buildings, liturgical worship, and catechesis come to mind. Or they may have had a painful experience with a church or even a professing Christian. To such as these, anything remotely religious is a turn-off. When you’re presented with this objection, however, there’s no need to go into attack mode. Far too often, Christians are ready to pounce without fully knowing why someone’s objection exists. Ask questions. Allow them to help you understand why they have this objection. Their reasons may be legitimate. If so, your task is to help them navigate through the fog of uncertainty. You may need to do this before you find an opportunity to invite them to church and/or share the gospel. In all of this, remember that you are speaking to a person who is made in the image of God and who may have a reasonable concern (cf. Gen. 1:26). Watch enough televangelists and read enough articles about the various church scandals and you’ll see their objection is not unfounded. In the end, the goal is to communicate that there’s nothing wrong with being religious in the Christian sense. The oft-quoted bumper sticker or T-shirt that says “It’s a relationship, not a religion” is inaccurate. Christ has instituted religion—it is called his church. And his church is a work in progress. We will make mistakes, and we may not be the best representatives of Christ at times, but God is working afresh in us daily, conforming us into the image of Christ—and, in a sense, making us both spiritual and religious.

“there’s no need to go into attack mode. Far too often, Christians are ready to pounce without fully knowing why someone’s objection exists.” 32

COMMON OBJECTION

“ That’s Right for You but Not for Me”

e have many choices in life. We choose the types of food we desire, where we live, and the college we attend. Oftentimes when we make these choices, there is no right and wrong. There only seem to be some choices that are better than others. Unfortunately, many people carry this same mentality into their choice of religion, though it’s frequently clothed in the statement, “What is right for you is not right for me.” In other words, “Jesus is good for you, but I have chosen to follow a different path.” When this happens to you, how can you respond? First, ask questions. It’s likely there is a reason for their response. More often than not, there is a misunderstanding of Christianity that has led

“while your goal is to help them recognize their mistaken notions, ultimately you want them to come to faith. This is the Spirit’s job.” them to believe that Christianity is just like every other religion. You can quickly determine this by asking them what the central teaching of Christianity is. If they say it is to be a good person or to follow the Ten Commandments, they have misunderstood it. Or maybe they have been to church several times and concluded it just was not for them. If so, ask them what put a bad taste in their mouth. Hypocritical and judgmental people are often what turn people off. If this is their response, you’ll find yourself doing clean-up duty before you get to the nuts and bolts of Christianity. But be warned that this could take some time—perhaps days, weeks, or months. You might find yourself venturing down the path of relativism before Christ and his majesty are ever discussed. Once you do finally have the opportunity to share the gospel, it is advantageous, though not necessary, to include certain statements regarding Christianity’s exclusivity: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6); “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matt. 7:14). By doing this, you challenge the notion that they have just

as much choice with religion as they do with the color of their socks. Additionally, you are showing the objectivity of Christianity. This may or may not go over well because you are challenging deeply held presuppositions and, as you know, change can be hard sometimes. Just remember, while your goal is to help them recognize their mistaken notions, ultimately you want them to come to faith. This is the Spirit’s job. So don’t get down on yourself if there doesn’t appear to be an immediate change as you confront their notions of relativism (cf. John 3:8). And remember to remain prayerful. We are not merely striving with flesh and blood—our battle is spiritual. As you do this, may God be pleased to change their minds and hearts to see the worth of Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord.

Leon Brown (MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido). He has published previously in Modern Reformation, Bible Expositor and Illuminator, Gospel Herald and Sunday School Times, and Christian Renewal. He is currently working on a book on personal evangelism. ModernReformation.org

ABANDONING EVANGELICALISM? by SHANE ROSENTHAL

iana Butler Bass opined in The Huffington Post that “one of the most significant trends in American religion is ‘switching’: people who grew up in one religion and changed to another.”1 I’ve never really thought of myself as a trendsetter, but I was on board with this whole switching thing as far back as I can remember.

For the first three years of my life, I was raised by a single mother who had abandoned the Methodism of her youth. Irritated by the shallowness, sentimentality, and superficiality of it all, she decided in her twenties that she didn’t want anything more to do with religion. But when she remarried in 1970, our entire family ended up adopting the Judaism of my stepfather. Even as a child, I could see that the form of Judaism in which I was being raised was not a serious faith. We didn’t keep kosher, we always had loads of yard work to do on Saturdays, and we never read or discussed Scripture, ever. So by the time I was in the fourth grade, I had essentially become an atheist. I can even recall telling my friends at the time that someone had

probably made up all the Bible stories and that religion was basically a waste of time. After my bar mitzvah at age thirteen, our family stopped attending synagogue altogether, which helped to confirm my growing suspicion that religion was merely a tool for childrearing and something we all outgrow.2 But I ended up making another switch at age eighteen. For the first time in my life, through discussions at work and issues that came up in various college classes I was taking, I began a serious exploration of religious questions. And in that search, I discovered that Jesus had claimed to be the Jewish Messiah, and that various interesting and compelling Old Testament prophecies

appeared to back up that claim. I began to read and study this issue in great detail, and after arguing about the nature and meaning of these prophecies with various family members and some rabbis, I ended up abandoning the Judaism of my youth and became a convert to Christianity. There I was, brand-new to the faith, yet knowing very little about the contents of the New Testament. So, ready and willing to learn, I started showing up at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. It was an obvious choice, since a lot of teens and young adults my age went there. In particular, we were attracted by the frequent Christian rock concerts and laid-back attitude. Some years earlier, a high school friend had taken me to one of these concerts, featuring bands like Undercover and The Altar Boys. Though I was a non-Christian at the time, I thought the music (which was in the genre of punk rock) was pretty cool, so much so that I joined in with various individuals who started slam dancing. After the first song, however, representatives from Calvary Chapel made it clear to us “outsiders” that our dancing was inappropriate. Oops, my bad. I was also told that it would be “uncool” to leave when the music was over and they began preaching (an approach not entirely unfamiliar to those who’ve endured a timeshare seminar in order to receive a free three-day vacation). Nevertheless, after my conversion, I thought Calvary Chapel might be a good place to check out. At first, I primarily enjoyed going to the Tuesday evening Bible study with Randy Ziegler, who taught us all about Jesus with a cool, surfer-like sensibility. Plus, the bro’s were always “stoked” when I showed up (though it didn’t take long for me to realize they never seemed to notice or care when I didn’t show up). Sunday mornings were a little less cool. There were a lot of blue-haired old ladies, and sometimes all the seats were already filled in the sanctuary so I was forced to sit in the overflow room where we’d all watch Chuck Smith on a big screen TV. This made it really easy for me to stay home on Sundays, since Smith’s sermons were broadcast on one of our local television channels. Why bother driving, I reasoned, since I might end up watching him on TV when I get there anyway? No one ever discipled me. No one ever recommended me for baptism. Some months later, I was told about a large baptism event at the beach and that it would be “a really cool thing to do.” So, motivated by what I was reading in the New Testament, I showed

up at the event and was baptized by Pastor Chuck Smith himself. I had never met him before and have never met him since. Still, even after this event, no one took me aside to talk with me about my understanding of the faith, or the meaning and significance of baptism. No one so much as signed me up for a class, a discipleship program, or anything. Months went by and I began to realize that I wasn’t being fed, but was kind of a self-feeder who was on my own in this megachurch. Even as a brand-new Christian, I instinctively knew something was wrong with this model. I knew that showing up only when I felt like it wasn’t good for me, and yet my attendance became more and more infrequent. But no one ever missed me. So I found myself praying for a home church with real community and accountability. In 1987, I found such a community at St. Luke’s Reformed Episcopal Church in Cypress, California. Kim Riddlebarger was taking his adult Sunday school class through the book of Romans, and a young Michael Horton was preaching semi-regularly. At St. Luke’s, I was introduced to the enchanting beauty of the Book of Common Prayer, the mystery of Word and Sacrament, and the assurance of regular confession

“Now, with new Reformation categories, I was able to see some of the problems inherent in American evangelicalism as I had experienced it over the past few years. I no longer considered myself an evangelical. It was like a second conversion.” ModernReformation.org

and absolution. I became a part of a community of like-minded believers who really wanted to learn more about God and his grace in Jesus Christ. I was finally being discipled. Now, with new Reformation categories, I was able to see some of the problems inherent in American evangelicalism as I had experienced it over the past few years. I no longer considered myself an evangelical. It was like a second conversion.

