living-in-exile-july-august-2001

HOW TO BE SEEKER-SENSITIVE ❘ ESSAY CONTEST WINNERS

MODERN REFORMATION LIVING IN EXILE: Tourists, Seekers, & Pilgrims

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LIVING IN EXILE: TOURISTS, SEEKERS, & PILGRIMS

13 Seekers or Tourists?: Or the Difference Between Pilgrimage and Vacation Church growth experts have long said that what works for one generation will not necessarily be successful for another.

As troubling as this advice is, a new generation of seekers may actually help churches recover what sustained older generations of saints. by Michael Horton

19 Something Short of Redemption: The Pilgrims of John Updike and Douglas Coupland In the works of two prominent American writers, the metaphors of pilgrimage and journey are frequent themes.

But modern-day pilgrims have little resemblance to the sort of pilgrims shaped by the gospel. by John Muether

24 Lost and Found According to the Gospel The Modern Reformation Prize in Theology and Culture This year’s prize-winning essays show that the categories of the gospel transcend those normally used to evaluate the job churches are doing. Sin and forgiveness, instead of churched and unchurched, give the Church her power and define her ministry. by Brian Hamer and Stephen A. Trout

35 Faithfulness of Christ’s Mission Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod Committee Of all the denominations in the United States that have examined the Church Growth Movement, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod may have produced the most sustained, thoughtful, and balanced treatment of the problems raised by recent efforts to reach the so-called unchurched. This excerpt demonstrates why.

42 The Cultural Captivity of Seeking: A Round-Table Discussion COVER PHOTO BY TONY STONE

Alliance Council members dialogue on what it means to be "seeker-sensitive" in a culture segmented by age and ethnic identity. As it turns out, the most multi-cultural approach may be the old-fashioned one of Word and Sacrament.

In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Open Exchange page 4 | Ex Auditu page 5 | Speaking of page 9 Between the Times page 10 | Resource Center page 26 | Reviews page 47 | On My Mind page 52 J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

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Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton

Seekers All

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MODERN REFORMATION

Executive Editor D. G. Hart

eeker-sensitive” is the new way of describing a congregation keen to reach the Managing Editor Irene H. DeLong

lost. It used to be that the way to tell whether a church had the proper zeal for the gospel was to look at its budget for foreign missions. Today it is by

looking at its bulletin and worship—is everything accessible to outsiders or will visitors (i.e., the lost) be confused and led astray? In either case, the assumption is that aggressive evangelism is what constitutes a healthy church. Are believers sufficiently concerned with those who do not believe? If not, the logic runs, then those Christians are likely inbred and ingrown. For to be a good Christian means having a desire, as one church planter I heard put it, “to give the faith away.”

The problem with giving the faith away is that sometimes it does actually give away the faith. Out of a desire to make the gospel accessible to those who do not believe, as the history of Christianity readily demonstrates, Christians with admirable zeal for the lost have taken away the offense of the cross, sometimes to the point of creating another gospel.

But another problem with a concern for seekers, which often goes unnoticed, is that this outlook has nurtured an understanding of the Christian life that runs counter to experience, and worse, appears to be at odds with the teaching of Scripture. Seekersensitivity, at least as it is usually practiced, equates genuine piety with soul winning, as if the believer’s chief duty after conversion is to gain more converts, who, in turn, look to win more souls to Christ. But the Christian life is filled with many more difficulties than those experienced while witnessing to neighbors or serving on a congregational outreach committee. Conversion is not a simple shift from the status of lost to found, or from being an object of seeking to one who now does the seeking. Instead, regeneration is the beginning of a pilgrimage in which believers must wrestle with the world, the Next Issue devil, and the flesh until Prophecy and they are perfected either the Meaning of through the Lord’s History: Why return or in death.

Word and Spirit The Bible speaks in Matter many places about the

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believer’s struggle with sin, but the writer to the Hebrews captures especially well the nature of the Christian life as a pilgrimage when he writes, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (Heb 13:14). To be sure, this verse is primarily about the intermediate character of the believer’s experience between the first and second comings of Christ; the Christian now is in a position similar to the one the Israelites experienced in the wilderness. He or she is a pilgrim who seeks and is journeying to the Promised Land. But this verse in Hebrews also implies that the pilgrimage of the believer will be difficult because only when Christ returns will Christians finally overcome sin and death.

Until then believers need the kind of comfort the Church is called to give. This is why John Calvin could refer to the Church as a mother from whom it is impossible for believers to grow into a stronger faith unless “she keeps us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels.”

The teaching of the Bible, then, is the great leveler of the “seeker-sensitive” versus “ingrown” church debate. On this side of the second coming, Christians are seekers every bit as much as the seekers for whom seekersensitive churches are designed. Believers seek a homeland the arrival at which does not always seem certain. They need comfort, hope, and guidance for the journey. The danger of reconfiguring the Church to make it more sensitive to seekers is that such churches may forget the other seekers, the believing ones, to whom they have been called to minister. And ironically, the churches that recognize the pilgrim character of the Christian life may be the ones most sensitive in ministering to both believing and nonbelieving seekers.

Alliance Council Gerald Bray ❘ Mark E. Dever J. Ligon Duncan, III ❘ W. Robert Godfrey John D. Hannah ❘ Michael Horton Rosemary Jensen ❘ Ken Jones John Nunes ❘ J. A. O. Preus Rod Rosenbladt ❘ R. C. Sproul Mark R. Talbot ❘ Gene E. Veith, Jr. Paul F. M. Zahl Department Editors Lisa Davis, Open Exchange Brian Lee, Ex Auditu Benjamin Sasse, Between the Times Mark R. Talbot, Reviews Staff ❘ Editors Ann Henderson Hart, Assistant Editor Diana S. Frazier, Contributing Editor Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Celeste McGhee, Proofreader Kathryn Baldino, Production Assistant John J. McClure, Marketing Assistant Contributing Scholars Charles P. Arand ❘ S. M. Baugh Jonathan Chao ❘ William M. Cwirla Marva J. Dawn ❘ Don Eberly Timothy George ❘ Douglas S. Groothuis Allen C. Guelzo ❘ Carl F. H. Henry Lee Irons ❘ Arthur A. Just Robert Kolb ❘ Donald Matzat Timothy M. Monsma ❘ John W. Montgomery John Muether ❘ Kenneth A. Myers Tom J. Nettles ❘ Leonard R. Payton Lawrence R. Rast ❘ Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie ❘ David P. Scaer Rachel S. Stahle ❘ David VanDrunen Cornelis Van Dam ❘ David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals © 2001 All rights reserved. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals 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: Modern Reformation 1716 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 ModRef@Alliance Net.org www.AllianceNet.org ISSN-1076-7169

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Dr. Zahl’s On My Mind article entitled “Ultimate Penultimates” in the March/April 2001 Modern Reformation magazine is very thought provoking. His contention that it is important for confessing evangelicals to know where to draw a line that divides truth from apostasy is correct.

Furthermore, his disagreement with the modern example of unrepentant, practicing homosexuality being considered acceptable Christian behavior because of the theory that one may not have a choice in their orientation is right on. My problem is with his incorrect view of Arminianism, and his apparent church dividing line in the sand drawn between Calvinists and Arminians.

All evangelicals would agree that God has every right to judge all of our behavior, whether bound or free. Arminians, however, believe that it is inconsistent with the revealed nature of God to believe that he would both predestine someone to damnation, with no chance of mercy, and then blame that person for not having a saving faith, making that person’s condemnation their own fault. This is not the same, however, as believing that one is not responsible for his sinful nature. We are required to repent and attempt to stop a sinful action when the Light convicts us of that sin, whether or not we believe that the sinful act is a result of our nature.

Please continue to write such thoughtprovoking articles.

David R. Monie Turnersville, New Jersey

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I found the discussion (monolog?) between MR and Donald Dayton to be both enlightening and disturbing.

Enlightening because Dayton obviates the mistaken notion that the majority of Arminians tend to be toward the bottom of the intelligence scale (more naïve), yet disturbing because a man possessing such scholasticism and influence among budding theology students could be so far from the truth. He seems to defend every theological position except the Reformed. He even seems to see validity in the Adventist’s notion regarding the soul. Does he really think that God’s Word doesn’t clearly teach the eternality of the soul?

I am reminded of Festus’ remarks to Paul, “Your great learning is driving you insane.” Also, Dayton calls to mind the quip of G. K. Chesterton that “we seem to have educated ourselves into a state of imbecility.”

Dayton is obviously well read (he drops names like a Fall tree drops leaves). However, I believe that he needs to spend more time reading, and rereading the Word of God, allowing it to speak to his soul (eternal soul), rather than seeking enlightenment from a myriad of authors that write what they think God’s Word says.

C. H. McGowen Warren, Ohio

Having been involved with several pro-life organizations over a period of more than 30 years, and having read widely in pro-life writings, I felt nonplussed upon reading that “a few…in the antiabortion movement have begun to urge” shifting resources from supposed “all-or-nothing political battles” and toward promotion of adoption and education about in utero fetal development. (We prefer “pro-life” partly to project a positive image and partly because life-debasing issues other than abortion also motivate us.)

I know of only one pro-life organization (Americans United for Life) that is focused [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8 ]

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by Mel McGinnis

Almost Persuaded

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or years, I was a Wesleyan-Arminian pastor who did not know the centrality of justification. In a spiritual crisis, I came across the Reformation. I don’t profess to be entirely sanctified anymore, but neither am I entirely Reformed…yet.

Relinquishing free will may take a second work of grace. However, steady dosages of MR and the White Horse Inn

Interested in contributing to Open Exchange?

Send your name, address, and essay topic to: Open Exchange c/o Modern Reformation Magazine 1716 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 or contact us by e-mail at OpenExchange @AllianceNet.org

have led me to agree with Wesley when he said, “I’m within a hair’s breadth of becoming a Calvinist.”

I am a member of a denomination seeking purpose-driven, visionary/rancher-type pastors in churches singing repetitive Hosanna music where pulpits are removed, tables pushed aside, crosses taken down, and drama takes the stage. This is all part of what is known as the WAVE: To know God and make him known. The push is on to “multiply” disciples, small groups, and leaders into “healthy biblical communities.”

Denominational leaders say, “[C]haos is a better strategy for survival than order” and to quote Peter Drucker, “Every organization…has to build into its very structure…organized abandonment of everything it does.” The following statement was also made, “I don’t know of anyone becoming a disciple from the pulpit.”

A friend who dropped out of the pastorate remarked to me: What I find most disturbing…is the mounting pressure [on]…pastors…to lay aside doctrinal distinctives, and move the church in the direction of being a “generic evangelical church” …to be as broad in its appeal to the public at large as is possible….

Maybe the Free Methodist Church isn’t headed toward theological pluralism yet, but if we’re going to employ more of the business world’s thinking…we’re going to need to watch out that we don’t become consumed by our own devices…. A pastor feeling overwhelmed by “multiplying” disciples stood to his feet at a meeting and,

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broken, confessed “I feel like a lame person caught up in a stampede.”

When debate over “what is church health” arose, a letter by a parishioner to a denominational leader contended: [T]he Belfast Free Methodist Church is a very healthy church, not because we laugh a lot or have utopian relationships with one another, but because we have the following: Confession of sin (James 5:16) being reminded of our unholiness and God’s holiness. Public reading of Scripture (1 Tim. 4:13) each week. Singing (Eph. 5:19) [with] solid theological content. The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:24–25) remembering Christ’s sacrifice and receiving anew His grace. Preaching the Gospel (1 Tim. 4:13) with law and the Gospel clearly defined.

Our church leaders are despairingly human.

Everyone has faults and has offended someone in the church at some time, in addition to offending God daily. Our church service is always inspirational but only to people who are inspired by the thought that Jesus Christ substituted his righteousness for our sinfulness. I assert with confidence that this is a church, which despite our humanity, belongs to God. We strive to please him as we continue to learn from his Word.

Not bad for a Wesleyan, wouldn’t you say? Could this parishioner be “within a hair’s breadth,” too?

Reverend Mel McGinnis, Belfast Free Methodist Church, Belfast, NY.

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Matthew 25:31–46

You are His People and the Sheep of His Hand Grace, Mercy, and Peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen. The sermon text is the Word of our Lord concerning the sheep and the goats, as recorded by Matthew (25:31–46) in the Gospel appointed for this Third Sunday of All Saints.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. [Amen] Many in our day, and also throughout history, would deny the reality of a final judgment. There is, in fact, a common myth that God could never send anyone to hell; that in the end he will simply “overlook” the sins of all mankind and grant everlasting salvation to everyone.

But one honest look at our Gospel from Matthew should dispel such misguided thoughts.

The words of our Lord are by no means ambiguous: There will come a day, just as real as this one that we are in, when the Son of Man will return—the King of the universe, riding upon the clouds of heaven as his chariot, with power and great glory, in the company of his angelic armies.

And he will judge with absolute and utter finality the living and the dead, as we have also heard from the Prophet Jeremiah this morning.

Anyone who has any doubts about it now will have no doubts on that day. Then all the arguments and excuses and rationalizations in the world will do no good; nor will any stubborn refusal to believe change the facts. The Judge of all mankind, with all authority in heaven and on earth, will take his seat at the bench of divine, eternal justice. The gavel will sound like thunder from his holy dwelling, roaring mightily against his land, and the verdict will be handed down, once and for all.

In contrast to those who deny the reality of the judgment revealed in the Word of God are those who believe in it but misinterpret our Gospel this morning. That is sometimes a problem with a familiar text like the sheep and the goats, because it can seem so easy to understand. It should be,

perhaps, but it is not. On the one hand, there are those who misinterpret the text by reading into it a “righteousness by works” mentality. On the other hand, some follow the same mentality in the opposite From direction. They despair of RICK STUCKWISCH being counted among the sheep and, thus, hear themselves condemned by the word of our Lord.

Pastor Now, if we should wish to Emmas Luthern Church hear this Holy Gospel as South Bend, IN though it were a checklist of requirements for getting into heaven, then we should also have to admit that we are all together lost and hopeless: a worthless herd of goats! Because for those who wish to stand before the Judge on the basis of their own works and merits, in accordance with his holy and righteous Law, there is no room for error; no allowance for even a single slip-up or mistake. If, at any time, on any occasion, you have failed to feed the hungry or welcome the stranger or visit the sick, then, says Jesus, you have not done it unto him.

The Law demands perfection. And so these words of our Lord must be taken with deadly seriousness, because the consequences of failure are devastating: eternal death and punishment in the ever-burning fires of hell. Those who think it’s all a big joke will find nothing more to laugh about from that day onward.

Thankfully, the deadly condemnation of the Law is not the whole story; in fact, these words of Jesus are as much or more a preaching of his

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Gospel. In this respect, they are not so much about you, at least not in the way that you might think at first, but rather about Christ and what he has done for you. Your sinful old Adam always wants to put yourself in the spotlight, whether it be your failures or your achievements. But a proper (Gospel) understanding of the sheep and the goats begins with a focus on Christ and his cross.

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judgment will likewise hinge on the crucifixion, and where the people of all nations stand in relationship to the sacrificial life and death of their judge and king.

As Jesus asked in response to James and John: “Will you be baptized with my baptism? Will you drink from my cup?” If so, then you shall hear the promise of Jesus to the one thief who was crucified with him: “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with he Judge of all mankind, with all authority in heaven and on earth, will take his seat me in paradise.” But if you refuse his baptism, his cup, at the bench of divine, eternal justice. and his cross, then you must hear a thief’s rebuke: “Do you not fear God? For we are In our Lord’s description of the sheep, you hear justly condemned, receiving the due reward of our above all a beautiful description of his own life and deeds. Whereas this man, Christ Jesus, has done love toward you, and toward all people. He visited nothing wrong, and yet, he is under the same you when you were sick and in prison. And not condemnation.”

God grant by his Word and Holy Spirit that only did he visit you, becoming like you and bearing all your sin and infirmity, but he healed the you might understand and truly believe, that just as sickness of your sin—as surely as he healed those your condemnation has become his, so also has his who were sick with frail and diseased bodies in his righteousness become yours, so that for his sake ministry on earth. He freed you from the prison of you might be with him when he comes into his your sinfulness, even as he freed the Israelites in the glorious Kingdom of paradise.

It is clear from the Words of Jesus that men and Exodus from Egypt. And just as he clothed Adam and Eve with skins after their fall into sin, so also women were created for eternal life, and heaven did he clothe your nakedness with the pure white was prepared for them to enjoy; whereas hell and garments of his perfect righteousness in the waters eternal judgment were created (after the fact), not of Holy Baptism. So also does he feed the hungry for people, but for the fallen angels, Satan, and those and give drink to those who thirst, by feeding you who followed him in their rebellion against the with his body and his blood in the Holy Supper.

Holy Triune God. Thus, you may take to heart, Now, as we have found with Matthew before, that your Lord does not desire nor intend for he has left us a number of important clues to the anyone to perish, but that all people should come genuine meaning of the sheep and the goats. Of to repentance and a knowledge of salvation, lest his these, perhaps the most significant is our Lord’s righteous judgment fall upon their unbelief. reference to those “on his right” and those “on his It is the Lord’s deepest desire that all people left” in the coming of his Kingdom. There are two should be saved. The shedding of his own blood other places in the Gospel where these same and the giving of his own life are proof enough of designations are used, both of them fairly familiar. that. He takes no pleasure in the death and On one occasion, the Apostles James and John damnation of anyone. Indeed, his compassionate came to Jesus with the request that one of them be heart must break over each and every sinner who allowed to sit “on his right” and the other “on his refuses to repent. Thus, it is the same “all nations” left” in the Kingdom. In his response, Jesus who will be called before his judgment seat, to immediately said that they had no idea what they whom he sends his apostles in Matthew 28: “Go, were asking, that his Kingdom would come in the therefore, and make disciples of all nations. . . .” form of a cross and suffering. And sure enough, as Call them to repentance in my name. Clothe them you might well remember, that is where the other in my garments of salvation by the waters of Holy reference is given, for we read that Christ was Baptism. Feed them with my holy body and crucified between two thieves, one “on his right” quench their desperate thirst with my cleansing and the other “on his left.” blood. And rest assured that I will be with them— So, what does this mean? Quite simply, that the and with you—at all times, even to the end of the separation of the sheep and the goats begins age; yes, unto life everlasting. already with the cross of Christ, and is carried out The goats, then, who will be eternally at all times (including here and now) in relation to condemned, are those who stubbornly refuse to that cross. And even so, the final verdict and find their life in Christ; who reject the forgiveness,

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life, and salvation that he has already earned for them and is for now holding out to them. They have chosen instead to face the final judgment on their own merits and their own righteousness. But there is no one—not now and not ever—who even comes close to measuring up on that basis.

Standing on their own two feet, apart from the cross and resurrection of Christ, the goats will simply have nothing to show. Just as you have nothing of your own to bring before the Lord.

What is it that we sing? “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.” That is the essence of faith. And by faith alone, the youngest infant has the genuine good works of Christ as evidence before the throne of glory.

Don’t imagine that those deeds of love and charity described four times over in our gospel are somehow your “part to play” in salvation. They are nothing more nor less than the gracious works of Christ himself—works that he did in your stead during his thirty-something years of human life on earth, and works that he himself has continued to do throughout the history of his church in the lives of his Christian people.

