has-evangelicalism-lost-its-voice-september-october-1997

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EFORMATION VOLUME 6 NUMBER 1

Has Evangelicalism Lost Its Voice?

T H E

M O V E M E N T

A N D

I T S

M E D I A

Has Evangelicalism Lost Its Voice?

THE MOVEMENT AND ITS MEDIA

FEATURES 4

Time for a Commercialism Break Michael S. Horton Being “wise as serpents” means recognizing how much the market pervades Evangelicalism—whether Christianity Today, early American revivalism, or your local church.

16 The Descent of Evangelicalism

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John Warwick Montgomery As Evangelicals we’re regressing, according to the author. Signs of ill health include anti-intellectualism, weak biblical knowledge, undue focus on inner experiences, and poor priorities. There’s hope however, in looking back to the Reformation.

19 Looking Toward 2000 James Montgomery Boice Equipping ourselves for the next century’s challenges means understanding the weaknesses of the evangelical movement today. The spiritual battles ahead will require us to participate in the world, develop the art of persuasion, and deepen our prayer life.

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26 But What Shall We Read?

David P. Scaer If Christianity Today is losing its theological and intellectual edge, where should we turn?

Can any periodical fill the void?

DEPARTMENTS 2 3 13 14

In This Issue Letters On the Agenda An Interview with Carl Henry 15 Comments by Harold O. J. Brown

24 Quotes 32 An Interview with Neil Postman 35 Review 38 In Print 39 Footnotes 40 On My Mind

29 The Scandal of Evangelical Scholarship Eric Gregory While there is a growing “evangelical academic elite,” it needs to be informed by Reformation theology. Christian scholars must know their theology to engage the university effectively.

EFORMATION

IN THIS ISSUE…

By Michael S. Horton

A publication of Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Editor-in-Chief Dr. Michael S. Horton Assistant Editor Benjamin E. Sasse Production Editor Irene H. Hetherington

his was a difficult issue for us to put together, chiefly because we do not want it to be perceived as a direct attack on any one institution or periodical. Nonetheless, most of our ar ticles do refer quite directly to Christianity Today, the publication that has served as the unofficial rudder of the evangelical ship since it was founded by Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry four decades ago. Not unlike “chicken-andthe-egg” debates over the influence of Hollywood on society, Christianity Today both reflects and helps to shape the direction of the movement.

None of us targets the folks at Christianity Today as the focus of the problem. In fact, in a recent issue (June 16), managing editor Michael Maudlin wisely noted, “We lack a good forum for healthy debate. We are dependent on controversy to stimulate discussion.” Just a few pages later, the editors responded to a letter to the editor by describing Evangelicalism as “a movement that, though united by the gospel, seems blessedly unable to find agreement on much else.” Exactly, except that I’m not sure the movement is even united by the Gospel. It lacks a coherent voice because it lacks a stable and well-articulated theology beyond clichés. As a movement rather than a Church, it has become easy prey for secular models of institutional identity. Each new “circus” that comes to the evangelical town divides the camp still fur ther—especially the ones claiming to unite the body of Christ.

In spite of these str uctural complications, when we talk about the crisis of truth within contemporary Christianity, we sometimes sound as if the only thing that is necessary is a

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repetition of sound theology. There are, however, so many other factors that make it difficult for genuine reformation to have a lasting impact. One of those challenges involves the evangelical movement’s institutional bondage to the marketplace. Whereas much of the Christian witness in the past was supervised and distributed by Churches (their publishing houses, schools, etc.), there is very little left today that is not in the hands of parachurch “ministries” and their enor mous industry of marketing, sales, advertising, media, public relations, and a host of related services. What we need right now is a lot more than fulminations over the theological departures, as serious as those are. Not even diatribes against consumerism and other obsessions will suffice.

What we need to ask ourselves is whether the Church has been replaced with the marketplace and whether genuine reformation will be possible only if we take the institutional aspects of the challenge seriously. As such, in this issue, we will consider both the theological and institutional drift of Evangelicalism. We will often consider Christianity Today as a barometer, but this is hardly an exercise in finger-pointing.

Instead, the questions we raise should make us all think about our role as accomplices. In this enterprise, we hope to encourage thoughtful debate for longter m solutions rather than simply stirring up controversy for its own sake.

As such, we certainly welcome your response.

Copy Editors Ann Henderson Hart Deborah Barackman Layout and Design Lori A. Yerger Proofreader Alyson S. Platt Alliance Council Dr. John H. Armstrong The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael S. Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen Dr. J.A.O. Preus Dr. R.C. Sproul Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Dr. David F. Wells Contributing Scholars Dr. S. M. Baugh Dr. D. A. Carson Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson Dr. Timothy George Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb Dr. John W. Montgomery Mr. John Muether Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Roger Nicole Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Dr. David P. Scaer The Rev. Harold L. Senkbeil Dr. Robert Strimple Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals © 1997 All rights reserved.

ACE exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life. For more information, call or write us at: ALLIANCE OF CONFESSING EVANGELICALS 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 • ModernRef@aol.com

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LETTERS A BALANCED ISSUE ON THE SACRAMENTS Congratulations on the most balanced and well written set of essays on the Sacraments (May/June 1997) I have seen. As an Episcopal priest who shares your love of the Reformed heritage and evangelical tradition, I am happy to have found modernREFORMATION. My only wish is that you might consider including Anglican authors in future issues.

Though the Episcopal Church is a denomination that is deeply divided, there are still many who hold to the authority of Scripture and who seek to be true to the Reformed tradition. As you know, the Anglican Reformers of the sixteenth century, while maintaining some Catholic practices, remained deeply committed to the work of Luther and Calvin. Archbishop Cranmer was certainly influenced by the likes of these men as well as by Martin Bucer. Indeed, the Elizabethan ThirtyNine Articles contain a marked “Calvinist” tone, especially about justification, the Sacraments, and predestination.

Please consider inviting some Anglicans to share their thoughts and ideas with your readers. As Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch has so correctly pointed out in his excellent biography of Thomas Cranmer: “With Archbishops like Cranmer, Calvin need never have turned Calvinism into a presbyterian system, and Andrew Melville need not have waged his long war against bishops in the Church of Scotland.”

Rev. Jeffrey S. Miller Rector, St. David’s Episcopal Church Cheraw, South Carolina

TOO BALANCED AN ISSUE? I hate to admit it, but I think I have a “middle” view between Luther and Calvin on the Sacraments. Don’t blame me—it’s all these Lutheran contributors in this magazine. I will always be a true blue Calvinist soteriologically, though maybe not sacramentally. I am grateful for the exposure to the Lutherans—even if they are corrupting my theology!

What does this make me—a Calutheran? Well, it is better than being a Calminian.

Steven Augustine Badal Via Internet CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM You have got to be nuts! Comparing Precious Moments (Jan/Feb 1997) figurines to the golden calf in the Bible!

Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?

People like you bring down the ideals of Christianity and love for your fellow man. Go crawl back into your cave!

JoAnne Lambert Via America On-Line modernREFORMATION: Letters to the Editor 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Fax: (215) 735-5133 ModernRef@aol.com www.remembrancer.com/ace

FOUNDATIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH JAMES MONTGOMERY BOICE Any serious study of the Bible will benefit from this thorough and readable overview of Christianity’s major doctrines. Understand God’s nature, how he reveals himself, sin and the fall, and how Christ redeems us.

Dr. Boice will lead you through the work of the Holy Spirit in justification and sanctification. And he sums up with the work of the Church and the meaning of history.

B-FCF Hardback, $30.00 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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Time for a Commercialism Break MICHAEL S. HORTON

In 1990 a gathering of evangelical theologians assembled chiefly for the purpose of defining “evangelical” concluded that such definition was practically impossible to accomplish in the movement’s cur rent condition. In 1992 Christianity Today ran a cover story with the headline, “evangelical Mega-shift,” announcing the growing popularity of relational and therapeutic categories over the traditional theological themes of judgment and justification. Representatives of both orthodox and “new model” Evangelicalism engaged in a lively debate, and ever since, Christianity Today, InterVarsity Press, and other important evangelical voices have vigorously encouraged debate with respect to classical theism and other traditional beliefs. (By the way, I am not intending here to raise the question of whether such debates are appropriate for evangelical publishers, but simply claiming that their treatment of the denials of these doctrines as an evangelical option is a barometer of wider trends.) This says nothing of the periodicals, publishing houses and media organizations of the vast, amorphous world that goes by the label “evangelical,” in which “being tossed back and forth with every wind of doctrine” has been raised to an art form.

For that reason, periodicals like Christianity Today become important windows through which to view the evangelical landscape. We have included many references to the magazine in this issue not in an effort to simply vent our frustrations at a visible target, but to try to get a better handle on our challenges. Only then can we match these challenges with (it is to be hoped) adequate and constructive responses.

When I first began reading Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell was still editor-in-chief and over the last two 4

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decades I have watched the magazine (like the movement it represents) change dramatically. Recently, I sat down at our office and read some back issues of the magazine during its early (Carl Henry) years. Refor med theologians such as Louis Berkhof and Lutheran theologians such as Herman Sasse contributed alongside respected evangelical scholars, interacting with the best and worst of modern theology with a clear and wellinformed critical edge. In those days, the magazine had courage and theological interest. It was a magazine with a mission.

But in recent decades, things have changed. I’m sure it’s not just Christianity Today, but the movement that it represents. But that is why the magazine is so important for tracking the movement. Some extraneous factors are surely to be figured in here, especially the fact that in 1977 the magazine had financial difficulties, relocated to the midwest, underwent a major organizational restructuring, and began to purchase a group of periodicals which served a lay and youth constituency.

Thus, the magazine’s earlier mandate to serve pastors and chiefly church-workers by offering thoughtful evangelical responses to current theological trends shifted considerably in order to make the magazine more MODERN REFORMATION

commercially viable. I am told that the magazine is still looking for its identity, and this partially explains the changes. Nevertheless, it does not explain everything.

Not all of the magazine’s editorial decisions can be accounted for simply in terms of commercial viability.

In recent years, decidedly non-evangelical views have been represented as part of the ever-expanding spectrum. There has been some limited theological engagement, but rather than offering a unified evangelical voice, these exercises have often thrown into question classical theism, Chalcedonian Christology, and traditional views of the atonement and justification. As Millard Erickson has recently observed in his new book, a “new guard” of theologians is emerging that is decidedly critical of traditional Reformational convictions.

Stanley Grenz and others have rallied under the banner of Clark Pinnock and his “megashift” from Augustinian views of sin and grace to more seeker-friendly conceptions.

Meanwhile, there are comparatively few Reformed and Lutheran scholars who are interacting with these writers, partly due to conservative lethargy but also to increasing marginalization by the “new guard” proponents in editorial leadership. To their credit, these younger theologians are actually engaging in contemporary debates, concerning which conservatives seem to be largely unaware. In that respect, the intellectual vigor of the new guard is reminiscent of the magazine’s early years. But that is where the comparisons end.

My purpose here, however, is to concentrate on the commercial captivity of the entire evangelical movement, typified by but by no means limited to Christianity Today.

In fact, the points I will be making here apply to all of us, including modernREFORMATION and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. We’re all in this together and we can only get out of it with each other’s help. It is an

economic captivity that does not discriminate on the basis of creed.

Now is the time for construction, rebuilding the walls, so to speak. I would like to use the rest of this article to defend the thesis that a reformation in our day requires much more than a simple return to forgotten doctrines; that this essential goal of theological recovery requires a fresh vision of the nature and function of the Church.

Her reclamation from commercial captivity is impossible apart from a constructive, bold, and costly reevaluation of our understanding of the Church.

In our increasingly homogeneous consumer society, a Reformed believer is more likely to be shaped by the icons of mainstream Evangelicalism than by the confessions, liturgy, theology, and piety of the Reformed tradition. The tie that binds is actually capitalism and popular culture, although it masquerades as new unity in the Spirit.

Where Is the “Visible” Church?

First, we need to come to terms with the fact that Evangelicalism is a movement and not a church. Confusion on this point has resulted in a host of misunderstandings.

Resting on sound exegesis, St. Augustine emphasized that “Church” in Scripture refers to both an invisible and a visible Church. While there are some sheep outside of the visible Church and some wolves within it, this is the earthly locus of Christ’s presence and the ordinary sphere of his saving activity. Gradually, medieval Rome came to treat the Church as only visible, so that only those who were in communion with the Church of Rome could be identified as tr ue Christians.

Meanwhile, the Anabaptists and other radical groups tended to see the Church as only invisible. The Reformers repeated Augustine’s familiar exegesis. After all, in Scripture “the Church” could identify all the elect throughout all ages or, more frequently, it could refer to “the Church at Jerusalem,” “Colossae,” “Galatia,” “Rome,” “Sardis,” and so forth.

In our day, there is almost no trace of a doctrine of the visible Church within Evangelicalism (for whom “the church” means “all born-again folks” and not an official institution). And should we be surprised?

Despite his clear Reformed convictions concerning the SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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Gospel message, George Whitefield and many leaders of the Great Awakening quite unintentionally subverted the ordained ministry and the ordinary means of grace for extraordinary parachurch events. Gradually, the revivalistic emphasis on the New Birth replaced the classic Reformed (as well as catholic and evangelical) concern with the Ministry of Word and Sacrament.

An impor tant shift occur red in Whitefield’s ministry: the institutional Church, while not directly attacked, was no longer to be regarded by the masses as the bearer of the kingdom’s keys. If the established churches would not accept the revivals, one no longer had to be “sent” by them, but simply had to create an alternative authority: that of the marketplace. The people would vote with their feet. So when the Southern Baptist Convention recently decided to boycott Disney for moral reasons, convention spokespersons were emphasizing the size and power of the denomination as a significant consumer block the way evangelicals often use their size and power as a voting block. The Church trades its unique mandate for secular power and, by using “hot button” issues, shows that beneath the particular moral concerns with Disney is a deeper moral problem within the Church itself: why are we this committed to “saving” Disney? It is part of our debt to popular culture. As a spokesman for the convention put it in an interview with David Brown on National Public Radio, June 18, “We long to embrace Mickey Mouse again.”

But this marriage requires a commitment on both sides. As the Church trades its spiritual capital for secular authority, it unhinges itself from the normal checks and balances of a historic doctrine of the Church. That’s why our annual denominational assemblies and synods are far less influential than the deals made in the Christian music hub of Nashville or at the Christian Booksellers’ Convention. In our increasingly homogeneous consumer society, a Reformed believer is more likely to be shaped by the icons of mainstream Evangelicalism than by the confessions, liturgy, theology, and piety of the Reformed tradition.

The tie that binds is actually capitalism and popular culture, although it masquerades as a new unity in the Spirit.

To be sure, revivals began as occasional meetings outside church auspices but not hostile to them.

Eventually, however, the churches began to adopt the revivalist’s techniques, including the appeal to popular culture (especially the press). The itinerant’s stage, constructed for the “big event,” at once religion and entertainment in an age before television, could hardly be kept out of the churches themselves by popular will.