S Options

ince that time, I have made the rounds in a number of different conservative Reformed denominations, and my family currently worships at an Orthodox Presbyterian church with a solid liturgy, weekly Communion, and Christcentered preaching. But my wife and I decided some time ago to regularly introduce our four children to other kinds of churches so they know what’s going on outside their own walls. We have visited all kinds of places: Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, and various evangelical megachurches. We do this about once a year, and it always makes for great discussion afterwards. On one occasion I asked, “So, what was the first thing you noticed when you walked into the church?” “Well,” replied one of our kids, “it sorta reminded me of a movie theatre.” “It was loud,” replied another. I still find both of these answers fascinating and provocative. Last year we visited a church that had three huge mega-screens featuring music videos and advertisements for various things before the service began. Along the right side and back of this expansive worship center people were selling CDs, books, T-shirts, and cappuccino, all in the same room. The pastor was absent and did all of his announcements via video screen. The visiting preacher he introduced told numerous jokes and actually preached a sermon, not on a particular text of the Bible but on the subject of his latest book. And at the end of his message, he actually pleaded with us to “go to the back and take a look at the book!” Yep, it was a book tour. When the message was over, we were forced to watch a fifteen-minute professionally produced

infomercial about the virtues of tithing. “There was one month when we stopped giving to the church for one reason or the other,” the woman on screen was saying, “and it was right around that time when the transmission on our truck gave out.” She went on to explain that God does not exactly punish us for failing to tithe, but that we do step out of his “circle of protection” when we go against his will. This video was followed up by, you guessed it, the offering basket. We did recognize the concluding hymn. Though it was set to a contemporary beat that caused many to stand up and sway (in fact, the same rhythmic motion that’s the origin of the phrase “rock ‘n roll”), we soon realized they were singing “Amazing Grace.” Unfortunately, after the first verse, the congregation began repeating the words “Praise God” over and over in a kind of mantra, yet still to the tune of Newton’s famous hymn. I guess the original hymn was simply too wordy. Later that evening our family discussed the trivialization of God that we witnessed there, the lack of depth, the absence of the sacraments, and the commercialization of worship. More importantly, we noticed an alarming chumminess with which these people approached God. Sin wasn’t mentioned nor our need for a mediator. Rather, Jesus, if he was presented at all, was there to help us get through life’s difficulties and challenges: “He can touch your life right now; all you have to do is ask him and he’ll be there for you.” Reason to Leave

fter describing some of my experiences at this particular megachurch on the White Horse Blog, one commenter by the name of Jim posted the following response: I’ve seen things similar to this in the evangelical world for years. That’s why I started attending Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican services. I’m still trying to decide which denomination I will join. In these churches, I feel more of a reverence toward God. Although my theology is still closest to Billy Graham, I’m sick and tired of the evangelical world treating Jesus like a high school buddy that one would goof off and watch football with...with a few Bud Lights handy.3

Jim’s response is not unusual. Though his theology is evangelical, he has become so frustrated with the loss of the sacred that he has begun looking elsewhere, including the world of Catholicism. I’m a convinced Protestant who is passionate about salvation by grace alone, through faith alone on account of the work of Christ alone. And for various theological reasons, I would not encourage unsatisfied evangelicals to wander into Roman territory. Nevertheless, I will be the first to admit that many Catholic churches are closer to the kingdom than the type of megachurch I described. First of all, in the Catholic Church there is an awareness of God’s holiness and our sin. Second, this sin is not primarily something that “knocks a hole in your bucket of joy,” as I recently observed on a church marquee; it is a serious offense against this infinitely holy God. Third, Christ is presented as the mediator between God and man. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The Word became flesh for us in order to save us by reconciling us with God, who ‘loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.’”4 This is a vast improvement from the approach I encountered in my experience at my nearby megachurch. There is a great deal that divides Protestants from Roman Catholics. In particular, we’re divided over the crucial question of justification. Is Christ’s merit alone sufficient for my righteousness, or is that a legal fiction? This is an incredibly important question that divides our two communions, especially in light of the fact that Rome’s anathemas against the Protestant position are still binding.5 But official Roman Catholicism and confessional Protestantism are closer to each other than they are to the theology and practice of moralistic therapeutic deism that so pervades contemporary American evangelicalism. This is to say nothing of the loss of the sacred in contemporary church music and worship, or of an overall aesthetic sensibility close to that of WalMart. It was this point that forced Jim to look outside of evangelicalism. As he said, his theology remained unchanged but he “felt more reverence” elsewhere. Lendol Cader once observed in the pages of Touchstone magazine that he knew “a dozen or so people who have made the pilgrimage from evangelicalism to Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Anglicanism. All are thoughtful people, and theology is important to them. But in each case their initial Herbert, John Rogers, RA (ca. 1844), The Assertion of Liberty of Conscience by the Independents at the Westminster Assembly of Divines (painting).

decision to migrate had little to do with a rejection of evangelical theology. Rather, they left evangelical churches out of despair over evangelical culture.”6

Perseverance of the Saints: The Westminster Confession of Faith “They, whom God hath accepted in his Beloved, effectually called, and sanctified by his Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved.” (WCF 17.1) “This perseverance of the saints depends not upon their own free will, but upon the immutability of the decree of election, flowing from the free and unchangeable love of God the Father; upon the efficacy of the merit and intercession of Jesus Christ, the abiding of the Spirit, and of the seed of God within them, and the nature of the covenant of grace: from all which ariseth also the certainty and infallibility thereof.” (WCF 17.2) “Nevertheless, they may, through the temptations of Satan and of the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation, fall into grievous sins; and, for a time, continue therein: whereby they incur God’s displeasure, and grieve his Holy Spirit, come to be deprived of some measure of their graces and comforts, have their hearts hardened, and their consciences wounded; hurt and scandalize others, and bring temporal judgments upon themselves.” (WCF 17.3)

ModernReformation.org

“The biggest reason people leave evangelical churches is because they’re not getting meaningful answers to their questions and are not connecting with a pastor.” I once talked with a representative of a Southern California megachurch who admitted that his church was losing people who felt that the regular worship services were too upbeat and happy-clappy. This was especially uncomfortable for people who were going through times of difficulty or loss, so his church had decided to build a new chapel on their campus to address this need. It’s now advertised on their website as a quiet place “to sit, reflect, pray, cry, think.” And in this new space, these megachurch parishioners can write out their prayers to God, light a candle, or just be still. But will this really solve the problem for those despairing over evangelical culture? Is adding a new chapel to the food court of various worship options really the answer? It may help some, but I doubt it will prevent many from continuing to abandon ship. Julia Duin, author of Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It, told us in a White Horse Inn interview that the biggest reason people leave evangelical churches is because they’re not getting meaningful answers to their questions and are not connecting with a pastor. She also observed that if they were ever absent, “no one noticed.”7 There are many reasons why people leave evangelical churches. Sometimes it has to do with lack of transcendence, mystery, or beauty. Others find a lack of seriousness and depth. Failing to receive

any shepherding or discipleship with individual attention and care, they realize their experience at church is sort of like watching TV. This was the primary reason for my own abandonment of an evangelical megachurch. And, unfortunately, many who give up on their church eventually end up abandoning Christianity altogether, as was the case of my own mother many decades ago. But I remain convinced that the most important thing to keep in mind is the truth. If the New Testament claim about Jesus is true, then this man, this God-man, deserves my worship, my allegiance, my faith, and my lifelong service to the church he purchased with his blood. And since I remain convinced of this truth, my frustration with the tacky architecture of my church building is just one of the things I have to deal with “east of Eden.” The early church met in catacombs and faced torture for being named among the followers of Christ, so by comparison the difficulty I experience is fairly tame. In my own thinking, some put too much weight on the way they feel in worship. As for me and my family, we look for Christ and his story of redemption. We look for this story in both Word and Sacrament. We arrive each Sunday not to immerse ourselves in a transcendent experience here and now, but we long to be transported to an amazing event that happened then. There, at the cross, we’re confronted with our own sin and God’s astonishing rescue. Here we worship our Savior in a community of saints with mutual accountability, shepherded by a pastor who knows our names, prays for us, and delivers Christ to us week after week, month after month, year after year.

Shane Rosenthal is executive producer of the White Horse Inn national radio broadcast. Diana Butler Bass, “Ex-Catholics and Ex-Evangelicals: Why Did You Leave?” The Huffington Post (16 July 2010), http://www.huffingtonpost.com. According to a recent CNN.com opinion piece, the idea that religion is something that a person outgrows appears to be gaining traction among today’s young evangelicals. The article claims that there has been a 43 percent drop in church attendance for evangelicals between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. Laura Sessions Stepp, “Why Young Evangelicals Are Leaving Church,” CNN Opinion (16 Dec. 2011), http://www.cnn.com. 3 Jim’s comment is associated with a post titled “Doritos, PepsiMax & The Loss of the Sacred” by Shane Rosenthal, Out of the Horse’s Mouth (4 Jan. 2011), http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/. 4 Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, MO: Ligouri Publications, 1994), 115. 5 See the Canons & Decrees of the Council of Trent, The Sixth Session, Canons 1–33. 6 Lendol Calder, “Christian Karaoke,” Touchstone 11 (March/April 1998). 7 Julia Duin, White Horse Inn interview (9 Nov. 2008); printed in Modern Reformation (September/October 2009). 1

JESUS+NOTHING=

EVERYTHING

by Tullian Tchividjian

ever had I experienced anything so tough. I could hardly eat, had trouble sleeping, and was continually battling nausea. I felt at the absolute end of myself. It was the summer of 2009, the low point in the most challenging and difficult year of my life. Then, at the end of June, as we always did, my family and I left home to go on vacation for a couple of weeks. Never had I needed it more. Just a few months earlier I was riding high. The church I planted back in 2003, New City Church, located just outside of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (my hometown), merged with the well-known but declining Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church twelve miles down the road. The merger process itself took many grueling months to finalize, but in March 2009, the elders from New City and Coral Ridge agreed unanimously on the merger plan that a joint team had drafted. After a congregational vote to approve the merger, the two churches became one new church on Easter Sunday, 2009. Though we all expected some tough times as two very different congregations merged into one, I had no idea how ugly and messy it would become. With the merger and the leadership transition, a small but vocal group of long-time Coral Ridge members immediately began voicing opposition to practically any and every change we initiated. Blogs were posted, letters were circulated—some anonymously—with false accusations about me. Just three months after I arrived, a vigorous petition drive was started to have me removed. Battle lines were drawn, rumors raced. There was a crescendo of misunderstandings, frustration, and pain. The virulence of opposition was more than I could bear. I was undergoing the shelling of my life—and I