By faith, those works of Christ have been credited to you, and on that basis, there is no need to worry that when Judgment Day comes you won’t have anything to show for yourself. The life and works of Christ are already in your column.

And what is more, Christ is working in you and through you, in ways that you don’t even realize, to will and to do his works of mercy for others, even for “the least of these, my brethren.”

By identifying himself with those who are “the least, the last, and the lost,” the Lord reveals that his cross and crucifixion are for them, for you, and for all people. Because it was on the cross, in particular, that Jesus himself was indeed hungry and thirsty. He had gone without food throughout the long night and day of his so-called “trial,” and remember his words: “I thirst.” It was on the cross that he became a stranger, betrayed and deserted by his closest friends and forsaken by his own dear Father. It was there on the cross that he was naked before the entire world, while his clothes were divided among his enemies; there that he was sick to the point of death, and executed as a prisoner of his own people.

Thus, you see Christ in the desperate needs and wants of those around you, and also in your own desperation. He has taken all those various wants and needs upon himself, and has borne them in his body on the cross. And because the one who did this is your shepherd, you shall not want for anything at all. For not only has he borne your griefs and carried all your sorrows, he has, by his sacrificial

suffering and death, forgiven all your sins and failings, and opened the Kingdom of heaven to you.

So also, then, as you have received—and continue to receive—the tender provision of your Good Shepherd, you likewise provide for the care and support of others, thereby participating in the life and work of Christ himself. Indeed, it is precisely because of your dear Lord’s life and work for you, that you, his dear sheep, likewise reflect that very same love and mercy in your life and work for others. In point of fact, it is the Shepherd himself who simply continues to do what he does, only now doing it in you and through you.

You do not make yourself into sheep by doing good deeds of kindness; quite the opposite, you do good deeds because you are the sheep of the Good Shepherd. Notice, in fact, that the sheep are not even aware of the good deeds they have done: “When, Lord. . . ?” they have to ask. They have lived a life of love and compassion—not because they set out with a checklist of things to do, like Boy Scouts earning their merit badges with daily good turns—but simply living their lives by faith in the grace and free forgiveness of Christ.

It is also by faith in Christ—that is to say, by living in him, and he in you—that “whatsoever you do” is done unto him. That is the true reality that Christians are privileged to recognize, namely, that everything in all creation centers in Christ and has significance in relation to him. Everything you do has meaning in him.

Regardless of who your neighbors might be, you live toward them the life that Christ has already lived and died for you. As you receive the clothing of his forgiveness and his perfect righteousness, so do you clothe others, both physically (covering their bodies) and spiritually (forgiving their sins against you). And as you are nourished by the food and drink of Christ, so also do you feed and give drink to those who hunger and thirst, not only filling their bellies, but also nourishing their souls and spirits with the gospel of Christ. And as he has healed your infirmity and delivered you from the prison of your sin, so do you also attend those who yet suffer under these burdens, and welcome with open arms and loving hearts the strangers who have yet to receive the adoption of sons that is already yours in Christ Jesus the Lord.

The basic rule, as I have said before, by which to live your Christian life, is really very simple: “Do unto others, as Christ has done for you….”

And the fact is, that you do—often without even realizing it—not because of your great resolve or

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good intentions, not because you have pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps, but for the simple reason that Christ is your Good Shepherd, and you are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. In other words, you live as sheep because your Shepherd cares for you.

In short, you become sheep and inherit the Kingdom of heaven only by receiving the righteousness of Christ, which he has earned for you and for all people. It is the perfect and flawless “works righteousness” of Christ alone, who fulfilled the Law of God completely on your behalf, that speaks for you before the throne of God. For it is his work that is credited to you; and his work, also, that continues to reverberate in the living of your life.

And you may take the greatest comfort in this, that even though you are too often unfaithful, he remains faithful toward you. Every time “you like sheep have gone astray,” your gracious Good Shepherd goes out of his way to find you, to carry you home, to shelter and protect you in the folds of his righteousness, to feed you from the sacrifice of his cross, and to nurture you for life in the Kingdom that he has prepared for you and all his saints from the foundation of the world. In his dear Name, and for his sake, Amen.

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God the Father, the Communion of his Holy Spirit will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.

Letters

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primarily on the legal and political aspects of the struggle to restore legal protection over the right to live. Others of this type may exist, but in my view the pro-life movement, virtually from its inception, has emphasized the humanity of the helpless infant; has counselled life-preserving alternatives while also providing love, assurance, shelter, and material assistance to girls and women in untimely or “unwanted” pregnancies; and has helped heal abortion’s second victims, those suffering the traumas of post-abortion stress.

For a short time during the infancy of the prolife movement, its leaders may have harbored a hope that a Court finding so egregiously flawed as Roe v. Wade, having no rational basis in the U.S. Constitution, in judicial or legal precedent or in social custom, surely would soon be overturned, but that age of innocence ended at least a quarter century ago.

Leonard C. Johnson Troy, Idaho

Join the Conversation!

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1716 Spruce Street

Rick Stuckwisch (M.A. candidate of Sacred Theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Indiana; and doctoral candidate in Liturgical Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana) is the pastor of Emmaus Lutheran Church in South Bend, Indiana.

Philadelphia, PA 19103 215.735.5133 fax ModRef@AllianceNet.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters.

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Speaking of...

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ommon sense and nature

will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.

W. Somerset Maugham

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xile is in fashion. Once it was consumption—pale, sunken cheeks, spatters of blood on a white linen handkerchief, and so on—that suggested an artistic sensibility and a poetic soul. Now it is exile that evokes the sensitive intellectual, the critical spirit operating alone on the margins of society, a traveler, rootless and yet at home in every metropolis, a tireless wanderer from academic conference to academic conference, a thinker in several languages, an eloquent advocate for ethnic and sexual minorities—in short, a romantic outsider living on the edge of the bourgeois world.

Ian Buruma, “The Romance of Exile,” The New Republic (Feb. 12, 2001)

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or myself, success is, during this earthly pilgrimage, to leave the woodpile a little higher than I found it.

Paul Harvey, U.S. Broadcast Journalist

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he self is always on the way and is not available to us abstracted from the story of one’s life—which story is not yet complete. Only God, as St. Augustine said, can catch the heart and hold it still. Only God can see us whole and entire, as we truly are. Hence, we cannot in any complete sense account for ourselves or our decisions, even as I noted that I am often baffled when I try to account for my decision to move. To take the embedded nature of our life seriously is to realize that the story of that life must be precisely what St. Augustine wrote—a confession that God knows us better than we know ourselves. We are characters in a story of which we are not the author, caught up in a present moment that is always, in Stephen Crites’s felicitous phrase, a “tensed present.” Caught between the memory of the past and expectation of the future, embedded in a present moment, unable to say in any complete sense who we are, we exist within the tensions of this pilgrim existence.

Gilbert Meilaender, “Creature of Time and Place,” in Things that Count (2000)

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LC-MS to Choose New President t its sixty-first Regular Convention to be held in St. Louis July 14 to 20, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LC-MS) will elect its thirteenth president. This past spring, the Rev. Dr. A. L. Barry, serving as former head of the 2.6-million-member LC-MS, died while in office on March 23.

Barry, 69, who had led the denomination since 1992, entered an Orlando hospital in late February with pneumonia. During treatment, he contracted a rare staph infection that ultimately caused liver and kidney failure. The Rev. Dr. Robert Kuhn, first vice president of the LC-MS, became president upon Barry’s death. Kuhn has decided to stand by his prior decision to retire this year, however, and will not seek another term in the denominational headquarters.

By LC-MS bylaws, the presidential ballot for the synod meeting is determined

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Dr. A. L. Barry by the five most frequently nominated ministers in the church. The denomination’s 6,000-plus congregations are each allowed to nominate up to two men for the office.

The five final candidates are: Dr. Raymond Hartwig, 55, secretary of the Synod; Dr. Gerald Kieschnick, 58, president of the Synod’s Texas District; Dr. Donald Muchow, 63, chairman of the Synod’s Board of Directors; Rev. Daniel Preus, 52, director of the Concordia Historical Institute; and Dr. Dean Wenthe, 56, president of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne.

(Dr. J. A. O. Preus, president

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of Concordia University in Irvine and a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which publishes MR, was one of two official nominees who declined to have his name included on the July ballot.)

Barry’s shoes will be difficult to fill. In a denomination that is debating many issues surrounding so-called “seeker worship,” Barry had simultaneously been known as a vigorous defender of the historic Lutheran confessions and as a principled promoter of outreach. In 1998, Barry persuaded the LC-MS to adopt an aggressive, thirteenyear evangelism campaign called “Tell the Good News About Jesus.”

His office had also produced scores of public statements and explanatory pamphlets about the LC-MS and the broader Christian witness in society. In the last year, Barry’s press releases criticizing the Vatican statement in Dominus Iesus that the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church have been widely reported.

He was also outpoken about the disregard for human life in the government’s new guidelines for funding research on stem cells taken from embryos. Under his leadership, the denomination published 29 “What About” pamphlets seeking to explain theological and ethical topics to current and prospective LC-MS members.

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(Information on available LCMS resources can be found at www.lcms.org.)

Barry will likely be best remembered, however, as a pastor. It was in the pulpit that he spent most of his years in ministry, and even as Synod president, most Lord’s Day mornings would find him in some pulpit.

According to denominational officials, laypeople writing to him in St. Louis typically began their letters simply, “Pastor Barry.”

Hartford Seminary Studies American Congregations artford Seminary recently released the results of the largest and most inclusive study ever of American congregational life. Named “Faith Communities Today” (FACT), the report contradicts many widely-held assumptions in the national media about American religion. With substantial funding from the Lilly Endowment, a team of sociologists conducted extensive surveys with more than 14,000 congregations (of America’s estimated 325,000 local bodies) across all geographic and theological lines. Among the highlights: • The average congregation is neither large nor urban/ suburban. More than half of all congregations report fewer than 100 active members; 83 percent report fewer than 350. Fifty-two

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percent of all bodies are rural.

• Researchers argue that the move away from denominational affiliation has been vastly overstated in the religious press. Although their study does not offer historical comparisons, the Hartford scholars were surprised to find that 62 percent of congregations still report strong loyalty to their denominations. (Non-immigrant whites are significantly more likely to disregard their denominational affiliation than any other racial or ethnic group.)

• There is a direct inverse relationship between a congregation’s date of founding and the likelihood that creeds and statements of faith are important in its governance and worship. Of bodies founded prior to 1945, 28 percent use creeds.

Of those founded between 1945 and 1965, 16 percent use creeds.

Of those founded from 1965 to 1990, 11 percent use creeds. And of those founded in the last decade, only 7 percent submit to creedal statements.

(Suburban evangelical congregations account for the largest percentage of congregations founded in

ÍFrance continues to debate proposed “anti-cult” legislation aimed at outlawing “mental manipulation.” Originally intended largely to regulate Scientology, the laws in question could effectively prohibit much

the last two categories.)

• Evangelicals continue to outdistance mainline Protestants in church-planting; evangelicals control the suburbs, while mainliners remain strong in rural areas.

Somewhat more surprisingly, Roman Catholics account for a much smaller percentage of congregational initiation than fifty years ago (5 percent today versus 10 percent then), while Baha’i, Muslim, Jewish, and Mormon congregations account for a combined 20 percent of new local groups today compared to only 3 percent half a century ago.

• The West now outpaces the South in terms of new congregations started.

• Churches and synagogues led by seminary-trained ministers and rabbis are much less likely to have a clear understanding of their purpose than are congregations headed by untrained leaders.

• Advertising and promotion do not appear to be effective in attracting new members. One of the largest sociological factors affecting growth is unambiguous moral teaching, such as the rejection of premarital sex.

Similarly, there is a strong

evangelization, according to some evangelicals in France, such as Louis DeMeo, founder of the Institut Theologique de Nimes.

Both United Nations officials and the U.S. Commission on Religious Liberty have expressed concern.

positive correlation between congregants’ giving and their congregation’s clear moral convictions.

The complete study is available at http://FACT. hartsem.edu.

Leaving Craftsmanship Behind fter selling three million advance video copies to adoring dispensational households, the makers of the feature film version of Left Behind are encountering less zealous audiences in theaters. Former New York Post film critic Rod Dreher, leading the charge, writes in the National Review that Left Behind is “bad beyond all telling”—largely because it “comes from the Earnestness Is Next to Godliness School of Christian art.” After identifying himself as a “believing Christian” to repel the potential charge that he is simply biased against theologically informed worldviews, Dreher suggested that Christians are often rightly criticized in their artistic endeavors because so many “in the Christian ghetto” have accepted “the

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ÍConcordia University Wisconsin has created the Cranach Institute, which it hopes will serve as a “Lutheran voice in the public square.” MR contributor Gene Edward Veith chairs the organization, and Rev.

wrongheaded idea that a movie should be judged on its usefulness in spreading a particular message.”

The advance video copies conclude with a pitch to the audience by Kirk Cameron, the evangelical star of Left Behind, urging believers to bring their friends to the theater version of the film.

This will, Cameron insists, “send a wake-up call to Hollywood.”

Objecting that Christians should be among those who take creation, beauty, and quality the most seriously, Dreher retorts: “Who are these people kidding? They have yet to learn the difference between art, even explicitly Christian art, and propaganda.” If Left Behind’s producers had known the difference, Dreher says, they could have taken this “amazing” premise—“even if you don’t believe a word” of it—and created something “compelling, something watchable instead of grindingly dull, achingly sincere schlock…. Good intentions are no substitute for craftsmanship.”

Todd Peperkorn hosts a new email discussion list dedicated to the exploration of the Lutheran doctrine of vocation in the contemporary context. To join the list, send an email to Cranach-subscribe @egroups.com.

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LIVING IN EXILE | Tourists, Seekers, & Pilgrims

Seekers or Tourists?: Or the Difference Between Pilgrimage and Vacation good deal has been reported in recent years about the remarkable rise in tourism. Every summer, Europeans experience mixed emotions as both the American and Japanese tourists arrive, cameras hanging from necks like pendants. “See Europe in ten days” is actually taken seriously by us because we don’t really intend to get to know the culture—we just want to take pictures and experience the experience. And if the tour group has three hours in San Marco Piazza, shopping for souvenirs will probably consume two-and-a-half of those hours, leaving twenty minutes for a quick survey of the actual Piazza. What really matters is not that we got to know Europe (which is good, since we didn’t), but that we have evidence to prove we were there. That’s why people speak of “doing Europe”: it’s a commodity, something to add to our repertoire of experiences that advertises something about us to other people.

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If this is a bit cynical, it is nevertheless worth asking whether the blending of consumerism and tourism might be evident in the way contemporary Americans approach religion and spirituality. We call them seekers, but “tourists” might be more apt.

The term “seeker” conjures notions of destination.

One has to be looking for something in particular in order to qualify as a seeker, but we are all used to being consumers and voyeurs of other people’s experiences. Unlike seekers, tourists have no intention of committing themselves once they find that for which they are looking. They are fascinated by nearly everything, just as “doing Asia” is fascinating, even if it is seen through the tinted glass of trains and posh buses.

We see this same phenomenon in the Church.

We have a lot of churches these days that instead of reaching the unchurched are unchurching the churched. What do I mean by that? Modernity has already virtually torn apart the generational fabric and rootedness that comes with long-term commitments. According to some of the statistics I’ve seen, the average candidate for a seeker church is not an unbeliever but a lapsed churchgoer or a churchgoer who has been so uprooted and transplanted in his or her life that belonging to a seeker church—with its more transient feel—is more desirable. A spiritual tourism, if you will.

• How can we reach the lost without losing the reached?

This does not spell defeat, however, because we believe that the gospel is “the power of God unto salvation.” It can arrest people in their tracks and end their spiritual tourism. But if that arresting truth is lacking in the churches on their itinerary, they will remain tourists and voyeurs—connoisseurs of religious experience along with everything else. Former labor secretary Robert Reich notes in an article in Civilization, “Instead of liberating us, the new world of choice is making us more dependent on people who specialize in persuading us to choose this or that.” In relation to the Church, I would argue, that makes pastors travel agents.

Reich is correct on this point: we are so burdened with small choices that we have little time to invest in long-term community, instruction, relationships, and obligation. For us as Christians, any notion of a covenant community gets lost in the deal. As writer Deborah Stone explains, “true freedom is something more than no one interfering with her personal will…” She adds,

Lately, freedom has taken on a new consumerist cast: being able to choose from an array of goods in every aspect of our lives….

There’s only one problem with this vision of the A theology that starts from the premise that we are sinful and weak rather than good life as being set loose in a superstore: basically good and strong is the best position, ironically, to provide a realistic Most of us, as we begin to fashion our life plans, want some things that basis for hope. can’t be had off the shelves…. We want connectedness as well as autonomy. We want to No real growth in the number of conversions to love and be loved. We want understanding, Christianity has occurred during this period of the loyalty, and compassion. We want the pleasmegachurch, so we may be justified in concluding ures of working with others on some larger that the growth is the result of smaller, more rootproject. No one—least of all the market or ed churches gradually losing their membership to anyone in it—can produce and package any megachurches. These folks are not necessarily of these things for us. These aren’t things we unbelievers who need to be reached but professing can choose. We have to make them, and we Christians who do not want to commit to anycan’t make them alone. Why can’t we make thing beyond themselves and who insist on not these things in markets? Because markets are limiting their options. With this in mind, these designed to disconnect people at the first questions arise: sign of trouble. When we’re disappointed with something we purchase in the market, • Will those who care the least about the kingwe don’t go back. We don’t bother to tell dom of God have the most to say about what anyone why we’re unhappy. We find anoththings look like for the next generation? er supplier. Like a child with her toys, when • Are we entrusting our covenant children to we get tired of something or it fails to please churches governed by the values of those us, we up and leave. who are the least committed to the Christian faith?

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Market-driven church growth principles cannot help but loosen and then disrupt entirely the interconnectedness of Christian communities. Not only does such an approach lead churches to promise what they cannot deliver; it is intrinsically resistant to the values that preserve a community over the long haul, during trials as well as triumphs.

Just substitute “church” for “supplies” and what Deborah Stone says of markets is true of most churches in America today. If we’re not happy, we simply try another church. Although market principles, including the greatest possible freedom of choice, may be valuable economic goals, they become utterly corrosive when allowed to establish the criteria for the things that matter most in our human existence: relationships, civic institutions, education and the arts, and churches.

David Brooks explores this cultural phenomenon of unlimited choice in his acclaimed Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

Having realized that New Age spirituality and smorgasbord religion “can lead to lazy spirituality,” the new upper class (“Bobos”) has realized that “the toppling of old authorities has not led to a glorious new dawn but instead to an alarming loss of faith in institutions and to spiritual confusion and social breakdown. So if you look around the Bobo world, you see people trying to rebuild connections.” At the same time, they still value their own personal freedom of choice as the nonnegotiable commitment. Although he is a nonpracticing Jew, Brooks observes, “The life of perpetual choice is a life of perpetual longing as you are prodded by the inextinguishable desire to try the next new thing. But maybe what the soul hungers for is ultimately not a variety of interesting and moving insights but a single universal truth…. Maybe now it is time, the Bobo says, to rediscover old values, to reconnect with the patient, rooted, and uncluttered realms.”

