the-effects-of-popular-culture-on-religion-january-february-1997

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EFORMATION VOLUME 6 NUMBER 1

THE EFFECTS OF POPULAR CULTURE ON RELIGION

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A Publication of Christians United for Reformation

EFORMATION JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1997

THE WHIRLPOOL: T E P C R HE FFECTS OF OPULAR

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ULTURE ON

PRECIOUS MOMENTS IN AMERICAN RELIGION Michael S. Horton

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IS “POPULAR CULTURE” EITHER? Ken Myers

15 CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE: GOD’S DOUBLE SOVEREIGNTY Gene Edward Veith

20 POSTHUMOUS TABLETALK Rick Ritchie

28 REACHING UNCHURCHED HEINRICH AND MARIE Leonard R. Payton

ELIGION

Editor-in-Chief Dr. Michael S. Horton Managing Editor Benjamin E. Sasse Copy Editor Ann Henderson Hart Layout and Design Lori A. Yerger Proofreader Rosetta Stockwell Contributing Scholars Dr. John Armstrong Dr. S. M. Baugh Dr. James M. Boice Dr. D. A. Carson Dr. Knox Chamblin Dr. Bryan Chapell Dr. Daniel Doriani Dr. J. Ligon Duncan Dr. Timothy George Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. Sinclair Ferguson Dr. John Hannah Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Michael S. Horton Dr. Robert Kolb Dr. Allen Mawhinney Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Joel Nederhood Dr. Roger Nicole Dr. Leonard R. Payton The Rev. Kim Riddlebarger Dr. Rod Rosenbladt The Rev. Harold L. Senkbeil Dr. R. C. Sproul Dr. Robert Strimple Dr. Willem A. Van Gemeren Dr. Gene E. Veith Dr. David Wells Cure Board of Directors Douglas Abendroth Michael E. Aldrich Cheryl Biehl The Rev. Earl Blackburn Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. Michael S. Horton James Linnell Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Christians United for Reformation © 1997 All rights reserved.

IN THIS ISSUE NEXT ISSUE LETTERS TO THE EDITOR QUOTES GENERAL TENDENCIES OF POPULAR AND HIGH CULTURE BOOK REVIEW BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS WHITE HORSE STATION LISTINGS

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Cure is a non-profit educational foundation committed to communicating the insights of the 16th century Reformation to the 20th century church. For more information, call or write us at: CHRISTIANS UNITED for REFORMATION 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 Subscribe to: modernREFORMATION US 1 YR $22 2 YR $40 Canada 1 YR $25 2 YR $45 Europe 1 YR $34 2 YR $62

In This Issue…

By Michael S. Horton “Sanctify them by the truth. Your Word is truth.”

“WHIRL IS KING.” hat’s what leading literary commentator Walter Lippman said of the moder n age early this century. We often fail to appreciate the extent to which supposedly “neutral” and “benign” factors mis-shape the identity of the church and of her message.

One of the reasons for the predicament in which we find the church these days is that the evangelical movement has, by and large, married the spirit of the age. A time when “whirl”—the fascination with the novel, eccentric, eclectic and “exciting”—is king, our age is dominated by an obsession with mass popular culture. We see it in the clichés and commercialism of the evangelical subculture, in its Tshirts, cruises, evangelistic crusades, and worship styles.

Often suspicious of “high culture” (the fine arts, classical music, refined literary tastes), evangelical Christians run the risk of becoming even more worldly than the

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mainline liberal Protestants whose place they sought to take in the cultural ascendancy. But should we be snobs? Is it any better to hang our churchly hopes on an allegiance to Haydn and Shakespeare instead of “I ‘Got You, Babe” jingles that seem to shape the style of praise choruses? And how do we get the Christian message out to the world without marketing it in some sense? D. L. Moody responded to critics, “I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it!” Are we perhaps making more out of the dangers of “pop-culture” than we should, while souls are lost forever?

In this issue, we’ll be consulting some of the best folks on this subject—individuals who have given these and a host of related questions—a great deal of thought. So join us as we seek to sharpen our understanding of the challenges and opportunities of our sojourn in the world of whirl.

NEXT ISSUE: WHAT IS “MINISTRY”? n our day, “ministry” has been so confused and trivialized that successful “super-apostles” who have built their work on their own personalities and abilities often raze the genuine apostolic ministry to its very foundations. At last we have come to the day when truth is stranger than its caricatures, with newspaper reports of evangelical entrepreneurs for “entertainment evangelism.” After all, says one, “People don’t want to hear about sin, justification, sanctification, and all those heavy things.” Paul’s infamous “super-apostles” couldn’t have said it better. Being “bold and willful,” they are like “waterless springs and mists driven by a storm” (2 Pet. 2:10, 17). In other words, they are “full of hot air,” blustering on about “things they do not understand” (v. 12). In contrast, the Apostle to the Gentiles defined the Office in this manner: “Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries” (1 Cor. 4:1).

It is not enough, therefore, simply to analyze individual ministers or ministries by their message.

Following carefully the Old and New Testament, we must cut more deeply into the situation and ask ourselves whether our whole contemporary notion of ministry is out of step with Scripture.

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Classical Reformation folk are not only those who protested against medieval abuses of the biblical Office of the Ministry; they were also catholic in their insistence upon a high view of this holy work. Against the tyranny of Roman prelates on one hand, and the enthusiasm of selfproclaimed “super-apostles” on the other, the Reformers and their successors recovered a robust biblical sense of what it means for us to enjoy an apostolic Ministry of Word and Sacrament in our own time and place.