From these early revivals to the Promise Keepers meetings, mass movements relying on commercial 6

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GEORGE WHITEFIELD AND THE SHIFT FROM THE PARISH TO THE PRESS Although his thesis is controversial (and perhaps exaggerated in places), Yale professor Harry S. Stout has argued persuasively that the revivalistic emphasis on the New Birth replaced the classic Reformed concern with the Ministry of Word and Sacrament.

In an article he wrote anticipating his book on Whitefield—The Divine Dramatist—Stout shows that “Before Whitefield, the newspapers did not include religion in their subject matter.” 1 Although the Calvinist culture had created, for the first time, a citizenship based on literacy, the press covered secular news. But with Whitefield things changed: “For the first time, religion became part of the exchange of information in the infant American press.”2 Increasingly, the evangelist came to rely on the press for amassing crowds, as the Puritan and Anglican cultures of established order gave way to Yankee populism. Setting himself against the local clergy in many places, Whitefield used the clerical furor to an advantage: “In utilizing the secular news, Whitefield was at once presenting religion as a popular commodity that could compete not so much against other churches as against the goods and services of this world. Not by accident, his greatest preaching successes would take place outside the traditional churches in the secular ‘fields’ of the marketplace.”3 What if Whitefield, instead of proclaiming Christ and justification, was an advocate of Arianism or Pelagianism? After he established the example, it would be impossible for churches to regulate their communicants. Authority moved to mass popular culture, to the realm of public opinion. As Stout reports from the evangelist’s own Journals, Whitefield was often taking great pride in making himself the news of the hour. “Instead of invoking authority as a means of popular control and influence, Whitefield would make himself popular and, on the basis of that popularity, claim authority and status.”4 “The tide of popularity now began to run very high,” Whitefield wrote, noting that, “I could no longer walk on foot as usual, but was constrained to go in a coach, from place to place, to avoid the

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hosannas of the multitude.”5 For the revolutionary Yankee, emancipation from traditional authority was the order of the day. It is little wonder that Benjamin Franklin, hardly a friend to Whitefield’s theology, nevertheless took his Anglican friend on board as a beneficiary of his patronage as America’s publisher and publicist. The more the established clergy (not only deists, but Calvinists) railed against Whitefield’s parachurch efforts, the more his audiences grew.

“Little do my enemies think what service they do me,” he observed.6 As the authority shifted from the Church to the marketplace, so too did the criteria. Instead of noting his faithfulness to the message, the papers noted that Whitefield “was ‘sprightly’ and ‘cheerful’ in temperament, and they understood that he moved ‘with great agility and life.’”7 Perhaps it is not such a giant step from this to the classified ads that churches place in Christianity Today for pastors. The section is even called, “Marketplace.” The effects could hardly be predicted by Whitefield himself.

mythic status and became the first modern religious celebrity, his revivals also transformed the meaning of religion in profound ways that would persist into the twentieth century... His mass revivals were not really a church, nor were they connected to local communities and congregations. The audiences changed with every meeting, evidencing no per manent structure or leadership aside from Whitefield’s own charismatic 9ministry and the network of media promoters.

Although he supported the settled churches (at least those in support of his work), “Whitefield’s audiences, publishers, and loyal supporters represented powerful new ‘parachurches’—g roups of otherwise disconnected individuals bound in voluntary religious associations based on a marketplace organization and destined to characterize panProtestant ‘evangelical’ organizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an ironic process that Whitefield could not have foreseen, and may not have By traveling constantly, realized, his media-enhanced Whitefield could structure all revivals had become, in effect, an of his preaching around the institution.”10 While for Jonathan cathartic and highly emotive George Whitefield experience of the New Birth.

Edwards revival was “a surprising Theology, denomination, social duty, and work of God,” for Whitefield, although a critic of sacraments were left behind for “settled” John Wesley’s Arminian theology, the events became preachers. For Whitefield, all was passion and routine. “Whitefield’s revivals had become, in effect, a the experience of regeneration.8 form of entertainment, that is, a series of trans-local, staged events that could be repeated with predictable—and no longer-frightening—regularity.”

This is an important point, for ever since, “ministry” has been defined less in terms of the ordained ministry Bystanders marveled at the evangelist’s oratory, than in terms of “soul-winning.” For Whitefield (and observing that women would faint at hearing him for that matter, many of the Great Awakening’s leaders, pronounce the word “Mesopotamia.” The darker side especially in the Second Awakening), it was not that the of this, impossible for Whitefield to have seen, is aptly settled ministry (catechism, the Sacraments, the ordinary summarized by Stout, especially in the age of mass worship, etc.) was unimportant, but that it could be set popular religious movements that routinely boast of aside or distinguished from evangelism. It is difficult for “breaking down the walls” of doctrinal division: us, heirs to exaggerated versions of this outlook, to even comprehend how new all of this was in the history of In one sense, Whitefield’s vision of a revivalthe Christian Church. Again, Stout’s point is on the driven, transatlantic parachurch committed to mark: the individual experience of the New Birth was nontheological. By not calling his revivals a Inevitably, new culture heroes produce new denomination, he did not need to craft credal myths. Even as Whitefield elevated himself to statements of faith or establish doctrinal

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requirements for membership that would set one group of Christians off from another.

Yet in another sense, Whitefield’s conception was profoundly theological. He avoided creeds and denominations in the revivals, but at the same time he presented a new theological perspective contained less in his own Calvinist convictions than in the radical new significance ascribed to religious experience and spiritual legitimacy. In Whitefield’s evangelical parachurch, individual experience became the ultimate arbiter of authentic religious faith.11 It fit perfectly with “the new order” of “the increasingly individualized and impersonal world of the marketplace.”12 The goal was not the communal process of becoming and being a Christian (viz., as in traditional Refor med theolog y, Baptism, catechesis, confirmation/profession, and lifelong growth through Word, Sacrament, and discipline), but an individual experience. Even before the shift from Calvinism to Arminianism, therefore, the evangelical revivals represent a shift from Churchbased theology and practice to popularly based approaches. As Stout notes, Whitefield never abandoned his Calvinism and even in his uniquely experience-driven approach the preaching of Christ and justification stand in sharp contrast to contemporary evangelism. Nevertheless, the shift that occurred, at once nontheological and yet quite theological, set a pattern for our current crisis. It demonstrates that we can no longer separate institutional reform from doctrinal reform.

As Stout reminds us, although Whitefield would have shuddered to have seen the triumph of Arminian revivalism, both in terms of its theology and its denigration of the ordinary ministry, it is difficult not to see in his ministry, despite its obvious fruit, an unsettling harbinger of things to come. “In the new revivals rooted in celebrity preaching and media packaging, theology counted for less. In the end, the revivals that Whitefield did so much to shape were simply not about theology, but about experience.”13 The Church was replaced with the marketplace; heart-centered and experiencecentered, individualistic evangelism replaced the more unitive and communal evangelism of the parish; popular ministry across all boundaries trumped the sending authority for the established ministry.

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success, public relations, and “news,” tended to replace the authority of the Church. For the first time, even in Protestantism, churches had to compete in the marketplace and defend their right to insist upon creeds, confessions, and liturgies. The values of the marketplace were already threatening the values of the Church.

Declaring the world to be his parish, John Wesley paved the way for the revivalism that pit the entrepreneurial and self-appointed enthusiast against the called and sent officers of the Church. Although there is not sufficient space to pursue the history here, the nineteenth century saw the notion of the visible Church collapse into the idea of an American voluntary association (like the Temperance Union or YMCA), leaving the notion of the invisible church as the only measure of the church’s distinction from the world.

“Church” now meant “all who had experienced the New Birth,” not this church here and there. Stripped of its visible status, evangelical ecclesiology ever since has suffered from a Gnostic docetism. Where the early Church struggled repeatedly with those who denied the reality of Christ’s visible, physical body, today the Church must also contend for its own visible, institutional existence.

Without the banks of the visible Church, the river of a rising capitalist economy could easily swell to floodstage, leaving the ministry Christ founded to climb higher and higher to dry ground, or to accept its fate and become part of the parachurch tide. As Wheaton professor Roger Lundin described the situation in The Culture of Interpretation, “By the time of the American Revolution, the transformation of the original Puritan vision was all but complete. At the center of the ‘city upon a hill’ was no longer a church but a marketplace, where preference was on its way to becoming the only principle.”1 Heir to both Whitefield’s low view of the visible Church and his emphasis on the experience of the New Birth, Billy Graham’s career was launched in earnest in his 1949 Los Angeles crusade, when newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst gave instructions to “puff Graham.” While generations of Lutherans, Reformed, and Baptists had accepted an identity shaped by their distinctive Church-life, a new coalition emerged around Graham and the neo-evangelical empire that replaced the authority of the Church. Even the Roman Church, the most institutionalized form of Christianity, was not able to withstand Americanization. (The romantic myth of untouched splendor, however, may account in part for the attraction of Wal-Mart-wary evangelicals to Rome.)

While the Protestant Reformers criticized the magisterial use of churchly authority, they insisted upon its ministerial use in guiding the communion of saints.

But it was increasingly the case in America that this was MODERN REFORMATION

becoming a communion of consumers: religion, like everything else, was a commodity to be bought and sold and Churches (including their publishing houses, schools, social agencies, etc.) were increasingly lacking a sense of purpose.

Nobody had to actually challenge the creeds and confessions; these norms simply became increasingly irrelevant compared to the massive influence of trends in the popular religious marketplace. Immigrant churches such as the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) even resisted the use of English in worship and the education of their children and clerg y in order to preserve their communions from the “lowest common denominator” homogeneity of revivalistic Evangelicalism. Eventually, the pressures of the marketplace were too great.

What this means is that “the church” for evangelicals, as for the enthusiasts, is nothing more than the set “all Christians.” This is why we can speak about “the evangelical church,” or “the American church,” as if there actually were such a thing. In fact, evangelicals are eager to insist that the church isn’t this Church or that Church (Presbyterian, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist, Anglican, etc.), but the church (i.e., all “born again” believers). My purpose here is not to critique this position, but simply to suggest that this loss of any real sense of the visible Church is partly responsible for our predicament. It is not enough to reform doctrinal content. We have to question the very institutional media or forms in which our doctrine, liturgy, and life come to us and incorporate us.

Once a low view of the visible Church is linked to a free-market economy, it becomes institutionally impossible to avoid consumerism and the lowestcommon-denominator instincts. In other words, theological and liturgical drift is inevitable, for conservatives and liberals alike, unless we can reconstruct a theological and practical model of the visible Church.

consciousness,” on the other hand, dominates those groups that see themselves as restoring a lost innocence.

In modern America, there is a third type which has g rown out of this second type: the “consumer consciousness.”

When “the church” is not a Church at all, but a movement, and at that, a movement dependent on popular culture, the leaders are no longer institutional authorities who receive their apostolic calling by a historical succession of called, qualified, and sent ministers, but those whose success in the world as celebrities or entrepreneurs earns the respect of a significant share of the marketplace.

For instance, the widely publicized “evangelicals and Catholics Together” involved a collection of Protestant “heavy weights” who represented a niche market, while the Roman Catholic side was represented by theologians and churchmen who were institutionally bound to speak on behalf of what they regard as the true visible Church. Those who wish to speak on behalf of Rome must receive the ecclesial imprimatur, while those who wish to speak on behalf of Evangelicalism must receive the approval of the marketplace. Best-selling authors who are also enter taining speakers are far more influential in shaping the average layperson (Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist, et. al.) than are those entrusted with the Ministry of the Word.

Similarly, while no hymn was allowed to be sung in Presbyterian churches before the turn of the century unless it bore the note at the bottom: “Permitted to be sung by the General Assembly,” conservative Presbyterian and Reformed congregations today regularly teach views diametrically opposed to their confessional standards.

Eventually, Wesleyan, Keswick, and Pentecostal theology made it into our hymnals and then, finally, we now have “praise music,” produced by music companies which are often owned by secular conglomerates whose mission statement is to enhance shareholder value (read: “make a lot of money”).

Shorn of a biblical doctrine of the visible Church, the evangelical movement has had to depend on secular models of authority and institutional identity. Its bourgeois sympathies find such ready-made models in the world of consumerism, marketing, therapy, and entertainment.

Painters across America are busy excising “Baptist,” “Lutheran,” “Presbyterian,” “Reformed,” and whatever else, from church signs that might turn people off.

The Church as Popular Culture Ernst Troeltsch coined a useful distinction between the “church-consciousness” and the “sectconsciousness,” the former characteristic of those groups that see themselves in continuity with a tradition and accountability within that tradition. The “sect-

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Our church culture mimics our mass culture. In a consumer-oriented society, the town square is left desolate in favor of the mall on the outskirts of town; freeways link one city’s service-oriented industries (hotel and restaurant chains) to another. In fact, a regular traveler could wake up in L.A., Dallas, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, or Seoul, and not recall where he or she is until the second cup of coffee. We have even built our cities and towns around our consumer-identity. Where one could say (and in many cases can still say) of quaint villages and city squares that have not lost their charm, “Now this is Bavaria!” or “What an interesting Victorian garden!”, most of the time we all live in Disneyland: a clean, safe, happy world made of facades.

Contemporary Christian music, following popular music, eradicates all of the distinctiveness not only of doctrine but of local or regional cultures, and becomes the musical equivalent of the mall and restaurant chain.

What does this depressing line of thought have to do with the Church? Unfortunately, quite a lot.

Distinctions are out; eclectic choices are in. Churches increasingly follow the patter n of the suburban shopping mall rather than the town square. Painters across America are busy excising “Baptist,” “Lutheran,” “Presbyterian,” “Reformed,” and whatever else, from church signs that might turn people off. It is not even that a Baptist might be suspicious of a Presbyterian church just down the street. In all likelihood, he or she would not even know what Presbyterians believed anyway. The real problem in having the denomination in the name is simply that it establishes a specific identity and this is dangerous in a consumer society. Niche markets might have worked four decades ago, when people knew what they believed and had convictions, but today we need to appeal to “seekers”; that is, to those who have spent most of their lives in our churches but never actually encountered Christianity.

All that “breaking down the walls” has accomplished is the triumph of modernity’s crass consumerism in the Church as well as the culture. In other words, now there is no real Bavaria or Victorian village, and no real Reformed or Lutheran church, but simply different “rides” in the evangelical theme park. It should hardly surprise us when we see charismatic churches suddenly becoming Eastern Orthodox and Presbyterian churches becoming Pentecostal. We have 10

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become consumers of religious experience.

As with many corrosive sociological trends in American culture, the Church often finds a way of inventing a new “move of the Spirit” to both sanction and benefit from the trends. Those who are proponents of minimizing church distinctives (viz., doctrinal, liturgical, ethical) are hailed as pioneers of ecumenism and Christian charity, when it is at least wor th considering whether they are merely cashing in on that aspect of our consumer culture that demands generic, user-friendly products of consumption. Announcing a new age of the Spirit, it ends up being the spirit of the age. Consuming a religious experience (like the New Birth, the Second Blessing, or the Toronto Blessing) is more attractive to us than dying to self and “growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Popular movements, not churches, are built for consumers.

The Economic Captivity of the Church Consumerism is an outlook that cannot be dispelled without a serious reevaluation of even our institutions. I am neither an economist nor the son of an economist, but bear with me here for a moment. I’m all for free-market economics, but as with every fallen system it is not without its destr uctive elements and those elements seem to show up where it counts the most: in education, culture, community, and the Church.