Brooks cites a New York Times Magazine issue on religion with the headline “Religion Makes a Comeback (Belief to Follow).” But one cannot live on hype and personal taste forever: Their souls being colored with shades of gray, they find nothing heroic, nothing inspiring, nothing that brings their lives to a point. Some days I look around and I think we have been able to achieve these reconciliations [between choice and meaningfulness] only by making ourselves more superficial, by simply ignoring the deeper thoughts and highest ideals that would torture us if we actually stopped to measure ourselves according to them. Sometimes I think we are too easy on ourselves.

And Now for Something Completely Different hereas the enormous size of the babyboom generation has elicited a lot of attention, and the seeker spirituality especially associated with that generation has received a lot of press, this is hardly the whole story. We have already seen such signs of change among advocates of contemporary Christian music (CCM) worship who have now called for greater theological reflection. In Soul Tsunami, cultural historian Leonard Sweet says that the so-called busters (born 1961 to 1981) “will keep the past and the future in perpetual conversation.”

Lynn Smith cites Karen Neudorf, publisher of Beyond magazine, targeting generation Xers and busters. “‘A concern I have is that the busters are biblically illiterate,’ says Neudorf. ‘While people are hungry for experiential faith, where will our doctrines come from? Who will teach us our doctrinal roots? Young adults need to be mentored.’ A hunger for roots will characterize the ‘ancientfuture’ churches, and this will have an enormous effect on worship. To be ‘radical’ in the postmodern era means not to tear up the roots, in the root canal fashion of the ‘60s,” says Sweet, “but to ‘go to the roots’ and there find the direction, energy and nutrients necessary for growth and development.”

(It’s worth noting that the Reformation fed off of the Renaissance call, Ad fontes!—“Back to the sources!”) The so-called millennials (born since 1981) get even more interesting. Theologian Robert Webber tells us, “Millennials are looking to the past to find old ways to cope with the world situation. For them, old is better. They have a newfound love for the classics and a deep interest in things medieval. In worship, this is evident in the millennial disdain for contemporary worship for its lack of form and beauty.”

Growing numbers of younger people are dumping these lowest-common-denominator approaches, either for no church or for churches that have some substance. A recent letter to the editor along these lines in The New Yorker caught my attention recently:

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I was once drawn to the faith of my father, a devout Lutheran, out of a sense of comfort in the familiar. But I didn’t find spiritual fulfillment until, after years of trying on other religious identities, I turned to Eastern Orthodoxy. I agree with John Updike that Christianity, seen strictly as a religion and not as a political movement, seems to be fading. Could that be because many denominations have diluted sacredness out of the faith?

Church services have become hug-thy-

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neighbor group-therapy sessions, confirmation classes bear the moniker “Deviating for Christ” in an effort to attract teenagers with “cool” language, and important religious services, like those at Easter and Christmas, include bunnies and Santas. Where is the sense of awe—even a touch of fear—of the Divine that I felt in the cathedrals of Europe or the church of my youth? God seems to have become a benign friend on whom one can call when needed, and Christianity merely a long-distance carrier to make that call.

No wonder so many of us search for more.

The same goes for anything else you term “contemporary.” We see right through it: it’s up-to-date for the sake of being up-to-date, and we’re not impressed by the results….

We know intuitively that, in the cosmic scheme of things, the stakes are too high for that…. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be excessively medieval and mysterious, either.

Mystery works up to a point, but it’s addictive, and once we get hooked on it, the Church won’t be able to provide enough to support our habit. We’ll turn instead (many of us already have) to Eastern gurus and ancient pagan spiritualities…. The Church has Deep down we know that the Song of Myself must give way to the fought against that Gnostic impulse from the Song of Moses. start: Christianity is explosively non-secretive, God en-fleshed for everyone to see, the light shining in the darkness. We’re much too comThis person is not alone. In fact, scores of fortable alone in the dark; we need the light younger evangelicals, many of them prominent, to shake us up. have left for Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism in an effort to find something that Hinlicky and her cohorts are weary of platitranscends the shallow narcissism of cultural Christianity. Both high Church mystery and con- tudes and ideological fads. “We see complicity in temporary familiarity easily pave the way for idols, the Church where you want us to see stability, as we try to force God to put in an appearance and moralism where you want us to see righteousness. allow us to experience his majesty on our terms. The ultimate difference is that where you see the We are discovering in our own circles of confess- City of God we see only the City of Man.” She ing Reformation churches a remarkable growth of also rejects the spiritual marketing that makes Jesus interest among young people who are fed up with the answer to everything. “Our stumbling block is fast-food religion. Traditionalists will risk squan- Christianity presented as a panacea.”

Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal published a dering this moment with a “See, we were right all along” smugness, but if we really understand what report by Eric Felten on the use of demographic is going on here, it will not only be a chance for marketing for churches. According to recent studnumerical growth but for a rediscovery of what we ies, those who identified themselves as ““Educated believe, why we believe it, and what and why we Working Families’ want ‘Adult Theological do it in our worship. Conservatives, I’m con- Discussion Groups.’” Furthermore, they prefer vinced, have as much to learn about what really “‘Traditional/Formal Worship’ held in churches animates our tradition as those eager folks who with ‘Somber/Serious Architecture.’” Whereas come in our doors. plenty of surveys indicate that there are a lot of Sarah E. Hinlicky, writing in First Things (February people out there who want or even demand seek1999), speaks for this growing trend when she writes er-driven worship, a growing number of studies are the following suggestions about how to reach her showing quite different trends. But it just doesn’t matter what the trends are or what they indicate. own overstereotyped generation X: They may be helpful and even interesting, but they We know you’ve tried to get us to church. cannot be normative. Comparing churches to That’s part of the problem. Many of your White House policy-by-polling, Felten writes, “It is appeals have been carefully calculated for somehow hard to imagine a firm religious convicsuccess, and that turns our collective stomtion, or reliable moral compass, issuing from marach. Take worship, for instance. You may keting tactics…. A church confident of its message think that fashionably cutting-edge liturgies doesn’t need to massage it with marketing studies. relate to us on our level, but the fact is, we God help the prophet who polls.” can find better entertainment elsewhere.

Having established that such market surveys

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should not chart our course, it is interesting to see that the tide is beginning to turn against the tactics of the Church Growth Movement that has targeted the boomers. A recent Christianity Today survey (January/February 2001) found that “Pastors were more likely than listeners to think their sermons should be shorter…. About 75 percent of pastors said it’s important to tailor sermon length to congregational expectations, while only half (53%) of listeners felt the same. The Builder generation, those 55 and over, wanted preachers to cater to their sermon-length ideals more than did Boomers or Gen-Xers.” And then here is a real surprise: Interestingly, in our survey, Gen-Xers seemed to have longer sermon attention spans than Boomers. Perhaps the effects of our fast-paced, media-oriented culture are not as severe as supposed. Sermons just may get a little longer in the future to satisfy the younger generation’s desires. Few listeners thought multimedia presentations or drama would make their pastor’s preaching more effective. Only 20 percent of listeners said that their pastor’s sermons would be improved by using multimedia, while 63 percent of pastors said this would help. Other techniques that pastors were two or three times more likely than listeners to believe would help their preaching included storytelling, narrative, or dramatic techniques (60% vs. 17%); illustrations (46% vs. 14%); movement outside the pulpit (37% vs. 14%); personal stories (25% vs. 12%); references to popular culture (22% vs. 11%); and gestures (32% vs. 9%).

While we must risk falling into the marketing trap ourselves simply because some of the data seem to put wind in our sails, marketing and demographic studies are yielding some interesting information. Michael Sack, marketing consultant to Fortune 500 companies, says, “Today’s young people see almost 1,000 percent more images than 55year-olds saw in their youth. Surprisingly, though, they don’t have a corresponding understanding of the images they see. The ability to find meaning in print or video is much greater in people over 50.”

At this point, many evangelical church marketers would be expected to conclude that we, therefore, need more video, more sound, more lights, more action. But Sack takes it in a different direction: “For Xers, those ages 16 to 25, the images have no symbolism, no moral value. They choose images for color or movement or entertainment.

Inanimate messages—anything other than person-

to-person speech—lose value as you get younger in this culture.” His interviewer asks, “Many would assume it’s the other way around. Isn’t it the MTV generation that deals in images?” Sack replies: For Xers, the media are flashing two thousand images a day. They can’t deal with that, so they ignore the images. As a result, young people are a hundred times more sophisticated in handling images, but not in attributing significance to them. The young eat images like popcorn; older adults eat them like a meal…. When pastors…ask people to watch a video, they need to know it will be less effective for those who are young. The impact of anything that hasn’t been personally delivered is going to go down by about 25 percent for each ten years an audience is below 50.

As for the boomers, “the god they don’t believe in revolves around discomfort rather than truth and evil. Their idea of evil is irritation…. The inability to look into the eyes of suffering, into the negative side of things, limits Boomers’ ability to appreciate the positive side of things. In that regard, research indicates Christians are no different than the rest of the culture.” Sack says that generation X “has almost no concept of evil,” but is looking for something to make sense of it. “I’ve never seen a group of people anywhere,” he says, “including people in absolute poverty in the Philippines, who have a greater urgency to hear good news than the under-25 generation in this country. They long to hear that there is hope.” Generation X needs “written reinforcement of key concepts.” Theirs is the “feed me” generation, according to Sack, whereas the boomers are the “entertain me and earn me generation”—“faddish, intellectually lazy.”

All that Sack mentions here concerning generation X identity indicates that there may well be more interest among this coming generation in embracing the discipline of Christian faith and practice. Bored by superficiality, their “feed me” attitude and their need for “written reinforcement of key concepts” suggest that they may find serious biblical preaching, teaching, worship, and community more attractive than the more self-obsessed and anti-intellectual generations.

Whereas the have-it-all boomer generation has imbibed the theology of glory, a new generation is arising that is more attuned to the theology of the cross. This generation cannot help but recognize the divine judgment standing over us all—over our self-righteousness, our pretentious plans of ushering in God’s kingdom by our grand efforts, our

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preference for our methods over God’s. And it is a judgment that not only stands over others, but over us—crucifying us with Christ, the one who at the cross bore the curse for our delusions of grandeur.

Gerhard Fourde reminds us, Anyone who gets some glimpse of what it means to be a theologian of the cross immediately realizes that the bane of a theology of glory never vanishes. It is the perennial theology of the fallen race. We have to persist in a theology of the cross in order precisely to expose that fact. I have come to wonder if the very theology of glory is not in a state of severe crisis. If it is true that no one is trying anymore [to save himself], what does that portend? … Have we lost the thread of the story? Is the “official optimism of North America,” as theologian Douglas John Hall spoke of it, finally running off into sand? Could that be one of the reasons for the despair and chaos in our homes and in our streets? Has the thirst for glory finally issued in the despair that Luther foresaw? My suspicion is that the malaise of the theology of glory is the ultimate source of contemporary despair. My assumption is that a theology of the cross brings hope—indeed, the only hope.

A theology that starts from the premise that we are sinful and weak rather than basically good and strong is in the best position, ironically, to provide a realistic basis for hope. We know that the latter is rubbish. We’ve seen too much selfishness, greed, ambition, anger, pride. Our homes have been living witnesses to total depravity. Victorian moralists who sentimentalize “home life” and “virtues” can’t survive in these times for very long. Their cheery optimism toward human ability rings hollow. The theology of the cross, however, does not leave us with a dark pessimism. “Now we see,” Calvin says, “how many good things, interwoven, spring from the cross. For, overturning that good opinion which we falsely entertain concerning our own strength, and unmasking our hypocrisy, which affords us delight, the cross strikes at our perilous confidence in the flesh.” Deep down we know that the Song of Myself must give way to the Song of Moses: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.

The LORD is my strength and my might, and he has become my salvation;

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this is my God and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him” (Ex. 15:1–2). ■

Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and the University of Coventry) is associate professor of historical theology and apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and chairs the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

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ihilism is the result of having so many compact discs from which to choose that, no matter which ones we choose, we are dissatisfied because we cannot be sure we have chosen what we really wanted…. The problem is not just that we have become consumers of our own lives, but that we can conceive of no alternative narrative since we lack any practices that could make such a narrative intelligible. Put differently, the project of modernity was to produce people who believe they should have no story except the story that they choose when they have no story…. I am aware that such a suggestion can only be met with disbelief. You may well think I cannot be serious. Normal nihilism is so wonderfully tolerant. Surely you are not against tolerance? How can anyone be against freedom?

Let me assure you I am serious, I am against tolerance, I do not believe the story of freedom is a true or good story. I do not believe it is a good story because it is so clearly a lie.

The lie is exposed by simply asking, “Who told you the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you have no story?” Why should you let that story determine your life? … For the truth is that since we are God’s good creation we are not free to choose our own stories. Freedom lies not in creating our lives, but in learning to recognize our lives as a gift.

— Michael Slack, “Brain Scan of America: A Conversation with Marketing Consultant Michael Slack,” Leadership Journal (Fall 1995).

LIVING IN EXILE | Tourists, Seekers, & Pilgrims

Something Short of Redemption: The Pilgrims of John Updike and Douglas Coupland n enduring metaphor in the most popular of Christian devotional literature, from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to Charles Shelton’s In His Steps, is that of pilgrimage. This is to be expected, because Scripture itself enjoins us to imagine the life of faith as a journey: we are traveling toward a destination we have not reached.

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Can the same observation be made of American fiction, but in this case that it, too, is replete with the metaphor of pilgrimage? In Reflections on America Jacques Maritain observed that “Americans seem to be in their own land as pilgrims, prodded by a dream. They are always on the move…. They are still far from being a settled people.” This restless searching is common in much of American litera-

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ture. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, generally regarded as the “great American novel,” Jay Gatsby’s quest for the American Dream was as near and yet elusive as the green light across the bay.

Freed (or so he thought) from history, from family, and from tradition, Gatsby tried to reinvent himself, but his Gnostic flight was futile, because ultimately we cannot untether ourselves from the worlds we inherit, as Nick Carroway discovered: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Of course, it may seem tautological, and therefore trivial, to observe that modern American fiction—or literature in general for that matter— tends to organize itself around the theme of pilgrimage. After all, in the most general sense, all literature describes some sort of quest or journey, if not a literal odyssey at least a figurative search for meaning and purpose, or an Edenic return to the past. And yet, a study of this theme may still prove fruitful if it opens a window to see what Americans are escaping from and searching for.

narratives premised on travel, such as long drives through the Pacific Northwest or the desert Southwest. The forbidding loneliness of these trips invites reflection on the howling wilderness that modernity presents to the alienated lives of Coupland’s twenty-something characters.

What links these two authors stylistically is their description of the breathless pace of modern life. Both Updike and Coupland offer, in the words of the subtitle of Generation X, “tales for an accelerated culture.” Updike wrote the Rabbit series in the present tense (an unusual literary device when he began in 1960) to heighten the pace of the narrative, creating a cinema-like sense of action flickering quickly before the reader. Coupland does the same in much of his work, and if the pace is quick in Updike, it can seem dizzying in Coupland.

The two novelists also report contemporary events in journalistic fashion to underscore the fastforward character of modern times. The television set dominates Rabbit’s world and all of Coupland’s novels, and references to popular culture abound.

(Spy magazine once poked fun at the frequency of pop Pilgrimage, biblically speaking, is far more than ascetic renunciation. The letter to culture references in the Rabbit series. Here is its the Hebrews employs pilgrimage as a metaphor to underscore the transience of count of TV series references, according to Spy the present life and as a reminder of our hope in the life to come.

(October 1990): three in Rabbit Run, 19 in Redux, 26 in Rich, and 38 in Rest.) Writing Two contemporary writers who display this over the course of four decades, Updike chronicles theme prominently in their works are John Updike the distress of the American middle class over the and Douglas Coupland. In the vast corpus of John second half of the twentieth century, from the turUpdike’s literary output, only one book carries the bulent ’60s to the AIDS-ridden ’90s. It is enough to overt theme of pilgrimage, S., his hilarious account wear out the athlete in Rabbit. Rabbit Is Rich begins of Sarah Worth’s renunciation of her suburban safe- with the energy crisis of the late ’70s. The “world ty to become a disciple of a Hindu cult leader in is running out of gas,” Angstrom laments, and so Arizona. But a careful reading of Updike will too, we discover, is Rabbit. uncover other pilgrims, albeit ones who are in no The point it seems, for both authors, is that for hurry to flee vanity fair, but rather enjoy the daz- modern Americans, pilgrimage is inescapable. The zling lights and seductive songs of this world. “We journey lies in experiencing the unprecedented are all pilgrims, faltering toward divorce,” a lapsed change of our culture. Long before James Gleick Catholic says in The Music School. Updike’s work wrote the book Faster, Updike and Coupland abounds with faltering, middle-class American pil- understood the frenetic character of our times. We grims, but none so much as Harry “Rabbit” privilege speed over direction. One must be movAngstrom, the ex-athlete and lustful protagonist of ing fast; where one is going is irrelevant. If the Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy. The pattern of his life is threat to Rabbit is aging, Coupland’s protagonists established in the first book, Rabbit, Run: “with an fear obsolescence (“Dead at 30 Buried at 70,” is a effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic Generation X chapter title). Mid-life crises are growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. reserved no longer for the forty-somethings; but Ah: runs. Runs.” woe to anyone incapable of maintaining the pace.

Douglas Coupland’s first book, Generation X, “How twenty minutes ago,” as a Coupland characcoined the term for his generation. That work and ter is wont to exclaim. subsequent titles (such as Shampoo Planet, Life After If modernity has conquered time, it has also God, and Girlfriend in a Coma) are road novels with eliminated space. Many of Coupland’s characters

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wander through non-places—airport hubs, middleclass suburbia, or the vast emptiness of the desert Southwest. In his Grateful Dead travelogue, Polaroids from the Dead, Coupland notes, “everybody travels everywhere. ‘Place’ is a joke.” As a result, we are rudderless and “denarrated.” In Life After God, the narrator worries he speaks with an “accent from nowhere…the accent of a person who has no fixed home in their mind.”

Coupland goes so far as to suggest that America at century’s end is so incapable of narration that it cannot even be reckoned as lost: “I know you guys think my life is some big joke—that it’s going nowhere,” exclaims a fellow traveler in Life After God. “But I’m happy. And it’s not like I’m lost or anything. We’re all too f—-ing middle class to ever be lost. Lost means you had faith or something to begin with and the middle class never really had any of that. So we can never be lost. And you tell me, Scout—what is it we end up being, then—what exactly is it we end up being then—instead of being lost?”

Updike seems to end his series on a similar note.

Rabbit ends where the story began, on the basketball court, though Angstrom is now in Deleon, Florida, far from his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania. Deleon is a strip-mall-saturated new retirement city in southwest Florida, with endless development of national chains that repeat themselves as Harry drives through the depressing fourlane highways. These are not the “limitless gleaming white freeways that lead us off into eternity” that Coupland describes in Polaroids. For Rabbit, they have the sense of death: “On the telephone wires, instead of the sparrows and starlings you see in Pennsylvania, lone hawks and buzzards lie.”

If these lives are accelerated, they are at the same time arrested because the frenetic pace of the culture ultimately exposes its soulnessness. Rabbit Redux begins with the 1969 moon landing, which strikes Rabbit as less about space than about emptiness. “Columbus flew blind and hit something,” he thought, “these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing.” And the wifeswapping at the end of Rabbit at Rest only serves to reveal to Rabbit the vast emptiness of his adulterous lifestyle.