As the Reformers recovered the New Testament offices, so too must we concentrate on the biblical material with a fresh sense of practical urgency. So, in our next issue, we’ll be asking questions such as: “Does the ‘priesthood of every believer’ mean that every believer is a minister?”; “What should we think about organizations, businesses, entertainment media, and other entities that call themselves ‘ministries?’”; “What is the relationship of today’s minister to the prophets and apostles? Isn’t he just an ‘equipper of the saints,’ giving the laity the tools to actually ‘do ministry’?” As you can already discern, this is a doctrinal, biblical, and historical question of enormous practical implications for our church-life today.

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L ETTERS CHRISTIAN BOOKSELLING REFLECTS CHRISTIAN’S THINKING As one actively engaged in the Christian Bookstore ministry for nearly 10 years, I confess Shane Rosenthal’s article on the anti-theological bias of Christian retailing (MR, September/October 1996) made me want to seek a plea bargain. His criticisms were absolutely on target.

We were guilty; I was guilty. We tried too hard to walk a tightrope between historic reformed faith and financial survival. Before I left (rather was expelled from) Joshua’s, Tandycraft (the parent corporation) had even suggested a change to Joshua’s Religious Stores, with a view of broadening our customer base. I resisted with arguments like, “But that will offend our evangelical customer base.”

I used similar arguments against ideas to go after Catholic customers and even the pre-lithium Charismatics. I should have known that the only thing that would really offend our evangelical customer base was a rigid return to the Sola Fide of the reformation. I should have seen the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin on the wall. But I did not.

The reason I did not is because I thought modern American evangelicalism still “got it.” Finally even that hope was dashed. I had invited R. C. Sproul to speak at a vendor breakfast and he took the Christian Booksellers Association (C. B. A.) to the woodshed for its departure from the historic gospel. In his message, he recommended Luther’s Bondage of the Will as a must read. About five people out of 150, had ever heard of it, much less read it. One brother asked me afterwards, how long before he was gunned down

by James Earl Ray had Dr. King written “that book.” You could have knocked me over with a police baton.

I guess I’m saying the church shares the guilt.

Whatever it’s doing is producing a generation of readers that don’t know or care that Martin Luther King and Mar tin Luther were not the same guy, or that justification by faith alone in the imputed righteousness of Christ really is the main thing. In that sense, C. B. A. is just like the law of God, it’s a mirror of where the church is today.

Thomas R. Browning Arlington, Texas MORE THAN MY EXPERIENCE! It is great to know that not all Christians have stooped to a purely experience based theology, and that there are a good number who will clearly enunciate truth—even if it hurts.

Dean Zimmerman Dallas, TX

PAST MR ARTICLES AVAILABLE ON INTERNET All this week, I have been searching your website and devouring every ar ticle I could find on Liturg y, Theology, the Reformation, Calvinism, worship as it relates to modern Christianity.

In nearly every article (which I have taken home for my wife to read) we find passages that validate our hopes and fears, along with our disappointments and blessings.

As I read these articles, I found myself weeping, feeling that during my lifetime, I have been denied the blessing of knowing God’s grace working in my life. Growing up as a preacher’s kid in evangelical denominations, I have experienced the gamut of bogus teachings, ranging from extreme legalism to extreme permissiveness. It wasn’t until this year that I realized the reason for my lifelong struggle with Christianity and the empty, desperate life I have been living.

The White Horse Inn and the modernReformation articles on Cure’s website have helped open my eyes to what God really wants to do for me. I have been absolutely thrilled with the realization that God doesn’t require me to reach out to him, but he has been reaching out to me, wanting to impute his righteousness to me.

J. G. Via Internet EDITOR’S COMMENT Some past MR articles, a recommended reading list, links to creeds and confessions of the Reformation, and links to other Reformation organizations and writings, are available on the Internet : http://members.aol.com/cureinc.

We are grateful for Letters to the Editor on all topics, but we would like to request particularly letters offering specific challenges to or support for specific articles.

Letters can be sent via standard mail, electronic mail, or fax:

modernREFORMATION: Letters to the Editor 1716 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 Fax: (215) 735-5133 E-mail: CUREInc@aol.com

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Precious Moments in American Religion MICHAEL S. HORTON n more than one occasion I have concluded that I am inhabiting a Salvador Dali painting: clocks dripping off of trees in surreal landscapes, and all that.

Perhaps no occasion more deeply pressed this haunting suspicion than on a trip through America’s heartland this past summer. I was making my way to New Haven, Connecticut, from California in my heavy-laden Pathfinder.

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Having driven across the country numerous times, I have tried to punctuate the tedious trek with stops at various points of local interest. But this time, on my fourth day of the journey, I stumbled on a dizzying discovery.

As I entered Missouri—the “Show-Me State”—I began to notice billboards advertising something called the “Precious Moments Chapel.” I thought nothing of it at first, recalling the “Precious Moment” figurines that seem to have replaced books in Christian book stores. But the billboards popped up again and again along the highway, boasting a remarkable mecca for “Precious” pilgrims. Groggy from driving far too many hours in one stretch, I felt strangely drawn to this chapel. So when a friend and I finally arrived at the turn-off, marked by an official state sign, I wound my way to the secluded venue.

“How big can this thing really be?” I asked myself repeatedly, as I began to approach the grounds.