In “high culture,” institutional protection against a market-mentality is established: PBS programming, museums, foundations and programs for education, scientific research, and the arts and humanities, all receive private funding so that they do not have to rely on the ever-changing whims of the marketplace. Few community theaters or city symphonies could survive one season without their many generous patrons, while movie chains hardly have to solicit sponsors. A well-endowed college does not need to make its decisions about course offerings on the basis of income. A privately funded artist or writer does not have to pander to mass consumer appetites. University publishing houses are funded by their sponsoring institutions, so they do not need to publish books that “sell,” but can make their editorial decisions strictly on the basis of what they think will contribute to MODERN REFORMATION

knowledge in particular fields. Recognizing that the corrosive effects of a market-oriented culture are discerned in things that matter most, these groups find institutional ways of saving a space for these pursuits.

God knew what he was doing when he founded a Church as an institutional way of preserving his selfrevelation in Christ. How is something constituted by Scripture as “the pillar and ground of the truth,” if it is merely an invisible collection of born-again Christians?

Sadly, it seems that the world takes it significant things (education, research, the arts, etc.) more seriously than the Church takes even the Gospel these days.

When we come to the evangelical movement, we find that its publishing houses, music distributors, artists, colleges and seminaries are largely dependent on the giving (and therefore the consumer trends) of the masses.

Even seminaries place ads in Christian periodicals “selling” their marketable features often to the exclusion of their program content distinctives. Here are just a few: “Earn your seminary degree without relocating”; “Psychology knows all the problems— Jesus Christ knows all the answers”; “Our psychology doctorate meets life’s hurts with tools that heal”; “Earn your M.A. in the field... Convenient and sensitive to your place in ministry”; “Earn your degree without relocating. Study off campus or on-line with your computer,” and on we could go. Academic and ecclesiastical priorities are pushed aside in the pursuit of practical and consumer-oriented goals. Is it any wonder, then, that those who come to a seminary as consumers would go out and build churches on the same model?

New “study” Bibles, many of them bizarre beyond description, roll off of evangelical presses. And why?

Because the ones we have available to us are really insufficient? Not quite. As one publisher admitted to me, it is because even a poorly received Bible sells more copies than a best-selling trade book. Actually, books are a diminishing commodity in Christian retailing.

Doug Ross, president of the evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) says it all: “Our industry is the ideal niche market.”2 According to one source, “We’re all fighting for the same disposable income along with Wal-Mart and Macy’s.”3 “Breaking down the walls”? Hardly. It’s just that instead of Baptists and Presbyterians fighting over Sacraments and competing for members, parachurch ministries and evangelical music, publishing, and church marketing companies compete for market share. Money talks.

Like popular music, which depends on the favor of a mass audience, contemporary Christianity is institutionally incapable of disappointing the crowds.

Its entire network of churches, ministries and institutions requires it to be answerable to a wide audience of consumers. To refuse to be answerable to the world of public taste, the evangelical movement would risk its very existence. As long as we accept the regnant paradigm of the Church, we will not see longterm and deeply rooted reformation.

In fact, a reformation that champions the Gospel in the clearest of terms will be short-lived unless there is an institutional way of preserving and faithfully mediating that Gospel in Word and Sacrament.

The consumer paradigm is not capable of being reformed. Just look at the example of Christianity Today.

Insiders tell us that its cur rent priorities do not reflect a theological shift but are the result of growing dependence on a broad evangelical market. But doesn’t this simply illustrate the point we are making here? In the beginning, the Pew Charitable Tr usts funded the magazine, giving Carl Henry and his associates free reign to provide a thoughtful and faithful alternative to modernism. But now the magazine must appeal to the broad evangelical market in order to be commercially viable. This is not a neutral shift by any means, and it is one more example of the fact that there can be no institutional integrity as long as one is dependent on commercial success. It is not a war between the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” modernREFORMATION will fare no better under the same conditions.

Some months back, I recall the Christianity Today cover story on the dangers of consumerism, with about half of the pages committed to adver tising.

Furthermore, the consumerism it pictured was the typical, narrowly defined moral variety (over-charging one’s Visa, for instance). It would perhaps have been too much to have hoped for a thoughtful soul-searching with respect to the commercialization of Christianity in terms of retailing, church growth, and publishing. What is required is a completely different structure of accountability, and this will not only demand soulsearching on the part of others, but for all of us.

The Church will have to replace the marketplace and her officers will have to replace the entrepreneurs, as God’s Word transforms us from consumers to believers.

But before we all nod, let us seriously count the cost that SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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putting such ideas into practice will require. In the abstract, it is hardly radical, but its institutional implications would be. At least one reason why there is “no place for truth” is that there is no space for truth in our market-driven religious atmosphere. We will have to recover a sound doctrine of the Church, no matter where it leads and no matter how painful it may be, even for us who claim to be on the right side of things.

Then, if we are able to go beyond this, we should look for resources that we consider significant enough to protect from the economic forces of the marketplace.

We can give lip-service to this response, but we cannot mean it in the same way Jesus meant it unless we divorce ourselves from the institutional polygamy that forces the churches to serve both God and Mammon.

These suggestions are admittedly sketchy. I’m not even sure of how to fill in the details myself but would encourage a wider and deeper discussion than has been provided here. At some point, we will have to come to the cross as sinners in need of salvation from God’s wrath rather than coming to the spiritual mall as consumers in need of having our “felt needs” met. And if we’re going to get beyond abstract truisms, this will have to take practical forms. A whole generation of Israelites was barred from the Promised Land because they “demanded the food they craved” instead of believing the promise. The real question of our time, as of every time, is whether, in the face of Jesus’ “hard sayings,” we will turn away too or, with Peter, say— however nervously—“Where else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” MR

Michael S. Horton, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), is a research fellow at Yale Divinity School and copastor of Christ Reformed Church (CRC) in Placentia, California.

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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ON THE AGENDA:

SUGGESTED AREAS OF REFORM WITHIN OUR OWN CHURCHES 1

A fresh consideration of the nature, purpose, and function of the Church: its constitution, offices, and marks. (For instance, we must continue to struggle with the modern challenges to the older conception of “the Ministry,” as were broached in the March/April 1997 issue of MR.)

2

A turn from criticism to construction. We must even be willing to reevaluate our own tradition and boldly offer mid-flight corrections. We must remember that our heroes had to act boldly when they were in our shoes. This is not a call for a false peace, for we may well be more severely criticized for what we build than we have been for what we want to see replaced. We can no longer offer judgments without suggestions and alternatives. Part of our fundamentalist-evangelical heritage is constant reaction. Hence most creative energy is spent by those who are eager to secularize the Church’s message. They then dictate the terms of the debate, and conservative Protestants are usually circling the wagons instead of moving them forward. We need a new intellectual and spiritual initiative.

3

A new sense of community. A generation is now coming of age that shows intense interest in ultimate questions and transcendent worship. They want to belong and they are acutely sensitive to manipulation. While “boomers” may continue to dominate the ecclesiastical landscape for some time, many of their children are disenchanted with rootlessness and narcissistic superficiality. Churches that make demands on their attention, minds, hearts, and lives will not only be more faithful but will probably find a more authentically interested hearing. As these young people watch Christians at worship and in their relationships, they will be attracted to the extent that it differs from their world.

ethics, we must see mature models of genuinely reformed (used here as an adjective) churches. Through a revived diaconate, our churches will care more deeply for the spiritual and material needs of their parishioners.

Churches will become counter-cultural models for greater racial reconciliation; social ethics will no longer be left merely to political conservatives or liberals. But by refusing to become politicized, our churches will also succeed in such initiatives precisely because our priority is the ministry of Word and Sacrament, and not political or social objectives. Only a richly textured and profound theological system is capable of shaping significant socio-ethical beliefs. Lutheran and Reformed systems provide just such depth and their practical consequences may well be one of the most constructive areas of progress.

5

An intensification of confessional distinctives while still engaging those outside our respective traditions.

Those coming from the churches of the Reformation are the vanguard of a new generation of evangelical faculty and students in leading universities. As encouraging as this trend is, however, few of these choose to enter theological disciplines and many have only a weak knowledge of the Bible. Much of evangelical theological reflection has been descriptive, content to summarize alternative theological proposals and contrast them with evangelical positions, rather than interacting critically and constructively with these proposals. It is hoped that the tide will change in this respect as liberal theologies spend themselves and leave their adherents wondering whether there is something in Scripture, as well as in those creeds and confessions, after all.

Michael S. Horton.

4

A renewed discussion of the relationship between theology and music, liturgy, and ethics. In terms of SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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AN INTERVIEW WITH CARL HENRY sanctification, and even predestination MR: Why did you launch Christianity found a place alongside contemporary Today? issues and debates. What has happened?

CH: The magazine had several CH: I don’t intend to bad-mouth sponsors—notably Billy Graham and his Christianity Today. Its editors and father-in-law, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, who supporting board determine what is were disturbed by the liberal drift of important to them. It needs to be read mainline Presbyterianism. There were for a window on contemporary generous evangelical board members Evangelicalism. Many evangelicals find it concerned over modernist ecumenism, theologically disappointing and and a dedicated editorial staff of which I cognitively ambiguous. Its news section was editor-in-chief. Christianity Today was remains among the best, although more launched, negatively, because the Christian proficient in covering evangelical failure Century distorted the American religious than evangelical success. scene in terms of the theological and political and economic left and, MR: Is the magazine a microcosm of positively, because of the dire need for a cognitively oriented journal devoted to Carl F. H. Henry, founding editor of the larger evangelical movement today?

Christianity Today.

CH: Unfortunately, yes. The leading biblical theology, ethics and apologetics, evangelical colleges and magazines ought to be the and predicated unapologetically on the authority and intellectual pacesetters. Instead, some seek to network inerrancy of the Scriptures. with the spirit of the age. Postliberalism is welcomed by some campus theologians, neoorthodoxy is promoted by MR: It wasn’t conceived as a popular magazine designed some editors—admittedly by scholars who seem for the laity, was it? unaware of concessions they make, and who perhaps CH: Its originally intended audience was “thinking think they are serving historic Christianity well. The Christians”—the clergy, teachers, church leaders, double tragedy is that evangelical funding unwittingly seminarians, collegians, that is, “lay intellectuals” supports such compromises of the biblical heritage. generally. It soon garnered the largest circulation to the clergy of any magazine. Time remarked that its content MR: There are calls today (including a recent Christianity and readership gave evidence of the existence of an Today editorial) for an Evangelicalism that has “a center inter national, interdenominational scholarship without a boundary.” Some of us are calling ourselves supportive of the evangelical outlook. “confessing evangelicals” in order to affirm our unity with those outside our own tradition to identify with the “solas” MR: At its peak as a thought journal what was the of the Reformation. What do you make of all this? magazine’s paid circulation and what is its current CH: Even the “people of God” seem sometimes to circulation? turn the vocabulary of belief into monstrous confusion.

CH: About 170,000 paid subscribers, then and now.

One need only compare and contrast the recent emergence of “confessing evangelicals” and the MR: Our random sampling of early issues identified publication by InterVarsity of The Nature of Confession many thoughtful essays designed to guide theological edited by two Wheaton College professors. Some reflection, submitted by representatives of confessional contributors in this book eagerly reject biblical Reformed and Lutheran as well as evangelical and inerrancy, propositional revelation, and an adequate Baptist traditions. Themes like justification, 14

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exposition of the nature and strength of the biblical heritage. The problem is not only that secular society today readily misunderstands “confessing evangelicals” as somehow holding a police record, but that more and more professing evangelicals also know so little about church history that they are prone to think the Reformation is a penal probation. One wonders sometimes if it will take waves of Muslim-like persecution to sift evangelical revivals and intentions.

Evangelical unity cannot be forced by promotional techniques, nor can it be hurried. It will likely come when evangelicals see through tears that their disunity has not only penalized their common cause, but even more it has pierced the crucified and risen and returning Lord. And that eventuation is unlikely to come apart from theological awakening that calls God’s people to prayer and adoration alongside a well-worn Bible.

MR: What encouragements and warnings can you give us as we seek to defend evangelical truth?

CH: The risen Lord told his hard-pressed disciples “You must not leave Jerusalem” on their earth-encompassing mission without the Holy Spirit’s empowerment.

Pentecost was once-for-all, but its realities and implications remain. God has written prayer into the universe as one of the means through which His sovereign will is achieved. Spirit-sanctified believers are essential to both a comprehensive defense of evangelical truth and a constructive engagement of the wider culture.

The risen Lord’s presence amid two or three godly and courageous disciples can still be the center of history’s enduring action. The prayer meeting where Scripture is read and trusted holds dutiful priority along with defense of the truth and engagement of the culture.

The Church has as its mission the winning of lost humans. A congregation that is so busy defending truth and engaging culture that it neglects its evangelistic imperative needs to rethink its priorities.

Mediating evangelicals seem now routinely to forfeit the inerrancy of the Bible and seek to compensate for such devaluation by insisting aggressively on biblical authority. But one cannot really have it both ways.

Some Comments on Christianity Today Harold O. J. Brown My first acquaintance with Christianity Today came during the 1950s, when, like Protestant seminary students all over the country, I was given a subscription to the newly founded magazine. It was edited by Carl F. H. Henry, a man of whom I had hardly heard and who was not given much attention at Harvard Divinity School. For a somewhat naive evangelical student, the magazine proved a spiritual life-saver. It acquainted me with the world of evangelical learning to which most of my Harvard professors paid little or no heed.

Every issue contained one or more solid theological articles, worth saving, and often, it seemed, just the antidote needed for some current bit of academic apostasy. It compared favorably in quality to Commentary.

Dr. Henry invited me to join the staff of the magazine, but I was not able to do so until he was no longer with it. Dr. Harold Lindsell sought to sharpen the focus of the magazine on evangelical doctrinal distinctives, especially on the doctrine of biblical inspiration, but we could not maintain Carl Henry’s intellectual niveau. The journal ran into severe financial problems in the early 1970s, ultimately solved by cutting staff, greatly expanding advertising, and paying more attention to people and trends than to watershed theological issues.

Subsequently—although perhaps not for that reason—its theological focus became blurred.

Today the magazine seems readier to “go with the flow” of theological innovation than to continue its former policy of swimming against the stream. It wants to be open to change and to the evangelicals and quasi-evangelicals who are promoting it. The old posture of “contending earnestly for the faith once delivered” is no longer very much in evidence. It is still valuable, but more to enable readers to keep up with the times than to stand up against the Zeitgeist.

Harold O. J. Brown, currently a consulting editor for Christianity Today, was for many years on the magazine’s editorial staff. The author of many books and articles, he is a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

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The Descent of Evangelicalism: ORIGINS OFTHE SPECIOUS JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY Christianity Today magazine, whose premier issue appeared on October 15, 1956, soon overwhelmingly outdistanced the liberal Christian Century in readership.

Evangelist Billy Graham was regarded consistently as the most respected living American, according to the polls.