was ready to quit and escape elsewhere. It would be so easy just to walk away and never look back. All that is what I was going through when, mercifully, vacation time rolled around in June 2009. On our first morning away, I woke up still saturated with the misery that had been intensifying for so many weeks. I opened up my Bible; in the reading plan I was following, it so happened that the day’s passages included the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Desperate for help from God, I read those verses and my eyes were opened to see the incredible sufficiency of Jesus with greater clarity than ever before. In my misery I demanded an explanation from God. After all, I had done what he asked me to do—I had put “my baby” on the altar. And now this? Like Jonah in the belly of the great fish, I was arguing with God and making my case for why he owed me rescue. Worn out, afraid, and angry, I insisted that God give me my old life back. As I was reading Colossians 1 that morning, it dawned on me that it wasn’t my old life I wanted back as much as I wanted my old idols back, and I knew that God loved me too much to give them to me. I never realized how dependent I’d become on human approval and acceptance until it was taken away. For the first time, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being deeply disliked and distrusted. I was realizing just how much I’d been relying on the ModernReformation.org

endorsement of others to validate me—to make me feel like I mattered. In and of itself, human approval and acceptance are not bad things. They are, in fact, a gift from God. But I had turned them into idols by making them my primary source of significance; without them I was miserable and depressed. God began rescuing me from my slavery by forcing me to more fully understand exactly what I already had in Christ. I was learning the hard way that the gospel alone can free us from our addiction to being liked, that Jesus measured up for us so we wouldn’t have to live under the enslaving pressure of measuring up for others— including ourselves. His good news met me in my dark place, at my deepest need. Through his liberating Word, I was being transformed, freed, refreshed. The verses that set me free, specifically, were Colossians 1:9–14. In those verses the apostle Paul says (my summary): You will grow in your understanding of God’s will, be filled with spiritual wisdom and understanding, increase in your knowledge of God, be strengthened with God’s power, which will produce joy-filled patience and endurance (vv. 9–12a) as you come to a greater realization that you’ve already been qualified, delivered, transferred, redeemed, and forgiven (vv. 12b–14). What those verses liberatingly taught me was that because of Jesus’ finished work for me I already had the justification, approval, acceptance, security, freedom, affection, cleansing, new beginning, righteousness, and rescue for which I was longing. I started to see the many-faceted dimensions of the gospel in a more dazzling way. It’s almost as if, for me, the gospel changed from something hazy and monochromatic to something richly multicolored, vivid, and vibrant. I was realizing in a fresh way the now-power of the gospel—that the gospel doesn’t simply rescue us from the past and rescue us for the future; it also rescues us in the present from being enslaved to fear, insecurity, anger, self-reliance, bitterness, entitlement, and insignificance. In the crucible of suffering, the now-power of the gospel was liberating me to be okay with not being okay. All of us know we’re not okay, though we try very hard to convince ourselves and other people that we’re basically fine. But the gospel tells us, “Relax, it is finished. The pressure’s off.” I was coming to glorious terms with the fact that because of Christ’s finished work for me, I had nothing to prove or protect. I didn’t need to pretend anymore that I was strong. I was being set free from the

narcissistic impulse to impress people, appease people, measure up for people, or prove myself to people. The gospel alone can free us from the burden of trying to control what other people think about us. It frees us from the miserable, unquenchable pursuit to make something of ourselves by using others. The gospel frees us from what Paul Zahl calls “the law of capability”—the law, he says, “that judges us wanting if we are not capable, if we cannot handle it all, if we are not competent to balance our diverse commitments without a slip.” The gospel grants us the strength to admit we’re weak and needy and restless, knowing that Christ’s finished work has proven to be all the strength and fulfillment and peace we could ever want and more. Since Jesus is our strength, our weaknesses don’t threaten our sense of worth and value. Now we’re free to admit our wrongs and weaknesses without feeling as if our flesh is being ripped off our bones. Through my pain, I was being convinced all over again that the power of the gospel is just as necessary and relevant after you become a Christian as it is before. Along with the vast majority of professing Christians, I once assumed that the gospel was simply what non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, while afterward we advance to deeper theological waters. But I’ve come to realize that once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel but to move them deeper into it. We never outgrow our need for the gospel. Because I am a daily sinner, I need God’s daily distributions of grace that come my way as a result of the finished work of Christ. I had become guilty (functionally, not theologically) of thinking the way many Christians think about Christian growth and progress. They think that becoming sanctified means that we become stronger and stronger, more and more competent. And, although we would never say it this way, we speak sometimes as if sanctification is growth beyond our need for Jesus and his finished work on our behalf. In other words, we tend to think of justification as step one and sanctification as step two. And once we get to step two, we never need to go back to step one. We needed Jesus a lot for justification. We need him less for sanctification. I was becoming frustrated with myself because I realized that I was not as sturdy and unquestioning as I thought I should be. The pressure I put on myself to exhibit strength and faithfulness was proving to expose my frailty and faithlessness. What kind of Christian leader was I? How could I allow these circumstances

to get me down the way they had? Where was my faith? Where was my trust in God? Martin Luther defined sin as “mankind turned inward.” And sadly, the way I had come to understand the nature of the Christian life had become terribly narcissistic. I was spending too much time thinking about how I was doing, if I was learning everything I was supposed to be learning during this difficult season, whether I was doing it right or not. I was spending way too much time pondering my failure and brooding over my momentary spiritual successes. In short, I was spending way too much time thinking about me and what I needed to do and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he had already done. And what I discovered is that the more I focused on my need to get better, the worse I actually got—I became neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my performance instead of Christ’s performance for me was making me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective. This is the opposite of how the Bible describes what it means to be sanctified. The truth I was learning through fiery trials is that Christian growth is coming to the realization of just how weak and incompetent we are and how strong and competent Jesus continues to be for us. Spiritual maturity is not marked by our growing, independent fitness. Rather, it’s marked by our growing dependence on Christ’s fitness for us. When we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that is what it means to get better. When we stop obsessing over our need to improve, that is what it means to improve! After all, the apostle Peter began to sink only when he took his eyes off Jesus and focused on “how he was doing.” Sanctification is forgetting about ourselves; it involves receiving Christ’s words, “It is finished” into our rebellious regions of unbelief. That June morning was when Jesus plus nothing equals everything became for me more than a preachable tagline. It became my functional lifeline! It was rediscovering the gospel that enabled me to see: Because Jesus was strong for me, I am free to be weak. Because Jesus won for me, I am free to lose. Because Jesus was Someone, I am free to be no one.

“I was realizing in a fresh way the nowpower of the gospel— that the gospel doesn’t simply rescue us from the past and rescue us for the future.” Because Jesus was extraordinary, I am free to be ordinary. Because Jesus succeeded for me, I am free to fail. Sunday morning, September 20, 2009, was the morning when, as a result of the petition drive to force my ouster from our church, a congregational vote regarding me was to be taken after the service. I was there to preach before that vote took place; to say the least, it was an awkward environment. Pockets of people were there to take me down. As I preached, they stared at me with looks that could kill. I preached my guts out—it was the freest I’ve ever been in the pulpit. I was realizing in the moment that no one in the room that morning could take away anything I’d received from Jesus, which was everything. I was completely free! As it turned out, the congregational vote that day was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping me as the church’s pastor. And since that time I’m pleased to say that God has seen fit to launch a gospel “riot” at Coral Ridge. The everything of God’s gospel is setting people free, creating great joy, and reaching our needy city. But what was far more important that day than any “victory at the polls” was the ever-freeing, presently empowering dynamics of the gospel I had rediscovered in the crucible of ache.

Tullian Tchividjian is the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a visiting professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, and a grandson of Billy and Ruth Graham. His latest book is Jesus + Nothing = Everything (Crossway, 2011).

ModernReformation.org

FROM the HALLWAY | by MICHAEL S. HORTON | illustrations by jesse lefkowitz

W HEN YOU R “ TESTIMON Y ” IS

BORING 42

rowing up in evangelicalism, I was one of those kids who felt mediocre at meetings where ex-drug addicts gave their “testimony” of suddenly losing their craving for LSD. My grandmother used to speak of two groups of Christians: those who were “saved,” and those who were “gloriously saved.” Everything a good, clean Baptist youth is supposed to be, I didn’t “dance, drink, smoke, or chew, or go with girls who do.” So unimpressive was my testimony that I did not even remember the day I was “saved.” That, of course, was a problem—a big one. From time to time, I even played with the idea of embellishing my spiritual autobiography in the interest of becoming a “trophy” like these other folks (none of whom, I am certain, had embellished their story). The time spent at a friend’s house past my curfew could become a period of rebellion. In many evangelical circles, one must remember the “big day.” Birthdays would be celebrated with a modified version of the usual song: “Happy birthday to you—only one will not do. It takes two for salvation—how many have you?” Since I “asked Jesus into my heart” on a weekly basis as a child, I simply selected age seven as the date to avoid embarrassment. Finally, as I was goi n g t h r o u g h Pa u l ’s Epistle to the Romans and wanted to share it with the youth group as I entered high school, Arminian: t h e p a s t o r, w o r r i e d Faith precedes about my interest in the new birth the theology of that Reformed: book, asked the familThe new birth iar query, “Son, when precedes faith were you saved?” But this time I wasn’t going to reach for a date out of a hat. Before I could catch myself, I heard myself answering: “In God’s plan, I was saved before the foundation of the world. Then, in God’s sacrifice, I was saved when

know what you believe

Christ died and was raised, and I am being s av e d b y G o d ’s p r e serving and sanctifying grace.” Decisional Regeneration