In Girlfriend in a Coma, Karen awakes in 1997 after a long coma to a world of remarkably changed technology, but also of teenaged-turned-thirtyyear-old friends whose lives remain as transitory, superficial, and spiritually bankrupt as before. “The whole world is only about work: work work work get get get…racing ahead…getting sacked from work…going online…knowing computer languages…winning contracts. I mean, it’s not just

what I would have imagined the world might be if you’d asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.”

Perhaps what is most striking is that there is no sense of sacrifice in the wanderings of these pilgrims. In Rabbit, Run, Updike describes a sermon Angstrom hears from the Episcopalian Reverend Eccles. “It concerns the forty days in the Wilderness and Christ’s conversation with the Devil. Does this story have any relevance to us, here, now?… Its larger significance, its greater meaning, Eccles takes to be this: suffering, deprivation, barrenness, hardship, lack are all an indispensable part of the education, the initiation, as it were, of any of those who would follow Jesus Christ.”

Rabbit rejects the message. “Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out.” After the sermon, he runs from his wife again, who in a drunken stupor drowns their infant daughter, which prompts, ironically, the anti-pilgrim to experience himself the very suffering and “passage into death” that he rejected.

Together Updike and Coupland confirm Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that we live at the “end of history,” that is, the end of ideological conflict. Only there is nothing to celebrate, because middle-class consumers in liberal democracies do not live happily ever after. So tied is Rabbit to his world that its collapse spells an identity crisis in Rabbit at Rest: “If there’s not a Cold War, what’s the point of being an American?” Russia “kept this life within bounds, somehow.” Without a competing superpower, “there’s just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.”

A similar discovery overcomes Coupland in Life After God: “The price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.” Even more graphically, listen to Hamilton Reese explain why he turned to heroin in Girlfriend in a Coma: “Don’t you understand, Richard? There is nothing at the center of what we do…. No center. It doesn’t exist. All of us—look at our lives: we have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there’s nothing else.”

Just as world-weariness overcomes Bunyan’s pilgrim, so too does it finally catch up to these travelers.

At middle age, Rabbit becomes the reluctant pilgrim, and the restless runner becomes the stubborn conservative who resists change. But death and dying do

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not present themselves as grave threats. For Rabbit, it is “enough,” having lethargically told his son Nelson, “all I can tell you is, [death] isn’t so bad.” For Coupland’s characters, death is often just another journey. As a woman in Life After God describes it, death is “like you’re in a store and a friend drives up to the front door in a beautiful car and says ‘Hop in— let’s go on a trip!’ And so you go out for a spin. And once you’re out on the road and having a great time, suddenly your friend turns to you and says, ‘Oh by the way, you’re dead,’ and you realize they’re right, but it doesn’t matter because you’re happy and this is an adventure and this is fine.”

While we may acknowledge with Updike and Coupland that traveling is an inescapable metaphor for modern times, it does not follow that everyone is a pilgrim. Distinctions are necessary among pilgrims, wanderers, and drifters. When Angstrom confesses, “I guess, that somewhere behind all this . . . there’s something that wants me to find it,” Reverend Eccles is unimpressed with his wanderlust: “all vagrants think they are on a quest.”

Eccles’s skepticism is important especially for so-called seeker-sensitive churches to consider. In marketing the Church to browsers, while calling them “seekers,” have we distorted the concept of pilgrimage beyond what is biblically recognizable?

Perhaps what is most striking is that there is no sense of sacrifice Have we confused pilgrimage with its counterfeit? in the wanderings of these pilgrims.

Moreover, for all their motion, the travelers in these novels have made very little And yet, Coupland often wonders if indeed progress. In Miss Wyoming, Coupland’s latest and that’s all there is. This conclusion emerges after a most serious effort, the two protagonists emerge desert sojourn in Life After God: “My secret is that I from Damascan-like experiences that just don’t need God—that I am sick and can no longer make seem to take. John Johnson, a burned-out it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no Hollywood producer, recovers from a near-fatal longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be virus while Susan Colgate, a former beauty queen kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to and aging starlet, miraculously walks away as the help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.” sole survivor of a plane crash. Each sets out on foot, But if Coupland’s characters regret that they do divesting themselves of both worldly goods and not know God, neither have they made it their celebrity identity. But their reinvented lives are as obsession to find him. A vague sense of some kind of sordid as their preconversion days, with casual sex afterlife pervades all of his work, typically expressed and dumpster diving for their daily bread.

Pilgrimage, biblically speaking, is far more than in retreats to primitive worlds—deserts, forests, or darkness—sites uncontaminated by modernity. ascetic renunciation. The letter to the Hebrews Ultimately, it is a formless life: Coupland’s preferred employs pilgrimage as a metaphor to underscore the form of travel is disembodied floating, about which transience of the present life and as a reminder of our his characters often imagine. (In a personal inter- hope in the life to come. By faith Abraham view, Coupland revealed how true it was that he was “sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign raised without religion, expressing surprise that land” (Heb. 11:8). He and other saints of old lived as Christian orthodoxy taught the resurrection of the “strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who body.) For his part, all Rabbit is capable of confess- speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a ing is that “I don’t not believe.” homeland” (Heb. 11:13–14). Pilgrimage speaks to Not that American evangelicalism has made it the fragile character of the Christian life and the need easy for these seekers to find God. In a clever to persevere in the wilderness. We are striving to scene in Life After God, the driver presses the seek enter into God’s rest, and not to fall short by way of button on his radio “continuously prowling for new disobedience (Heb. 4:11). The wilderness is no stations,” while driving through the desert creating place to indulge the flesh. Rather, it reminds us that the effect of a double pilgrimage. Often all that is our salvation is in neither a completed nor an available is Christian radio, where preachers offer unthreatened state. So we must take heed lest we fall.

Jesus as if they are peddling sex. For Harry In the end, likening these stories to pilgrimage Angstrom, Christianity is just another commodity might prove too much of a stretch. Rabbit’s movethat is splashed on Florida highway billboards: ments are spontaneous and unreflective, neither “Easy Drugs, Nu-View, Ameri-Life and Health, deliberate nor intentional, and so, too, are Starlite Motel, Jesus Christ is Lord.” As both Coupland’s impulsive pilgrims. There is little that authors see it, the commercialism of evangelicalism is finally discovered in these sojourns, no calling to renders it weightless. a higher, nobler purpose, no sense that weariness

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leads to new strength or that deprivation produces greater riches. For Rabbit, life remains a zero-sum game. “The whole point of his earthly existence has been to produce little Nellie Angstrom, so he in turn could produce Judy and Roy, and so on until the sun burns out.”

Still, for all its ambiguity, the road beckons these travelers. However uncertain, the journey entices. In the words of Miss Wyoming’s Johnson, “This is the road we’re talking about—the romance of the road. Strange new friends. Adventures every ten minutes. Waking up each morning feeling like a wild animal. No crappy rules or smothering obligations.”

John Johnson brings to mind another character in American fiction. In Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett travels to New Mexico in Gatsbyesque search for independence and autonomy: “This is the locus of pure possibility, he thought, his neck prickling. What a man can be in the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.” Barrett’s thoughts are autobiographical, for Percy himself traveled from Mississippi to New Mexico, and discovered, in the words of his biographer, “a place without the complications of family or history, a place that felt as remote from the entanglements of the South as the moon.” Yet this was not the promised land that Percy hoped to discover. “But now that he was living from second to isolated second in the rarefied atmosphere of pure possibility, he found that he was oddly dissatisfied, even a little fearful. His existence lacked gravity. If he could do anything, then what he was, everything that life had made him up to this point, was irrelevant.”

For Percy, no less than for Updike or Coupland, the wasteland of post-Edenic America becomes an opportunity to display one’s homelessness. But Percy’s solution to modernity’s denarration is not to run away nor to float away, but to find a vocation.

The road can betray us. To set out on your own is to take on a burden, not to have it removed.

Instead, Percy moved to New Orleans, converted to Christianity, and began his career as a writer. In Jay Tolson’s aptly titled biography, Percy was truly a “pilgrim in the ruins.” ■

John Muether (M.A.R., Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia) is Librarian for the Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida He is also an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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o you’re in quite a pickle: you can’t tell us that the Church has “the Truth” and we know that the Church won’t miraculously cure us of our misery. What do you have left to persuade us? One thing: the story…. You wonder why we’re so self-destructive, but we’re looking for the one story with staying power, the destruction and redemption of our own lives. That’s to your advantage: you have the best redemption story on the market.

Perhaps the only thing you can do, then, is to point us towards Golgotha, a story that we can make sense of. Show us the women who wept and loved the Lord but couldn’t change his fate. Remind us that Peter, the rock of the Church, denied the Messiah three times. Tell us that Pilate washed his hands of the truth, something we are often tempted to do. Mostly, though, turn us towards God hanging on the cross. That is what the world does to the holy. Where the cities of God and Man intersect, there is a crucifixion. The best-laid plans are swept aside; the blueprints for the perfect society are divided among the spoilers. We recognize this world: ripped from the start by our parents’ divorces, spoiled by our own bad choices, threatened by war and poverty, pain and meaninglessness…. One more thing. In our world where the stakes are high, remind us that all hope is not lost. As Christians you worship not at the time of the crucifixion, but Sunday morning at the resurrection. Tell us that the lives we lead now are redeemed, and that the Church, for all her flaws, is the bearer of this redemption. A story needs a storyteller, and it is the Church alone that tells the story of salvation. Here in the Church is where the cities of Man and God meet, and that is why all the real spiritual battles, the most exciting adventure stories, begin here. We know that death will continue to break our hearts and our bodies, but it’s not the end of the story. Because of all the stories competing for our attention, the story of the City of God is the only one worth living, and dying, for.

— Sarah E. Hinlicky, “Talking to Generation X,” First Things (February 1999).

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LIVING IN EXILE | Tourists, Seekers, & Pilgrims

Lost & Found Accor FIRST-PLACE WINNER

Saints, Sinners, and Surveys From the Perspective of Lutheran Theology Is the believer in Christ a saint or a sinner?

On the one hand, Paul calls the redeemed in Christ “saints” in several of his epistles: “All the saints salute you” (2 Cor. 13:13). Christ alone is the Holy One who can share his righteousness with his church by giving his life into death for her sins and taking it up again for her justification. Martin Luther comments on the name “saint” in 2 Corinthians 13:13, “Here [Paul] plainly calls all Christians by their name: ‘saints.’ So, when Christendom began, the custom of calling one another ‘saints’ continued for a long time. This should still be the practice” (What Luther Says). In his explanation of John 17:19, Luther notes the holiness of the saints is not a holiness or righteousness of their own, but an alien righteousness in Christ: “But [the saints] become holy through a foreign holiness, namely, through that of the Lord Christ, which is given them by faith and thus becomes their own.”

On the other hand, Paul also describes the saints as sinners. The Old Adam died in baptism [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 8 ]

by BRIAN HAMER

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rding to the Gospel RUNNER-UP

“Such a Lonely Word…”

The Quest for an Honestto-God Evangelicalism He had an unmistakable look of contempt on his face. “He” was a friend, an unfortunate soul in the pew of an evangelical church who had finally admitted to himself that it was time to, so to speak, get out of Denmark. Like so many, he had discovered something rotten when he came to church for some good news. Now he stood there and mused, finally confessing with a sigh, “My goodness, I have looked for hope, but all seems lost, and I believe I too am lost…”

The outcome is predictable enough. The burntout and the self-righteous sit together in our churches, and like oil and water, try to mix but always separate. Of course, Jesus said it would happen—even families might split over truth (Matt.

10:34–38). So what’s going on?

Honest to God “Honesty,” as popular singer Billy Joel once put it, “is such a lonely word.” Despite the fact that God is not the least bit afraid of offending us by calling us all [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 0 ]

by STEPHEN A. TROUT

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In Print July/August Book Recommendations Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan The classic story of Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction to the beautiful Celestial City as he seeks desperately to find deliverance from his heavy burden.

B-BUN-2 HARDCOVER, $10.00 Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy Stanley Hauerwas In these essays the provocative Duke Divinity School ethicist challenges Christians to eschew the dangers that attend too permanent a habitation in a place called America and to assume instead the risks characteristic of people called out, set apart, and led by God. B-HAU-1 PAPERBACK, $19.00 Selling Out the Church: the Dangers of Church Marketing Philip D. Kenneson and James L. Street An important critique of the contemporary church’s preoccupation with numbers, feltneeds, and likeability.

B-KENN-1 PAPERBACK, $14.00 Selling God: Religion in the American Marketplace of Culture R. Laurence Moore In this historical survey the author shows that marketing the faith is as old as the United States.

B-MO-1 PAPERBACK, $15.00 John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace James Yerkes, editor The first in-depth look at the religious vision of Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike, complete with a reflection by Updike himself.

B-YER-1 HARDCOVER, $24.00 Art of Man Fishing: A Puritan’s View of Evangelism Thomas Boston A good work to see how 17th century Protestants conceived of seeker sensitivity.

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On Tape From the Alliance Archives Lord, have mercy!

Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology 2001 Lord, have mercy! That is the cry of every sinner ever saved.

A God of mercy! That is what the gospel proclaims. God’s mercy is central to every aspect of Christian salvation. If one thing is needed in our shallow, man-centered age it is a fresh view of our great God. Knowing his mercy invites us to a closer, deeper relationship with him. It encourages us to study God and to make him the center of our lives. Furthermore, God’s mercy is what makes Christianity good news at every stage: in God’s sovereign election, in the forgiveness of our sin, in the call to practical godliness, and in the future entrance of God’s people into glory. Speakers: R. C. Sproul, Eric Alexander, Ligon Duncan, and Philip Ryken address this topic in our 28th annual conference series.

C-01-P0A 6 TAPES IN AN ALBUM, $33.00 CD-01PS0A 6 MESSAGES ON COMPACT DISC PLUS THE 3 SEMINAR SESSIONS, $53.00 American Religion Is American Christianity more American than it is Christian?

Have the secular ideals of consumerism and pragmatism replaced the biblical doctrines of sin and grace? In this six-tape White Horse Inn series, Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger and Rod Rosenbladt show us the difference between historic Christianity and religion across the American landscape.

C-AR-RS 6 TAPES IN 1 ALBUM, $33.00 Christianity and Popular Culture In this three-tape White Horse Inn series, Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger and Rod Rosenbladt discuss the ways in which popular culture affects our world view, and more importantly, our faith. Featuring interviews with Ken Myers and

John Fisher, these tapes help us to better understand the attractive appeal of a consumer-driven culture and provide a stern warning for those who want to adopt the methods of pop-culture for the purpose of evangelism.

C-CPC-S 3 TAPES IN 1 ALBUM, $18.00 Finding a Church How do you find the right church home? Has God called you to be a member of the congregation where you worship now?

What responsibilities and benefits do you have as the member of a church? These questions and others are answered in this short series.

C-W433-34 1 TAPE, $5.00 In the Face of God The search for the sacred is being hailed in evangelical and liberal circles alike, but often uncritically. After all, as long as people are getting closer to God, who cares how they get there? In this series the White Horse Inn hosts consider the ways in which the quest for a contemporary spirituality has trivialized our view of God. Only by returning to a theology of the cross can we have true intimacy with God. C-ITFG-S 4 TAPES IN 1 ALBUM, $23.00 Worship God, 25th Annual Conference What kind of worship pleases God, formal or informal? Who should be in charge of worship services, pastors or “ministers of music”? What sort of music should we use, and what about drama? Does anything go? Or are there biblical guidelines we should follow? Disagreements are often fierce and the battle lines sharply drawn. This year’s conference addresses these issues candidly.

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What do surveys have to do with the saint-sinner theme? I would propose we answer the question through a quick tour of one influential church growth book in light of the saint-sinner dichotomy: George Barna’s Church Marketing: Breaking Ground for the Harvest. The front cover entices the potential reader with promises on how to implement successful marketing strategies and how to run the business side of your church. The back cover politely informs us that the Bible offers four examples of good marketers: Solomon, Joshua, Nehemiah, and Paul. Two sample surveys (305–324) used in real-life congregations ask the consumer the following questions: Why do you attend any given service: the worship style, the style of music, or the learning center/youth ministry? Should communion be celebrated more or less often? Should the music be louder or quieter?

Should the music be more traditional or more contemporary? Should the amount of musical accompaniment be increased or decreased? Should the preaching focus on biblical teaching more or less? If your unchurched friends So from baptism, to the preached gospel, to the Lord's Supper, sinners are attended the seeker service, would they like or dislike the killed and saints are raised to new life in Christ. music, content of the teaching, style of teaching, atmosphere of worship, and friendliness? If you could change Taken together, our holiness in Christ and our one thing about our congregation, what would it total depravity make us one hundred percent saint be? The back cover of the book then invites us to and one hundred percent sinner at the same time. consider the ultimate question: Can you afford not Commenting on Romans 7:18 (“I know that in me, to market? that is, in my flesh nothing good dwells”), Luther By the rule of love, I appreciate Barna’s sensitivsays, “Here the Apostle ascribes the flesh to himself ity to people and his lip service to evangelization. as a part of himself, just as he says: ‘I am carnal.’ He But by the rule of faith, his surveys of radically priis carnal and evil on account of his carnal nature” vatized likes and dislikes shatter at the foot of the (Commentary on the Epistles to the Romans). The “I” in cross. It is difficult to imagine Jesus asking his disRomans 7 refers not just to the Apostle Paul as a ciples the following questions during Holy Week: person in general, but specifically to Paul the saint Do you like Jesus’ style of entering Jerusalem on a or to Paul the sinner. Luther notes, “The words ‘I donkey? Do you like his style of cleansing the will’ and ‘I hate’ refer to his spiritual nature; but the temple or do you think Jesus needs to work on his words ‘I do’ and ‘I am carnal’ refer to his fleshly people skills? Do you think the Passover meal nature.” In Romans 7:19, the “I” (Paul) is caught in should be served more or less often? Do you enjoy this storm between saint and sinner: “For the good the bitter herbs? Do you think the Psalms should that I [the saint] will to do, I [the sinner] do not do; be sung louder or softer, more contemporary or trathe evil I [the saint] will not to do, that I [the sin- ditional? Do you think Jesus’ farewell discourse ner] practice.” Paul does not resolve the saint-sin- should focus more on the Bible and its teaching? ner dichotomy, but leaves this tension in theology: Do you think Jesus should die the death of a crim“So then, with the mind I myself [the saint] serve inal? If your unchurched friends attended the cruthe law of God, but the flesh [I the sinner] the law cifixion, would they like or dislike the jeering of of sin” (Rom. 7:25). Luther summarizes: “These the crowd, shedding of blood, buzzing of flies, two things are diametrically opposed: that a breaking of legs, and rumbling of the earthquake?

Christian is righteous and beloved by God, and yet If you could change one thing about the crucifixthat he is a sinner at the same time.” ion of the Son of God, what would it be?

Saints, Sinners, and Surveys [CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24]

(Rom. 6:3–10), but the Old Adam swims well: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned….” (Rom. 5:12). The disease which seized our first parents has grasped our own bodies and souls: “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of him who was to come” (Rom. 5:14). Paul is a saint, but he still struggles with his identity as a sinner: “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I [the saint] will to do, that I [the sinner] do not practice; but what I [the saint] hate, that I [the sinner] do” (Rom. 7:15). Similarly, Luther notes that even the baptized still contend with their sin: “For as long as we live, sin still clings to our flesh; there remains a law in our flesh and members at war with the law of our mind and making us captive to the law of sin”(Luther’s Works).