Theological seminaries of evangelical persuasion, such as Fuller in California and Trinity in Illinois, attracted many of the best college graduates, while enrollments at generally oppose evolutionary theory. Recent evidence liberal, mainline denominational seminaries steadily suggests that Evangelicalism is now illustrating its declined. The biennial International Missionary opposition to evolution by its own activities: by Conventions of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship regressing rather than going forward. and the activities of Campus Crusade for Christ on According to a recent report by the Princeton secular university and college campuses touched many Religion Research Center in New Jersey, based on a with the evangelical message and resulted in significant nationwide Gallup poll, the average American’s belief in missionary activity at home and abroad. The “death of Scripture’s reliability has declined by half in the last God” movement of the thirty years (from 65% 1960s epitomized the in 1963 to 32% today) vacuity of liberal and 69% of U.S. theology, and seemed to adults now identify confirm the inevitable with a modified success of all that situation ethics of Evangelicalism stood for. moral relativity even And today? When we while believing that one think of evangelists, our should do what God or first thought is often Scripture says is right. not of Billy Graham, The conclusion seems now in his seventies, but inescapable: on two of of such media figures as its most impor tant Jer ry Falwell and his agenda items, the now defunct Moral promotion of biblical Majority; Oral Roberts, authority and moral who has been in the absolutes, Evangelicalprocess of selling the ism has been a City of Faith medical conspicuous failure in complex (which a 900our generation. foot Jesus was supposed This sad state of to have told him in a affairs is particularly “Wherever pragmatics and emotion can be chosen in preference to careful vision to build); Jimmy surprising when one reasoning, the evangelical will do so.”

Swaggert and his steamy recalls that in the late sexual re-creations; and Jim Bakker with his grandiose, 1950s and early 1960s the success of Evangelicalism fraudulent schemes and weepy, heavily mascaraed ex-wife. seemed assured. A Gallup poll at the time revealed that Christianity Today began as a journal of opinion under a significant majority of American clerg ymen, the editorship of theologian Carl F. H. Henry, who irrespective of denomination, preferred to designate located it in the nation’s capitol so as to influence their theology and churchmanship as “evangelical.”

Evangelicalism—representing the majority of American Protestant Christians—stands for an experiential relationship with Christ, a strong view of the Bible, personal holiness of life, and eschatological confidence in the return of the Lord to judge the world. Evangelicals also

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maximally the liberal and secular climate of opinion.

Subsequently, to economize its heavily subsidized production costs, the operation was moved to the Wheaton, Illinois, area: roughly, Evangelicalism’s equivalent of Vatican City. The mantle had fallen to Harold Lindsell, who labored to maintain the journal’s standards. But with the pressure on to increase circulation, Lindsell’s successor, Kenneth Kantzer, vir tually tur ned the magazine over to journalists.

The “Current Religious Thought” page, which had been written by such luminaries as Berkouwer of Amsterdam, was eliminated. What had been a journal of opinion soon descended to the level of a slick, evangelically oriented family magazine. To give it a facade of intellectual respectability in its new format, the masthead for a time carried the names of members of a “Christianity Today Institute,” but this was little more than window dressing.

Here (read them and weep!) are typical major articles from some of the most recent issues of Christianity Today that I had around: “Getting the Small Picture: Recovery from our Love Affair with Bigness”; “Withering Flowers in the Garden of Hope”; “The New Sexual Revolution”; “Laughing with Sarah”; and “Secret Sins [i.e., incest] in the Church Closet.” At one time, Christianity Today made news by impacting the world of ideas; today, at best, it merely reports news, with ideological content almost solely limited to so-called “in-depth interviews.”

Evangelical book publishers have followed a similar route. From the 1940s through the 1970s, some very serious theological works were issued by the Grand Rapids, Michigan, houses, and by evangelical publishing firms elsewhere in the country. (I think, for example, of the works of Wilbur Smith and Edward John Carnell.)

But when Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth became a national best-seller, evangelical publishers woke up to the possibility of mass sales of popular titles. The result has been to turn the annual Christian Booksellers Convention trade-fair into a cheap carnival of trivia and the average local Christian bookshop into a place to purchase audiocassettes of evangelical country-western music and pencils inscribed with Bible verses. I take at random the twenty-four new titles reviewed in the latest issue of a respectable evangelical national church paper: thirteen of twenty-four (over half) deal with sex and marriage, daily living, and personal crises, or are fiction,

including children’s books. Only one title (on science and religion) attempts to break new ground or reach the thinking unbeliever. The evangelical publisher of my Suicide of Christian Theology (1970) now features Christian romance novels (The Journals of Corrie Belle Hollister: “Pa was long since dead. Ma didn’t make it through the desert.

Now it’s only me [sic; sick?] and the kids....”). That publisher also prides itself on having sold 970,000 copies of Free to be Thin, an evangelical weight-loss plan.

Many evangelical seminaries and colleges have made devastating theological shifts.

Fuller Seminary has altered its doctrinal statement, dropping the word “iner rant” in reference to the Scriptures. Westmont College has refused to discipline a professor who proclaims an “evangelical” redaction criticism which sees such events in the Gospel of Matthew as the coming of the Magi as nonhistorical ser mon illustrations paralleling the Jewish midrash. Other conservative, evangelical seminaries have experienced hideous intranecine warfare; one thinks of Concordia Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, where distinguished scholar and president Robert Preus was forcibly retired, took legal action, and was then defrocked for seeking due process!

Which brings us to the evangelical paradox of illegality/legalism. On the one hand, Operation Rescue has no compunctions about breaking the law for the higher end of opposing abortion. On the other, evangelicals manifest toward each other appalling moralism and legalism, thereby tur ning off the unbeliever who might otherwise be attracted by the message. For example, at a distinguished midwestern Bible College, a professor was discharged because his wife wrote a “feminist” book. At the same school, a fine teacher of apologetics resigned before his book, Divorce and Remarriage: Recovering the Biblical View, was published by Harper and Row because he knew that the controversial content would result in his immediate discharge—even though he heartily subscribed to scriptural inerrancy.

Why these sad phenomena? What explains Evangelicalism’s inability to fulfill its promises of a generation ago? At least four factors contribute to the problem, in my view.

1) Evangelicalism’s deep-seated anti-intellectualism. In spite of the Herculean efforts made by many fine evangelical scholars and institutions of higher lear ning, Evangelicalism’s invidious comparison of heart and

When sanctification is separated from justification, as invariably occurs in Evangelicalism, the result is pharisaic moralism.

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head, to the detriment of the latter, cripples its cause.

Wherever pragmatics and emotion can be chosen in preference to careful reasoning, the evangelical will do so. Thus money and emotional ties to the womb-like security of the midwest Bible belt determined the move of Christianity Today from Washington, D.C.—not the rational question of influencing the general climate of opinion at the political nerve-center of the country.

2) Evangelicalism’s confusion of social matters with theological truth. The liberal criticizes the evangelical for “biblicism,” but in reality the evangelical is not biblical enough: he does not allow the Scriptures to criticize his own societal patterns. Thus the evangelical seldom subjects the salesmanship of the television evangelist or the popularity craze in evangelical publishing to biblical standards. If he did, he would see how he constantly attempts—unsuccessfully—to serve two masters.

3) Evangelicalism’s overstress on inner experience. C. S. Lewis well noted in The Screwtape Letters that the devil encourages us to push our strengths until they become major weaknesses. In the face of dead churchmanship, evangelicals have historically insisted on a living, personal Christ experience, and quite correctly. But this personal emphasis has readily and often imperceptibly been transformed into something quite different: a religious

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existentialism in which general principle and even biblical principle are ignored. The charismatic side of Evangelicalism displays this weakness in particular (the “Spirit” leading, without the restraint of Scripture or the means of grace), but the same phenomenon lies at the root of the overall evangelical impatience with theological formulations, church organization, and stable ministry.

4) Evangelicalism’s poor priorities. Ever since John Wesley made sanctification rather than justification the focus of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival, evangelicals have looked upon holiness as their central concer n (public morality; private confor mity to evangelical blue laws). But Martin Luther was far more biblical than Wesley when he declared that you do not need to preach to a good tree to bear good fruit. When sanctification is separated from justification, as invariably occurs in Evangelicalism, the result is pharisaic moralism. This is probably Evangelicalism’s most obnoxious characteristic. It was classically lampooned in Sir Henry Rashford’s Augustus Carp, Esq., Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man (1924), but it is rampant throughout the evangelical scene.

Here is a personal illustration. When Jerry Falwell and I were both members of a small delegation invited by the late President Sadat of Egypt to discuss the Near East conflict, Falwell attempted to prevent the Egyptians from serving wine at a state dinner: he seemed to care less about the impact of our gospel message than about improving our hosts’ morals.

To return to our starting point: the evangelical, in attempting to refute evolutionary theory, argues that entropy, by way of the second law of thermodynamics, is more basic than biological development. Everything ultimately runs down, not up. Unhappily, this argument may also apply to Evangelicalism itself ! But if the evangelical wishes to postpone that eventuality, he should seriously consider going back much farther than eighteenth-century revivalism for his roots and for his corrective: to the Reformation for the doctrine of justification (the “article on which the Church stands or falls”) and the early church for the objectivity of the Creeds and the holiness of classical worship. MR

John Warwick Montgomery, Professor Emeritus at the University of Luton and a practicing Barrister in England, is the author of more than forty books with topics ranging from theology and apologetics to law and ethics. A Lutheran clergyman, he has held professorships at many evangelical institutions and was an editor-at-large for Christianity Today for over a decade.

Another version of this article appeared in the New Oxford Review.

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Looking Toward 2000 WHERE WILL EVANGELICALISM BETHEN? JAMES MONTGOMERY BOICE

Today wa s i t s e l f par t of t h e re s u rge n c e . L e d by founding editor Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine was mounting an effective challenge to the liberal churches and especially to the liberal theological thoughtjour nal, Christian Century.

Evangelical churches were also growing, and they were emerging from their comfor table suburban ghettos to engage selected aspects of the secular culture.

A decade later Newsweek magazine would call 1976 “the year of the evangelical.”

It was also a time of decline for the mainline churches. I was part of one of these denominations after leaving my work with the magazine to begin a pastorate at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in 1968, and I spent some effort trying to understand what was happening to the major denominations. I concluded that they were trying to do God’s work in a secular way and that they were declining as a significant religious

force as a result. The older churches were pursuing the world’s wisdom, embracing the world’s theology, following the world’s agenda, and employing the world’s methods.

The Worldly (Liberal) Churches In earlier ages of the Church, Christians stood before their Bibles and confessed their ignorance of spiritual things. They even confessed their inability to understand what was written in the Bible apart from the grace of God through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

They sought the wisdom of God in Scripture. But this ancient wisdom had been discarded by the liberal church with the result that the reforming voice of God in the church through the Scriptures was forgotten.

The world’s wisdom. This had three sad consequences for these churches. First, church leaders were uncertain about what to believe and do.

This was usually covered up.

But it was tr ue, and it explained why so many people were beginning to desert these churches and tur n to conservative churches instead.

People are not attracted to churches that do not know what they believe. Second, the liberal churches were embracing the outlook and moral values of the world.

“A view from the pulpit,” Rob Zeller

When I returned to the United States from theological studies in Switzerland in 1966 to work as an assistant editor at Christianity Today, I found that it was a time of rising influence for evangelicals. Christianity

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Since there was nothing to make them distinct, they ended up being merely a pale reflection of their culture.

Third, they made decisions based not on the teachings of the Bible but as a response to the prevailing opinions of the time, what I called the wisdom of the fifty-one percent vote. Business was conducted by consensus, and it was always a worldly consensus. I learned that if Christians throw out a transcendent authority, an earthly authority will always take the Bible’s place.

The world’s theology. The mainline churches had also adopted the world’s theology. This theology is easy to define. It is the view that human beings are basically good, that no one is really lost, and that belief in Jesus Christ is not necessary for anyone’s salvation, though it may be helpful for some people.

In this approach, many of the old biblical terms were retained, but they were given different meanings.

Sin became not rebellion against God and his righteous law, for which we are held accountable, but ignorance or the oppression found in social structures. The way to overcome it was by social change, new laws or revolution. Jesus became not the incarnate God who died for our salvation, but rather a pattern for creative living.

We were to look to Jesus as an example, but not as a divine Savior. Salvation was defined as liberation from oppressive social structures. Faith was becoming aware of oppression and then beginning to do something about it. Evangelism did not mean carrying the gospel of Jesus Christ to a perishing world, but rather working through the world’s power centers to overthrow injustice.

The world’s agenda. In the liberal churches the words “the world must set the agenda” were quite popular.

They meant that the church’s concerns should be the concerns of the world, even to the exclusion of the gospel. If the world’s main priority was world hunger, well, that should be the church’s priority too. Racism?

Ecology? Aging? Whatever it was, it was to be first on the minds of Christian people.

The world’s methods. The final capitulation of the mainline churches to the world was in the area of methods. God’s methods for the church are participation, persuasion, and prayer, all converging on Word and Sacrament. I will return to those matters later in this article. But these three methods, particularly persuasion and prayer, were being jettisoned as hopelessly inadequate and what was proposed in their place was a gospel of power, politics, and money. I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker at about that time that got it exactly right.

Two Pilgrims were coming over on the Mayflower and one was saying, “Religious freedom is my immediate goal, but my long-range plan is to go into real estate.”

The Worldly (Evangelical) Churches What has jolted me in recent years is discovering 20

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that what I had been saying about the liberal churches at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s now needs to be said about evangelicals, too. Can it be that evangelicals, who have always opposed liberalism and its methods, have fixed their eyes on a worldly kingdom and have made politics, marketing, and money their weapons of choice for winning it? I think they have. A few years ago University of Chicago church historian Martin Marty, always a shrewd observer of the American church scene, said in an interview that, in his judgment, by the end of the century evangelicals would be “the most worldly people in America.” His statement was on target, except that he was probably a bit too sanguine. Evangelicals have already fulfilled his prophecy, and it is not yet the year 2000.

The world’s wisdom. Evangelicals are not heretics, at least not consciously. If we ask whether the Bible is the authoritative and inerrant Word of God, most will answer affirmatively. But many evangelicals have abandoned the Bible all the same simply because they do not think it is adequate for the challenges we face at the end of this century. They doubt it is sufficient for winning people to Christ, so they turn to “felt-need” sermons or entertainment or signs and wonders instead.

They do not think it is sufficient for achieving Christian growth, so they turn to therapy groups or Christian counseling.

The world’s theology. Like the liberals before us, evangelicals use the Bible’s words but give them new meaning, pouring bad secular content into spiritual terminology. Sin becomes dysfunctional behavior.

Salvation becomes self-esteem or wholeness. Jesus becomes more an example for right living rather than our Savior from sin. People are told how to build happy marriages and rear nice children, but not how to get right with an offended God. The world’s agenda. The world’s major agenda—forget world hunger, racism or ecology—is to be happy, happiness being understood as the maximum amount of personal peace and sufficient prosperity to enjoy it. But is that not the bottom line of much evangelical preaching today? How to be happy? To be content? To be satisfied? Far be it from us to preach a gospel that would expose people’s sins and drive them to the Savior.