Ironically, many who would accuse baptismal regeneration of being a form of works-righteousness have no problem with decisional regeneration: the belief that God has done his part by providing a means of forgiveness, and waits patiently for us to “let him have his way” and “let Jesus come into our heart” by “making Jesus Savior and Lord.” Many Christians spend their lives questioning whether they are really “saved” because of the nature of their conversion experience, while others who have no interest in Christ, ignoring his means of grace and living as unbelievers, feel “safe and secure from all alarm” on the basis of an evangelistic hoop they jumped through once upon a time. But what does Scripture say about conversion? The Order of Salvation

The conversionist vocabulary (“making Jesus Savior and Lord,” “making a decision,” “accepting Jesus into your heart,” and so on) is largely the product of an Arminian “order of salvation” that makes faith logically prior to regeneration. Because terms can be used differently over time, we must be very careful on this one. First, there is a problem of definition. When the Reformers wrote about “regeneration,” they were not thinking about the new birth (as most of us do today), but about “sanctification”; that is, the process of inward moral transformation by the Holy Spirit’s gradual renewal of our sinful affections. Thus the Reformers, understanding by “regeneration” what we today refer to as “sanctification,” insisted against Roman Catholic objections that faith preceded regeneration. But they never would have argued that the new birth is caused ModernReformation.org

by our decision. The new birth, unlike sanctification, is not a process, but the instantaneous and gratuitous resurrection of those who are spiritually dead. Paul writes, “While you were dead he made you alive” (Eph. 1:5). “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). “Therefore, it does not depend on a person’s decision or effort, but on

God’s mercy” (Rom. 9:16). As Jesus declared, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws him” (John 6:44). Then does it matter whether we receive Christ? You bet! “To those who received him, he gave the right to become children of God.” But read the rest of the verse: “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but of God” (John 1:12–13). While we have the responsibility to accept God’s gracious provision, we must never think that such acceptance produced God’s acceptance of us. It was because he accepted us, made a decision for us, and made himself our Savior and Lord that we accept his gift. The new birth gives us the principle of spiritual life that causes us to cry out, hile Israel is constantly called to renew her covenantal loyalty “Abba, Father”; without it all and reminded of her responsibilities to carry forward redempo f o u r wo r k s, a l l o f o u r tive history by insuring the faithfulness of future generations, movements, all of our deciindividual Israelites are not considered unbelievers who need to be convertsions and rededications are ed. There is no “age of accountability,” and Jewish children are not told they nothing more than the stirmust have a radical experience that will make them immediately lose all derings of those who are only sire for their sinful cravings. Because they are circumcised members of the alive, and utterly alive, to covenant community, they belong to the people of God and therefore to God sin. himself. Even the children are considered believers whose faith needs to be The children of the Reforconfirmed and strengthened, not granted. mation, though differing on God issues an absolute, unconditional edict to his redeemed community: specifics, join voices in the “I will be your God and you will be my people.” The date individual Israelites biblical affirmation that must remember is the day “when Israel came out of Egypt, the house of Ja“salvation is of the Lord” cob from a people of foreign tongue, [when] Judah became God’s sanctuary, (Jonah 2:9) and that even Israel his dominion” (Ps. 114:1). They must never forget the day; not when they our new birth is the result of “let him have his way” or when they “accepted Christ,” but “when Yahweh grace alone, not of human provided redemption for his people; he ordained his covenant forever—holy cooperation with grace.

The Old Testament

and awesome is his name” (Ps. 111:9). Again and again, the psalmist calls upon the people to remember dates, but they are the dates when God did something important in history: Cre-

The Style of Conversion

ation, the Promise, the Exodus, the preservation of the redeemed community in the wilderness, and so on. From time to time, Israel’s unfaithfulness is met with a divine “cold shoulder,” as God treats his people like any other unbelieving nation. Israel’s national unfaithfulness cannot invalidate God’s unconditional promise to Abraham that included the decree that Abraham would be “the father of many nations.” “Understand, then,” Paul argues in the New Testament, “that those who believe are children of Abraham” since “the Scriptures foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,” as Abraham was justified (Gal. 3:6–7).

It’s important to distinguish regeneration (or the new birth) from conversion. In the former, we are passive recipients. The Spirit draws us inwardly to Christ through the gospel proclaimed. As the sign and seal of this unilateral act of grace, baptism is something

God does to and for us. Born again, we now exercise repentance and faith. We are active—not yet in good works, but in consciously embracing Christ with all of his benefits. United to Christ through faith, we are justified and also artin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, which launched begin to grow in truth and holiness. the Reformation, state: “When our Lord and Master Conversion (repentance and faith) is Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believa lifelong journey in grace. Some of us ers to be one of repentance.” This was to establish the can put a date on it, but most Christians guardrails against two equally dangerous cliffs. On one side throughout church history can’t recall was the precipice of the medieval sacramental system that a decisive moment. The first should repromised forgiveness and full repentance when the sinner joice in the palpable experience of an had jumped through the prescribed hoops deemed approobvious change; the latter should repriate by the priest. A financial contribution could help sejoice in God’s faithfulness to his covecure this in Luther’s day. On the other end, there were nant promises. Neither should lodge those, such as Erasmus and other humanists, who argued this joy in conversion itself but in that outward repentance was not important, that converChrist, “for whenever our heart consion or repentance was merely inward. Luther specifically demns us, God is greater than our attacked this view in his third thesis. heart” (1 John 3:20). Here we are faced with these two equally disastrous alternatives: either to make repentance a once-and-for-all Those who have had dramatic beginnings in conexternal act of penance (for example, by going version ought to treasure the radical nature of through the modern sacrament of the altar call) or God’s grace they have experienced. They ought to by making it exclusively internal, as if it does not be able to joyfully share this experience with othmatter if you hate your neighbor, as long as you ers without cynical slurs like, “Becky ‘got relimean to do otherwise. gion.’” But those who have been raised in Christian Instead we need to recapture a sense of converhomes and have never rebelled against the promsion as lifelong repentance. Conversion is never ise God made to believers and their children are complete in this life and is always demanding. also God’s people and are also being converted. Since we are converted (Rom. 6), the process of rePromised or actually begun in their infancy, conpentance and sanctifying conversion is not a goal version and regeneration become as rich a treato which we strive, but a reality from which we sure of Christ’s presence as memories of “before” live. We do not live godly lives in order to become and “after” portraits can be for new converts. godly, but because we are godly in Christ: declared righteous already in justification, growing in The Covenant Christ as we draw our life-giving sap from the Vine. If our justification depended on our conversion experience, we would never be justified, for he focus of the gospel should be Christ, not conversion is always imperfect in this life. Once conversion, and the date we are to rememagain, this is why we must insist that while the new ber is a dark afternoon nearly two millenbirth precedes faith, the process of conversion folnia ago outside Jerusalem’s city gate. In the lows faith. Yet even in this lifelong process, we are big picture, the Bible records two essential facts: God never moving on from Christ and the gospel, but is the one acting in our redemption, and he is redeemreturning to Christ as the only source of our daily ing a people, not just individuals. Sadly, evangelicalrepentance and faith. ism’s conversionist mentality downplays these two If this is the nature of conversion, the style of central convictions. conversion will differ from person to person.

know what you believe

ModernReformation.org

The NEW Testament

he New Testament is a continuation, not a disruption, in God’s redemptive plan to save a covenant people. In the Gospels, the Jews are called to em-

brace their covenant Redeemer-King, but the majority refuses to become a part of this Abrahamic community. The unbelieving Jews, therefore, are not the people of God because of their ethnic identity, and they can no longer rely on their racial heritage as Abraham’s children (Matt. 3:9; John 8:39–47). This point is driven home in the Epistles as a major theme. The covenant community is established on the basis of faith in Christ. In this way, the believer, sharing Christ’s “last will and testament,” owns all of his riches. As he redeemed his people from Egypt and led them through the wilderness to the Promised Land, so too he has saved, is saving, and will one day save his people fully and finally at the last day. Conversion in the New Testament (especially in Acts) is of a missionary type. Pagans hear about Christ for the first time and dramatic conversions take place. Notice, however, that throughout these accounts—from our Lord’s invitations in the Gospels to the urgent appeals of the apostles—the call is not to conversion but to Christ. The challenge is not to do something, but to believe something. Christ’s appeal is not “Convert yourself and you shall be saved,” or “Whoever makes a decision and makes me Lord and Savior will be born again.” Rather, we read, “Repent and believe” (Luke 13:3). Peter charges people to “repent and be baptized.…The promise is for you and your children” (Acts 2:38–39). While conversion is often radical for first-generation believers, it is usually less dramatic for their children, but the promise is as much for them as for adults. It is difficult for us to accept this idea because of our emphasis on decisional regeneration. Instead of viewing conversion as part of a process in God’s successive activities, we see it as a step we have taken that was truly determinative of our salvation. There must be something, even the smallest effort, on my end that I can show God on Judgment Day: “Look, here is the one thing I did. You must let me in, because I fulfilled the conditions.” Is there something, however, that is decisive about our acceptance of God’s gracious gift? To answer this question, we have to understand something about the order of salvation and the nature and style of conversion itself.