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Surveys bypass our identity as saints and sinners. Each question regarding the atonement can be answered two different ways: as sinner or as saint. Sinners prefer glory over suffering, majesty over shame, and entertainment over the cross.

Saints will take the suffering and shame of the cross for the sake of forgiveness, life, and salvation. As goes the cross, so goes the church in her life under the cross. Should communion be served more or less often? The sinner says “less,” the saint says “more.” Should the preaching focus on the Bible and its teaching? The sinner says ‘no,’ the saint says “yes.” If your unchurched friends attended the service, would they like it? The sinner cannot stand to be in God’s presence. The saint longs for the house of the Lord.

Whatever else may be said on the subject—and that is a great deal—the one thing we must know about people in our evangelistic efforts is their identity in the saint-sinner dichotomy. Reality suggests many visitors already believe in Christ and are simply looking for a home church. They are fully saint and fully sinner at the same time. By contrast, the unbeliever is one hundred percent sinner and zero percent saint and must be converted through the preached word of law and gospel.

This is not to reject other information about the unchurched. As a church body, we will naturally be interested in their faith story and maybe even their demographic status. But the Church of the Reformation must approach evangelization through the filter of their identity as saints and/or sinners, not the latest survey. For sin and grace are the only concerns of our Chief Surgeon as he prepares to operate with the scalpel of the law and then to apply the healing balm of the gospel.

As saints and sinners, we need the ongoing pattern of death and resurrection in Christ. Our sin cannot be reformed into an innocent house pet, swept under the carpet of political correctness, or cured through a band-aid of self-esteem. Sin must be killed through the violent drowning of baptism.

But where there is the death of sin, there is the resurrection of new life in Christ. The font is at once our grave and our mother: a grave where sins are buried in Jesus’ tomb and a mother where we are born into the family of God. Since saints are also sinners, the preaching of the law must expose our ongoing sin that it may be crucified through repentance. Where there is repentance, there is the Apostolic preaching of the cross to give exactly what it says: the entire Christ, forgiveness of sins, and eternal salvation. In the Lord’s Supper, Jesus gives us the same body and blood offered on the cross yet risen from the dead and now fed the people of God—for us, for salvation. So from baptism

to the preached gospel to the Lord’s Supper, sinners are killed and saints are raised to new life in Christ.

In C. S. Lewis’ novel The Pilgrim’s Regress, a pilgrim named John walks through a land called The Sin of Adam. He is unable to find the answers to eternal salvation among the false gods and fabricated solutions of this world. In good babyboomer fashion, John wanders through this world on a quest for spirituality. Someone directs John to visit the mysterious Mother Kirk, a beggarly old woman who lives in a catacomb next to a deep pool of water.

She has no tinsel-town McDisneyland Mass. But this old woman is able to rehearse the entire story of the land, including the history of creation and the fall. Mother Kirk invites John to strip off his old clothes and dive deep into her magical pool until he dies and is raised to new life. John plunges into Mother Kirk’s pool for death and resurrection. He still lives in this world of sin, but now he understands the purpose of his journey and his final destination. For he has met the pathetic looking Mother Kirk, he has heard her preaching, and he has submitted to her magical waters of death and life.

Mother Kirk is Holy Mother Church (Kirche).

John is the unchurched individual. Mother Kirk’s history is the redemptive-historical story of salvation in Christ. And her pool is the water of baptism, where there is death and new life at one and the same time for sinners like John. If we are to reach the lost without losing the reached; if we are to have a strong presence of the right theology in the midst of our culture; if we are to achieve a reformation for our modern times; then I would suggest baptism into Jesus’ death and resurrection should be the first thing on the genuinely evangelical mind, not salesmanship bravado. We are Mother Kirk, with no consumer-oriented impresarios to generate the collective animal heat of a large crowd. But we have the one thing needful which infinitely transcends the trophies of this age: the entire Christ and all his gifts. Missiology is making Christ present: Christ in baptism, Christ in the preached gospel, and Christ in the Lord’s Supper. And it is only through these divinely appointed means that the crucified and risen One will draw all men to himself in the lively promulgation of the gospel. ■ Brian Hamer is a student at the University of Florida, working on an M. Mus. with an anticipated graduation date of 2001. He lives in Brandon, Florida.

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“Such a Lonely Word…”

[ C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 2 5 ]

liars (John 8:44, 45; Psalm 116:11), we in the American church have had a long-standing love affair with our own glory. No doubt about it, we are addicted to it. We love our politics, our personal moral code, the compound-style gates around the worship center. Lying about ourselves helps immensely.

If the cultural landscape is changing quickly, we in the Church may alter the trappings, but still seem incapable of the needed realism about our true selves. Where one sees it advancing, strangely enough, is outside the evangelical church.

Honesty, as William Willimon and others have pointed out, is actually making a reappearance in the culture! (See his excellent interview in the December 2000 issue of MR.) Waking Up Thankfully, our Faithful God brings turning points into our experience, some quite unexpected, and at some odd moment we awaken to view our world, as Calvin said, as if with new lenses. Only later do we learn that it was the seemingly insignificant moments of life that preceded the larger, flashier ones, for God, not just the devil, was in the details. John Bunyan’s experience was just such a one; his fascinating allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, is no

doubt one of the most important works in English literature. But in his autobiographical classic, Grace Abounding, we discover one of the “unsophisticated” yet seminal events that was behind it all: a simple conversation among poor peasant women in the town of Bedford. They spoke honestly, with a love that beckoned the thirsty soul of the laborer.

Listen as Bunyan recounts it: But one day the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my trade. In one of the streets of that town, I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun talking about the things of God. Being now willing to hear their discourse, I drew near to hear what they said, for I was now a brisk talker myself in the matters of religion. I will say I heard, but understood not, for they were far above my reach. Their talk was about a new birth, the work of God in their hearts, and also how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature. They talked how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported against the temptations of the devil.

Moreover, they spoke about the suggestions

The Theological De I. An Appeal to the Evangelical Congregations and Christians in Germany The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church met in Barmen, May 29–31, 1934. Here representatives from all the German Confessional Churches met with one accord in a confession of the one Lord of the one, holy, apostolic Church. In fidelity to their Confession of Faith, members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches sought a common message for the need and temptation of the Church in our day. With gratitude to God they are convinced that they have been given a common word to utter. It was not their intention to found a new Church or to form a union. For nothing was farther from their minds than the abolition of the confessional status of our Churches. Their intention was, rather, to withstand in faith and unanimity the destruction of the Confession of Faith, and thus of the Evangelical Church in Germany. In opposition to attempts to establish the unity of the German Evangelical Church by means of false doctrine, by the use of force and insincere practices, the Confessional

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Synod insists that the unity of the Evangelical Churches in Germany can come only from the Word of God in faith through the Holy Spirit. Thus alone is the Church renewed…. We publicly declare before all evangelical Churches in Germany that what they hold in common in this Confession is grievously imperiled, and with it the unity of the German Evangelical Church. It is threatened by the teaching methods and actions of the ruling Church party of the “German Christians” and of the Church administration carried on by them…. When these principles are held to be valid, then, according to all the Confessions in force among us, the Church ceases to be the Church and the German Evangelical Church, as a federation of Confessional Churches, becomes intrinsically impossible. As members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches we may and must speak with one voice in this matter today. Precisely because we want to be and to remain faithful to our various Confessions, we may not keep silent, since we believe that we have been given a common message to utter in a time of common need and temptation….

and temptations of Satan in particular, and told each other by what means they had been afflicted, and how they were strengthened under his assaults. They also discoursed about their own wretchedness of heart and their unbelief, and did condemn, slight, and abhor their own righteousness as filthy and insufficient to do them any good.

I mused as I read the words of Bunyan. It seems he saw a vibrancy, a solidness in those women that he envied and I longed for. He wrote later, “I thought as if joy did make them speak…they were to me as if they had found a new world.” What attractiveness! How low they were in their own estimation (a concept foreign to the modern mind, and to the Church) and how exalted was Christ!

But then I wondered: would they find any common ground, any similarity in discourses if they were transported in time into the current evangelicalism, where the “good news” is so frequently couched in terms of what we ourselves seem to be so able to do (keep our promises, try to lead a “fully surrendered” life, get behind the right moral crusades, etc.) as opposed to what we have actually failed to do, that we may see afresh what Jesus Christ has done?

Such is the standard fare served up in the Church in our day. It seems to have the look of Christianity, or so it claims, but it has little or noth-

ing to do with exploring the profound ramifications of the cross.

Dishonest with the World Remarkably, what we find is that even the world is tired of the moralism and the shallow theology of our day. What secular author Allan Bloom described in regard to education in Love and Friendship could easily be said of the evangelical church: A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality.

Why must we always feed this desperate “need” to feel good? A related question might also be asked. Has feeling good and the need to be entertained helped the evangelical church avoid honesty about the mess we’ve got in our hearts, to the extent that we can’t even impact our little corner of the world? Surely there can be no cure unless the disease is properly identified. So here is my contention. We have lost a deep honesty in the Church, and it’s killing us.

eclaration of Barmen II. In view of the errors of the “German Christians” of the present Reich Church government which are devastating the Church and are also thereby breaking up the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber…. I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved” (John 10:1, 9). Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death…. As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures. We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords—areas in

which we would not need justification and sanctification through him…. The Christian Church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts present as the Lord in Word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit…. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions…. “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt. 28:20). “The word of God is not fettered” (2 Tim. 2:9). The Church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and sacrament. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.

From The Book of Confessions (PCUSA, 1991).

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Furthermore, our culture sees right through it.

Why do you think Saturday Night Live could pull off their “Church-Lady” skit so well, and everyone immediately got it? Because it’s all connected. If you sacrifice honesty with how Scripture diagnoses you, then, ipso facto, you end up finger pointing at your “nasty pagan neighbors” in order to feel better.

It works nicely! If you want to maintain your own little Christian ghetto, that is. But let’s look instead at what Jesus cared about in his church gatherings.

righteous—a sermon of gratitude and tears. Grace had helped her get honest about who she was, and now even the fear of man (Prov. 29:25), often so paralyzing to us in the Church, cannot stop her movement toward Jesus. Going to him, she pours out her broken yet thankful heart, like the sweet perfume with which she anoints him. And did you catch this? The only perfume she could really offer was bought with the earnings of her immoral lifestyle.

So it is with us all. Is it too much to say that Jesus is probably smiling? One thing you can be sure of, when she Remarkably, what we find is that even the world is tired of the moralism looks up into his face, he does not look away.

and the shallow theology of our day.

A Tale of Three Hearts Turning to Scripture, we see in the story of Jesus and the so-called sinful woman (Luke 7:31–50) a picture of a church that has gone out to lunch—literally. The analogy is fitting in our day.

“Pastor” Simon has stood up to announce a nice buffet, with all the saints on the guest list. Oh, and Jesus, you be sure to come too.

There they are, reclining on couches around the table, as Simon, their host looks on. Simon, perhaps an original member of the Jesus Seminar, has not made up his mind about Jesus. Is he really who he claims to be? If so, how will that affect me? Simon’s heart reveals a “wait and see” man; he’d rather walk by sight instead of faith. Not unlike me, often.

And then, as we said, God brings in the unexpected to rock their world a bit, for in she walks. In the text, she is just the “sinful woman.” Why not a name, do you suppose? I suggest that God is actually saying, “listen, insert your own name here,” for we are all the sinful woman and the sinful man.

(Ouch, too much honesty? Read on!)

As she enters, eyes are lowered, immediate indigestion is perceived. Perhaps there is even anger in the hearts of some. Again, let’s be honest. What “sinner” can you think of that would make you do that? After all, doesn’t she know she’s in the company of the pure? (Here the reader is free to cough nervously, with appropriate involuntary spasms, as the growing host of fallen evangelical “super-stars” comes to mind.)

What made her show up in the first place?

Knowing the kind of guy Jesus was, (a “Friend of Sinners”), he probably had been to her street corner, and preached grace to the town prostitutes. What she heard that day came as unbelievably good news to her heart, and she was never the same. Now, broken in heart and body, she preaches a sermon to the self-

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Looking for Honesty Cautious Simon said nothing, but Jesus answered his heart of pride (v.

40). The reader of hearts who revealed his heart of compassion to the broken hearted woman also knew this Pharisee’s thoughts. What Simon learned that day leaves us, the evangelical church, with a whole host of questions that need to be answered.

As we begin to face the mess, here are four “gospel remedies” to be applied: 1. Do we say to people, “go get cleaned up first before I deal with you, before I invite you to church?” Jesus didn’t. He said to the woman, as he says to all sinners (all of us), “Come as you are, and taste of my forgiveness and grace. No need to embark on a self-improvement program.

Face your sin honestly, and come to me.”

Remember, the good news is that Christ became a curse for you, bore your shame, and clothed you in his imputed righteousness. (Catch the word “imputed” righteousness there … it will always be what makes you acceptable to God. See 2 Cor. 5:21.) True community, joy, and wonderful freedom is never earned. It’s the result of his enduring promise to befriend sinners.

2. O.K., so how do I really do evangelism? Learn weakness evangelism. The world is pretty sure we’re all neurotic hypocrites or just plain nonstrugglers. When they really get to know us, they’ll have to ask about our dishonesty. The gospel frees us to be honest about who we really are, both to ourselves and others: rebels addicted to the desperate quest of trying to cover ourselves with the fig leaves of our “good behavior.” As Dave McCarty has observed in Sonship, “honest people are better lovers. They love Jesus more, they are better lovers of people…honest people know the depths of their need and the even deeper mercy and provision

of God. They who are forgiven much, love much.” Remember what love the forgiven woman had for her Savior!

3. But what about cleaning up society? You’re asking the wrong question. If you mix in moralism or legalism it isn’t the gospel. Anyway, preach grace, and people won’t be able to help themselves. They may just start helping their neighbor because it’s a loving thing to do, and because they know they don’t deserve Christ any more than their neighbor does. And what cordial is greater than love for a broken world?

4. But I preach the Bible! What are you saying?

You probably know enough about keeping the Scriptures preeminent, especially if you’ve traveled in Reformed circles. Now start seeing Christ, not your moral agendas, as preeminent in the Scriptures. That’s being honest with the Word (Luke 24: 25–27). Take the rest of your life and learn about the dangers of confusing law and gospel (John 1:17, the whole books of Galatians and Romans, etc.). The law of God is the mirror in which to diagnose our sin. As David Powlison writes in The Journal of Pastoral Practice, “modern psycho-dynamic explanations of the heart which have made a strong appearance in the modern Church and which focus on merely fulfilling assumed ‘needs’ in the person are not adequate. The law must expose the idolatry of false loves; it demands an assessment of how God and others have been loved.”

Of course, the “two kingdoms” concept is also strategic, though space doesn’t allow comment on that one. The bottom line is, remember how freeing the gospel is!

Now, back to my despairing brother who is pretty sure he’ll never darken the door of a church again.

If you’ve read this and are now saying, “Well, if only the church was more like Jesus!” I will say to you my friend, that is exactly why we need him, because we aren’t like him. We’ll never be saved by “being like Jesus,” WWJD bracelets aside. Heck, I’m not exactly sure what Jesus would do in every situation. But I do know what Jesus did do. He called sinful women, sinful men, sinful children to his side. May he give you and me the grace to believe the message, and start being honest about the whole affair. ■

Stephen A. Trout is a student at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He plans to graduate in 2001 and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Recovering the Evangel: Covenant, Confession, and Kingdom

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he antidote for the ills of modern evangelicalism is not novel, but can be found in the mandate and charter of the apostolic church: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:19-20, NASB). The Great Commission summarizes the duties of the Church by emphasizing three major themes: covenant, confession, and kingdom.

Covenant. In order to combat individualism, the Church must reclaim the concept of covenant. The Great Commission contains a most wonderful promise, “Lo, I am with you always.” The essence of this promise is that Christ will be with his people as we serve him just as he was with the Church in the Old Testament when he told his covenant people, “I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be my people" (Lev. 26:12, NASB).

Confession. In order to reverse the modern antipathy toward authority, the Church must fulfill Christ's call in the Great Commission to “make disciples” and to teach them to observe all that he has commanded. The Reformation confessions, as subordinate standards, are well suited for this task. The Scripture is replete with examples of our duty to confess Christ and to adhere to the teachings of the apostles and prophets. In fact, the New Testament administration of the Church is built upon confession. One need only recall Peter's confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16, NASB).

Kingdom. Finally, in order to avoid pandering to the religous consumer, the Church must concentrate on the eschatological importance of the Kingdom of God. Christ declared in the Great Commission, “make disciples of all the nations,” and commanded us to do so,“even unto the end of the age.” Therefore, the Church's mandate is an eschatological mandate, the fulfillment of which does not depend upon feeble marketing efforts, but rather upon the victorious and triumphant acts of the King and Head of the Church.

— Anthony Selvaggio Honorable Mention 2001 Modern Reformation Essay Contest

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SPEAKING OF

L

ord God, Thou hast given me another day, a day to live in

STAND FOR

TRUTH

Thy service and for the good of my fellow men. I am indeed

a poor tool in Thy hand and deserving to be cast aside. Forgive me all my sins for Jesus’ sake, and by Thy Spirit grant me the fitness to work for Thee this day. I beseech Thee to make me mindful, dear Lord, that I am but a stranger and a pilgrim in this present world. Let me not

Train for

Life

devote my efforts today to purposes unworthy of Thee; let me not gather treasures merely for this world; let me not serve Mammon. This life is but a vain show; let me not search for an abiding city here. But, Lord, fasten my heart and hope on the life that is in Thee, and let my striv-

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ings and desires be directed to the treasures of Thy love. As long as I am in the land of my pilgrimage, hold Thou my hand; keep me from every straying path. If I should stumble in sinful weakness, grant me repentance and faith.

For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

— Morning prayer, from Lutheran Book of Prayer (Concordia Publishing House, 1951)

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LIVING IN EXILE | Tourists, Seekers, & Pilgrims

Faithfulness to Christ’s Mission Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod Committee Part One: The Theological Issues he following statements spell out Biblical principles for genuine evangelism, in which God Himself grows His church by bringing sinners to faith. Therefore, they are a means of assessing the theology and the various practices advocated by the Church Growth Movement.

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I. The saving presence of God the Holy Trinity through the means of grace (Word and Sacrament) is the heart and center of the church’s life, worship and growth.

• The Word of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God for salvation. (John 6:63; Romans 1:16) • Holy Absolution, as an application of that Gospel, actually bestows forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name. (John 20:21–22) (Apology XII) • The Sacrament of Holy Baptism is the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.

(Titus 3:5, Matthew 28:19–20) • The Sacrament of the Altar is the actual body

and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the bread and the wine, given to us Christians to eat and to drink for forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. (1 Corinthians 10:16, Luke 22:14–20) • The Gospel and the Sacraments are the distinguishing marks of Christ’s church on earth and the means by which God the Holy Trinity grants His forgiving and life-giving presence among His people.