Suddenly, my jaw fell to the floorboard as I entered the expansive theme park that was the Precious Moments Chapel. Actually, it was a sprawling campus with tour buses and fountains, ponds and a visitors’ center that combined the ambiance of a mall with the hushed reverence of a sanctuary. The ceiling of the visitors’ center glittered with a starry expanse of twinkling lights, and shops bustled with pilgrims who busily snapped up everything from greeting cards and night-lights to the sacred objects d’art themselves, all bearing the image of the Precious Moments trademark angels. (As I learned on the tour, these figurines have now passed Hummel and 4

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every other maker of ceramic figurines in sales worldwide.)

I made my way through the shoppers’ paradise to the long colonnade, lined by life-size (lifesize?—perhaps I’m taking this all too seriously) concrete statues of the inordinately chummy hosts, and finally arrived at the shrine itself. It was a large chapel, part Spanish-baroque, part Anaheim-funeral parlor,

whose doors opened electronically, only after the tour guide had explained the exquisite appointments and their subtle meaning. Behind the heavy wooden doors was truly a world of wonder: the entire interior was enchanted with fresco-like images of the adoring cherubs. They were everywhere: on the walls, the vaulted ceiling, and enshrined in stained plastic windows. As we exited, a trolley greeted us with sweets. A little piece of heaven in Missouri.

Why do I relate this story? Is it simply an occasion to poke fun at the innocent pastimes of Precious Moments collectors? Hardly. This is big business, not just sentimentalism. But while I was visiting this park, I had my own precious moment, an epiphany, as theories about the American religion and popular culture were suddenly captured in one experience. Like the MODERN REFORMATION

exaggerated features of the Precious Moment angels— calculated to evoke particular emotions of intimacy and sweetness—popular American religion in general has become increasingly captive to false gods.

Of course, only a hard-hearted Calvinist (perhaps a Lutheran, too) could launch such jeremiads against these delicate creatures. What gall: calling these delightful figures “idols”! I’m not calling them this because I believe that people are actually taking these ceramic trinkets home to a shrine, offering morning and evening supplications to them and lighting votive candles. But there are, after all, perfectly Protestant ways of setting up idols.

Like statues of Mary and the saints, these unique statues are not somehow evil themselves. There is nothing in the ceramic, no insidious conspiracy of a pottery elite, to lure us from the worship of God to the adoration of false deities. But I cannot resist the impression that the “cult of Mary and the Saints” has been replaced in some circles with the “cult of Sentimentality.” Instead of the “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” we have the “Sacred Heart of the Self.” And what could be more sentimental, more inviting, more user-friendly and cozy, than these cute and cuddly creatures?

It was not that Aaron was willing to have Israel worship a false god, but that he was willing to let them worship the true God falsely.

Nor am I suggesting that this business amounts to the “worship of angels,” that the apostles warned against in their letters. Nevertheless, I do wonder if this sudden obsession with angels in pagan America is, like the medieval cult, a distraction from the worship of the true God. Just as Mary and the saints were made into objects of folk art to become something other than they really were—sinless, pure, worthy of devotion and mediation—these Precious Moments “angels” are far from the biblical representation. After all, biblical angels were the servants of Yahweh who stood at the gate of Paradise after the Fall, with flashing sword,

barring entrance; ministers of judgment at Sodom and Gomorrah. One would be hard-pressed to have Michael the Archangel in mind when gazing on one of these benign figurines. Are these the angels that executed God’s plagues on Egypt? Do we have any reason to identify them even with the glad but epoch-making announcements of mysterious births that were to advance redemptive history? Even when one came with joyful tidings, Mary was filled with terror at the appearance of God’s angelic messenger.

Perhaps we like these adorable ceramic angels because they represent more than a likable, nonthreatening angel; they offer us a sentimentally attractive deity as well, a religion of the heart that “bind[s] the wounds of [God’s] people as though they were not serious, saying, ‘Peace,’ ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace.”

It is in this vein that I wish to focus our attention briefly on the Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Ex. 20:4).

Precious Metals The immediate backg round to this verse is instructive. The days before, God had commanded Moses to have a fence built around Mount Sinai. It was for the safety of the people, after all, for if God’s sinful people were to even touch the foot of God’s mountain, they would be killed. “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go down and warn the people not to press through to see me; otherwise many of them will perish’” (Ex. 19:21). Everyone wants to have an experience with God; we all want to see the spectacle, to take in the sight of his splendor. But God knows best. He is holy, and we are not.

After the giving of the Commandments, we read: “When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen, but do not have God speak to us, or we will die’” (Ex. 20:18). At Sinai, God’s presence in his holiness was not attractive to Israel, but repulsive. Because of their sinfulness, the people felt distant from God and afraid: “Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was” (v.21).

While God was giving his Commandments at the top of the mountain, his people were already breaking them down below. In chapter 32, we read that the Israelites were growing impatient with Moses’ absence, so Aaron accommodated to their “felt needs.” Instead of a God whose presence inspired fear, they wanted a “userfriendly” deity who imposed no limits and made them feel good about themselves. Like Adam, when he realized he JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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was naked and ashamed after his disobedience, the Israelites fled from God’s terrifying presence, but instead of fig leaves they fashioned a golden calf.

At last, here was a god who could be safely approached. It’s important for us to see here that Aaron was not violating the first Commandment: “You shall have no other gods...,” but the second. In other words, : “Tomorrow,” he decrees, “shall be a festival to the LORD” (Ex. 32:5). Notice, it’s a festival to the LORD—the capital letters referring to Yahweh, Israel’s God. In fact, this idolatrous form of Yahweh was so affable and friendly that the people “rose up early” to worship.