Nowhere in either testament are there calls to “let Jesus have his way” or to “make him Lord of your life.” The gospel is a promise, not merely an offer: “I will be your God and you will be my people” (Lev. 26:12). We do not “let” the Alpha and Omega, the Resurrection and the Life, the Author and Finisher of Faith do anything! It is because of who he is and what he does, not because of what we allow him to do, that he is our Savior and Lord. We do not “make him Lord” any more than someone in the mailroom makes the CEO one’s boss or a child makes her father her parent. The covenant, with all of its blessings (election, redemption, justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification), is God’s idea; he started it and he will finish it (Phil. 1:6). Furthermore, this Sovereign God is redeeming not merely individuals who say “yes,” but “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that [we] may declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once [we] were not a people, but now [we] are the people of God” (1 Pet. 2:9–10). God’s goal is a redeemed and converted people. Unlike the Marines, he is not just “looking for a few good men” but is creating a new humanity out of an ungodly race. He does not simply want a few outstanding trumpet players who “wow” their adoring fans (not a few “testimonies” have fit that picture), but an orchestra where the attraction lies in the harmony. Therefore, a correct relationship to God can take place only within the context of the covenant community. We enter this new society through baptism, as circumcision served in the Old Testament. This analogy, far from an imposition of a theological system, is directly affirmed by our Lord and his apostles. For instance, Paul tells us that we were united with Christ through “the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism” (Col. 2:11). As Peter assured his audience that the gospel promise was still “for you and for your children,” so too we must challenge any conversionistic

evangelism that ignores the covenantal context of conversion. In this way, the anxiety of Christian children about being converted or born again is removed. They are called to deepen their understanding and experience of God and their inheritance with the saints, but they are not to turn inward, searching for that one radical change in their behavior they brought about one day when they decided to follow Jesus. Our society is given to conversionism: self-help cures, self-improvement programs with cheerful testimonies and “before” and “after” photos. Dramatic contrasts and sensational reports, while calculated to bring glory to God, often bring glory to those who had the sense to turn their life around. And there is a danger of so emphasizing the covenantal aspect that children are not encouraged to develop their own relationship with God. But the guardrail must also be raised against the opposite and more general danger in evangelicalism: individualistic and triumphalist visions that rob God of his glory and his people of their comfort and assurance. Let us, therefore, honor conversion not only as an event of turning from sin to Christ, but also as a lifelong struggle. It is not a struggle to inherit the Promised Land, since this is a free gift secured for us by the electing, redeeming, and saving grace of the Triune God. Rather, it is a lifelong struggle toward this everlasting inheritance. We have been saved ( justification); we are being saved (sanctification); we will be saved (glorification). Regardless of how unimpressive our experiences of growth, zeal, and spiritual success, God has

“Instead we need to recapture a sense of conversion as lifelong repentance. Conversion is never complete in this life and is always demanding. Since we are converted (Rom. 6), the process of repentance and sanctifying conversion is not a goal to which we strive, but a reality from which we live.” promised this land to all who have placed their faith in Christ alone. Let us long for greater and deeper conversion by casting a skeptical eye on approaches that make radical conversion and instant change in behavior and personality a mark of a genuine new birth. While the new birth, our spiritual resurrection, is instantaneous and not the product of our cooperation, conversion is a marathon in which we struggle earnestly, and the crown of life awaits us at the finish line. It is not the survival of the fittest, but the endurance of the weakest, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2).

Michael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

ModernReformation.org

road trip We know conversations are even better in person. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why we want you to join us at a White Horse Inn event near you. See whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s coming up on the schedule, and start penciling them into your calendar. We hope to see you at the next event!

V i s i t W h iteHo r seInn.o r g/ events to che ck t he s che d ul e

book reviews 52 50 56

54 ModernReformation.org

book reviews

If I Were a Horse

Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises By Scott W. Hahn Yale University Press, 2009 589 pages (hardcover), $50.00

cott Hahn has written a useful volume for the academic community with a well-researched book on the subject of covenant. The final product of years of sustained labor and reflection, this is a reworking of Hahn’s doctoral dissertation and will be of immense interest to all students of the Bible, professional and otherwise, because it engages such a central topic—arguably a topic that is the very backbone of the Bible. Well-informed readers will notice an openness to source criticism (that is, the idea that the Bible was manipulated by editors long after the events described in the Bible had taken place) similar to that of the pontifical commission’s view of biblical hermeneutics.1 Hahn, however, seems even more interested in biblical theology and claims that his entire project “can be described aptly as one vast exercise in biblical-theological correlation” (23). All of this will not be surprising for those that know Hahn’s own spiritual pilgrimage from Wittenberg to Rome.2 Hahn’s scholarship is eclectic: Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, higher critics, pre-critical scholars, and conservative Calvinists are all incorporated and synthesized. It is evident that Hahn attempts to engage these different traditions judiciously. Even so, Hahn insists that “the familial nature of covenants is their unifying factor” (333, emphasis added), and he ends up aligning himself theologically with Roman Catholicism in the end. Building on the work of retired Harvard professor Frank Moore Cross and new trends in scholarship,

Hahn argues that the “root metaphor” of kinship is crucial for a correct understanding of covenant in the Bible. In fact, he begins to show just how important this category is for his system when he says that these root metaphors “underwrite the fatherson relationship between Yahweh and Israel throughout the various Old Testament traditions and periods of salvation history” (42). Hahn argues that the three covenants in the patriarchal period, as exemplified in Genesis 15, 17, and 22, move in parallel to the three most significant covenants in the Old Testament: the Sinaitic; the Deuteronomic (made on the plains of Moab); and finally the Davidic covenant, which has its focus on Zion. After stating this thesis (112), he then proceeds to refine and develop the complex relationships between these Old Testament covenants in Part One, since “each covenant in Israel’s history, in a sense, anticipates and finds fulfillment in” the “Davidic Covenant Fulfillment in Luke– Acts”; the “Covenant, Oath, and Divine Sonship in Galatians 3–4”; and then “Covenant, Oath, and Royal Priestly Primogeniture in Hebrews 1–9.” Having discussed all this material in the Old and New Testaments, Hahn concludes with a chapter offering far-reaching theological reflections on the biblical data he has engaged. From this reviewer’s viewpoint, Hahn has written a book that will be frequently consulted as a resource, especially since it gathers so much material on biblical covenants in one place. The book, however, is subject to a number of criticisms. First, Hahn’s demonstration of the importance of the kinship material is commendable; nevertheless, his work exhibits methodological flaws that influence his conclusions. In the Ancient Near East, covenants rested on a personal basis and were often expressed in terms of fatherhood or brotherhood (i.e., kinship). Between vassals and suzerains, vassals were to love and be faithful to their suzerains. Between rulers of equal status, the covenant agreements formed between parties were

sometimes cloaked in personal language between brothers. The fact of the matter is, however, that while this may have been true generally, we simply do not know that the ancients held the concept of kinship as in any way primary. Here is where Hahn’s system stumbles, as he presents strong conclusions about kinship that seem to engulf and minimize any legal aspect of these covenants. This is what E. E. EvansPritchard called the “if I were a horse” mentality.3 What is meant by this is an imaginative “attempt at introspection from a distance,” which is very much a hazardous task because of the difficulty of weighing and assessing intention and emotion in history.4 In short, by foregrounding and prioritizing the personal and familial elements of kinship as Hahn does, he forces his own preferences on the past and does not give proper respect for legal categories. This is the methodological issue that creates further problems. A second criticism is that Hahn makes grace primary in his evaluation of biblical covenants. This is a fatal flaw and the theological Achilles’ heel of his book. Hahn writes, The gift of life from father to son is unmerited, and thereafter a father will love his son unconditionally. Yet it is precisely because of his unconditional love that the father wishes his son to practice the virtues he himself possesses, and thus become like the father and so enjoy deeper communion with him. When this familial model is applied to the theological concepts of grace and law, we see that divine grace—the unconditional love of the father—is always primary, and the divine law—the virtue required of the son to be in the image of his father—flows naturally and necessarily from that grace. Once these covenant relations and obligations are reexamined in the light of the natural complexity of kinship relations and obligations, there is no need to posit any inherent tension between unconditional grace and the conditions of law, or between unilateral or bilateral covenant relations. (335) Hahn has flipped the biblical paradigm upside down here, and so betrays the quintessential problem in making the essence of the covenant “unconditional promise.” The reader should ask whether there is a place for “conditional promises” in such a system. If the Bible communicates that the covenant at creation

“ In short, Hahn has hoisted his construction of biblical covenantal theology on a petard of his own making because he has predetermined that unconditional promise be the foundation of his system. It has to be noted, however, that the Bible portrays God as ‘father’ but also portrays God as ‘judge.’” in the garden was a covenant in which God assigned a stipulated work to Adam as the representative head of the human race with the promise of a reward upon the condition of performance of that work, and if creation precedes redemption, then law must be the foundation of any biblical covenantal system. In short, Hahn has hoisted his construction of biblical covenantal theology on a petard of his own making because he has predetermined that unconditional promise be the foundation of his system. It has to be noted, however, that the Bible portrays God as “father” but also portrays God as “judge.” God is Lord of the covenant, and as such he is both judge and father. By focusing almost exclusively upon kinship categories, it seems that Hahn’s position represents a reduction in the clarity and fullness of the Bible’s teaching. ModernReformation.org

book reviews

Thankfully, in the final section Hahn is clear and forthright in his views. There he boldly concludes that by adopting his familial model it is possible to transcend older debates about whether biblical covenants are bilateral or unilateral, conditional or unconditional (355). For Hahn, these debates miscarried because of theological abstraction and “competing doctrinal presuppositions and ecclesiastical traditions” (335). But as noted at the beginning, it is well known that Hahn himself made a pilgrimage from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, and in the process became an enthusiastic apologist for his new religion. The fact of the matter remains that in this transition, Hahn came to reject two cardinal tenets of the Reformation: sola fide and sola scriptura. It is therefore no surprise that after 334 pages of exposition on the covenants, he declares his view that the familial model will allegedly dissolve the biblical tension between divine grace and law, with obvious implications for the Reformation-era debate. Indeed Hahn sounds antagonistic toward judicial and legal categories in this section of the book, at least according to any Protestant construal of how God satisfies his justice (see 336). This is noteworthy. For readers familiar with the controversy on justification surrounding Norman Shepherd at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, it should be noted that during Hahn’s exit from Protestantism he came to agree with Shepherd who was, in Hahn’s own words, “about to undergo a heresy trial for teaching the same view of justification that I was expounding”(31). In sum, the important question to ask is whether Hahn is successful in this large-scale project of biblical-theological correlation. Did he discover an organizing paradigm that emerges from Scripture itself, or superimpose one that is foreign to the biblical material? In spite of the strengths of this significant book, if the goal of such a project is to incorporate all of the most important biblical

material touching on the subject of covenant, then this reviewer must answer the question with an emphatic no.