(Small Catechism, Augsburg Confession V & VII; Apology VII & VIII[7]; XIV [4]; SA III, part VIII,10) • Our churches confess a clear theology of worship embracing sermon, Sacrament, and prayer.

This is not a matter of adiaphora. (Augsburg Confession XXIV, Apology XXIV, XV[42,43]) • All rites and ceremonies that serve the Gospel purely preached and the Sacraments rightly administered are observed for the sake of faithfulness to the Gospel, and for unity and continuity in the faith. (Augsburg Confession XXIV, XXVI [40–41]; Apology XV [20]; Formula of Concord–SD X [5])

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• All liturgies, hymns, and agendas used in the churches of our confession are to be doctrinally pure and in accord with the faith of the one, holy, Christian and apostolic church. (Formula of Concord SD RN (summary formulation) [10])

are equally in need of salvation. God desires all to receive in faith the redemption already won for all through His Son, Jesus Christ, and delivered in His Word and Holy Sacraments.

• The Holy Spirit through the Holy Scriptures has given us one Gospel for all people in whatIt follows that spiritual growth does not happen ever culture they live. (Acts 4:12; Galatians entirely or in part through man-made devices and 1:6–9) methodologies.

• God has given the church a unique and different message, which the sinful world cannot understand or appreciate. (1 Corinthians 1 Christ's church is the assembly of saints gathered around His Gospel & 2, esp. 2:14) This message must be treasured and proand Sacraments. claimed so that the Holy Spirit can change the hearts of people.

• God has called the community of faith in every place to welcome visiTherefore, it is spiritually harmful: tors and inquirers warmly and openly. He calls • When absolution and the Sacraments of Holy His church lovingly to adapt her outreach to Baptism and Holy Communion are minimized the culture of the hearers without giving up any in favor of personal religious efforts, relational of the doctrinal and sacramental fullness of the concerns or church activities.

Gospel. (Leviticus 19:34; Matthew 25:35; 1 • When people-oriented social sciences and Corinthians 9:22; Hebrews 13:2) methodologies subtly dominate the God-centered Means of Grace.

• When small-group (meta-church) organization It follows that the church’s mission is to be viewed and interaction are considered essential or com- theologically rather than sociologically. pete with the public ministry of God’s Word Therefore, it is spiritually harmful: and Sacrament.

• When “spiritual gifts” are substituted for the • When an artificial tension is postulated between the church’s worship and the church’s mission.

Means of Grace as the organizing principle of • When mission is shaped mainly by its attracthe church. tiveness and friendliness to unbelievers, thus • When ever-busy church activism is substituted pandering to the old Adam. for God-pleasing service in daily Christian • When secular culture in one way or another vocation. controls the shape of the church’s mission.

• When programs of “leadership training” result in (1) substitution of lay leaders for public minis- • When multi-cultural emphases override the one transcultural mission of the church to all people, ters of the Gospel or (2) inadequate training for thus promoting a different Gospel for each subthe proper theological preparation of preachers. culture.

• When the decisive criteria for the church’s misII. The mission of the church is God’s mission.

• In the Divine Service, the corporate worship of sion become techniques of commercial marketthe church, the risen Christ publicly nurtures ing, rhetorical persuasion, statistical success, or and feeds His people by means of the Word and external appearances of happiness or harmony. the Sacraments. All Christian witness in home, • When recently popularized small groups (metagroups) are viewed as foundational in mission. church and society flows from and leads to this corporate worship. (1 Corinthians 10:17, 11:26; [Foundational gatherings, or the “house churches” referenced in Acts 2:42–46 were apostle-led Hebrews 10:23–25; Acts 2:42) gatherings of Word and Sacrament ministry.]

• The gifts of the Gospel, forgiveness and life given in Word and Sacrament, are God’s own means for evangelizing the lost. (See section III.) III. Pastors are shepherds of Christ’s sheep called to This is how Christ builds His church. (Matthew feed them with His Word and Sacraments and thus to lead them in the mission of the church.

16:18; Ephesians 2:20–22; Colossians 2:19) • God created all people—regardless of sex, race, • Jesus Christ gave His church the preaching office precisely for the missionary proclamation generation, or culture—but all have sinned and

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of the Gospel. (Romans 10:14,15; 2 Corinthians 3:6; 4:5; 5:20; Augsburg Confession V & XIV) God has given pastors to His church to feed His flock and defend it against error. This includes both teaching the pure doctrine, and overseeing the doctrine and life of the community of faith.

(John 21:15–17; 1 Timothy 3:1; 4:13 & 16; Titus 1:5 & 9; 2:1; Hebrews 13:7 & 17; Augsburg Confession XXVIII) The ordination and installation rites of our church specify the real responsibilities of the pastor and the promises of God concerning the Holy Ministry.

Since Christ builds His church through the Gospel, the preaching of that Gospel is the highest office or activity in the church and the chief instrument of its mission. (Acts 6:1–7, Romans 1:16, Romans 10:14–17) “Practical and clear sermons hold an audience. The real adornment of the churches is godly, practical, and clear teaching, the godly use of the Sacraments, ardent prayer, and the like.” (Apology XXIV [50–51]) In addition to public preaching of the Word, administration of the Sacraments, and confession and absolution, a pastor’s own responsibilities include teaching, comforting the sick and dying, admonishing the erring, evangelizing the lost, counseling the inquirer, reconciling the alienated, etc. (Luke 15; 1 Timothy 4:16; 2 Timothy 4:5)

God’s people are a glorious priesthood (priesthood of all believers), which is far greater than and different from the new idea of “everyone a minister.”

The public Gospel ministry, in turn, serves this priesthood of all God’s people.

Therefore, it is spiritually harmful: • When the modern concept “everyone a minister” is equated with the priesthood of all believers: a) This denies the true priesthood of all believers, which is exercised not only in worship and prayer, but also in daily vocation (i.e., the work of one’s earthly calling, Christian witness in daily life, parental teaching in the home, etc.) (1 Peter 2:9; Romans 12:1–2); b) It confuses individual Christian lives with public offices in the church. (Acts 6); c) It can be used to undermine Jesus’ gift of the office of preaching the Word and administering the Sacraments (pastoral office). (Ephesians 3:7–10, 4:11; 1 Corinthians 12:28–29 (Augsburg Confession V, XIV, XXVIII [8]) • When congregations or small groups are encouraged to regard fellow lay Christians or church staff personnel as their pastors rather

than those men properly trained, qualified, called and ordained to the pastoral office.

• When the pastor is viewed as a chief executive officer/administrator/director whose primary purpose is to train laity to do the real pastoral care.

• When it is held that some ethnic groups or small congregations do not need properly educated, called and ordained ministers of the Gospel.

• When pastors lord it over their flocks, not giving patient attention to careful instruction and faithful service as Christ’s undershepherds to His sheep.

IV. Worship is the center of the church’s life both in this world and in the next.

• Christ’s church is the assembly of saints gathered around His Gospel and Sacraments.

(Ephesians 2:20; 4:5,6; Hebrews 12:18–24; Augsburg Confession VII) • Though ceremonies and rites for such gatherings are not dictated, Christ’s holy presence and His promised gifts determine both the substance and the reverent style of the Divine Service.

• Christian freedom with respect to rites and ceremonies is defined and determined by Scripture and Confessions. In part, our churches retain ancient worship forms for the purpose of teaching, order and continuity with the worshipping church universal as our joyful confession of the presence and life-giving treasures of Christ.

(Apology VII and VIII, 33; XV, 38–39; 44; 51; Formula of Concord X) • Because church fellowship rests on true confession (agreement in the apostolic doctrine), not on an assumed “faith in the heart,” loving pastoral care in public worship leads a congregation in the practice of close(d) communion.

(Acts 2:42; 1 Corinthians 11:27–30) • Worship is first of all God’s service to us—His giving forgiveness, life and salvation in Christ; only upon receipt of His gifts by faith can worship be said to be our offering to God. • The church’s life in its worship is transcultural.

The Law and Gospel message of the church is otherworldly and is not a servant to satisfy the felt needs of the world. Rather, felt needs provide an occasion for the clear proclamation of Law and Gospel.

It follows that not all humanly devised ceremonies faithfully confess the presence of Christ in worship.

Therefore, it is spiritually harmful: • When it is taught that worship is essentially “celebration” rather than receiving the mercies of Christ in His Word and Sacrament.

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• When man-centered ceremonies replace Godcentered worship.

• When orders of service are subjectively devised quite independently from orders of worship that are the property of the church universal and that faithfully confess and receive the presence of Christ in His Word and Sacrament.

• When the church’s preaching, teaching, music and worship are changed to be more like the world in order to be accepted by the world.

• When the church’s solemn public worship is treated as a matter of experiment and entertainment.

• When the loving God-given practice of close(d) communion is abandoned for the sake of perceived friendliness, inclusiveness in worship and numerical growth.

• When so-called “liberty” in worship ceremonies, customs and rites leads to orders of worship that compromise our confession. (Formula of Concord X) The Divine Service includes those rites that confess the saving presence of the

vant, humbly hid His majesty in the lowly manger and on the despised cross (Philippians 2:6–11), so He continues His work under the lowly cover of preaching and Sacraments. And just so He draws close to His children in their sufferings and weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9–10) • As at Pentecost, God built His church with dramatic increase in numbers through the proclamation of the cross; so in the days of Noah, Elijah, and Jeremiah, He built His church in times of decreasing numbers. (1 Peter 3:17–22) • Faithfulness on the part of pastor and congregation includes the work of evangelism, that is, the proclamation of Christ crucified in community and world. (1 Corinthians 9:16–19; 1 Peter 2:9; 3:15–16) • In an unbelieving world, as Christ’s faithful bride, the church lives under the cross, she may expect contempt, hardship, struggle, and suffering. (Matthew 10:19–25; Mark 10:28–30)

American culture offers many blessings, but it currently includes features

It follows that the “theology of glory” (the wisdom of the world) misleads the church.

that can undermine faith. risen Christ in His Gospel, such as confession and absolution, Law and Gospel preaching, Creed, the Lord’s Supper, prayer for the church universal, etc. (Apology XXIV) • When music and hymnody used in worship focus principally on human sentiment and emotion rather than on the Biblical content of the Christian faith.

• When well-meaning pious language is substituted for the historic creeds of the church.

VI. The “theology of the cross” defines the mission and ministry of the church.

• The Holy Spirit uses the “foolishness” of preaching Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 1:21) together with Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to build Christ’s church on earth.

• This great treasure of the Gospel of the cross, and it alone, offers the power of God for salvation to all mankind. Any alternate ways to build Christ’s church are illusory, essentially deny God’s Word, and are contrary to God’s revealed will. (Romans 1:16; Galatians 1:6–10) • The risen Christ has won this salvation, not by what the world would recognize as victory, but by the humiliation, suffering, and defeat of the cross. (John 12:23–25; John 12:32) • As the Son of God, in taking the form of a ser-

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Therefore, it is spiritually harmful: When spiritual life is measured in terms of personal happiness, earthly success and appearance, worldly wisdom and human glory. (1 Corinthians 1:21–25) When behavioral and social sciences are given a shared authority with the Word of God as a measure of spiritual truth.

When it is thought that saving faith can be imparted by human market strategies or that the growth of the Holy Christian Church can be adequately or accurately measured by numbers. (Matthew 7:13–14; 16:18; Acts 2:47; Colossians 2:19) When a congregation sees itself as necessarily more faithful because it is not growing. Or, conversely, when a congregation views growing numbers and income as an indication that Christ is necessarily building His church.

Numbers, large or small, are not a litmus test of the Gospel’s power. (Matthew 7:24–27) When anything other than faithfulness by pastor or people to the pure Gospel and Sacraments of Christ is used to measure the “health” of a congregation. (1 Corinthians 2:2)

Part Two: The Cultural Issues he Church Growth Movement is an attempt to address the contemporary culture, which has become increasingly secu-

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larized and in need of evangelization. The question then becomes, to what extent should the church change its practices to accommodate the culture?

Clearly, Christians exist in a particular culture, as do the non-Christians we hope to reach with the Gospel. The church must communicate in a language and in a way that the surrounding culture can understand. On the other hand, following the lead of a secularized culture can only lead to a secularized church.

Further complicating the matter is the fact of cultural pluralism. America today embraces many different cultures, so that attempts to appeal to one (for example, affluent white baby-boomers who live in the suburbs) may not appeal to others (African-Americans, Hispanics, rural midwesterners, Generation-Xers). These pluralistic cultures are themselves under assault from the commercial “pop culture” which reduces all cultural expressions to a homogenized commodity to buy and sell.

The Lutheran Church is blessed with a theology that offers a specific, comprehensive framework for addressing the relationship between the church and culture. The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms can help us address the cultural issues raised by the Church Growth Movement in a positive way.

The Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions state that the world in essence is essentially good but accidentally evil. (The Confessions utilize Aristotelian terms to describe both “essence” and “accident”). Original sin is not of the nature or essence of man (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article I, & 55–58. Theodore Tappert, The Book of Concord, p. 518). Therefore, the earth is the Lord’s. In Luther’s two-kingdom paradigm, the kingdom of power is where God operates as the Creator. It is not the world of Satan.

Both Christians and non-Christians co-exist in the kingdom of power.

I. The Lutheran Theology of the Two Kingdoms teaches that God reigns in all cultures, but that the church is to be ruled by the Word of God alone, and not by the culture.

• The Two Kingdoms are defined as the Kingdom of Power, which God rules today by virtue of His creation, and the Kingdom of Grace, which Jesus Christ rules today by virtue of His redemption.

• God’s earthly kingdom—or “Kingdom of the Left Hand” or “Kingdom of Power”—includes all persons in the world whether they are Christians or non-Christians, and remains subject to God’s Law, His created orders and His providential care.

• God’s spiritual kingdom or “Kingdom of the

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Right Hand” or “Kingdom of Grace”—includes only those persons who have been given faith in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, are thus under the Gospel.

God’s earthly kingdom is subject to human reason, cultural dynamics, and scientific laws. God’s spiritual kingdom is subject only to His Word.

Both kingdoms belong to God. (Augsburg Confession and Apology, XIV, XVI, XXVIII) God is active in His earthly kingdom, for both Christians and non-Christians, through human vocations—the family, citizenship and the workplace—in order to provide our daily bread and other needs of this life.

Christians are citizens of both kingdoms: the earthly kingdom by birth and the spiritual kingdom by rebirth in Baptism.

Christians exercise their citizenship in the earthly kingdom in their vocation and in the spiritual kingdom in the life of the church.

Christians are to be in the world, but not of the world. (John 17:15–18) The Two Kingdoms are not to be confused or mingled with each other.

The church is not to imitate the culture. Nor must individual Christians think they must create some separate Christian culture or attempt to conquer the world for Christ. God already reigns, even in the most secular culture among those who do not know Him. The church, as a supernatural institution present in the world and called into being solely by God, is distinct from the culture, even as its members are constructively engaged in the culture through their vocations.

It follows that the culture is not to set the agenda for the Church.

Therefore, it is spiritually harmful: • When the church changes its teachings to follow prevailing cultural trends.

• When theology is determined by cultural considerations rather than by the Word of God. • When worship is shaped not by theology but by currently popular styles.

• When Christians ignore their responsibilities to serve their neighbors and to apply God’s moral law in the cultures in which God has placed them.

• When Christians believe that only “church work” is a valid way of serving God, so that they neglect their earthly vocations.

• When the church is operated as a purely secular corporation, with the pastor functioning as the “CEO,” the elders being reduced to a Board of Directors, and the congregation treated as

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workers, all organized according to a business plan to market a product.

• When the “Priesthood of All Believers” is taken to mean “every member a minister.” This view denigrates the secular vocations (in implying that everyone ought to be engaged in ministerial functions to serve God, as if their existing callings were not equally spiritual in God’s sight). It also can be used to denigrate the pastoral vocation (in implying that everyone can do what the pastor has personally been called to do).

II. American culture offers many blessings, but it currently includes features that can undermine the faith.

• The American legacy of religious and political freedom, economic prosperity and technological progress is a great blessing from the hand of God. • Though God continues to work in today’s secular culture, many of our cultural problems can be seen in terms of human rebellion against God’s kingdom.

• Certain thought patterns in American culture, however appropriate in the earthly kingdom, can raise problems when brought into the spiritual kingdom of the church.

• The American philosophy of pragmatism aims only at quantifiable results, assuming that the desired outcomes can be produced when the barriers are removed. Such a view—concerned only with the question “Does it work?”—often neglects issues of objective truth and the radical consequences of the Fall.

• American culture is often oriented to hedonism, which makes human pleasure the highest priority. This view caters to our sinful flesh.

• American culture is influenced by utilitarianism, which evaluates ideas and principles in terms of their usefulness. This view is human-centered and, when applied to moral decisions, rejects the absolutes of God’s Word.

• American culture promotes subjectivism, which evaluates knowledge and values on the basis of personal inner feelings. This view neglects the objective truths ordained by God. • Americans are often consequentialists, believing that the end justifies the means. This view justifies negative behavior in the name of an ultimate good, a position that rationalizes sin and violates God’s Law. • Today’s postmodern culture denies that there are any absolutes. Truth is relative; morality is relative; and religion is nothing more than a privatized, interior meaning-system with no connection to transcendent realities.

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It follows that adjusting the church’s practice to appeal to today’s American culture, as advocated by the Church Growth Movement, will be particularly problematic.

Therefore, it is spiritually harmful: • When the “success” of a particular church is assumed to consist in quantifiable results, such as its budget or its number of new members.

• When pragmatic or utilitarian considerations— however helpful in their sphere—assume an authority over that of God’s Word.

• When worship is shaped by the hedonistic desire for entertainment.

• When subjective religious experience takes the place of the Word and the Sacraments.

• When certain doctrinally-based features of the church—its liturgy, hymns, moral stances, theological teachings, or culturally unpopular practices (such as close[d] communion and refusal to ordain women)—are construed as barriers that need to be eliminated for the church to grow.

• When it is assumed that the church grows through the application of principles, prescriptions, programs and other human actions, as opposed to the work of the Holy Spirit in the Means of Grace.

III. Cultural pluralism does not mean cultural relativism; rather, it means that the church has the opportunity to reach out to human beings in all of their God-given diversity.

• Though America has its distinct cultural qualities, America is also a land of cultural pluralism. There have always been many different cultures that constitute America, and the rise of immigration and the acceleration of generational differences are rapidly increasing our cultural diversity.

• The various cultures of the world and within this country experience God’s manifold blessings in His earthly kingdom, even though these cultures are tainted by sin.

• Folk cultures of every kind, with their traditional values and ethnic identities, are being undermined by a homogenous popular culture, which has its origins in mass technology and economic consumerism.

• Whereas the music, customs, and other artifacts of ethnic cultures transmit and preserve community values, artifacts of the pop culture exist to be bought and sold to the largest possible market.

• The pop culture favors products that entertain, that do not demand thought or effort on the part of its audience, and that satisfy the subjec-

tive tastes of the buyers.

• The pop culture also is eroding the high culture, the realm of human achievement, education, and expertise. Quality music, literature and art are giving way to the shallowness of pop music, soap operas and computer games.

• The fact of cultural diversity does not mean that truth or morality are relative; rather, all cultures are limited in their knowledge, tainted by sin, and are in need of the transcendent truths of God’s Word.