The world’s methods. Evangelicals have become like liberals in this area, too. How else are we to explain the stress many place on numerical growth and money? That many pastors tone down the hard edges of biblical truth in order to attract greater numbers to their services? Or that we support a National Association of evangelicals lobby in Washington? Or that we have created social action groups to advance specific legislation?

Or consider evangelical rhetoric. Evangelicals speak of “taking back America,” “fighting for the country’s MODERN REFORMATION

soul,” “reclaiming the United States for Christ.” How? By electing Christian presidents, congressmen and senators, lobbying for conservative judges, taking over power structures, and imposing our Christian standard of morality on the rest of the nation by law. But was America ever really a Christian nation? Was any nation?

And does law produce morality? What about Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities that meant so much to the Reformers? Will any country ever be anything other than man’s city? And what about America’s soul? Is there really an American soul to be redeemed? Or fought over?

When you put these contemporary evangelical charac-teristics together it is hard to escape feeling that today’s evangelicals sound much like the old Christian Century that Christianity Today was founded to oppose.

And as for Christianity Today itself, it is a lot like the Christian Century was, though with far less theological content.

They have continued, growing stronger and even more influential nationally.

The Onslaught of Modernity What I had not foreseen in 1975 was the onslaught of the modern age. The dominant philosophy of today’s generation is relativism, the rejection of absolutes which Allan Bloom decried in his best-selling book on the decline of American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind. And hard on the heels of philosophical relativism came the militant attack on beliefs or values of any kind, known popularly as “postmodernism.”

The effect of modernity on the churches is interesting.

On the one hand, evangelicals appear to have succumbed to the spirit of the age. Several decades ago, when the conservative rebirth was getting underway, evangelical churches and other evangelical organizations were held together by variations on a typical evangelical “creed” or statement of faith. It usually had about twelve points, star ting with a few statements about God or the Scriptures, asserting the deity of Christ, stressing belief in miracles, including the resurrection of Jesus, mentioning evangelism or the missionary task, and concluding with affirmation of Christ’s visible bodily return and the final judgment.

The statements usually bypassed any thoughts about the nature or importance of the Church, avoided any reference to the Sacraments, and never stressed the sovereignty of God in salvation or the inability of human beings in an unsaved state to respond to the Gospel apart from God’s prior grace.

In spite of their glaring weaknesses, especially when compared to the great confessions and catechisms of the Reformation, these evangelical statements worked fairly well at holding evangelicals to a supernatural gospel and to certain nonnegotiable essentials. But evangelical strength actually lay in the fact that the people involved knew more of their Bibles and had deeper theological understanding than their creeds or confessions suggested. And the culture was not militant then either.

Many people, even if they were not actually Christians, held to something like a Christian worldview.

However, in a secular and increasingly hostile

“The world’s theology is easy to define: human beings are basiscally good, no one is really lost, and belief in Jesus Christ is not necessary for anyone’s salvation, though it may be helpful for some people.”

Resurgence of the Reformation Churches Yet the situation is not altogether grim, in my opinion. In 1975, seven years after I left Christianity Today, I wrote an ar ticle for the magazine titled, “Is the Refor med Faith Being Rediscovered?” At that time only liberal churches were declining. Evangelicals were still going strong. But I noted within Evangelicalism a significant return to Calvinistic and Lutheran theology by those committed to the doctrines of g race as summarized in the Reformation standards: the Book of Concord, the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, the Canons of Dort, the Belgic Confession, and the Heidelberg Catechism. I suggested that this was a promising sign for the future.

Calvinistic seminaries were growing, including the newly established Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. There was an upsurge among Reformed Baptist churches. Reformational study centers were getting underway. In Philadelphia we had just launched the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology which has continued now for more than twenty years and has been replicated by others in many different settings across the United States. In 1975 I was looking to these Reformational movements to be the theological core of a revitalized Evangelicalism.

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culture, we are now finding that even mild evangelical consensus statements are inadequate. Christians need a robust, full-orbed theology with a great view of God and an informed focus on the doctrines of God’s grace in bad times. For all its apparent strength, Evangelicalism was weak at the center, and the result has been capitulation to the world’s wisdom, theology, agenda and methods, as I noted earlier.

What about the Reformed churches, those I saw to be emerging in new strength more than twenty years ago? Here the situation is quite different. The glory of the Reformation theology has always been its ability to withstand whatever secular culture confronts it. It was formed in crisis—first in the early church in the battle of the apostles and their successors against Greek and Roman culture, and later in the Reformation period by men like Martin Luther, John Calvin and others who opposed the theological corruptions of the Middle Ages. Many of today’s Refor med churches are accommodating in similar ways to the evangelical ones.

But some, rather than being swept away by secularism, are proclaiming the tr uths of the Gospel more effectively than ever and are becoming an increasingly attractive option for people who are hungry for genuine spiritual reality in our times.

Two of the criticisms traditionally leveled at the Calvinistic churches have been their lack of evangelistic zeal (“Why evangelize if God is going to save the people he wants to save anyway?”) and their lack of social concern (“Don’t Calvinists have a theology of the head rather than a winsome gospel of the heart?”). Those criticisms perhaps were justified partially at times for some Reformed people. But they are increasingly unjustified today as many of those in Reformed churches are reaching into the hard areas of our society to win forgotten people to Christ, establish strong churches and then reach out with concern for the needs of the community beyond their own walls.

Mission to the Cities. One striking characteristic of the Reformed churches in recent years is a newly discovered concern for America’s inner cities. For a long time evangelical churches were abandoning the cities for the nicer, safer and more affluent suburbs. In fact, the older evangelical churches have largely completed their suburbanization. Few white evangelical churches remain in the larger inner cities. But Reformed churches are strong in many cities and are forging ahead in others.

One example is Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. With the encouragement of the church planting agency of the Presbyterian Church in America, a former professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Timothy Keller, moved to New York in the late 1980s to plant a church there. New York is a notoriously difficult mission field. But this effort not 22

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only succeeded, it thrived, and it did so by a serious effort to teach authentic New Testament Christianity to urban people. Today, Redeemer Church meets in the Hunter College auditorium in central Manhattan, draws 1,900 people on Sunday mornings, and is in the process of planting daughter churches throughout the metropolitan area. One such church is in Greenwich Village. Another is in Westchester County to the north.

These churches are joining with Korean and largely African-American cong regations to establish a Metropolitan Presbytery.

Keller traces racial problems to pride which flows from attempts at self-justification. “The theology of Christ’s totally sufficient work for our salvation removes that pride,” he says. “People use the strengths of their culture-group to feel superior to others. But the Reformation message, if it is believed and practiced, destroys this false superiority.”

We have experienced the same type of growth at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, where I still pastor. Tenth is an old church, founded in 1829. It is in the very center of the city, with no parking and with all the obstacles associated with inner-city work. But Tenth has grown consistently for decades and is today overflowing its seating capacity, attracting 1,200 people on a Sunday morning. We sponsor an inner-city high school, have an extensive evangelistic work with internationals, and support strong outreach and service works for children living in project housing, street people, homosexuals, and those who are dying of AIDS. The facility is filled throughout the week.

Racial Reconciliation. About the same time that Keller moved to New York City to begin the work there, a pastor by the name of Randy Nabors began a new work in an inner-city black neighborhood of Chattanooga, Tennessee. His goals were: 1) faithfulness and obedience to the Bible, 2) changed and discipled lives, 3) the joy of worship and the faith response of the people, 4) numerical growth, and 5) the impact of the church on the community. This racially mixed church has grown to an attendance of 800 on Sunday mornings, has established daughter churches in St. Louis and Orlando, and is moving to plant a church in another location in Chattanooga’s inner city soon.

In the Chicago area Covenant Presbyterian Church, a solid Calvinistic ministry, is carrying on a work with young urban professionals from its base in a newly reclaimed Polish Catholic Cathedral. It is headed by a man named David Williams. Looking to the city from the western suburbs, the College Church of Wheaton is funding an innercity church planting effort led by David Helm, one of the church’s associate pastors who has a burden for the city. Helm is looking to plant a large number of churches in Chicago over the next decade.

MODERN REFORMATION

Last summer a former black pastoral assistant from Tenth Presbyterian Church named Kevin Smith moved into Washington, D.C. to establish a Reformed AfricanAmerican church in that city.

Toward the Year 2000 In my 1975 article for Christianity Today I asked the question “Will the Calvinists carry the field?� That is not the way I would ask the question today for it pits those who stand by the Reformation doctrines against other evangelicals. The battle is not against them but for the survival of Christianity in a secular and antiChristian age. Today I would ask, “Can the Reformation churches show the way?�

I think they can. And they are doing so. If they hold to a full-orbed Reformation theology and do not compromise with the culture around them, as the evangelicals for the most part have done or are doing, these churches will grow stronger even as the evangelical movement goes the way of the liberal church before it, not vanishing but becoming increasingly insignificant as

MARKET VALUES Choice Profit Buying/Consuming Felt Needs “Is�

Opinion (What Works) Mass Appeal Homogeneity/Universality The “New and Improved�

Antinomian Individualistic Acquisition (Eros) Passing Fads/the Ephemeral Attractive Packaging Momentary Experience The Marketplace

a religious force. And those who are dissatisfied with the shallowness of the evangelical movement will leave it for something more authentically Christian and will swell the Reformation ranks.

Reformed people must remember that in the spiritual battles of our time our weapons are not the world’s weapons. The weapons of the world are political power and money. Our weapons are: 1) participation in the world, not in an escape from it; 2) persuasion, attempting to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God� (2 Cor. 10:5); and 3) prayer, since even the best arguments will fail to persuade unless the Spirit of God opens the minds and hearts of our hearers and gives them grace to receive the Gospel. MR

James Montgomery Boice, a former assistant editor of Christianity Today, is senior minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Philadelphia, speaker on The Bible Study Hour and the chairman of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

FAITH VALUES Confession Loss Believing/Obeying Real Needs “Ought�

Truth Offense of the Cross Uniqueness/Particularity The “Tried and Tested�

Structured Liberty Communal Agape Enduring Legacy Substantive Content Lifelong Discipleship The Church

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QUOTES Most of us, myself included, feel repugnance when confronted with the advertising-like quality much Christian witnessing has taken on in the media. Between the arrogance, the indiscretion, and the vulgarity of such testimony, on the one hand, and the flight into polite and prudent silence in the name of the private character of belief and respect for others, on the other, the most honest and courageous form of testimony, where it is needed and required by both the situation and our fellow human beings, is neither easy to discover nor to formulate. On both the individual and the communal planes, the question remains open what such honest and courageous testimony would look like in a liberal society.

— Paul Ricoeur, Figuring The Sacred, 287.

Why are “myth” approaches appealing today?

Too often the mainline Church denominations offer only moralism, psychological platitudes, or political action. Evangelical Churches may offer the same, combined with worship experiences that have a thinness that mirrors the surrounding culture, instead of a profound encounter with a God who is holy and majestic. People who live in such communities often have no sense that the world is deep or profound, or that their lives have any depth of purpose. Rather, they see themselves simply as material pleasure-seekers, grasping whatever moments of enjoyment come their way... It is not hard to see why imaginative stories charged with metaphysical meaning offer relief in such a culture.

— C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith, 73.

Some historians and sociologists have identified Evangelicalism as a community of orthodoxy, of concern for right belief. But there are so many doctrines on which self-proclaimed evangelicals disagree that one must ask whether or not contemporary Evangelicalism is better defined as a community of orthopathos, of concern for right feeling.

The challenge for evangelical leaders is to be able to stand back and ask to what extent their movement and their churches have embraced certain cultural forms for the sake of expediency, just as the fourteenth-century church introduced a flood of image-based piety. These leaders need to become more sensitive to the way forms communicate values. This could lead to some radical changes, but so did the Reformation.

— Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, 186-87.

Fundamentalism, the Holiness movement, and Pentecostalism were grass-roots movements with democratic structure and spirit. All were extremely diverse coalitions, dominated by scores of self-appointed and independent-minded religious leaders. Had not dominant personalities sounded an alarm and begun building their own popular constituencies, these movements would not have come into existence... In Fundamentalist hands, even Presbyterian polity veered sharply toward congregational autonomy.

— Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 214.

Previously images were mere illustrations of a dominant text. Language was by far the most important element, and in addition there were images to make the text’s content more explicit and hold the reader’s attention. This was their sole purpose. Now the situation is reversed: the image contains everything. And as we turn the pages we follow a sequence of images, making use of a completely different mental operation.

— Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, 116.

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MODERN REFORMATION

More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local. Doing so, it contributed further to the dissociation of medieval society: print made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering attention of the printed word, people lost that balance between the sensuous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract....[The] authority of books was more widely diffused by printing, so that if knowledge had an ampler province so, too, did error.

— Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 136.

Carl Henry and the founders of Christianity Today…did differ on how they thought the magazine should discuss theology. After meeting with [Billy] Graham and [his father-in-law, retired missionary doctor L. Nelson] Bell in August 1955, Henry wrote to them insisting on a firmer stance were he to be editor. Apparently their proposed strategy was that for the first two years they would emphasize points of commonality with ecumenical Christians, thus establishing the widest possible hearing for the magazine. Henry found this totally unacceptable. [He wrote them:] It allows men whose theological perspective is, at best, gray, to appear to receive special distinction because, here and there, they maintain par tial points of contact with evangelical theology. It offers no clear and decisive criticism of that false doctrine of ecumenical unity which not only treasures a minimal of doctrinal agreement, and even rejoices in (rather than merely tolerates) an inclusivistic theology, but which militates against a sound evangelical witness except where that witness lends itself without protest to the platform and service of ecumenical outlets.

Henry suggested that perhaps after the two-year concessive period he might be interested in the editorship, but that he could not accept their present strategy. He then added...: “The truth is still the indispensable human factor in Christian apologetics; truth without love will be usually ignored, but love without the truth is not even real love.”

The founders of Christianity Today conceded to Henry’s terms and named him editor.

— George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, 161.

[At] the psychological center of much evangelical faith are two ideas that are also at the heart of the practice of democracy: (1) the audience is sovereign, and (2) ideas find legitimacy and value only within the marketplace.

Ideas have no intrinsic or self-evident value; it is the people’s right to give ideas their legitimacy. One implication of this belief is that the work of doing theology ought not to be left to an intellectual elite who may think that they are gifted for and called to do such work and may consider the discovery of truth to be an end in itself. Rather, it should be taken on by those who can persuade the masses of the usefulness of the ideas.

And there probably is no clearer illustration of how these assumptions have changed the nature of evangelical faith in the recent past than the transformation that has occurred in the pages of Christianity Today.

— David Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology, 207.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

We used to believe there were only so many “events” in the world.

— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 8.

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“But What Shall We Read?”

DAVID P. SCAER

Christianity Today, is addressing them the way it once did.