They were ready to go immediately, prepared to eagerly meet this chummy deity. They “sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play” (v.6). What a contrast with their experience of the Holy One of Israel! At last, they had created God in their own image: a manageable, agreeable god who would serve their cravings instead of inspiring fear.

While we attack high culture (those “culture elites”), we swallow popular culture whole.

When Moses returns from the top of the mountain, he confronts Aaron. Like Adam, who passed the buck to Eve, who passed the buck to the serpent, Aaron replies, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, how they are bent on evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off ’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” (vv. 21-24, italics added).

“Out came this calf,” indeed. We can almost, in our day, hear Aaron telling Moses, “Look, you were up there with God all this time and the natives were getting restless. They were impatient, fearful of a God who inspired terror. I kept them in tow and simply changed the form of worship, so that they would stay around.

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Well, they stayed, didn’t they? Don’t get hung up on style, Moses!”

Later in his life, Aaron would see his sons grow up into fine ministers of God in the sanctuary. But one day, they too offered an unauthorized offering in the Holy of Holies, and died instantly (Lev. 10:1-3).

“Aaron remained silent,” we read.

It is a tough lesson, and Israel had to learn it again and again. To worship God—even the true God— according to our own imagination rather than according to his own self-revelation, is to discover “the consuming fire” rather than the welcoming Presence.

But there is good news in the midst of all this. God did not want to destroy his people, and that is why he commanded them to stay at a distance and to carefully observe the ceremonial boundaries. It was not enough to worship the correct God; they had to worship the correct God according to his own revelation, not their own wits.

And why? Because one day, the true “icon of the invisible God” would appear, the promised Redeemer (Col. 1:15). God himself would visit his people and save them from his just wrath. He would come not in the form of a golden calf (or a ceramic cherub), but “though he was in the form of God,” he would come “taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). To solve the problem of impatience with an icon of their own making, Israel was substituting the glorious hope of the Incarnation and redemption in Christ with a mute piece of precious metal. They had worshipped themselves instead of God, settling for a cheap imitation who would satisfy their “felt needs” and momentary pleasures.

In the last century, theologian Ludwig Feuerbach declared, “The religious object of adoration is nothing but the objectified nature of him who adores it.” Claiming that Feuerbach was a “new Luther” in the history of human development, Karl Marx added, “Man makes religion, it is not religion that makes man; religion is in reality man’s own consciousness and feeling which has not yet found itself or has lost itself again.” Thus, Marx concluded, religion is “the opiate of the masses,” their selfcreated projections of hopes and longings. Sigmund Freud took this notion into psychoanalysis by arguing that religion was an “illusion” of human consciousness.

Religious statements do not refer to objective realities, but to the subjective, inner psychological world that one desires so much that he or she will project it as though it had the reality of a piece of furniture.

But what Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud discovered was the nature of idolatry, not the nature of Christian belief. Though our purposes here are not to pursue the latter, clearly these writers are correct in observing that MODERN REFORMATION

much of that which we call “religion” is indeed simply the illusory projection of our own felt needs, inner longings, and sinful demands. Israel projected her idolatrous longings for a user-friendly deity like that of her neighbors, and “out came this calf.” Likewise, we determine what is most important to us, shaped as we are by consumerism, popular entertainment, shallow conversation, and the torrent of trivial information, and out comes whatever image of God that happens to satisfy our momentary lusts.

In our day, the temptation is to view these stories as remote examples of a rather crude, superstitious antiquity.

And yet, ours is among the most image-based and imageworshipping societies in human history. Like the golden calf, our images promise health, wealth, happiness, success, even intimacy, without any price. “Don’t worry, be happy,” cry our gelded idols from the pages of slick magazines, billboards, TV and computer screens, and radio ads. “Sure it costs more, but I’m worth it!” “You deserve a break today!” “You can have it all!” “Just do it!” “Screw guilt!”

And too often, the evangelical world simply shapes its own calf from the fool’s gold of popular culture.

“God” is now worshipped as though he were a product, making promises not unlike those mentioned here in connection with other units of sales. Instead of being hidden in thick smoke, his voice shaking the earth as it sends terror into our sinful hearts, the images we market console us in our misery, enslaving us with bonds of addiction, at last leaving us to rot in a cell of consumption, self-deceit, and unfulfilled cravings.

Part of the problem is that we do not even really g rasp our captivity; we are still in the phase of adoration, believing in the benevolence of the idols too much to reject them. When we hear stories of persecuted Christians in hostile lands, we cheer them on in their refusal to give in to the enormous pressures of compromise. As for the persecuted believers themselves—especially in Islamic states—they do not have the luxury of enjoying both the comfort of their cultural acceptability and the purity of faith. At some point, they have to choose. After careful consideration, weighing the options, counting the cost, they finally agree courageously to be baptized, realizing that this will alienate them from their whole society. Now, of course, nothing like that confronts us in terms of degree, but we do face the same challenge in kind.

The problem is, we express alarm when it comes to the political and moral crisis of our time, while we often ignore the ways in which our culture is deeply corrosive of Christian faith and practice in deeper and broader ways. I am far more worried about the market-driven, therapeutic, narcissistic and entertainment-oriented culture of modern evangelicalism than I am about the second term of President Clinton.

Furthermore, while we attack high culture (those “culture elites”), we swallow popular culture whole, when in truth there is more that is true, good, and beautiful in high culture than a mass popular culture can ever yield.