• Christ died for all peoples. The same Gospel is for all the world. (Acts 1:8) • God’s Word is not culturally-specific nor culturebound. Christianity is for “every tribe and language and people and nation.” (Revelations 5:9) • The historic church, unified in all of its diversity in the one Lord Jesus Christ, embraces every time, extending back through history, constituting a communion of all the saints who still worship their Lord in heaven.

• The Christian church—with its universal claims, its liturgies that have transcended times and places and nationalities, and its message that continues to change the hearts of people in every nation, tribe and language—is the one genuinely multi-cultural institution.

It follows that, in a climate of cultural diversity, the church must recover its universality.

Therefore, it is spiritually harmful: • When the church emulates the commercial pop culture at the expense of traditional Biblical practices.

• When the transient styles of pop music drive out classic hymns and liturgies that have withstood the test of time.

• When church practices are judged by their entertainment value, rather than by their Scriptural faithfulness.

• When different messages are devised for different cultures or sub-cultures.

• When the church is divided upon cultural or generational lines, violating the unity of diverse peoples in the Body of Christ. (Galatians 3:28; 1 Corinthians 12:12–31) • When the church, attempting to blend into a homogenized culture, does not affirm its unique identity.

• When a congregation aims at an undifferentiated, generic Christianity, rather than taking its distinct place as the Holy Christian Church in a diverse religious landscape.

• When the church attempts to appeal to only one segment within the congregation, thereby

dividing God’s people against each other.

• When the cultural range of the church is narrowed by adapting to a single, momentary cultural expression (such as that of white, middleclass baby-boomers) that will soon pass away.

• When Christians become culturally parochial, neglecting missions and outreach to people different from themselves.

• When the church changes with each prevailing culture and with every new generation, thereby losing its catholicity, pitting cultures and generations against each other, and, ironically, losing its relevance to any culture. ■

By permission of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), this article has been excerpted from “For the Sake of Christ’s Commission,” the Report of the LCMS Church Growth Study Committee. The entire document can be found at www.lcms.org/president/statements/christcommission.asp

SPEAKING OF

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odily pain affects man as a whole down to the deepest layers of his moral being. It forces him to face again the fundamental questions of

his fate, of his attitude toward God and fellow man, of his individual and collective responsibility and of the sense of his pilgrimage on earth.

— Pope Pius XII

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LIVING IN EXILE | Tourists, Seekers, & Pilgrims

The Cultural Captivity of Seeking: A Round-Table Discussion This round-table discussion on evangelism took place during the 2000 National Pastors' Conference held in Atlanta, Georgia. The pastors engaged in the discussion included Alliance Council members Ken Jones, John Nunes, Gene Veith, and Michael Horton, as well as Alistair Begg and Rick Phillips.

Horton: We have a situation today where people often wonder, “Can we have missions and evangelism to the unreached people groups of our own neighborhood and at the same time have integrity in our worship and in our teaching? How can we keep the two together? Or are we automatically left with seeker-resilient churches that don’t reach out?”

First of all, what is a “seeker,” and should we be gearing our worship around seekers?

Jones: Well, the language itself is indicative of what we used to call evangelism. I think that’s where it comes from—when we talk about seekers, basically, those who

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are potential church members. However, the very use of the term indicates, I think, a shift in our understanding of evangelism. “Seeker” now equals “potential customer.” Therefore the goal of reaching those individuals would be somewhat different from the past when we were attempting to share the gospel, and what ends up happening is, essentially, we rearrange the furniture for people who have no desire for being in the house. We end up unchurching the Church, and we remove all of the offense of the gospel for the sake of those who might have a passing interest.

Nunes: The term seeker is really a euphemism for what used to be called “the lost,” those who are out of the relationship for which they were created. I like the way Augustine says we are made for God, and so there is this restlessness of heart. That’s the restlessness we see in our culture. People are kind of searching for this potpourri of options, whatever works for them, whatever is expedient for them, and putting together a package that can make life make sense for them. But the Bible calls that “lost.”

Jesus calls those people “lost.” Those are the ones he finds. So, then, we won’t have wholeness, we won’t have that sense of balance, we won’t have that sense of salvation, without being in that relationship for which we are created.

Veith: One thing the Scriptures make clear is that the seeker is Christ. It isn’t that we are seeking him, he is seeking us. In fact, what we seek as sinners is something very different than God. That’s what drives us. And the gospel is about how God takes the initiative; Christ is the seeker of Scripture. I just don’t understand how Christians can be designing their worship according to what nonChristians want. Christians need to bring the lost into communion with Christ and his people. And that seems to be what the Church needs to do, rather than to have the Church be formed by the non-Christian world.

Horton: Well, okay, that’s great in theory and probably a lot of people, who have large ministries built on the seeker model, would agree but how would you then respond to the criticism there, that reaching even the people in your pew now takes a sensitivity to time and place, where we are right now, and that to really minister effectively, sometimes we do have to tone things down a bit and not use all these big words such as redemption and justification, and so forth, even for the people of God? Veith: We just have to teach them these words, and teach them these concepts. We don’t eliminate them, that doesn’t help the people who need to learn the richness of what that is.

Horton: Now, John, you are an inner-city pastor as are two others here, Ken and Rick. How, in your

ministry, do you respond to those who say, “Well, but the thing is, it’s not really meeting me where I am because what you’re trying is culture-bound.” A lot of people will say, “You know, there’s a different way of worshiping God in Nigeria than there is in Reno.” Do you think that the culture thing is overplayed in our churches?

Nunes: Culture can become an excuse. I think that once you become a believer, there’s an entrance into a distinct culture itself. Entrance into the Christian Church is entrance into another culture that transcends and cuts through all cultures around the world. Attempting to communicate the gospel in a way that is designed for a specific culture can be culture-bound. You become a prisoner to the culture that you’re attempting to use to communicate the gospel. And what I try to emphasize is that once you become a believer you’re joining a new culture that is universal and is eternal.

Veith: I think, on one hand, that we do have to recognize the transcendence of the Church; we’re talking about a transcendent God. But at the same time we have to begin with where people are. So we do have to take seriously the ethnic, cultural identities of the people who make up the Church.

We don’t necessarily leave them there, but it’s a reality. We do what we do; we enter the building the way we do, we wear our hats the way we do, because of something. So even when it comes to presenting the gospel, because Jesus did come in flesh and blood, he also participated in a particular culture. He went into the temple at Jerusalem at twelve years old because that was part of a particular culture. So, the issue is this: Our culture, our neighborhoods, are still to be subject to the authority of Scripture. We cannot use culture as an excuse to negate the gospel message.

Nunes: Yes, it’s a lie for anyone to say that we do things without any culture—in our music, our preaching, our style, or whatever. We need to recognize there is a culture, but we can’t use that as an excuse or a scapegoat, for being ineffective in a particular community.

Phillips: What we’re saying is, I think, that we all come out of a cultural background and history, but what we’re leading them into is not that culture, but into the one new man in Christ. That’s why we do have our own terminology; we do have our own way of doing things that are distinctive from other social sets—every meaningful cultural or social organization will have its own language, its own forms, but we want to be leading them into something that’s distinctively Christian rather than distinctively Euro, African, Spanish, or whatnot.

Veith: There’s another cultural issue today, and I think we use the word culture in many different

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ways. It’s one thing to speak of an ethnic culture.

This is a community with its own history, customs, and those are very traditional, and it’s part of a people with a certain history. Another term is the high culture, the culture of people, of individuals, who achieve something great, whether in writing or in thinking, or in science or the like, those things can be called cultural. The issue today that we’re struggling with is not culture in either of those senses.

It’s to what extent can the Church embrace the popular or mass culture where everything becomes an economic commodity? Most students of culture are saying that right now in America we’re having a problem because it’s the ethnic cultures that are being destroyed by the pop culture. It’s the high culture that’s being destroyed by the pop culture.

This is because pop culture can’t handle any kind of traditional values, or any kinds of excellence or truth, or something that is demanding.

Horton: So, popular culture is not multi-ethnic, but anti-ethnic.

Veith: It’s anti-ethnic; and another irony is that a lot of times ministries in trying to reach a particular cultural group, the Hispanics, for example, or the Asian, try to apply American pop culture. That is totally foreign to the Hispanic mind, which is very focused on family and on traditions, on rituals—and the Asian, very focused on the group, and

And the gospel is about how God takes the initiative; Christ is the seeker of Scripture. giving in what you need to the good of us all, whereas the pop culture is driving all that out.

Horton: A meeting was held recently in Latin America where missiologists were saying, “Look, get your American stuff out of our continent.” And it was basically marketing. They said, “We’re sick of McDonald’s. Could we please have a little space down here where we could develop a Latin American missiology?”

Phillips: I think that the Church has felt the need to capitulate to that mass-commodity culture, the same way small towns have to capitulate to WalMart when it comes in.

Jones: That’s right. We end up destroying ethnic identities in the name of pop culture. People will look at a sitcom, like Sanford and Son, or Good Times, and think because that’s their favorite show on television, “I know what it’s like to live in the inner city,” not realizing that these are scripts written by people who have never even visited those areas.

And the people who are actually the actors are just

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collecting a paycheck. These shows have nothing to do with living in the ghetto.

Horton: And why is it the case that there is no thirst for the mega-church movement to plant churches in the inner city?

Veith: That is because it’s appealing to white, affluent, suburban baby boomers—a very narrow group. But the demographics are such that you can attract a lot of them together. I think Christians need to realize the many ways in which different ethnic cultures spell good news. Those cultures are probably more open to a kind of a Christian worldview that can be taught than American pop culture.

Ours is the culture where families are breaking apart, that rejects any kind of moral values when it comes to sexuality and other things. You don’t have that in ethnic cultures, except to the extent that they eagerly adopt the American pop culture values. And it’s those communities that are suffering. And yet, there is a lot of literature trying to scare churches into adopting mega-church techniques as, “Wow—immigration is coming, and white people are going to be a minority . . . ” Actually, that might be the salvation of the Church when that really happens.

Horton: I just read a book by John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Marketing of Culture and the Culture of Marketing, that talks about the extent to which marketing isn’t simply something that people do but is an epistemology. This is the way we think. And in an interesting issue of Civilization, which is published by the Library of Congress, there was an article there, “The Choice Fetish: Blessings and Curses of a Market Idol.” And in there, former Labor Secretary Robert Reisch notes, “Instead of liberating us, the new world of choice is making us more dependent on people who specialize in persuasion.” In relation to the Church, can’t we argue that what is happening with the Church is an episode of its capitulation to marketing consultants? That now, churches feel more and more like they are dependent? Pastors don’t have to read J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, but they have to get out there and read the latest demographic.

Phillips: And our anthropology is formed by advertising and marketing data…rather than the Scriptures…rather than Romans 3.

Horton: The worst of it, I think, is this notion of niche marketing to specific age groups. You used to have marketing that appealed to consumers because it was good enough for your mother and so is good enough for you. Now the ads say, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” This mentality is

coming into the Church. Instead of “this is the church where my father went, and my grandfather, and my grandmother is buried out there—you can see her grave through the window.”

But today people come to church on Sunday, and then the church, like the culture, rips them apart.

These people who hardly spend any time together anyway end up being ripped apart by demographics.

People talk about how divided it is ethnically on Sunday morning. Well, half of that is probably not racism, but marketing, niche marketing.

Jones: I think of when I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, one of our favorite pastimes was to point out the narcs, the undercover cops, that were so undercover that all we had to do was sit at the corner and say, “Okay, well, there’s one, and there’s one…” because the fact of the matter is that they weren’t cool at all. What they thought was being cool was what made them uncool.

Nunes: I know where you’re going here…

Jones: We rap to them instead of catechize them, and then we wonder why they don’t take the Church seriously when they’re going through adolescence. If we teach them the categories, teach them the truth of the gospel, we will recover credible evangelism. The biblical categories are very simple: people are either saved sinners or lost sinners. Period. Instead of fitting in, we actually attract the world’s contempt. They’re not laughing with us, they’re laughing at us, because we don’t rap very well.

Horton: Yes. C. S. Lewis made the point that keeps coming back to me as we talk about these issues where he says we human beings think food, drink, sex, power, success are the ultimate pleasures of life. He says we’re like little children making mud pies in the slums because we can’t imagine what it would be like to have a holiday at the sea.

Isn’t our job, as ministers, to try to give people, every week, such an encounter with God, in his judgment and his justification, that they say, “Whatever I came in with this morning, I just realized what’s really important in life. I didn’t have Christianity filling the vacuum I decided I had. I was completely undone and shown something that I couldn’t even conceive of, and the result is I now have a gift that is far greater than any of the felt needs that I could wish for being fulfilled.”

Begg: That takes it back one step, at least for me, as I hear you speaking, Michael, because you and I will never be instrumental in giving people, some of whom we know and many of whom we’ve never met, any sense of divine encounter unless we ourselves have come from the place of a divine encounter. We can be the purveyors of theological accuracy, we can be the instruments in a variety of

forms of spiritual insight and guidance and yet fail to be involved. That existential encounter we long for, which is the in-rush of God into the experience of our finitude is key. It’s a responsibility that none of us can handle. It’s a responsibility that none of us can embrace. We have nothing to bring, unless we ourselves have been brought there. And I think that has been the mark of great preaching throughout the ages, that there’s been a sense of the greatness of God. Whether it was a fabulous sermon, whatever else it was, you know, we knew that the person was serious about God, that he had something to say that he felt passionately that we needed to hear, rather than that he’d found something really cute in US Airways Magazine when he was flying to Pittsburgh and managed to find four verses for it, stuck it together and banged it out, and did it twenty minutes before he turned the TV on for the evening.

Horton: Alistair, you’re a pastor of a suburban, white, middle-class church. Do you think that the ministry in your church is significantly different from the kind of ministry that John or Ken or other inner-city pastors—Rick, in Philadelphia—might encounter?

Begg: Well, I’m sitting here . . . and I’m fascinated by the discussion and I’m learning as well, which happens all the time. But, you know, the way that we reach people, irrespective of the immediate context in which we find ourselves, is essentially one person at a time. And effective evangelism is evangelism that is based not on some kind of program but is based on people living out the life of Christ in their own community. And the most exciting things that are happening in our church are not directly related to any strategy that we have or any methodology that we’ve adopted, but simply as a result of people who have had their lives turned upside-down by Christ, and their friends and neighbors are asking, “What in the world has happened to you?” Now, in that sense, that cuts across every ethnic boundary, or socioeconomic boundary, because everyone has a context in which they’re living their lives. But the idea of being able to start where people are is not an unbiblical idea, I’m sure we would agree. So, we have to be careful. I want to guard against distancing myself from the reality of the approach of Christ, which was able to take people where they started and move them to where he wanted them to go, whether it was the woman at the well, or whether it was Zacchaeus up a tree, or whoever it was. And I think there’s a sense in which some who may not share our same theological presuppositions at least are a challenge to us in being imaginative and creative in bringing our own biblical understanding of

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When the Wisdom of Man Becomes the Wisdom of God

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comparison of church life between orthodox Protestant denominations and most evangelical churches reveals an existing theological polarity.

Architectural design, liturgical versus informal worship, shifts in hymnody, the attendance or non-attendance of children in Sunday morning worship, Memorialist views of the Lord's Table versus the Real Presence, and Christ-centered preaching versus Christian life-experience preaching, are logical consequences of dueling first principles. Traditional and evangelical churches are trees which should look different, because their respective roots are different.

For the sake of evangelism, the congregations of the evangelical movement have compromised the evangel of classical Protestantism. One could analyze and critique the surface distinctions listed above and, thus, make a case against the movement. However, if this strategy is utilized, the root of the tree still exists, and continues to yield its fruit. What must be analyzed and critiqued, therefore, is the underlying principle which gives birth to the surface expressions. Only then can the tree be “uprooted and planted in the sea,” (Luke 17:6), and the two sides “reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). …Biblical evangelism must proclaim the Biblical evangel.

This message is that “what the law was powerless to do...God did, by sending His own Son...in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us” (Rom. 8:3-4).

And these requirements are met in us because Christ is “made unto us wisdom, and righteous, and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). Protestants must continue to proclaim it; and evangelicals must return from the wisdom of man to the wisdom of God. — Daniel Smith Honorable Mention 2001 Modern Reformation Essay Contest

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things to bear upon the opportunity.

Horton: You mean we shouldn’t be seeker resilient? Some of our churches are, of course, not seeker-sensitive but don’t really want seekers.

Rosenbladt: Something like Judaism in the first century. A proselyte at the gate had to be really, really dedicated to getting in.

Phillips: We believe we should be doing intentional evangelism. We should be doing things to equip our people, for instance, to go out there and share the gospel. That’s a world of difference from believing that the seeker is a consumer, and his or her decision is sovereign, and we’ve got to conform. First of all, we know their need better than they do. They don’t know their need.

Horton: If they come as consumers, they already don’t know their need because you only really know your need if you come as a sinner.

Phillips: People are dissatisfied. And they are seeking things, it’s just not God. And so there is a readiness, a willingness to try new things that are accessible and seem to be attractive. I think in that sense if there is a seeker, our goal is to get them to see that what they need is not what they’re seeking.

Rosenbladt: I wonder if we’re trying to make the Sunday morning service do evangelism to get away from equipping our people from having a private conversation at the next mechanic’s stall. In the past, the prep for inviting somebody to church, the background, was that the layman had some kind of idea what he believed and maybe why, and could have that conversation. I don’t think any church service and hot young pastor can make up for that, on Sunday morning.

Horton: So you are saying that if the Church did its job of informing that kind of a person, focusing on the Church, focusing on the professing believers, that believers would then actually have more effect in evangelism because they would be ready to give everyone an answer. ■

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| The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform

How Historical Theology Affects Our Thinking Today

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istorical theology is an important part of the process of deciding who we are,

“God has been doing for two thousand years to lead his what we believe, and consequently how we will behave. For confessional people into an understanding of the truth.”

One of Protestants, the past is not absolutely definitive, since all theologies besides historical theology’s great questions is “How do the God’s revealed Word err, but its various epochs of Christian history relate?” Does influence on our lives is inescapable. some theme unite the theology of the third century Much of what we teach and do in our with those of the 14th and 20th centuries? Olson churches and schools is determined by sees soteriology as the dominant theme, although what our forefathers said and did he recognizes that even this theme has waxed and centuries ago and what we believe about waned in Christian history. that past. Therefore, we must tell the Aimed at the interested layman and the pastor truth about the past. This is historical who wants a refresher course in the history of theology’s primary vocation. theology, Olson’s book is grounded in the Unfortunately, far too many historical conviction that no doctrine ever arose “out of thin theologians tell us far more about air” but always within a context and in response to themselves than about the past because some challenge. His reminder that doctrines they refuse to separate their own develop for reasons and were not meant to confuse convictions from those about whom simple Christians corrects the televised they write. This is unnecessary. Heiko anti-intellectualism of our age. His conviction that Oberman, Richard Muller, David Steinmetz, Jill doctrine matters even for piety is commendable.

He contends that there is a canon of great The Story of Raitt, Peter Stephens, David Bagchi, and Carl Christian Trueman, to name but a few, have shown that it is books and thinkers in the Christian tradition, the Theology: possible to write fairly and even sympathetically study of which is essential for good history even if it is politically incorrect. Yet, as he notes, many of Twenty about those with whom they disagree.