A survey taken in the 1960s among the clergy of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod found people in the background respond, that next to the official The Lutheran “But what shall we do?” For us Witness, Christianity Today was the most the question is, “But what shall we widely read periodical. Christianity read?” Avoiding the moral and Today was a factor in breaking the doctrinal negatives is only half of theological isolationism of the the equation. Providing positive Missouri Synod. Theological no directives is the other side of the less than biological isolation makes coin. At its inception, Christianity the inhabitants more susceptible to Today provided both the “do’s” and infection from the outside. So with the “don’t’s” for Protestant the barriers with Europe removed at Christianity which was facing a the conclusion of the Second World deceptively attractive neo-orthodox War, the Synod found itself theology. Theologians Karl Barth, unprepared to address theological Emil Brunner, and John Baillie were currents which soon turned into all the rage. Also par t of the tor rents. This flood from the 1956, Carl F. H. Henry, editor theological invasion of America outside led to the resignation of was the demythologizing exegetical method of Rudolph nearly the entire faculty of its Saint Louis seminary in Bultmann. What I should have been learning about 1974, which was soon followed by the formation of a these intrusions from my seminary’s professors, I was new church. This was a watershed learning from Christianity Today. The event, even if the only reason was magazine was the step-professor for that the Missouri Synod was the many budding theologians. first major denomination to resist Christianity Today, under the being drowned in the swells of editorship of Carl F. H. Henry and mainline Protestantism. Small then Kenneth Kantzer, gained a church bodies held to biblical large audience among Lutherans. inerrancy and inspiration, but the Perhaps our own theologians were really large denominations had ill-equipped to analyze the newer succumbed years before. theologies or maybe they wanted to Future historians may offer take advantage of the confusion to another assessment, but Christianity masquerade these newer views in Today was a significant factor for the dress of traditional orthoMissouri Synod traditionalists in doxies. In the midst of chaos, keeping their balance in redefining Christianity Today provided guidance. their positions over against the new Today, however, an entirely new set theologies. Editor Carl Henry and of theological and hermeneutical Missouri Synod theologian Robert options monopolize the horizon D. Preus became allies in and the problems at mid-century maintaining historic positions on are no more than points in biblical inspiration and inerrancy. theological history. But I am not In another century, a Baptistsure that any periodical, including Lutheran alliance would have been 1965, Harold Lindsell, editor

A favorite cartoon of mine pictures Moses having come down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. The

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MODERN REFORMATION

cur rents were flooding the strange if possible, but it was now a Missouri Synod. This time the battle for the Bible. Preus became a waters came from an incipient, but household name among conpersistent Evangelicalism. Except servative Protestants. Even in for occasional brief notices, Europe, his name, which of course Christianity Today took no note of was the same as that of his brother, the turmoil. If the replacement of who became Synod president, meant synod president Oliver Harms by theological solipsism. Christianity J.A.O. Preus in 1969, and the Today’s popularity among Missouri walkout of the Saint Louis faculty Synod pastors was directly in 1974, were headline material, connected with what was seen as the more recent but equally pungent “liberal” threat to Lutheranism’s sola events received scant attention.

Scriptura principle. Those from Christianity Today stayed on the whom Lutherans theologically and sidelines, even though Preus had a historically have distanced place on the periodical’s masthead themselves were providing weapons as a contributing editor. for theological combat. Like Israel’s Today, most Christianity Today alliances with foreign nations, issues feature personal faith-type though, these alliances did not come articles. Example: its April 7, without a price. Such Neo1997 issue with ar ticles on evangelical practices as decisions for underpaid pastors, the private Christ, the requirement of 1978, Kenneth Kantzer, editor feelings of pastors’ wives, and guilt “personal faith,” testimonies, and feelings of mothers who have had abortions. Lutherans de-emphasis on the Sacraments are more and more do not use phrases such as “personal faith” and do not commonplace in Missouri Synod congregations. Use of like this one in particular—or at least they shouldn’t. creative liturgies makes some Lutheran congregations Embarrassingly, the Synod’s Lutheran Witness offers the indistinguishable from certain forms of left-wing same kind of articles. Twenty years Protestantism. Lutheranism began ago Christianity Today dared to print to resemble a kind of Christianity opposing ar ticles on Infant now often found on the pages of Baptism, but even then airing Christianity Today. Ironically, this eucharistic differences was taboo. periodical had nothing to do with Considering that Lutherans are these changes. It no longer had a statistically the largest Protestant hold on the theological thinking of segment and that in certain parts of its pastors. the United States Lutheranism Before his death, Robert Preus predominates, Lutheran positions acknowledged that the theological and issues should find a more conflict had switched battlefields. prominent place in periodicals Biblical inspiration and inerrancy, which appeal to a general whose classical foundations in the Protestant audience. For example, seventeenth century he unearthed why not a thorough examination of and so began the Coper nican the Lutheran alliances with revolution in the Missouri Synod, Anglicans in Europe and their were no longer the issues. Now at Episcopalian counterparts and the the center of the debate were Reformed in America? Not since doctrines of Christ, the Sacraments, 1830, when Lutheran worship and the Ministry, an extremely forms were banned in Prussia, has pungent issue for him, since he had our church come so close to been deprived of the seminary 1985, Harold L. Myra, editor becoming a vanishing minority. In presidency, lost his professorship, other words, at the beginning of the third millennium, and was removed from the Synod. Whatever else his Lutheranism may voluntarily slip away into the history removal from the presidency of Concordia Theological books. Lutheranism will have become “Reformed,” a Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1989 meant, it fact which may delight evangelicals, but would be a signaled to him and others, that other theological SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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Christianity around which Neodisaster of the largest proportions evangelicals and Roman Catholics for confessionally minded have already gathered. It takes Lutherans! In our search for conservative stances on social issues common points of agreement, we and for thrightly points out cannot surrender or compromise differences among Christians. the heart of our faith and engage in Wonderfully, a debate on whether the doctrinal counterpar t of Roman Catholicism is a sectarian Bultmann’s demythologizing scheme. form of catholicism was fought on Call it de-doctrinalization. the editorial pages. It targets the Conservative Christians in their financially, academically, and search for common ground more theologically upper crust—if there often than not create a theological is such a thing. This and other homogenization which emits a fog in periodicals do not serve the which the central doctrines of the purpose which Christianity Today faith are blurred. Today the issue is adopted at its founding in no longer only biblical inspiration providing a common theological and inerrancy, but the doctrines of ground. It is not too late to retake God, Christ, and the Sacraments. the theological field and even to go But what shall we read? Nothing further in addressing issues still has filled the void which Christianity dividing Bible-believing Christians.

Today has left. The Synod’s own Only in squarely confronting scholarly journals often do not 1996, David Neff, editor differences among those committed address promptly the pressing to Christianity’s biblical and historical dimensions can theological issues. In addition, their articles may not be the faith be preserved and strengthened. MR direct enough in their approach. Logia is chiefly for conservative Lutherans pastors. The Lutheran Forum with its companion, the chatty Forum Letter, intends to be panLutheran and is obsessed with hanging out the wash of Currently a corresponding editor for Christianity Today, David P. Scaer is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which it Chairman of the Department of Systematic Theology at Concordia hopelessly believes can be rescued from the Protestant Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he has been a professor mainstream. Pro-Ecclesia presents a classical Christianity since 1966. He has served as the editor of the Concordia Theological Quarterly and is the author of several books. but as a scholarly journal it has a limited audience.

Richard John Neuhaus’s First Things presents a core modernREFORMATION Back Issue Order Form NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1996 Pilgrim’s Progress What do you think about when you come across that verb “to sanctify” or the noun “holy”?

Especially in our day, images of a prude come to mind. That caricature is not only superficial, it’s the opposite of the biblical portrait. In this magazine, contributors dispel misconceptions about the important topic of sanctification.

Contributors include: John D. Hannah, Harold L. Senkbeil, Zacharias Ursinus.

Code # MR-11/96 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1997 The Whirlpool: The Effects of Popular Culture on Religion A time when “whirl”—the fascination with the novel, eccentric, eclectic and “exciting”—is king,

our age is dominated by an obsession with mass popular culture. But, how do we get the Christian message out without marketing it in some sense?

Are we perhaps making more out of the dangers of “pop-culture” than we should? Contributors include: Ken Myers, Leonard R. Payton, Rick Ritchie, Gene Veith. Code # MR-01/97 MARCH/APRIL 1997 Finding the Keys: Liberating the Ministry from Trivial Pursuits What should we think about organizations, businesses, entertainment media, and other groups that call themselves “ministries”? What is the relationship of today’s minister to the prophets and apostles? Contributors to this issue of modernREFORMATION explore the possibility that our whole contemporary notion of the

ministry is out of step with Scripture.

Contributors include: D. G. Hart, Lawrence R. Rast, Jr., Rick Ritchie.

Code # MR-03/97 MAY/JUNE 1997 How Do We Receive Christ: God’s Sacraments or Ours?

Among other things, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are supposed to unite us not only to Christ, but to his Body. And yet, they have caused some of the widest divisions among professing Christians. In this issue, contributors from many denominational backgrounds discuss the meaning, method and mode of the Sacraments. Contributors include: Timothy George, W. Robert Godfrey, Arthur A. Just, Tom Nettles, Rick Ritchie. Code # MR-05/97

Cost per issue: $4.00 To order call MR at 215-546-3696 (M–F 8:30 am–4:30 pm ET) 28

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The Scandal of Evangelical Scholarship: WHERE ARETHE REFORMATIONTHEOLOGIANS? ERIC GREGORY One of the more interesting features of contemporary American Evangelicalism is the emergence of an evangelical academic elite. To be sure, the evangelical movement has always had intellectuals within its orbit. These intellectuals, however, have tended to live at the margins of both the secular academy and the movement itself. Despite the relative success of many evangelical liberal ar ts colleges, antiintellectualism has limited the capacity of the evangelical community to nur ture a vibrant scholarly tradition. A number of recent authors have lamented this situation, most notably Wheaton College historian Mark Noll in his widely read manifesto, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994). While some Reformed observers claim that this “scandal� is endemic to the evangelical theological condition, the sources of anti-intellectualism are deep and varied.

But the situation for evangelical scholarship today is dramatically different from even its recent past. It is difficult to assess how dramatic these changes are, but there are several signs that a sizable portion of the evangelical community is engaged in serious intellectual activity. These developments reflect the fact that more evangelicals have attended graduate school in the past thirty years. Two large Christian trusts even have programs which sponsor graduate study in premier secular universities. Visit almost any major research university, and you will find a group of evangelical students scattered throughout various disciplines. Indeed, you will likely find self-professed evangelicals among the most prominent of senior faculty at these universities. Many of these faculty members are contributors to a new Christianity Today publication, Books and Culture, which consciously models itself as a New York Review of Books for Christians. Some disciplines, especially philosophy and history, have SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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attracted enough of a critical mass of evangelical scholars to organize professional academic societies.

Perhaps the surest sign of this growing class of evangelical academics is a flourishing cottage industry of conferences, e-mail discussion groups, and even books which focus on the complex question of distinctively Christian scholarship.

Some of these efforts perpetuate the conventional evangelical mantras about the “integration of faith and learning” and the “need for a Christian worldview.”

Taken in themselves, these slogans might suggest tired and misguided promises which have never been fulfilled by the evangelical community.

College parachurch g roups have invoked them for at least fifty years, but a worldview does not a theolog y make. The cur rent revival of interest in Christian scholarship, however, does make effective use of two related changes in the academic landscape.

First, the secular universities’ rush toward diversity has, ironically, challenged their anti-Christian bias.

Opportunities for Christian scholars are more open today because of university efforts to give everyone a place at the table. Cynical readings of this aspect of academic life picture evangelicals competing with feminists and ethnic minorities for the coveted status of most-favored victim of the secular regime. The point, however, is that Christian scholars ostensibly no longer need to hide their faith in order to participate in the academic enterprise.

A second, and more significant change, is a growing consensus in virtually every discipline that something is wrong with the standard Enlightenment account of how human beings know things and what it is that they know.

This article is not the place to assess the possible effects, positive and negative, of so-called postmodern theory on the Reformed tradition, but it is important to note that many of the sweeping philosophical trends in the academy may indeed open the door for certain sophisticated Christian arguments. Many of this new breed of evangelical academics have done their homework and are fast becoming players in the larger world of ideas.

However, a recent conference on Christian scholarship gave me pause. Frankly, there seemed to be an overwhelming ignorance of theology bordering on indifference. Not one theologian addressed the

conference; rather, the literary theorists and the philosophers seemed to be the new high priests of the evangelical elite.

It should be said that many of this new breed of evangelical academics share a suspiciously Reformed pedigree. References to J. Gresham Machen and Abraham Kuyper abound, especially among the key thinkers who are shaping how evangelicals view Christian scholarship. These references, however, tend to skim the surface of theological reflection. The younger scholars showed even less inclination to think in theological categories. I sensed that they had read more Walker Percy and Michel Foucault than Augustine or Calvin. Not everyone is called to be academic theologians, and Percy and Foucault certainly have bearing on theology, but those who aspire to be Christian scholars in any field need more theological equipping to do the ambitious work they hope to accomplish. It is a curious paradox that evangelical scholars are able and willing to do advanced research in their own areas, but invoke scholarly incompetence when it comes to basic historical theology.

This conference experience, however, reinforced my belief that Reformed critics need to examine themselves before faulting evangelicals. Such introspection may even lead to constructive proposals. The problems of theological education are well known. Academics grow up in the same churches as everyone else, and for many that means a pretty thin diet of confessional theology— even in Reformed churches. The improvement of church education is a formidable and long-term task.

Another challenge for the Reformed faith falls more immediately on Reformed theologians and pastors: high quality engagement with the university, which is to say today’s university, not some fiction of yesterday’s.

Evangelical scholars are not to be blamed for theological ignorance when it is difficult to identify constructive and rigorous Reformed writing engaged with current intellectual themes. The marginalization of theology from the university is another long story. There have been definite advantages for the preservation of orthodox Reformed theology because of its isolation from the mainstream academy. It would be a difficult case to make, however, that theology is flourishing as a discipline in America (Reformed or otherwise!). The

Evangelical scholars are not to be blamed for theological ignorance when it is difficult to identify constructive and rigorous Reformed writing engaged with current intellectual themes.

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opportunities which are present in our new academic situation suggest that something might be done.

As someone who has a lot to learn about these issues, my personal wish list includes two things. First, that there might be a conscious effort on the part of Reformed theology to enter into the debates about Christian scholarship. The evangelical audience is receptive to creative discussions of these ideas, and it already shows a predilection for Reformed insights. I would love to see a Primer on Reformed Theology for Humanities Students, especially if it were written in clear and exciting prose. Reformed seminaries might also sponsor courses in theology for scholars in other disciplines. Evangelical scholars are busy people, but they are committed to both the Christian and scholarship components of Christian scholarship. Second, Reformed theology needs to incorporate the questions of the modern academy (which includes mainstream theology) and make this scholarship more accessible to evangelical scholars. This is another difficult task because these new evangelicals are demanding academics. They are not the evangelicals you think you know, even if their theological knowledge is limited. If these things start to happen, the evangelical academic elite might even be lured into thinking theologically. MR

Eric Gregory, a graduate of Harvard and Trinity College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, is a Ph.D. candidate in ethics at Yale.

THE RARE JEWEL OF CHRISTIAN CONTENTMENT Jeremiah Burroughs We live our lives in a discontented world and it’s all too easy for the Christian to share its spirit. This book by the English puritan preacher Jeremiah Burroughs remedies this spiritual disease in practical biblical ways. The Rare Jewel concentrates on promoting peace and contentment in the hear ts of individual believers. Chapters include “Christian Contentment Described,” “How Christ Teaches Contentment,” “The Evils of a Murmuring Spirit” and more.