Bryan D. Estelle (PhD) is associate professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido, California. See Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “The Biblical Commission’s Document ‘The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church’: Text and Commentary,” Subsidia Biblica 18 (Rome, Italy: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1995). 2 Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993). 3 See Douglas Davies, “An Interpretation of Sacrifice in Leviticus,” Anthropological Approaches to the Old Testament, ed. Bernhard Lang, Issues in Religion and Theology 8 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 154 (see also 151–62). 4 Davies, 154. 1

Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys By Kay s. Hymowitz Basic Books, 2011 248 pages (hardcover), $25.99

y father is very into gender roles; so much so that it was one of the first things he taught my younger brother. When Mark made the mistake of opening the door to a restaurant and sauntered in without waiting for our mother, Dad ensured this never happened again. To this day, Mark opens all my doors, repairs and washes my car, and unstops my sink. Nowadays, unless a boy is being raised in what I will call “the traditional manner,” he probably thinks nothing of opening a door just for himself. What is more telling is that his mother probably thinks nothing of it either. In a post-third-wave feminism world, such formality and distinction is either obsequious or degrading. At least that’s what we’re meant to think. I’m told there is a no more nerve-wracking moment during a first date than when a man has to decide whether he’s going to open the door for a woman. But women are just as

“the traditional sphere that men have occupied in society (protector and provider) has been taken over by women. Women can buy their own homes and become pregnant on their own (sort of). This new order frees men to remain emotional adolescents for the rest of their lives, if they so choose. If they don’t choose, that’s even better—for them.” nervous as men. While he’s agonizing about the door, she’s wondering whether they’re even on a date. It’s this current state of relational confusion that Kay Hymowitz characterizes in her book Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys. Despite what the title may suggest, Hymowitz is neither a Friedan activist nor Schlafly crusader. Her thesis is that the technological, economic, and social shifts of the past one hundred years have effectively eliminated Western society’s traditional “lifescript,” drastically altering the roles of men and women in society. Both sexes are reaching adulthood

without any idea of the general trajectory their lives should take. They know they want fulfilling, meaningful lives and relationships, but they have no clear idea of how that’s going to happen. Instead, they’re fed nebulous dictums such as “Explore your options” and “Expand your horizons,” and from them develop a vague sense that adulthood isn’t a destination to be reached, but a journey to be experienced. According to them, a fulfilling life is equated with an interesting and creative career, and our knowledge-driven economy provides them with plenty of options—web designer, social media director, and market analyst are a smattering of the jobs available to college graduates. They may not pay much, but they beat the sterile, lifesucking corporate cubicle. As long as you feel like you’re in a BlackBerry ad most of the time, you know you’re on the right track. It’s the “fulfilling and meaningful relationships” bit that’s a tad trickier. Getting an interesting and sexy job takes time and resources, and doesn’t leave much time for budding romance. Not that this troubles our young dreamers. Women, having been groomed for financial success and social independence, aren’t too worried about it. For them, it’s career first, marriage and family second. Men, having come of age at the dawn of a new era in their sex’s history, are even less concerned. According to Hymowitz, they don’t need to; the traditional sphere that men have occupied in society (protector and provider) has been taken over by women. Women can buy their own homes and become pregnant on their own (sort of ). This new order frees men to remain emotional adolescents for the rest of their lives, if they so choose. If they don’t choose, that’s even better—for them. While women are on a timecrunch to have children (and therefore marry, since most of them don’t fancy single motherhood), men have almost all the time in the world biologically. The longer they wait, the better their chances of finding a wife. As a man matures, gains more confidence, and enjoys greater financial success, he finds that his popularity with women soars and his mating potential increases, whereas a woman’s appeal dwindles with time and her chances for conceiving drop. Combine these opposing biological courses with the fact that neither gender knows what they’re doing nor what they’re supposed to be doing, and you have an intersexual catastrophe of Jersey Shore proportions. ModernReformation.org

book reviews

Hymowitz is quick to point out the negative side effects of some of these new lifestyles. The “Dating Darwinists” (the single men who systematically rate and pursue women according to their ranking on a 1–10 scale) somehow manage to end up with the very women they were running away from. She candidly states that “Choice Mothers” (the single women who choose motherhood via artificial insemination) aren’t doing half as much for the affirmation of autonomous femininity as they are for the propagation of male immaturity. She attempts to reassure her uncomfortably squirming single readers that there is a pinprick of light in this relational black hole by citing several sources that indicate that over 80 percent of college-educated people marry by the time they’re forty. However, she spends considerably more time on the fact that this trend of delayed marriage means that men and women who spend their youth trying to outwit this emotional obstacle course are going to have a difficult time establishing a home and raising the next generation of young adults. While it is true that most single people don’t want the BlackBerry life half as much as they want companionship and families, she notes that those who do get married often don’t stay married; and she acknowledges that both sexes are licking so many wounds and bringing so much baggage into their relationships that it’s practically impossible to predict what the outcome of our current state might look like. Without assigning blame to any one ideology or sex, she drives home the significance of our new social and sexual ideals and the gravity of our current situation. So what should we do about it? Apart from her mildly worded advice to the Choice Mother, Hymowitz doesn’t really say. After all, what can she say? As a society, we’ve done away with the idea that a person’s life ought to be characterized by something or anything. We don’t want social norms or biological impulses; we want the freedom to determine our own destinies and carve our own

paths. The question Hymowitz poses is this: considering that this freedom hasn’t really made us happier, is it really what we want?

Brooke Mintun (BA, University of California San Diego) is living the BlackBerry ad life as Social Media Director for Modern Reformation.

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World By Paul E. Miller NavPress, 2009 288 pages (paperback), $14.99

here are a lot of books on the topic of prayer, and I have found helpful insights in many of them. I would have to say, however, that Paul Miller’s A Praying Life has been the book that has been of greatest help to my personal prayer life. At the risk of sounding trite, I would even say that there is a sense in which it has been a life-changing book for me. Furthermore, I have often recommended this book to others, and just about everyone who reads it tells me that they too have found it to be extremely helpful. It is a unique book, one I might even be willing to deem a must-read for every Christian. For this reason, I want to commend A Praying Life to you by highlighting several of the things that make it such a special book. Perhaps what makes Miller’s book so effective is that he talks about prayer not as a duty but as a desperate need. We need to pray because we are utterly dependent on God for everything. When we neglect prayer, we lose sight of our helplessness and place our confidence in ourselves rather than in the Lord. Miller points out that even Jesus expressed his dependence upon God by cultivating a rich prayer life. “If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize

you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray” (49). Of course, it is possible for a person to have a regular prayer life and still place his confidence in himself rather than in the Lord; there is a place for prayer in performance-based religion. Jesus illustrated this well in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in which both men prayed to God, but only the tax collector, who acknowledged his utter helplessness, went away justified before God (Luke 18:9–14). This is the “foolish” logic of the gospel (1 Cor. 1:20–31), and the same logic applies to true prayer. In Miller’s words, “The gospel, God’s free gift of grace in Jesus, only works when we realize we don’t have it all together. The same is true for prayer. The very thing we are allergic to—our helplessness—is what makes prayer work” (55). Another major strength of A Praying Life is Miller’s treatment of the relationship between prayer and divine providence, especially with regard to his thoughts on “unanswered” prayers, suffering, and how God uses our prayers to shape us. Miller writes, When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching. You watch God weave his patterns in the story of your life. Instead of trying to be out front, designing your life, you realize you are inside God’s drama. As you wait, you begin to see him work, and your life begins to sparkle with wonder. You are learning to trust again. (73) The life of dependent prayer involves watching to see what the Lord will do in response to our prayers, and this enables us to see God’s hand at work in our lives with greater clarity. It is not that he will always answer our prayers in the way we want. He is not a cosmic genie, bound to do our bidding. But if you belong to Jesus Christ, you can be certain that the Lord of heaven and earth really will listen to your prayers. And you can trust that he will act for your ultimate good. Two other things to note about A Praying Life are Miller’s use of personal stories and his suggestions for developing a prayer system. Regarding the latter, the simple system he discusses makes it easier to actually follow through when we tell people that we’ll be

“Perhaps what makes Miller’s book so effective is that he talks about prayer not as a duty but as a desperate need. We need to pray because we are utterly dependent on God for everything. When we neglect prayer, we lose sight of our helplessness and place our confidence in ourselves rather than in the Lord.” praying for them. It also provides a structure that helps us be more consistent and specific in praying for ourselves, individual family members, the church’s ministry and members, people in need, and unbelievers. As for the numerous stories from Miller’s life, I found many of them to be well-placed examples of how prayer really does make a difference in the lives of God’s people. There are, however, a few weaknesses in the book. I would like to have seen more theological precision, such as “seeing Jesus” in the lives of Christians (97) and Miller’s use of the term “incarnation” in relation to what God does when we pray (125). In addition, I wonder why so many of his quotations are taken from Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox figures when there is a wealth of material on prayer among the ModernReformation.org

book reviews

Reformed and the Puritans. Finally, some readers may be turned off by the way Miller talks about the intimacy we can cultivate with our heavenly Father in prayer, or by his emphasis on praying for things that some might deem to be trivial. Frankly, these last two things did not really bother me, since they seem to be legitimate applications of the biblical principles of abiding in Christ and asking our heavenly Father for anything in Christ’s name. All in all, there is far more to commend than criticize about this book. I hope that I have convinced you to read it.