Centuries of Historical theology is descriptive, not the great theologians were not dead white prescriptive. The historical theologian’s task is not European males, but rather Africans or Semites.

Tradition and to judge whether a theologian is correct; that is the Reform His working assumptions include his making a work of dogmatics or church courts. His task is to distinction between dogma, doctrine, and opinion. discover and explain what a theologian taught and Opinion involves matters indifferent (e.g., the

by Roger E. Olson why. nature of angels or the details of the parousia).

InterVarsity Press, 1999 Doctrine is a nonessential deduction from Scripture $34.99, 652 pages Summary of Olson’s Thesis that is essential to some particular theological In his new history of Christian theology, Roger tradition. Dogma is what confessional Protestants Olson, professor of theology at Truett Theological would call catholic truth (e.g., the doctrines of the Seminary, Baylor University, sets out to tell us what Trinity and the two natures of Christ). Olson

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argues that doctrines can matter too much, such as when Reformed and Lutheran Christians separated over the nature of the Lord’s Supper.

He maintains that “God works in mysterious ways to establish his people in truth and to reform theology when needed,” thus rejecting both the kind of historicism that assumes that everything has a natural cause and divine sovereignty as distinguished from providence. He acknowledges that he is not writing a “neutral scientific-historical description” of the history of theology (22).

Methodological Criticisms Having enjoyed Olson’s 20th Century Theology (coauthored with Stanley Grenz), I came to this work with high expectations. As a teacher of historical theology, I have been looking for a text to assign to new students to orient them to the methods and topics of historical theology.

Unfortunately, this is not that book.

Olson’s honesty about his assumptions is helpful, but it reveals the book’s basic flaw, which is his refusal to distinguish consistently between historical and dogmatic theology. His distinctions about dogma, doctrine, and opinion are virtually meaningless for historical theology. What he thinks constitutes a dogma, a doctrine, or an opinion is interesting, but in the history of theology it is what, for example, Anselm or Aquinas considered to be dogma, doctrine, or opinion that matters.

Although apparently pious, his attempt to discern the hand of providence in the history of theology is highly problematic, since determining when God was or was not working is necessarily a dogmatic and not a historical judgment. Judgments about what God has been doing providentially for the last two millennia require bringing the interpretation of Scripture to bear on historical theology.

This is a hotbed for special pleading. Reformed and Lutheran Christians could find it satisfying to explain and defend the Reformation by appealing to providence, but why should a Roman Catholic find such a claim compelling? Appeals to providence cut both ways. We appeal to Luther and Calvin but the Jesuit appeals to Peter Canisius as evidence of divine blessing. In their own ways, both Calvin and Canisius had great success. So what do we learn about history from such claims? Nothing. We just learn Olson’s interpretations of providence. As interesting as this is, it is not history.

The book’s subtitle illustrates the problem: “Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform” is a bad way to frame the history of theology because in our culture “tradition” is suspect and “reform”

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stands for progress. Those laying claim to being reformers thus have a rhetorical advantage, whereas those described as “traditionalists” are marginalized. Olson’s approach to history is like the Mafia’s approach to sports. They watch the game, but the outcome is not in doubt.

Elsewhere, Olson positions himself as a champion of progressive neo-evangelicalism. He aligns himself with—if he has not actually adopted—the new doctrine of God promulgated by theologians such as Clark Pinnock and Gregory Boyd. Known as “open theism,” this doctrine casts itself rhetorically as a new Reformation reacting against allegedly stodgy, confessionalist, traditionalist theology. Hence, Olson has a stake in who is accounted traditional and who is accounted a reformer. This surfaces throughout his book, as when his sympathies for open theism lead him cavalierly to dismiss Tertullian’s doctrine of God as being unduly influenced by Greek philosophical categories. Similarly, his negative assessment of Cyprian’s ecclesiology (“no salvation outside the Church”) as hierarchical and hurtful to personal piety seems to owe more to his own ecclesiology than to the actual historical life and consequences of Cyprian’s theology.

Historical Criticisms The book’s greatest weakness may be its lack of a strong historical foundation. Good historical theology must be written with historical sensitivity; that is, it must take careful account of the circumstances in which a particular theology developed. It must evaluate a theologian against the time in which he formed his theology, and it must avoid anachronism.

Olson consistently misses these marks. For example, he treats Luther as a “born again” Christian, which is anachronistic and distorts Luther’s actual experience. Paul Tillich is a twentieth-century Clement and Karl Barth a modern Tertullian. This is highly tendentious, because it ignores the great gulf that exists between Christian antiquity and post-Christian modernity.

Post-Christian modernity deliberately rejects historic Christianity yet uses historic Christian language to express distinctively modern convictions. As radically opposed as Tillich and Barth were in many ways, they were both very modern thinkers who only superficially resemble Clement and Tertullian.

Clement and Tertullian both believed in the history of redemption and in the actual truth of the Scriptures and the Christian faith, whereas Tillich did not, and it is debatable whether Barth believed historic Christianity beyond the resurrection of Christ.

Olson publicly positions himself as a spokesman

for beleaguered Arminians. So how does he treat his theological opponents? Unfortunately, not well. He has Servetus issuing a “prophetic challenge” to Calvin’s “overbearing dominance” in Geneva. This is historical nonsense. Even Calvin’s harshest critics should acknowledge that he only had limited political influence in Geneva, as his inability to gain permission from the civil authorities to celebrate the Supper weekly shows.

Olson’s description of the Arminian controversy would have been more helpful if he had simply followed the historical order of things. His Arminius was reacting to the five points of Calvinism!

This would have startled the international delegation to the Synod, who thought that they were responding to the five points of the Remonstrants. Olson’s bias is particularly evident when he categorizes Augustinian-Calvinism as an “extreme” pole opposite process theology. He has a right to consider Calvinism to be in error and even dangerous. Yet, as an historical judgment, his characterization of the Augustinian view of the fall and divine sovereignty as extreme is historically untenable, since it was shared by many of the Fathers, by most major medieval theologians including Thomas, and by Luther and Calvin.

Covenant theology is discussed only in the context of New England controversies (see 501–02), while its roots lie much deeper in the history of Western theology than that. His account of federal theology could have been written fifty years ago.

Modern Reformation readers will be interested to learn than the Protestant scholastics were guilty of “metaphysical speculation.” Olson cites Richard Muller’s work but shows no real grasp of his argument or research, ignoring completely Muller’s published research on Theodore Beza. In the past twenty-five years, a significant body of secondary literature has radically revised several of the accounts upon which Olson apparently relied.

His account of the nature of contemporary theology also is flawed. He describes the German theologians Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg as “critically orthodox,” contrasting them to classical theism’s “all-controlling and static God.” The only conservative alternative to the futurist eschatology he seems to imagine is of the Tim LaHaye/Hal Lindsey variety. Classical Protestant (Lutheran or Reformed) amillennialism or even historic chiliasm does not seem to cross his radar screen. Thus, this book is curiously parochial. On the one hand, Olson is dismissive of key aspects of classical theology and, on the other, he shows little genuine familiarity with its primary

texts or its force.

Conclusion I have been involved in discussions with Roger Olson on the doctrine of God. In conversation and in print, he makes it plain that he believes he is being persecuted for his views. I do not want to persecute him for his theology but to prosecute his book as a prime example of what is wrong with much contemporary historical theology.

This book is well designed, containing reasonably useful indices of names and topics, although some page references are incorrect. It is a little surprising, however, that it does not include a bibliography of primary and secondary resources for further study.

It is well written and accessible. Olson seems to have tried harder in some sections to be fair (e.g., regarding contemporary evangelicalism; see 592–596) than in others (e.g., on Anabaptism; see 415–428). Readers will want to consult Geoffrey Bromiley, Historical Theology: An Introduction, Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology, and even Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, for more successful attempts to tell the story of Christian theology that do not involve their writers working to vindicate themselves in the process.

R. Scott Clark Westminster Theological Seminary Escondido, CA

SHORT NOTICES The “Miscellanies” 501–832

by Jonathan Edwards Edited with an introduction by Ava Chamberlain Yale University Press, 2000 $80.00, 578 pages The “Miscellanies” 501–832 is part of a projected twenty-seven-volume Yale University Press edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. This is the first critical edition of Edwards’s Works and will no doubt long remain the only one.

Each volume has been hallmarked by an editor’s introduction that places its contents in its historical setting and in Edwards’s thought, and then provides a critical analysis of both. These introductions have set the standard for Edwards scholars to follow. Ava Chamberlain’s introduction is no exception. Her familiarity with Edwards’s written corpus, ministerial legacy, and the scope of his oftentimes complex philosophical theology is exhibited in her remarkably helpful comments, through which she provides a condensed but accessible overview of this volume’s major themes.

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The “Miscellanies” are a series of nine original theological notebooks that record Edwards’s intellectual development from a first entry in 1722 through to his last entry in 1758, the year of his death. This volume reproduces the entries from 1731–1740. It is the second of four volumes on these semi-private notebooks that Yale will publish.

More than just a repository for theological speculation, the “Miscellanies” are “a record of Edwards’ affective inner life,…a life centered on God and not the self.” Edwards’s theocentrism gives coherence to the host of themes he explores, the most dominant of which are “justification by faith alone; spiritual knowledge, which includes both the ‘new spiritual sense’ and Christian practice; the rationality of the Christian religion; the history of the work of redemption; and conversion and the religious life.”

These five themes reveal Edwards’s relevance for contemporary discussions in soteriology, philosophical theology, and even apologetics. For instance, when treating the biblical idea of saving faith, he strives against neonomianism by defining “faith” not in causal or “conditional” terms but in a way that safeguards its forensic quality. He does this by linking the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer with the believer’s preexisting union with Christ. Thus, Chamberlain explains, “Because the union with Christ, which occurs by faith, creates the ontological foundation necessary for imputation, it is fitting that the faithful are justified.” This bold move affects nearly every aspect of Edwards’s soteriology.

Regeneration—the ontological alteration of a human being—is nothing other than “the Spirit of Christ so uniting himself to the soul of man, that he becomes there a vital and holy principle.” For Edwards, then, sanctification is not just a necessary correlate of regeneration, but also of justification— perseverance in sanctification is evidence of justification as well as regeneration, though it is ground of neither. A dozen or more entries record how Edwards came to these conclusions— conclusions that were to become foundational to his most notable treatises.

The numerous entries on “The History of the Work of Redemption” are also relevant because they correct John H. Gerstner’s depiction of Edwards as the quintessential “classical” or “traditional” apologist.

Edwards began his theological career endeavoring to provide a systematic “Rational Account of Christianity, or The Perfect Harmony between the Doctrines of the Christian Religion and Human Reason.” But he abandoned that project just prior to the Great

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Awakening of 1740 to take up another that signaled a shift in his apologetical engagement with Enlightenment religion. As he came to see during the 1730s, conviction about Christianity’s truth is ultimately grounded not in human reason but in the perception of divine “excellency” conveyed by the “new spiritual sense.” This aesthetic vision is a mental state that is the consequence of union with Christ. The redeemed, therefore, have a “view” of the reality of spiritual things to which unregenerate skeptics have no access.

As Chamberlain observes, “A purely rational defense of Christian doctrine would have required Edwards to use, as did the latitudinarians in their antideist polemic, the standard of rationality advocated by his opponents.” In order to avoid this “tactical mistake” Edwards moved away from a systematic defense based upon rationality to a historical defense based upon biblical prophecy and the testimony of redemption history, that is, the history of the world “both sacred and profane.”

Aside from its fascinating and surprisingly relevant content, what may generate a bit more interest in this handsome, sophisticated, and yet unfortunately expensive volume is the fact that while 103 of its more than 330 entries can be found in previously published sources, only 21 or so of them are available in the second volume of the familiar and widely circulated Banner of Truth edition. All told, it contains over 200 previously unavailable entries. Convenient indexes for biblical passages and general topics allow for ready referencing.

John J. Bombaro King’s College University of London

The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals

by Gene Edward Veith, Jr. Concordia Publishing House, 1999 $8.99, 127 pages In the New Testament, the word “spiritual” almost always refers to the kind of life that Christians possess because the Holy Spirit indwells and influences them. “Christian spirituality,” then, is life lived by, in, and through God’s Spirit.

Today, “spirituality” is a particular way of approaching and experiencing life—what results when a particular set of beliefs and principles and emphases contact life’s nitty-gritty. In this sense of

“spirituality,” there are Zen Buddhist as well as Shinto “spiritualities”; and different Christian traditions—Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Methodist, among others—each has its own “spirituality,” arising from its own particular “take” on Christian faith and life.

Veith’s very fine little book rehearses the “spirituality” of historic Lutheranism. He wants to show that what he discovered there, after his own pilgrimage through several other non-Christian and Christian spiritualities, is a “spiritual framework big enough to embrace the whole range of human existence, a realistic spirituality,” one “that is not a negation of the physical world or ordinary life, but one that transfigures them.” This spirituality is particularly centered on Jesus Christ’s cross. It is evangelical because it focuses on the Gospel, “the good news that Christ, through His death and resurrection, has won forgiveness for sinful human beings and offers salvation as a free gift.” Starting from the conviction that “all human effort to reach God is futile,” it takes true spirituality to have to do first and foremostly with “recognizing God’s work—what He accomplished on the cross and what He continues to accomplish in people’s lives through the Holy Spirit.” So Veith’s book is about “spirituality” in both of its senses.

There are chapters or sections on the Lutheran distinction between law and gospel, the word of God as God’s addressing human beings through human language, the hiddenness of God in Christ’s work on the cross as well as in our own suffering, the sanctification of ordinary life through the concept of vocation, the notion that Christians live in two kingdoms—one secular, one sacred, but both under God’s rule—and Lutheran worship. Each clearly and succinctly summarizes part of what makes the Lutheran way of life a distinct “spirituality.”

Aimed at non-Lutherans, this book enables us outsiders to avail ourselves of the spiritual insights found therein. There are, as Veith says, “problems and distortions” in each Christian tradition, and places where Christians in different traditions will disagree. For instance, I found Veith’s remarks on sanctification to be quite dissatisfying, as I often find such Lutheran remarks to be—that is why I am not a Lutheran but a Calvinist! Yet, overall, this book is rich, warm food for those who hunger for true spirituality.

Mark R. Talbot Wheaton College Wheaton, IL

Sold Out for Jesus

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he analogy between evangelism and marketing has become a popular cliche in the secular arena, but one must wonder whether the evangelical subculture has been clued in on the joke. In the 1980s, most evangelicals were horrified at the televangelism scams where slick hucksters preyed on the emotions and trusting nature of so many people, all for the almighty dollar.

In large part, today's churches have disavowed their desire for financial profit, even to the point of placing collection plates at the back of churches instead of passing them down aisles.

They have been forthright in their desire, not for cash, but for souls. But what seems to have gone unnoticed is that though the currency has changed, the product they are pushing still remains the same: Jesus.

In some cases, Christianity has become one big factory. You begin with a sales person (the evangelist). Then you add the product (the good news of the gospel). Next you send the product down to the P.R. department (the gospel is made marketable by extracting unfriendly terms, arranged in attractive and easily comprehended points, and spiced up with a few catchy slogans). After that the salesperson is ready for training (she is taught how to begin a conversation, lead it into “spiritual matters”' and finally close the deal). Now the salesperson is ready for her blitz on the marketplace. As her pitch is made and the deal is closed, the salesperson ingeniously informs the new member that his part in his new acquisition includes his responsibility as a salesperson. And the training begins….

How then do Christians escape consumerism and still transform the world? It can only begin by abandoning the notion that it is our duty to transform the world and claiming the idea that it is our duty to be faithful to God. The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins by answering that the chief end of man is to glorify and enjoy God. Godly, faithful living for the glory and enjoyment of God can sound funny to conversion-centered ears. When we worship, we should worship as Christians according to God's Word. When we work or in relationships, we should uphold godly living by not cutting corners, stealing, or being slothful, and by conducting ourselves in the humility and generosity of Christ. This, too, is spreading the gospel!

— Kevin Nelson Honorable Mention 2001 Modern Reformation Essay Contest

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Feeding On Fast-Food Religion

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ecently I crossed a ministry milestone. For more than half of my 38-year-old life,

for a real illustration for this article, I tuned in to a popular I have worked as an inner-city church professional—mostly as a musician and early morning television program featuring a pastor in African-American settings. So it is not from the sidelines of prosperity preacher with high urban ratings. In fact, he theoretical broadcasts on the Black Entertainment Television theology but from the frontline trenches of praxis network (BET). Within five minutes he messed up that I observe this negative and growing trend. the beautifully messianic Psalm 45:1, “my tongue is Simply, the content and confession of urban the pen of a skillful writer.” Regarding what we Christian spirituality is taking a wrong turn. Some want in life, (I quote directly): “You can write your would say another wrong turn. Urban churches— own ticket with God.” No way! says Paul. We are black, Latino, and poor white—were once the written upon. The Word is what’s written. The stereotyped as preaching an irrelevant “fire and Spirit of the living God is the writer (2 Cor. 3:3). brimstone, pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by religion.” But Grace? Faith? Scripture? Christ? “We’ll let God you could usually count on some preaching about worry about doctrine in heaven,” I was told by a JOHN NUNES staff member of one mega-ministry. In the the cross.

Now, a new form of godliness is the rage. In it, prosperity scheme, main-course biblical themes Senior Pastor eternal life receives scant mention. Crosses are serve the pursuit of secondary desserts such as St. Paul illuminated or gold-plated, but rarely taken up. health, wealth, and family fulfillment. Some Lutheran Church Dallas, TX This urban religion du jour urges “using faith” to speakers are masterful motivators, but they deceive obtain a deserved piece of the American pie. No if they claim to be Christian preachers. Temporary longer in the sky, “American pie piety” redefines things—however good, noble, or true—cannot saving faith as an attitude that promotes everything replace permanent things. Those who limp toward from self-improvement to increased popularity, these messages end in despairing hunger.

Real hope is tasted in the Bible’s central teaching that is, if you have “the faith” and follow the plan.

The Apostle Peter doesn’t have much patience with of justifying faith in Christ. Quick fixes of fast-food such plastic words: literally, plastoi logoi (2 Pet. 2:3). religion demean suffering and the sufferers. The The rapidly rising neo-Pentecostal, new wave cruciform sign of hope gives meaning. From spirituality echoes fast-food ads that jingle out “You Stephen, the proto-martyr, to Martin Luther King, deserve a break today” or “Have it your way.” Christian history is replete with examples of Especially the poor, oppressed, feeble, and fearful redemptive suffering. are prime consumers of this seduction. It has a Redemption is God’s invasive victory over the familiar flavor. After all, “Jesus” is fervently named; terrible triad of sin, death, and the devil. It is be it formulaically, like some magical leverage for neither quick nor easy, but the complete answer to paying bills supernaturally, possessing a millionaire the problem of human pain. Jesus Christ, himself, faith for your finances, or maximizing latent is the suffering servant: implausible to rationalists, potential. As if Christian living were primarily embarrassing to trickster prosperity preachers, an intended to be organized around an individual’s impediment to miracle seekers. But whether stuck drives, dreams, and desires. in a ghetto life or succeeding in the good life, only Fast-food cooks flip burgers. Junk-food this cross story can fully satisfy with God’s fullness religionists do exegetical somersaults. Searching of life (1 Cor. 1:18).

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