When the church growth expert or the youth director hitches the ministry to the stars of popular culture (especially youth culture, which is the dominant form of popular culture), one might as well tell a Chinese Christian that her faith is perfectly consistent with Marxism or an Iranian believer that he need not renounce Islam in order to be a Christian. In fact, in terms of the parallel I am making here, one might as well even say that Marxism and Islam actually become practical means of grace, effective tools for evangelism. If this parallel sounds ludicrous, perhaps we have not sufficiently weighed the corrosive effects of a market-driven culture.

America’s popular culture is every bit as dangerous (perhaps more so because of its pervasiveness) as these more obvious threats. Popular culture, vast in its liturgical forms, is an ideology, perhaps even a religion.

A sappy, sentimental, harmless deity is hardly worthy of our awe, and perhaps this is one reason why the popular god elicits only passing excitement and new golden calves must be fashioned when today’s intoxication turns into tomorrow’s hang-over.

While there is undoubtedly a great deal more freedom and justice in America than in China or Iran, there is almost no discussion within evangelical circles about the enormously detrimental effects of free market capitalism and its mass popular culture on the family, vocation, local culture, language, and faith and practice.

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In a fallen world, free market capitalism may indeed prove the best system, but to suggest (even by implicit silence) that its effects are either entirely benevolent or neutral is, I think, precisely what makes it impossible for us to see ourselves as exiles. While we are not persecuted, we are seduced. What we need to do at this moment in time is to repent: to say simply, like the Chinese or Iranian convert, “By God’s grace, we renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil.” William Willimon of Duke University speaks of the need to focus on “preaching to the baptized,” but we should also start thinking and acting as the baptized.

But what if people stop coming to our churches? Is that really our business, assuming we are fulfilling our divinely-ordained functions? In Acts 2, we read that the apostles were preaching and God was adding daily to the number of the redeemed. We have to stop taking responsibility for the growth of the church and instead make faithfulness our measuring rod. It may just be that, as the culture unravels at an increasingly rapid pace, large churches that want to be faithful will experience serious numerical loss over a short time. This, it seems, to me, is the price we may have to pay, and it is hardly to be compared to the price paid by our persecuted brothers and sisters. The other option is to be increasingly seduced and to maintain our numbers or even increase the rolls, only to create a successful secularized congregation.

Perhaps pastors and their officers could spend their next retreat laying out such a call to repentance. Of course, there will be those, either on staff or as officers (or both) who will raise obvious practical questions, charts and graphs in hand. Surely wisdom would warn against extreme or sudden measures, but it is worth taking the time to build a team of pastoral and lay support before the typical warning lights start blinking.

What are you willing to lose in order to be faithful to God and his gospel? That is the question to put before the group.

If there were only one Word and one Mountain, we might all become existentialists and abandon ourselves to this nihilistic realm of self-destruction, where we consume and amuse ourselves to death. After all, if God is only wrath and power, justice and holiness, we too might as well call for the rocks to fall on us—or fill our days with frolic around the golden calf—rather than face the God who is there. But, as God revealed his goodness to Moses by proclaiming his mercy instead of showing his face, so now, when God at last comes near to us in the flesh of Jesus Christ, we can finally see God and live to tell about it. Instead of his word of judgment, we hear his word of pardon:

to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross. And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him... (Col. 1:20-21).

Instead of Mount Sinai, burning with smoke, we have come to Mount Zion (Heb. 12:18-28). In Christ, the Consuming Fire is hidden in the gentleness of the manger, turning water into wine, inviting sinners to his table. Clothed in him, we are protected like Moses in the cleft of the rock, and are able to stand in his Holy of Holies without fear of judgment. And yet, our worship must still be “with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is [still] a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29).

Given this self-revelation of God, what have we to do with the false religious images? A sappy, sentimental, harmless deity is hardly worthy of our awe, and perhaps this is one reason why the popular god elicits only passing excitement and new golden calves must be fashioned when today’s intoxication tur ns into tomorrow’s hang-over. As Israel fell under the spell of her neighbors’ idols again and again, so too the church in our day seems so eager to shape Yahweh into the various images of popular culture: enter tainment, sentimentality, therapy, marketing, anti-intellectualism, and passivity. C. S. Lewis once wrote that our cravings are wrong, not because we want too much, but because we’re willing to settle for too little. When God offers us a Mediator greater than Moses, a Living Redeemer instead of a golden calf, and a salvation so much richer and more promising than the trivial gods of our mass culture, how can we fail to turn from idols to the true and living God!

1 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, ed. by E. G. Waring and F. W. Strothmann (New York: Ungar, 1987), 10.

2 Ibid., viii.

3 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. and ed. by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).

Dr. Michael S. Horton is the president of Christians United for Reformation and a research fellow at Yale Divinity School. He is a graduate of Biola University, Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. In addition to the recently released In the Face of God: The Dangers and Delights of Spiritual Intimacy (Word), Dr. Horton is the author or editor of eight books. For further consideration of topics related to those of this article, see his Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991).

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Is “Popular Culture”Either?

KENNETH A. MYERS opular culture” is a slippery and deceptive term for a massive and unwieldy reality. As in other controversies, many arguments about popular culture are frustrating because there is no prior agreement on exactly what is being talked about.

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Sometimes “popular culture” is used to denote any cultural activity not produced and sanctioned by “elite” cultural institutions. But that really doesn’t clarify things, since the term “elite” has a number of meanings. In referring to “elite” cultural institutions, do we mean those institutions supported by a small group of people or those controlled by a small group of people? As it turns out, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example, serves a much smaller audience than does, say, CBS television. In that sense the Orchestra might be seen as a more elite institution than CBS. But the programming decisions for what appears on CBS are made by a very small elite, compared to the overall number of people working for CBS. The programming decisions at the Chicago Symphony are made by a much larger percentage of orchestra employees.