Andy Wilson is the pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Laconia, New Hampshire.

The Quest for Comfort: The Story of the Heidelberg Catechism By William Boekestein Reformation Heritage, 2011 32 pages (hardcover), $10.00

ears ago, as I was teaching Question 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism to my Sunday school class of firstthrough third-grade students, I wished for a book written specifically for their age about the rich history behind this important document, imparting the passion and urgency with which it was originally composed. That’s why I was glad to receive William Boekestein’s newest release, The Quest for Comfort. This volume, a sequel to Boekestein’s Faithfulness Under Fire, is short enough to keep young children interested and long enough to give them a clear understanding of how this catechism was written and why it is important to us today. On every page, a colorful illustration captures the attention and inspires the imagination. I especially love the one depicting Ursinus as he writes the catechism’s first question, a text clearly readable, taking up most of the page. I can see

how this picture and the story around it can bring this text to new life for a young child who may be memorizing it. In short, the book tells how the Heidelberg Catechism was devised, composed, and defended in the sixteenth century. After briefly introducing the three main characters of the story—Caspar Olevianus (a professor), Zacharias Ursinus (a pastor), and Frederick III (a prince)—and how God providentially brought them together, Boekestein tells of Frederick’s desire to create this catechism, even if other similar documents had already been produced in Europe: “Frederick wanted something simpler, more personal, and more peaceful. He wanted a book that showed the heart of the gospel to men, women, boys, and girls who needed the comfort that only God can give.” Boekestein also explains how the text in the catechism was organized and why. Finally, we learn that the catechism was met with both excitement and anger. The authors were often attacked violently and had to risk their lives to defend this work. This will give our children a greater appreciation for the words they memorize and recite. At a time when most Christians shy away from a serious study of theology, Boekestein anticipates that his choice of topic may generate some surprise. “Are you serious? A children’s book about the composition of a dry, pedagogical, theological document?” he asks in his “Talk to Parents” at the end of the book. His answer is fitting, “This is no ordinary document and the record of its birth is anything but boring.” This is, in my view, the strength of this book. Through its few pages, the author’s enthusiasm for this catechism shines through. We get the sense that as a Christian, a pastor, and a father of three young children he has experienced the exciting relevance of this document as an approachable, warm, and practical presentation of the truth of the gospel. The brevity of the book and its concise style leaves room for further studies for those who

want to use it as a springboard to explore the catechism’s rich history and doctrine. For this reason, at the end of the book Boekestein provides a list of related books that treat these subjects more in depth. Boekestein’s first book for children, Faithfulness Under Fire, described the difficult, passionate life of Guido de Bres and the making of the Belgic Confession of Faith. Will the author finish the “trilogy,” telling the history behind the Canons of Dordt, the last document contained in the Three Forms of Unity of the Reformed faith? “I have been thinking about it,” he recently told me. In spite of his busy schedule, he is hoping to complete the series: After that, I’m not really sure. I have in mind to write a book on the Westminster Assembly and then perhaps one on Henry Bullinger (and the Second Helvetic Confession). Although the Anglican Church differs in several ways from the Reformed Church, the story of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the life of Thomas Cranmer would make for a worthy and engaging children’s book as well. One of my goals is to help a new generation of children to grow up never thinking that the historic confessions are boring or irrelevant. Stories and art can make powerful impressions in the minds of young people, which I

hope will aid in their appreciation for the doctrine they may not yet understand. None of these projects has been confirmed, but they are all exciting intentions. At a time when confessions and creeds are belittled and even disparaged as elements of division, it is important to teach our children why and how they were originally written. It is important to help them understand why people were willing to die to bring doctrinal unity to the church. It is important to show the countless hours these men spent in study, conference, and prayer to summarize the teachings of the Bible with clarity and without doing violence to the text. Boekestein’s books are doing just this. If your children are memorizing a catechism or studying a confession of faith, these books will fire their interest and deepen their understanding. If they are not, they are still a wonderful way of whetting their appetite, encouraging them to discover these historical documents for themselves.

Simonetta Carr is a former elementary school teacher and has homeschooled her eight children. She is the author of the series Christian Biographies for Young Readers (Reformation Heritage) and of the fictional biography Weight of a Flame: The Passion of Olympia Morata (P&R). She lives in Santee, California, and is a Sunday school teacher at Christ United Reformed Church.

ModernReformation.org

geek s quad

THE P R O B LE M OF A SSU R A NCE

by Ryan Glomsrud

o you know if your name is written in the book of life? Unless your parents named you after a Bible hero like David, Sarah, Mary, or Abraham, how can you really know for sure? This is the so-called problem of assurance that most serious-minded Christians wrestle with at some point in their lives.

There have been a number of different approaches taken to the issue. Puritan moral theology vigorously pursued “orthopraxy” or “right living” as the fruit of “orthodoxy,” or “right believing.” In relation to the question of assurance, they examined this fruit in what is called the “practical syllogism.”

The Practical Syllogism

➨ A true Christian will perform good works. ➨ I perform good works. ➨ Ergo: I am a true Christian.

Recall that if the premises of a syllogism are true, its conclusion is certain. In this case there can be little doubt about the first premise, based

on the overwhelming testimony of Scripture that faith produces fruit. The second premise, however, is the sticking point on a personal level and can sometimes leave assurance vulnerable to doubt. Here the truth of the premise guaranteeing the conclusion requires a kind of moral conjecture. Take a personal inventory: Are you progressing in holiness? Are you becoming more Christ-like? Those are important questions to ask ourselves, especially since the apostle Paul exhorts us to “examine ourselves” to see whether we are in the faith (2 Cor. 13:5). But uncertainty is inevitable for the simple reason that our personal sanctity does not have the same visibility from month to month, much less day to day. Can assurance of our justification be secured when it rests on our sanctification? For this reason, many

other Reformed thinkers articulated a different kind of syllogism that keeps faith in focus, instead of centering on moral obedience.

The Reflex Act of Faith

➨ Salvation is given to those who have faith in Christ. ➨ I have faith in Christ. ➨ Ergo: I am a recipient of salvation.

In this argument, the deciding issue is whether or not genuine faith is present. This is sometimes called the “reflex act” of faith—namely, when a Christian steps outside of himself, metaphorically speaking, to determine whether he is in fact in possession of faith. This presupposes a distinction between faith in Christ in a direct act and the reflex act that searches out self-awareness of faith. For Calvin and many Reformed, the Holy Spirit accomplishes the work of the reflex act of faith. In other words, it is the Spirit who brings assurance and helps us know that we are beloved of God. This is closely related to the “mystical syllogism.”

The Mystical Syllogism

➨ True believers will experience the peace and joy of salvation. ➨ By the Holy Spirit I experience the peace of a cleansed conscience. ➨ Ergo: I am a true believer.

This can be a powerful testimony of assurance in the Christian life, though it must be seen in its proper place. Unfortunately, evangelical pietism— even of the Calvinist variety—sometimes overemphasizes the importance of these syllogisms, which can have the effect of subtly diverting one’s focus from Christ and his person and work to oneself. Introspection of either the moral, faith-reflexive, or experiential variety has some value but is always open to question and doubt. For this reason, Reformed theology on the whole tends to follow Calvin, who approached assurance by another route. Even the Westminster Confession of Faith (sometimes held to be in tension with Calvin on

assurance) grounds the doctrine in the following order of priority. For the Divines at the Assembly, taking pride of place is: 1. The divine truth of the promises of salvation; 2. The inward evidence of those graces (i.e., the practical syllogism); 3. The testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God (i.e., the mystical syllogism). Taking precedence then is the reliability of God’s covenant oath, his unchangeable promise of salvation, and the certainty of Christ’s finished work. That is the foundation of all assurance. In other words, Christians should first look to Christ himself in the gospel, something that is accomplished by the direct act of faith. As one classic Reformed text explains: Therefore I would have you to close with Christ in the promise, without making any question whether you are in the faith or no; for there is an assurance which rises from the exercise of faith by a direct act, and that is, when a man, by faith, directly lays hold upon Christ, and concludes assurance from thence.* According to Westminster then, self-examination is useful but secondary. The witness of the Spirit, in much the same way, is a genuine reality but still not the starting point for assurance. Instead, like Calvin the confession teaches that if Christ has found you, and you have embraced him in faith, then your first assurance derives directly from the strength of his saving office. Assurance is, in other words, a necessary implication of knowledge, assent, and hearty trust. It is important to answer moments of doubt in the Christian life with faith, returning again and again to Christ in his shepherding ministry. We should fight doubt with faith that God’s promises are sure and salvation has been accomplished in Christ.

Ryan Glomsrud is executive editor of Modern Reformation. * Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity (repr. Christian Heritage, 2009), 243.

ModernReformation.org

ba c k s t o ry

Ex i t I n t e rv i e w s by MICHAEL S. HORTON

hen religion is shuttled off to its little island of irrational subjectivity, the leap of faith, when evangelism bases its appeal on personal experience and moral usefulness with the slogan “deeds, not creeds,” when “I feel” edges out “we believe,” and when churches target niche markets for spiritual consumers, we should hardly be surprised when Monday’s cheerleaders for our spiritual brand are something else by Friday.