B-BT-28, paperbasck, $8.50

To order call (800) 956-2644.

“When Christianity Today began, advertising was minimal, modest, and circumspect, taking up a mere 3 to 7 percent of the space in the editions of 1959.

Three decades later, in the editions of 1989, advertising filled anywhere from 30 to 48 percent of the space. Along with the expected fare of books and educational institutions were added advertisements for jobs, media professionals, fundraising businesses, Sunday School peanut-butter, Pioneer Club grape jelly, and a handy mini-catalog for Christmas shoppers. In this latter advertising insert, one could find a large selection of thoughtful gifts, including a gold-embossed ring that had been made, the reader was told, “to unite the body of Christ.” The line between commerce and religion, it seems, was becoming just a bit thin. All of this, however, was but the setting for the most drastic transformation.

At the beginning of Christianity Today’s fourth year, its editor at the time, Carl F. H. Henry, described the publication as a journal of “international, interdenominational scholarship” with “the largest circulation in the world to the Protestant ministry and lay leadership.” Its mix of articles was simple and consistent. In 1959, 20 percent of the magazine was given to covering religious news, 15 percent to reviewing books of serious scholarship, and 36 percent to expounding the content of the Bible and the meaning of biblical doctrine for the moder n world. Three decades later, having responded to the suggestions of sophisticated marketing surveys, the editors had changed the content drastically. The news coverage was doubled from 20 to 40 percent, the book section was cut from 15 to 9 percent (and what was chosen for review was sometimes lacking in serious content), and the biblical and doctrinal content was reduced from 36 to 8 percent. In the place of the former commitment to biblically derived truth was a whole new interest in success stories about churches and ministries, as well as personal testimonies. These were not featured at all in 1959, but in 1989 they accounted for 19 percent of the content. Thus, whereas the magazine had formerly looked outward, offering biblically informed and incisive critiques of church and society, it now looked inward, and its analyses of church and society read more like journalistic dispatches from the cheering section.”

— David Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology, 208-209.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH NEIL POSTMAN with the religious experience, wrote a MR: In Amusing Ourselves to Death, you book some years ago called the have a chapter on the influence of Humiliation of the Word. In it he talks entertainment on religion. Do you about the very issues you’re raising, think that modernity comes to us in and I wonder if we really know what stealthlike fashion, and sometimes the results of this are going to be.

Christians and other groups can be Much of the Judeo-Christian religion, naive in viewing style as neutral? as well as the Judeo-Christian culture NP: I certainly think that it is a that comes to us is based on the idea mistake to believe that style is neutral, that through the word we can especially if one means by “style” the understand ourselves and our culture. form, or forms, in which messages That we the great genius of Greek address people. I try to make the culture, and Christianity inherited that point in Amusing Ourselves to Death that idea.

Sociolog y, philosophy, the style of television favors and anthropology, and psychology, and amplifies the entertainment mode. In everything else are somehow within cases like politics, news, and especially the domain and can be put under religion, I think that poses a very control of the word. As culture moves serious problem, because religion— away from the word toward pictures and Christianity in particular—is a and moving pictures, it would be a demanding discipline. And although Neil Postman new Reformation alright, but that there is joy and exultation that results could be a Reformation in reverse that seriously harms from religious experience, when we present religion as our traditional understanding of religion. nothing different from a Broadway show, I think it trivializes and corrupts the religious experience. If there MR: A lot of people talk about postmodernism; it are people who think that it makes no difference how seems as if it’s merely in the realm of philosophy and messages are conveyed to people, that one form is just as the history of ideas, whereas I think one of the things good as the other, I think these people are you pointed out to so many of us is that there are other underestimating the power of the forms in media. factors besides intellectual factors that shape the culture.

In particular, when we think about postmodernism and MR: You emphasize the importance of the printed its turn inward, involving a distrust of reason and of word in Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, and one absolute truth. To what extent is it pushed along by the of the things that comes to mind is the sort of shift at influence of such media as television and marketing? the time of the Reformation from the image to the NP: Maybe to some extent its roots go further back. I’d printed page. Do you think it is significant that in our say the most pervasive intellectual idea of this century day we’ve gone back to an iconographic sort of medium, (one finds it in physics, anthropology, psychology, especially for those of us who are Jews and Christians philosophy, almost everything else) is that the form in who appeal to the written word? which we express whatever we have to express about the NP: Yes, of course I do believe that. There is a rather world controls to some extent what we are saying and rapid movement away from the word and the power of what we can see. You find this in (the Ger man the word toward iconography. One of the more physicist) Werner Heisenberg’s remark that we do not interesting theologians of our time, Jacques Ellul, the see nature as it is, only by the questions we put to it.

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And you find in linguistics people discovering that different grammatical forms give people different perceptions of how the universe works. Some people say, “We don’t see things as they are but as we are.” It’s this idea which I think is the major thrust of scholarship in our own century.

MR: Would you say that the advent of not only television, but virtual reality, gives us that much more that jibes with our experience, telling us that the postmodern feeling is correct?

NP: I think it is indisputable that this contention that is labeled the “postmodern view” is correct. I think we understand now that how we say things and what instruments we use to measure those things will influence the kinds of results we get. I think we understand that; it represents an advance in human understanding. Nevertheless, that sort of idea can have a psychopathic expression, and the idea that therefore everything is relative and that we cannot know anything is a corrupted extension of that idea.

MR: Will it contribute ultimately to the disintegration of the mind and of high culture?

NP: When you read some of these postmodernists, you would think that’s the direction. However, I think there’s an essential sanity in most people so that they have reality tests. Thank God. MR: They have to live with their own common sense.

NP: Yes. They know if they want to go from here to there and there’s a mountain in between, they’re going to have a problem. And they know this whether they speak English or Spanish, or anything else. There’s a biological basis after all, to the human condition. We recognize that, and through our engagement with what we call “reality” there are some things we know. I think that will act as a kind of modifying idea so that our intellectual life won’t be destroyed. The fact is that the astrophysicists at NASA were able, by using language and their mathematics, to get some people to the moon.

There was nothing arbitrary about that. There may be somewhere in the universe another mathematics that could also have helped us to achieve that. But we can act as if that mathematics is real and as if its structure has some correspondence with the structure of what we call reality. I don’t think that the postmodern thought will in the end destroy intellectual life; I think it adds something to it. If people are not carried to psychopathic extremes about it then I think we’ll be alright.

MR: That sanity that you bring to these subjects is very

much in view in Technopoly, in your opening reference to Thamus and Theuth, where one character is so worried about the other’s technology that even the invention of the printed word is perceived as disastrous for its effect on memory and analysis. We can become Luddites, can’t we, rejecting the gifts of God’s providential oversight of technological advances because of a blind commitment to “the old ways”?

NP: I think that would be a mistake, too. I think that we have to recognize that some part of our genius is made manifest in our ability to make these machines and invent technology. And we ought not to disdain that genius. On the other hand, we also know that almost anything we create will cause problems. I think what we don’t need is a point of view that says, “Let’s get rid of the machinery,” which in any case wouldn’t happen, but a point of view that says, “Let’s see if we can exercise some control over it.”

From Amusing Ourselves to Death: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious thought and institutions in America were dominated by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of discourse that is largely absent from religious life today. No clearer example of the difference between earlier and modern forms of public discourse can be found than in the contrast between the theological arguments of Jonathan Edwards and those of, say, Jerry Falwell, or Billy Graham, or Oral Roberts. The formidable content to Edwards’ theology must inevitably engage the intellect; if there is such a content to the theology of the television evangelicals, they have not yet made it known.1 From Technopoly: It is possible that, some day soon, an advertising man who must create a television commercial for a new Califor nia Chardonnay will have the following inspiration: Jesus is standing alone in a desert oasis. A gentle breeze flutters the leaves of the stately palms behind him. Soft Mideastern music caresses the air.

Jesus holds in his hand a bottle of wine at which he gazes adoringly. Turning toward the camera, he says, “When I transformed water into wine at Cana, this is what I had in mind. Try it today. You’ll become a believer.”2 From Amusing Ourselves to Death: ...[Most] of the religion available to us on television is “fundamentalist,” which explicitly disdains ritual and theology in favor of direct communication with the Bible itself, that is, with God. Without ensnaring myself in a theological argument for which I am unprepared, I SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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think it both fair and obvious to say that on television, God is a vague and subordinate character. Though His name is invoked repeatedly, the concreteness and persistence of the image of the preacher carries the clear message that it is he, not He, who must be worshipped.

I do not mean to imply that the preacher wishes it to be so; only that the power of a close-up televised face, in color, makes idolatry a continual hazard. Television is, after all, a form of graven imagery far more alluring than a golden calf. I suspect (though I have no external evidence of it) that Catholic objections to Bishop Fulton Sheen’s theatrical performances on television (of several years back) sprang from the impression that viewers were misdirecting their devotions, away from God and toward Bishop Sheen, whose piercing eyes, awesome cape and stately tones were as close a resemblance to a deity as charisma allows.

Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads. That is why CBS’s programs about the universe were called “Walter Cronkite’s Universe.” One would think that the grandeur of the universe needs no assistance from Walter Cronkite. One would think wrong. CBS knows that Walter Cronkite plays better on television than the Milky Way. And Jimmy Swaggart plays better than God. For God exists only in our minds, whereas Swaggart is there, to be seen, admired, adored. Which is why he is the star of the show. And why Billy Graham is a celebrity, and why Oral Roberts has his own university, and why Robert Schuller has a crystal cathedral all to himself. If I am not mistaken, the word for this is blasphemy.3

Neil Postman is a critic and communications theorist, and chair of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University. Among his seventeen books are The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, and The End of Education. This interview was previously published in the Sept/Oct 1995 issue of MR.

THE CHURCH AT THE END OF THE 20TH CENTURY Francis A. Schaeffer

Today the pressures and battles Schaeffer predicted have engulfed the evangelical church. They come from the moral decay of the surrounding world. They come from the g rowing compromise morally and theologically within the church and among evangelicals in particular. Dr. Schaeffer’s insights, republished in this book, have crucial significance in helping Christians to understand and confront these battles. He challenges every Christian to examine his or her life for a reality rooted in a personal relationship to Jesus Christ and lived out in an or thodoxy of doctrine, Christian compassion, and true community. Widely recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of our day, he lectured frequently in leading universities in the United States and abroad on the recur rent theme of the uncompromising truth of historic, biblical Christianity and its relevance for all of life before his death in 1984.

B-SCH-1, paperback, $10.00 To order call (800) 956-2644.

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REVIEW OF

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S BOOK REVIEWS

REVIEWED BY JOHN MUETHER As “people of the Book,” American evangelicals have also been people of books. In order to take the Word of God seriously, they have taken seriously the words of others, recognizing the vital importance of stimulating reading in the development of godly minds.

In 1956, Christianity Today was founded on the premise that conservative Protestantism was not obscurantist, but rather capable of an intellectual defense against all the challenges of the modern world. Persuaded that the “basic solution to the world crisis is theological,” the magazine’s opening editorial promised to expound and defend the “basic truths of the Christian faith.”1 Though not specifically mentioned, the importance of reviews could be read between the lines. Christianity Today desired to nurture its readers in the best of Christian literature, past and present, and to engage in debate with mainline authors as well as the best in non-Christian thought.

Above all, Christianity Today would review books because that is what the Christian Century did. The comparison with the Century weighed heavily in the minds of Christianity Today’s original editors. Christianity Today would do everything that the leading organ of Protestant liberalism did, only better.

And so reviews were important, with the pattern being set in the very first issue. In reviewing B. B. Warfield on Calvin and a new edition of Luther’s writings, Christianity Today saw itself joining in a great conversation. Reviews of Karl Bar th, Rudolph Bultmann, and Paul Tillich ran in the first year, and thus would Christianity Today keep up with trends in contemporary theology. Editors regularly solicited prominent reviewers, as well as enabling younger scholars to break into print, such as R. J. Rushdooney and James Packer. Reader response was positive: letters of appreciation for the new evangelical voice included gratitude for the book review section.

Publishing at a steady rate of six to seven reviews per issue, Christianity Today kept the subject of its reviews in careful focus, with particular stress on Biblical studies, systematic theology, and church history. Characteristic of this emphasis was the “Year in Books” summary that appeared in a 1962 issue. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, F. F. Bruce, and Edward J. Young surveyed church history and doctrine, New Testament, and Old Testament,

respectively, each offering masterful bibliographical essays on the state of their disciplines.

The Perils of Populism Historians of the magazine have noted that after Carl Henry left, the direction shifted from reaching pastors and scholars to courting a mass readership.

Accordingly, the review section changed in both length and depth, and the percentage of academic contributors declined, from more than half to less than a third. The number of book reviews declined as well, to today where there are less than three reviews on average per issue.

But more was at work here than a shift to lay readership. At a deeper level was a changed understanding of the laity and their reading habits. As early as 1967, Christianity Today gave advice to lay readers on building up their theological literacy, with a reading program consisting of twenty books. This remarkable theological primer set included the daunting 900-page Reformed Dogmatics by Her man Hoeksema. 2 It is unimaginable that any magazine today would place such expectations before its lay readers.3 In contrast, the populism that now characterizes Christianity Today’s approach to theological literature is reflected in its annual book of the year award, begun in 1990. Originally these awards included both “readers’ choice” and “critics’ choice” categories, and the effect was to blur academic achievement and popular success.

Thus the pop novels of Frank Peretti and an inspiring autobiography of Dave Dravecky ranked alongside John Stott’s commentary on Acts. Chuck Colson on The Body would outdistance F. F. Bruce on the canon. After five years, Christianity Today dropped the reader’s poll and restricted its survey to “evangelical leaders,” producing a single top-25 list. The results are now more high-brow (Cornelius Plantinga’s study on sin was a recent winner), and serious works in biblical studies are reemerging, though not at the levels of dominance found in the bestbooks list of the magazine’s first decade.

Of course, some things have not changed in Christianity Today. There has always been a strong emphasis on missionary biographies (beginning with Elizabeth Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendour) and primers on evangelism (Hearst was not the only journalist to “puff Graham”). Science and evolution have been a SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

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focus since John Whitcomb and Henry Morris’ Genesis Flood. And nothing has been a more constant feature in Christianity Today reviews than what Martin Marty called its “overworked C. S. Lewis wind-up doll.”4 Scarcely has the magazine let any work in the field of Lewisiana go unreviewed in its pages.

Throughout its history, Christianity Today reported proudly on the resurgence of religious publishing. One article, entitled “Published in Grand Rapids,” lauded the “remarkable advance” of Baker, Eerdmans, and Zondervan “to the forefront of religious book publishing.” A later piece congratulated New York publishers for getting religion. But these reports generally lacked a distinction between financial success and publishing excellence. Another measurement employed to gauge evangelical scholarly industriousness was the proliferation of Bible translations and paraphrases. Although it gave a cold reception to the Revised Standard Version in two 1957 reviews, Christianity Today always greeted later arrivals warmly, including the Berkeley Version (1959), Living Bible (1971), New International Version (1978), Eugene Peterson’s The Message (1993), and finally the New Living Translation (1996). In almost every case it was oblivious to the marketing interests that drove these works into print and kept them there.