One might argue that the TV executives are more responsive to market forces than are the symphony orchestra board. And in that sense, CBS may be less of an elite institution. But the important thing to remember is that the artifacts of popular culture are neither created by nor controlled by the populace; they are as much the product of elites as are the artifacts of so-called “high culture.” Popular culture is trickle-down culture, consumed by the populace, but not initiated by them. “Baywatch” may be enormously popular, but David Hasselhof and Pamela Anderson are still in a small and amazingly influential elite.

Popular culture seems more democratic than high culture (and hence, in America, “better”) because pop culture elites do not treat the masses with disdain or paternalism. The works of popular culture make no

effort to “elevate” or “improve,” the way high cultural institutions often do. “Popular” is a horizontal and affable adjective, whereas “high” is proudly hierarchical.

“Popular” presents cultural life as egalitarian and natural, where “high” suggests standards, norms, and difficult striving. In fact, there is abundant evidence that the makers of popular culture, far from beckoning to the “lesser breeds without the law” from their superior pinnacle, are actually an anti-elite, coaxing those of us with scruples and a sense of decorum to slide down to their level. In an inverted mimicry of the pretentious artist-prophets of high culture, pop culture celebrities are also an avant-garde, a small band of brave pioneers, blazing new trails for the great unwashed to follow.

And follow they do. I recently heard an interview with members of a Los Angeles gang, who were asked by a pastor working with them why they felt the necessity to acquire certain brands of athletic shoes.

These kids knew immediately that the desire for these talismanic accessories was engendered by TV commercials. This is how popular culture works: the programs the kids were watching, the commercials they saw, the shoes they bought, and the social bonding within which these shoes were culturally significant to them. All of these elements are in some sense the stuff of popular culture. But none of it was generated at a popular level. Leave a bunch of inner-city kids alone for ten or fifteen years and it is unlikely that they will, ex nihilo, evolve a desire for Japanese-made cross trainers with pneumatic bladders.

For the most part, popular culture rarely comes from the people. It comes from elites more decisively than does high culture. In the past, high culture has relied much more often on elements appropriated from folk culture (e.g., folk tunes in classical music, folk legends in literature, folk masks in Picasso). Popular culture is endorsed by large masses of people and hence is regarded as being “of the people” more than high culture.

There are exceptions. You could make the case that JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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rap music originated in urban folk culture, and was promoted to popular cultural status (with the help of elites at record companies and radio stations). But generally, popular culture is no less elitist in origins than “high culture.” Cultural life always tends to be influenced dispropor tionately by elites, whether prophets, priests, potentates, poets, professors, or publicity managers.

What has changed over the history of American culture is the identity and intent of the elites who wield influence. Over the years various elites have vied for power. Clerical, academic, political, artistic, and mercantile elites (unlike many other nations, we have never had the visible prominence of a military elite) have taken turns in shaping cultural values. Today, the entertainment elite dominates because it governs the field that identifies and exports American culture to the rest of the world, the industry that produces our most successful export: entertainment. In fin-de-siecle America, the keys to the kingdom are in the hands of clowns, acrobats, and their wealthy masters.

Popular culture is not neutral regarding the sensibilities it encourages.

Because of the centrality of commercial concerns, popular culture maintains a preferential option for the upbeat, the informal, the new and “interesting.”

Those who defend popular culture summarily dismiss its critics as “elitists,” which is a category as obviously reprehensible as “racist” or “fascist.” But that charge ignores an important fact even as it conceals an essential assumption. The fact is that popular culture is sustained by elites whose guiding hand is not entirely 10

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unprejudiced. Since the well-being of these elites is sustained by certain cultural sympathies, they will always amplify certain themes at the cost of others. For example, popular culture is unimaginable without massmedia, which is in turn unimaginable without advertising, which would not survive in a cultural climate that places a premium on modesty, chastity, frugality, simplicity, and contentment. So those virtues will necessarily be alien to popular culture, even if the people wanted them there. Themes of restless desire, the lust for power, the insistence of moral autonomy, and resistance to restraint are common in popular culture precisely because its elites must sustain these sensibilities to stay in business.

The assumption that undergirds the charge of elitism is an anti-hierarchical egalitarianism, the notion that justice and goodness cannot be possible as long as hierarchies of authority remain. The Bible clearly assumes hierarchies of authority in social life in all forms. The preferred biblical metaphor for leadership in the church, for example, is that of shepherd, which sounds pretty “elitist” to me. “Pastors” are to be a sacrificial elite to be sure, but an elite nonetheless. The presupposition of biblical teaching is that any right-minded sheep should tur n to a shepherd for help whenever encountering the sort of trouble sheep are likely to get into. Shepherds aren’t perfect, to be sure; there are some things they might learn from observing sheep, and they need shepherding themselves. But they are clearly an elite, like it or not.

As Nathan Hatch has shown in The Democratization of American Christianity, Americans generally haven’t liked it.

So they have preferred those churches and polities that minimize or deny the authority of pastors. In fact, among Protestants, it seems assumed that the church government that governs least governs best. To the extent that shared Christian life is dominated by the same “populist” dynamics that drive popular culture, there are no shepherds, only sheep (or, in a misunderstanding of the Reformation principle, evangelicals seem to affirm the shepherdhood of all believers).