To the extent that Protestantism makes the individual consumer the center of the universe, the enemy of all external deities, forms, structures, creeds, rites, and authorities, it is basically Gnostic. Like the ancient second-century heresy, modern spirituality celebrates the inner self. A spark of

divinity, the soul loathes not only its bodily prison but everything similar to it. Like everything physical, the visible church is a distraction from the invisible church; what happens inside of the individual, spontaneously and without creaturely means, is more real—more “authentic”—than the

GLOSSARY MR frequently describes trends within contemporary evangelicalism as “Gnostic,” but what exactly was this ancient heresy? Gnosticism was a movement comprised of many writers in the early centuries of the Christian history. Above all, they were committed to a dualistic understanding of the universe, posing a contrast between physical matter (which was bad) and “spirit” (which was good). They even suggested that the God of the Old Testament was the Creator of matter who therefore stood in negative comparison with the God of love and spirit in the New Testament. Several early church fathers combated this heresy, such as Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, from a.d. 115 to 202. Despite his successful campaign, Gnostic impulses continue today to make inroads into contemporary evangelicalism in the form of various dualisms.

hum-drum ministry of preaching, baptizing, communing, and looking after the material as well as spiritual health of the flock. The Gnostic soul longs to be liberated from its chains and fly upward at last to claim the reward of its striving ascent. A host of sociologists study this “search for the sacred” that is the perennial religion story in American life. Although he does not mention the ancient heresy, Wade Clark Roof ’s description of contemporary American spirituality picks up Gnosticism’s main characteristics: a religion that “celebrates experience rather than doctrine; the personal rather than the institutional; the mythic and dreamlike over the cognitive; people’s religion over official religion; soft, caring images of deity” that can even be described as “feminine and androgynous,” over images of God as Creator, Redeemer, Lord, and Judge.1 According to James Davison Hunter, “The spiritual aspects of evangelical life are increasingly approached by means of and interpreted in terms of ‘principles,’ ‘rules,’ ‘steps,’ ‘laws,’ ‘codes,’ ‘guidelines,’ and the like.”2 Roof adds,

Salvation as a theological doctrine…becomes reduced to simple steps, easy procedures, and formulas for psychological rewards. The approach to religious truth changes—away from any objective grounds on which it must be judged, to a more subjective, more instrumental understanding of what it does for the believer, and how it can do what it does most efficiently.3

ccording to Roof ’s studies, “The distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘institution’ is of major importance” to spiritual seekers today.4 “Spirit is the inner, experiential aspect of religion; institution is the outer, established form of religion.” 5 He adds, “Direct experience is always more trustworthy, if for no other reason than because of its ‘inwardness’ and ‘withinness’—two qualities that have come to be much appreciated in a highly expressive, narcissistic culture.”6 So the real question is: Where can I best find this inner enlightenment for the upward ascent? Some years ago, Gilles Quispel suggested that the Western cultural tradition consists of three rival visions of reality and how we come to know it: “Reason,” “Faith,” and “Gnosis.” Through all of the transitions from ancient to medieval to modern and now postmodern, these remain enduring sources of meaning. The exit interviews that we hear often fall into these three categories. If I may be so bold, let me offer some advice. First, let’s consider those friends who believe that the choice between reason and faith had to be made, and it was made in favor of reason. Many of the most vocal atheists today (and in the past) have been reared in fundamentalist and evangelical circles. Think of how often in the Gospels the disciples ask Jesus a question, and then let’s ask ourselves how often we encourage believers to know not only what they believe, but why. When we answer their honest doubts with “Just pray about it” or “Just read your Bible more,” thoughtful people are pressed to conclude that they have to either build a sturdy wall between their faith and their ordinary thinking or check out if they don’t swallow our dogmatism whole. But let’s not let rationalists off the hook, either. ModernReformation.org

B A CK STO R Y

Reason is a tool; rationalism is a philosophy. Rationalists already know what’s true before actually examining the evidence. People don’t rise from the dead, because people can’t rise from the dead. This is a logical fallacy, called “begging the question.” Naturalism is the worldview that makes certain things possible and impossible, and therefore God, miracles, and the like are a priori impossible. No use engaging arguments and evidence to the contrary. Rationalism is a reverse dogmatism. It cannot justify its own policy; at the end of the day, when pressed to defend their position, rationalists will usually throw up their hands like any fideist and say, “Well, that’s the way it is.” The alternative to rationalism is Gnosticism. I don’t actually think that they are that far apart— and they’re certainly closer to each other than either is to the Christian faith. Like rationalists, Gnostics already know everything inside themselves. Whether it’s identified with reason or spirit, both lodge ultimate authority in the individual’s inner light. However, some move back and forth between traditions within the Christian faith. Although the Reformers excoriated Gnostic “enthusiasm” (“god-within-ism”) among radical sects in their day, it finds a welcome home in many churches today that are formally connected to the Reformation. American revivalism helped foster this “enthusiast” spirit. It’s no wonder then that so many Protestants, liberal and conservative, are casting a longing eye toward Rome and the East. Many evangelicals are rushing into Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy without the Reformation even being a whistle-stop along the way. That’s probably due in part to the fact that Reformation Christianity is marginal in American religion today, even sometimes in churches that are confessionally committed to it. Years ago, psychologist Robert Jay Loftin described the passion for perpetual change among many in Western societies today as a restlessness for something new. He drew on the Greek myth of Proteus, who would change his shape to elude capture. The “Protean Self” is how he described identity in our age. What used to be identified as

pathological (multiple-personality disorder) is now actually quite normal. According to Lofton, it is an obsession with personal makeovers that has its origins in a sense of guilt whose origin and solution the self cannot clearly identify. This analysis makes sense of the conversations I’ve had with so many who have tried just about everything. Where does the feverish striving for self-making and remaking stop? According to Scripture, Proteus is chained by the law, forced to hear what he doesn’t want to hear, so that he can be addressed by the gospel— the news that even though he can’t make himself new, he can be forgiven, clothed in Christ’s righteousness, and recast by the Spirit as a character in Christ’s unfolding drama: the New Creation. Paul Avis observed that the Reformers were preoccupied with two questions that were inextricably linked: “How can I find a gracious God?” and “Where can I find a true church?” Actually, they are not only linked; the answer is the same for both. The true church is found “wherever the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered according to Christ’s ordinance.” Only when Proteus is chained, his anxious self-transformations stopped dead in their tracks, can he really be free. The true church is not wherever we like the music or wherever we have the best chance of finding props and costumes for our life movie. It is not wherever we are awed by mysterious transcendence or hi-tech immanence, or wherever we find a group of people like us. We find God (or rather, he finds us) where he has promised to meet us: in his Word proclaimed, administered, and applied in the covenant of grace. That’s where you find a gracious God—in Christ, as he is clothed with his gospel.

Michael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 195. James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 75. 3 Roof, 195. 4 Roof, 23. 5 Roof, 30. 6 Roof, 67. 1

Final Thoughts

by MICHAEL S. HORTON

here are a lot of reasons why people exit evangelical, Lutheran, and Reformed churches for other Christian traditions or other religions or no religion at all. It doesn’t help to speculate or psychologize about the motives and reasons. That’s a dead giveaway of resentment to which we’re prone whenever we see someone in our number check out.

Furthermore, no one ever makes big commitments, including religious ones, for one reason or one argument. But here are some things to think about. If you’re considering Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, here are some questions. First, are you reacting against an admittedly messy Protestantism—fundamentalism, liberalism, or something in between—only to find similar problems elsewhere? Sure, there are a lot of parishes where you won’t find a polka mass or praise band, but will you hear the gospel preached? And will the sacraments be administered as the church’s offering to God or as God’s gift to sinners? Sure, you’ll hear about grace here and there, but will you be led to rest in grace alone, in Christ alone? Rome and Orthodoxy offer a powerful apologetic against the Reformation: of what use is an infallible text if you don’t have an infallible interpreter—either the pope or the tradition? But what will you actually find when you get there? Anyone who has studied church history knows that the centuries of controversy, contradiction, and even schism are there as well, along with libraries filled with papal decrees and interpretations of tradition. This is infinite regress: who interprets the interpreters? The Bible is itself a library. Its richness, depth, and diversity—not to mention our own finitude and sin—mean that we will have differences over interpretation. But ask yourself this question: is the magisterium or the tradition as clear and, yes, as simple as the Bible itself in its central plot and teachings? And if you’re thinking about abandoning Christianity—or perhaps any religion—ask yourself whether you have compared apples to apples. In other words, have you compared a weak set of

“does the alternative you’re considering really probe the seriousness of the human condition and provide a gospel that is as deep as the problem?” arguments for Christianity with a strong case against it? Maybe you have. Walking away from the gospel is not just an intellectual affair; it involves the heart and will. Nevertheless, have you investigated the Christian claims—and the arguments and evidence—seriously enough to this point? Furthermore, does the alternative you’re considering really probe the seriousness of the human condition and provide a gospel that is as deep as the problem? As Francis Schaeffer often said, “Christianity is not useful if it isn’t true.” Paul said that first in 1 Corinthians 15. No other religion or philosophy hangs everything on history as the gospel does. You don’t need Christianity to be smart, to be a good person, to have a great marriage and a sense of inner peace. You need the gospel only if there is a coming judgment and someone else has taken care of it for you. ModernReformation.org

book

of th e

year

“Horton delivers the Reformed goods to a new generation.” So say the judges of Christianity Today, who— we are proud to announce—have voted Mike Horton’s The Christian Faith book of the year for 2012 in the category of theology/ethics. To order the award -winning systematic theology book today, v i s i t W h iteHo r seInn.o r g/ Th eCh r i st i an Fai t h.