There are other ways in which Christianity Today conflated editorial and marketing considerations in its treatment of books. In recent years the magazine has included an annual “Bible Update” supplement insert, where articles about new books and reference tools are wrapped around publishers’ advertisements. The result is a print version of an “info-mercial.” (I once declined an invitation to write for a similar supplement—for another magazine—after I was carefully instr ucted which publishers would be major adver tisers and whose books would thus be appropriate to highlight.)

At other times, Christianity Today’s marketing and editorial departments were at curious loggerheads. In a 1983 issue, it published a “speaking out” column that critiqued several anti-New Age authors and labeled these heresy-hunters a “new 36

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inquisition.” Ironically, one of the books under scrutiny, Hunt and McMahon’s The Seduction of Christianity, was featured later in the same issue in a full page ad, with glowing endorsements from several evangelical luminaries.

From Fosdick to Pinnock Beyond a populist impulse that has increasingly characterized the magazine, the changing direction in Christianity Today’s reviews can be seen in the theological assessments found in them. Early reviewers were quick to identify modernism when they found it. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a subject of several reviews, may have been “immensely readable” but “not edifying.”

Reviewers charged him with denying the essentials of historic Christianity by making experience the ultimate test of truth. “Who knows,” lamented one reviewer, “what might have happened in Protestantism if his great mind and influential voice had been on the side of evangelical Christianity?”

Similarly, early Christianity Today found Norman Vincent Peale appalling. “This is neither religion, moralism, medicine, or anything more than self-help baptized with a sprinkling of devout-plus-medical phrases,” wrote a 1957 reviewer. Another reviewer, a decade later, bluntly concluded that Peale’s work on Sin, Sex, and Self-Control was “not Christianity.” But recently the magazine spoke more cautiously. A review of Peale’s biography, while questioning his legacy, suggested he was a devout Christian who offered a simplified Gospel in tune with his times.

In contrast to the certainty of earlier days, there is an ambivalence in Christianity Today’s evaluation of renegade theologian Clark Pinnock.

On the one hand, Harold O. J. Brown labeled his views “unjustifiably hostile to historic Christianity.” On the other hand, Stanley Grenz called readers to listen to this “gadfly,” while offering no rebuttal to Pinnock’s abandonment of sola Scriptura and propositional revelation.

Pinnock himself was given the platform to provide a positive view of John Wimber’s MODERN REFORMATION

Power Evangelism in a 1986 review. “I know from personal experience,” he wrote, “that one [incident of healing] can be wor th a bookshelf of academic apologetics for Christianity.”

More recently Pinnock’s pilgrimage into the charismatic movement was treated to a favorable review

by Roger Olson in 1996. Olson assured conservative non-Pentecostals that they could “safely walk onto” the bridge that Pinnock was constructing, and he applauded Pinnock for avoiding “another dry-as-dust, scholastic summary of all propositional truth, many of which already crowd the shelves of theological libraries and used-book stores.”

Self-styled post-conservatives, Professors Olson and Grenz have become the chief theological reviewers for CT in this decade, and they do not accord all gadflies equal treatment. In his review of David Wells’ No Place for Truth, Olson charged this “gadfly” with “crankiness,” and challenged Wells’ analysis of the crisis in evangelical theology: “Many will question Wells’ elevation of theology to the status of being central to the Christian faith itself.” Better for Olson is a balance between Wells’ academic approach and the practical, lay-oriented method of Robert Banks, whose book, Redeeming the Routines, he also reviewed.

No Place for Theology?

While Olson was not prepared to go all the way with Banks in jettisoning academic theology, Christianity Today’s review policy may seem headed in that direction.

In a 1981 article, Walter Elwell polled 40 evangelical leaders on books they found most influential, and the results were heavy in doctrinal theology and lightest in the social sciences. Further, academic books outpolled popular titles by a wide (8 to 1) margin.5 However, a special book section three years later highlighted six new books on fiction, history, and public policy, with no titles in theology or biblical studies.6 To be sure, Christianity Today cannot bear all of the blame for the disappearance of theology from its review section. After all, it cannot review what is not being published, and so its review section is to some extent a mirror of the confused state of evangelical publishing at large. Academic theology is a hard sell in an age of Max Lucado and Chuck Swindoll.

But on this very point, a curious irony emerges.

During its early years, when Christianity Today was reviewing academic books and putting scholarly titles on its “choice” book lists, it was expressing its concern over the lack of good titles from evangelical presses. “Better books are needed,” a contributor urged in 1963.7 But today, when less scholarly material dominates Christianity Today’s best books lists, an opposite sentiment dominates. The magazine frequently suggests that

conservative theological publishing has come into its own. “Evangelical output in systematic theology has been massive and challenging,” opined one observer.8 But can that conclusion be drawn by a current magazine subscriber? In recent years, a review of a theological title is an exception, and a biblical commentary a rarity. Reviews since the seventies focus far more on sociological concerns, practical issues in ministry, and on “contemporary issues.” In 1993 the magazine admitted that the latter had become its “bread and butter at least in terms of what we review and excerpt.”9 Christianity Today’s recognition of the importance of books led its parent organization recently to found Books and Culture, a bimonthly newspaper dedicated to recovering the lost mind of contemporary Evangelicalism through lengthy reviews, interviews, and book excerpts.

But even here theology plays a secondary role to science, history, literature, sociology, and popular culture, and the masthead includes fewer professional theologians (Cornelius Plantinga and Thomas Oden) than the two dozen found on the early Christianity Today mastheads.

It would be wrong to conclude that changes in Christianity Today reviews have been ideologically driven.

But still it seems fair to track in its reviews the odyssey of a magazine. Moreover, in its heightened social and political engagement and its concurrent decline in theology, the review section tells the story not only of a magazine but of the evangelical movement that it seeks to serve. In following that pattern, Christianity Today may have settled for being a monitor of trends, and less than the shaper of evangelical thinking that its founders had envisioned.

John Muether is the Director of the Library of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando and the co-editor of the Nicotine Theological Journal.

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IN PRINT The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America Daniel J. Boorstin (New York: Atheneum, 1961) First published in 1961, this provocative book introduced the notion of “pseudo-events”—events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported—and the contemporary definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knowness.” Boorstin has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.

B-BOOR-1, $13.00, paperback Reckoning with the Past: Historical Essays on American Evangelicalism D. G. Hart (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995) Reckoning with the Past samples the history of U.S. Evangelicalism in wide-ranging essays that move from seventeenth-century Puritans through Youth for Christ and postmodernism. The studies include the ideological origins of the American Revolution, the popular theology that sprung from the Second Great Awakening, and developments in Pentecostalism, millennialism, and Fundamentalism.

B-HAR-2, $23.00, paperback The Democratization of American Christianity Nathan O. Hatch (New Haven: Yale, 1989) In the prize-winning book on American religious history, Notre Dame professor Nathan O. Hatch offers a provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, arguing that during this period American Christianity was democratized. The importance of ministers being sent by a constituted authority was minimized and selfpromotion became increasingly important.

B-HAT-1, $16.00, paperback Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism Michael S. Horton (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991) In Made in America Michael Horton clearly demonstrates that the Christian gospel is different than the finest of American ideals. Christianity can be translated into 38

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American norms and mores only at great loss to the original. This is a bracing challenge to let God be God, even in America, even among evangelicals.

B-MIA, $16.00, paperback Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism George M. Marsden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987) In 1982 George Marsden was commissioned by Fuller Seminary to write a history of the school. It was not to be a conventional laudatory institutional history, however. Rather—by the choice of both Marsden and Fuller President David Hubbard—the history was to be a framework in which to focus a study of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism since the mid-1940s.

B-MARS-1, $15.00, paperback Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Neil Postman (New York: Penguin, 1986) Television has conditioned us to tolerate visually entertaining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs. In this persuasive book, Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught.

B-CM-6, $12.00, paperback No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology David Wells (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) Written expressly to encourage renewal in evangelical theology, No Place for Truth explores the interface between Christian faith and the modern world in entirely new ways and with uncommon rigor. This sweeping analysis examines the collapse of theology in the church, the academy, and modern culture, raising profound questions about the future of conservative Protestant faith.

B-NPFT-P, $18.00, paperback All books are available from MR by calling (800) 9562644. Phones are answered from 8:30 am through 4:30 pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. For further book recommendations and an on-line resource catalog, please visit our website at www.remembrancer.com/ace.

MODERN REFORMATION

FOOTNOTES TIME FOR A COMMERCIALISM BREAK—Michael S. Horton 1 Roger Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 160 (italics added).

2 Reported in Christianity Today, January 8, 1996, 58.

3 Ibid., 59.

GEORGE WHITEFIELD AND THE SHIFT FROM THE PARISH TO THE PRESS 1 Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and George Whitefield,” in Communication and Change in American Religious History, edited by Leonard I. Sweet (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 108-125.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

continued from page 40 Should it continue to give the Christian public the kind of biblical and theological substance it needed, or should it simply settle on being commercially successful?

In hindsight the line that was crossed seems rather clear but at the time it probably was not. The result, however, is a journal whose strategy for survival is a recipe for the demise of evangelical spirituality.

To gauge how far Christianity Today has sold its soul to the world of commerce, you need only ask whether there are any convictions which now remain. Is there anything for which the editors would take a stand even if that meant losing some readers? It is not clear that there is. Before the scandals with the televangelists broke, for example, the magazine was too timorous to point out what was already a matter of public record. Long before the sexual episodes became known, a sordid trail of greed was already evident. It was an affront to many people and a catastrophe for the Gospel, giving people the single largest reason, they told Gallup, for not believing. Christianity Today, however, held its peace. And it continues to hold its peace. When selling becomes paramount, believing is diminished.

REVIEW OF CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S BOOK REVIEWS— John Muether 1 “Why ‘Christianity Today’?” Christianity Today October 15, 1956, 20-21.

2 Robert L. Cleath, “Read Your Way to Theological Literacy,” Christianity Today, September 15, 1967, 32-34.

3 This is true. As far as we can remember, the longest book MR has recommended to its lay readers in the last year has been Louis Berkhof’s 784-page Systematic Theology. —The Editors.

4 Martin E. Marty, “The Marks and Misses of a Magazine,” Christianity Today, July 17, 1981, 49.

5 Walter A. Elwell, “Books of Influence: The Choices of Church Leaders” Christianity Today, January 23, 1981, 24-25.

6 “Choice Books,” Christianity Today, September 7, 1984, 29-38.

7 Donald T. Kauffman, “Of the Making of Christian Books,” Christianity Today, September 27, 1963, 3-4.

8 Roger Nicole, “What Evangelicalism has Accomplished,” Christianity Today, September 16, 1996, 31-34.

9 Michael G. Maudlin, “1993 Book Awards,” Christianity Today, April 5, 1993, 27.

INTERVIEW WITH NEIL POSTMAN 1 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986), 55–56.

2 Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf, 1992), 164 3 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 122–133.

Christianity Today’s need to succeed has become too compelling and its willingness to be unloved is now much weakened. The result is that while once it was a magazine of conviction, now it is a chameleon. Once, it stood for something; now, it does not. Once, it was a leader; now it is a follower. Once, it gave voice to a vision; now, it aspires only to being successful.

Sometimes people say and do things in old age which are unwise, but what is done then should not be allowed to undo the memories of all the good things they did earlier. It is so here, too. Christianity Today has stumbled but it does have a noble past. In its first two decades, from the mid-fifties to about the mid-seventies, it served the cause of biblical truth with clarity, courage, and conviction, and it was responsible in no small measure for the emergence, under God, of a vibrant Evangelicalism. May it return to its greater days.

Former research scholar for Christianity Today, David F. Wells is a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and is the Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1997

39

ON MY MIND

By David F. Wells

Killing Us Softly his is a story of a lost Christian opportunity. It begins, in fact, among our unparalleled abundance. America is the cradle in which the world’s most avid consumers have been born, people who really do believe that the good life is about the good things of life.

Consider the following: Americans represent 7% of the world’s population but we consume 33% of its goods and services, not to mention 50% of its illegal drugs. Over fifty billion dollars are spent on advertising each year and the result is that on any given day you should be able to see well over a thousand advertisements. The average child will see 20,000 advertisements a year on television. You are probably a regular recipient of some of the twelve billion catalogs that are mailed to American households each year. This rhythm of buying and selling is a part of the air we breath. It has affected the way we think of ourselves and our world so profoundly that it blurs the line between believing and buying. This is true on the secular side of the equation as well as the religious.

Malls, for example, have become temples to consumption because they are not simply selling goods.

They are designed visually to create the sense of walking down a small town street while hinting that we are far from home: exotic plant life, fountains, carefully lit vistas in a utopia of abundance. Along with designer jeans, exotic coffees, and vacations, you can also buy happiness, a new image, psychological wholeness, and cures for any of the mutant addictions which now roam our society. It is all up for sale, all shimmering with the same allure, and all wrapped in the same paper.

Malls are selling life, the good life, indeed, the more abundant life. They are to our time what cathedrals were to the Middle Ages. However, in these temples, repentance is not only unnecessary but is an obscenity.

If it is true that buying thus leads into a secularized version of believing, it is also the case that believing can lead into a religious version of buying. In the one case, the intangibles which make up life’s meaning are being sold in our malls and, in the other, religious intangibles are being hitched up to the tricks and devices of the marketplace in order to attract followers.

T

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It is, of course, Evangelicalism which is peculiarly vulnerable to this blurring between believing and buying because evangelism without theology is what, in the secular world, we know as marketing. Because much of the evangelical world has emptied itself of theology, it is no mystery as to why the marketing of the Church, with its ingenious but shameless adaptations of its “product” to the consuming public, is spreading like a wild fire.

Nor is it any surprise to see its leadership passing from the pastors and biblical scholars of the early post-war years to the managers and entrepreneurs of today. And the growing professionalization of the ministry is part of this picture, too. Pastors now think of themselves more as CEOs with careers to nourish than as shepherds who give themselves for their flocks so that biblical truth might take root in their lives. These are telltale signs of how deeply secularized we have become.

The voice of this changing internal ethos, however, belongs uniquely to Christianity Today. As a magazine it is run like a secular corporation. It maintains strict statistical surveillance of its readers’ sentiments and appetites and constantly adjusts its “product” to satisfy their needs. This, of course, is what all good businesses do, but most businesses do not exist to serve Christian truth. They are simply selling products. God, the Gospel, biblical truth are not products, nor are they puppets to be jerked around by our needs. In matters of faith, believers are not consumers. The consumer model for understanding Christian faith is quite toxic because it subjugates everything to the self. Biblical faith is Godcentered; the marketing model is human-centered.

In another day, the results might not have been so unhappy at Christianity Today because the Christian public would not have suffered gladly the emptying out of faith that is evident on many of its pages. Today, the Christian public takes this loss of seriousness and depth as normative.

At some point a line was crossed. A choice was forced on the magazine. Should it lead or should it follow? Should it continue to speak from Christian conviction or should it simply become a product? continued on page 39 MODERN REFORMATION