Yet, there are hidden elites in this realm as well; some sheep, it seems, have gotten stronger and louder than the rest. While the American Church generally rejects ecclesiastical authority, it is quite evidently susceptible to the leadership of affable celebrities, men and women with the same entertaining, anti-paternalistic manner as their counterparts at CBS. Some of them are celebrity speakers, some are writers (or skilled celebrities who manage teams of ghost-writers working for them), increasingly more are simply entertainers.

Just as the secular culture has moved from accepting MODERN REFORMATION

manners and mores from recognized elites to embracing the “lifestyles” concocted by unacknowledged “populistelites,” so the church in America has moved from submitting to the divinely ordained leadership of preacher-shepherds to the commercially driven leadership of charismatic storytellers, minstrels, and chanteuses. These crypto-shepherds, in turn, generally ape their secular counterparts, learning the technology of celebrity from the real masters. So it should not be surprising that Disney, David Letterman, and MTV are seen by Christian leaders, even pastors, as models for the art of “reaching people.”

The Church does not love its neighbors (or her Lord) if she mimics populist or egalitarian manners and thereby adds momentum to the debilitating suspicion of authority that afflicts our age.

Pop culture-inspired worship services (usually called “contemporary” worship, although such services totally exclude contemporary high culture) are often defended (with the certainty of those who believe they alone occupy the moral high ground) by the assertion that they are simply services that respect the vernacular of “the people.” It is true that many people coming to church on a given Sunday morning (believers and non-believers) do want something more informal, upbeat, and generally more consonant with the popular-culture sensibilities that they live with Monday through Saturday. But they want these things for the same reason that the ghetto kids want a pair of Nikes: because the ambiance of popular culture within which they live promotes and authenticates—or normalizes—certain sensibilities.

And, as suggested earlier, popular culture is not

neutral regarding the sensibilities it encourages. Because of the centrality of commercial concerns, popular culture maintains a preferential option for the upbeat, the informal, the new and “interesting.” This is not because these are the virtues that make a better person (let alone a better Christian), but because these are the attributes that produce the best consumers.

This is the greatest tragedy of all in the church’s careless appropriation of popular culture: that popular culture is not really a culture after all. Historically, cultures have been mechanisms of restraint. Cultural institutions, traditions, and artifacts developed as means of encouraging members of a society to respect its taboos, to obey its laws, and to become the sort of person whose character served the common good by conforming to a view of the good that the society held in common. In theological terms, cultures are thus instruments of common grace that keep people from doing every damned thing (theologically speaking) that they want to. Cultures were also deliberately intergenerational; cultural artifacts were ways of handing down to the coming generation the commitments and beliefs of the passing generation.

But, as University of Pennsylvania scholar Philip Rieff has pointed out, since Freud, cultures (and specific cultural institutions) have increasingly been seen as instruments of liberation rather than restraint. Since repression is a bad thing, the commonweal can be served (ironically) only if there is no notion of the common good that cultural institutions enforce. Empowering people to be all that they can be, to express all that they feel, and to obtain all that they desire is now seen to be the proper function of cultural institutions. I believe this assumption explains why high cultural institutions caved so quickly to the sensibilities of popular culture in the last thirty years. High culture had many defects, but total relativism was not one of them. High culture could only survive in the context of standards and norms of some kind. But a fully democratized and highly commercial popular culture admits no standards.

If the customer is always right, and if every social interaction is one in which I am best understood as a consumer, then everyone is always right everywhere.

As to the inter-generational structure of cultures, it should be obvious that the commercial aspects of popular culture demolish the possibility of inter-generational concerns. Just watch a Saturday morning’s worth of TV commercials, and see how many products are sold by making the appeal (tacitly or explicitly) that your parents (or adults in general, but especially adults in positions of authority) won’t like you to have this product. The idea of a youth culture is really a commercial invention; it is sustained by the desire to sell more and more products to younger and younger people by causing them to JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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understand themselves as a separate race.

So popular culture takes on the attributes of a kind of anti-culture, a system that rejects the task of restraint and normative character formation in favor of liberation and self-expression. Culture is not a legacy that is transmitted and received, it is a commodity that is consumed. Under this regime, children are not to be molded by participation in shared traditions, they are stimulated to “be themselves” and to buy themselves into being.

This is a very abbreviated glance at a very complex issue, but if the outlines of it are generally sound, it should cause some concern among Christians who want to exploit or co-opt popular culture for the sake of the gospel. As I have argued elsewhere, individual artifacts within the system of popular culture may be delightful and innocently entertaining. But the Church cannot condone the social dynamics or the existential sensibilities of popular culture. They are too distorting or too inadequate to perform the sorts of social and personal tasks that culture has, in the providence of God, the function of performing.

Two places to begin are suggested by the deficiencies in popular culture described above. The Church can be a community that displays loving and redemptive authority, thereby offering an alternative to the dubious populism promoted outside. Several cultural critics have argued that one of the major crises of modern society is the crisis of authority. The Church does not love its neighbors (or her Lord) if she mimics populist or egalitarian manners and thereby adds momentum to the debilitating suspicion of authority that afflicts our age.

Secondly, the Church can insist on its identity as an inter-generational community. It can do this structurally, by refusing to segment congregations by age, and temperamentally, by recovering a biblical respect for maturity and rejecting popular culture’s infantilism, thereby offering to children a goal of growing up.

Popular culture exalts perpetual adolescence. Rock critic Lawrence Grossberg recently described the way this fixated state is perpetuated in the music of youth culture: In privileging youth, rock transfor ms a temporary and transitional identity into a culture of transitions. Youth itself is transformed from a matter of age into an ambiguous matter of attitude, defined by its rejection of boredom and its celebration of movement, change, energy: that is, fun. And this celebration is lived out in and inscribed upon the body—in dance, sex, drugs, fashion, style and even the music itself.

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By contrast, in the view of biblical personhood, adulthood is a desirable telos. Paul regularly talks about perfection and completeness and maturity as aims for disciples.

Instead of adopting the ways of popular culture, the Church should show the world a more excellent way.

Instead of retooling Sunday to render it in synch with Monday through Saturday, the Church, in its proclamation and in its making of disciples, should offer a counter-cultural model of living obedience, seeking to transform what believers and unbelievers experience during the week by what happens to them and around them on Sunday.

1Lawrence Grossberg, “Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Really Care?: On the State of Rock,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51.

Kenneth A. Myers is a graduate of the University of Maryland and Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. The author of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture, and a former editor with National Public Radio, Mr. Myers is the host of the MARS HILL Tapes (800331-6407).

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MODERN REFORMATION

Q UTOES “Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.”—Aristophanes

“Let me net it out for you,” the pastor says as he concludes a sermon.

“We seek to provide a corporate, not a religious appearance.”

“Nothing should be expected in the service. It should be a total surprise each week. There should be an expectant buzz—like before a football game or rock concert.”

“We seek to get to the emotions as the emotions are the window of the soul.”

“If you have only $500 to spend in your church budget, spend $300 on multimedia.”

“I lose 15 to 20 percent of my effectiveness in preaching if I don’t have good lighting and sound system.”

“We’ve broken attendance records every time we’ve used the word ‘sex’ in a sermon title.”

“It’s especially difficult to write drama skits about God. Dramas on human relationships are easy. If your pastor decides to preach on the character of God, or something like that, I’d advise you to ignore his topic and stick with skits on human relationships.”

— Comments made at the Willow Creek Church Leadership Conference in May, 1992, as reported by John Seel, The Evangelical Forfeit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 92. “[Faith and worship] ought to go against the ‘character’ of a culture that makes commodities of God and worship, that deals with God and humans in terms of chumminess and folksiness, but never with awe—and thus seldom with power to liberate worshipers from the bonds of a binding and dulling culture.”

— Martin E. Marty, Foreword to Marva Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

“If we wish to remain a literate culture, someone is going to have to take the responsibility for teaching children at all socioeconomic levels how to talk, listen, and think...We care deeply about the ‘smartness’ of our children, but our culture lacks patience with the slow, time-consuming handwork by which intellects are woven. The quiet spaces of childhood have been disr upted by media assault and instant sensory gratification. Children have been yoked to hectic adult schedules, and assailed by societal anxieties.”

— Jane Healy, Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don’t Think (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 270-78.

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth [as in Orwell’s vision]. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 155-56.

“In every culture to which the Gospel comes there are men who hail Jesus as the Messiah of their society, the fulfiller of its hopes and aspirations, the perfecter of its true faith, the source of its holiest spirit...Cultural Christianity, in modern times at least, has always given birth to movements that tended toward the extreme of self-reliant humanism, which found the doctrine of grace—and even more the reliance upon it—demeaning to man and discouraging to his will.”

— H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951), 83, 113.

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“The promises of liberalism have not been fulfilled.

We are living in the midst of that vast dissolution of ancient habits which the emancipators believed would restore our birthright of happiness....We have come to see that Huxley was right when he said that ‘a man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes’....We have succeeded only in substituting trivial illusions for majestic faiths. [The modern person] does not believe the words of the Gospel but he believes the best adver tised notion. The older fable may be incredible today, but when it was credible it bound together the whole of experience upon a stately and dignified theme. The modern man has ceased to believe in it but he has not ceased to be credulous, and the need to believe haunts him.”

— Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 4-6.

“Thus it is that evangelicalism, no less than the earlier liberalism, pays its social dues. Liberalism never had a view of the transcendence of God, and evangelicalism rarely has a functioning view of the transcendence of God. Neither has had a place to stand outside the culture, therefore, and so each has been left to echo that culture, one on the high end and the other on the popular end.”

— David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 28.

“Where is my home? For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it. O eter nal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O eternal in vain.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche “I myself have often choked on our Lord’s statement that the way is narrow and have often thought: We are such a tiny and poor little flock, despised and condemned by everything high and great on earth. Do we have a right to defy the whole world, to boast that only our cause is right...? But we must overcome this and conclude: I know that my cause is right, though the whole world may say otherwise...Do not think: I shall stay with the majority, for the fact that the greater part of mankind is in darkness is nothing new.”

— Martin Luther.

“To be short, there is none of us who would not be pleased if those who have the charge of building and teaching the Church should please men: they should be willing to renounce our Lord Jesus Christ. And hereby all Ministers of God’s Word are taught to shut their eyes when they intend to discharge their duty faithfully, so that they do not look aside to the regard of men according to their disordered desires which they see, but set aside all desire of their popularity and favor.”

— John Calvin, sermon on Galatians 1:8-9.

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MODERN REFORMATION

Christianity and Culture GOD’S DOUBLE SOVEREIGNTY GENE EDWARD VEITH ost of the world’s faiths are cultural religions.

Hinduism, with its caste system and social rituals, is inextricably tied to the culture of India. Islam seeks to apply the Koranic law to every detail of society and so creates a specific culture, as evident throughout the Middle East. Tribal religions mythologize tribes’ customs, history, and social organization. Secular sociologists go so far as to define religion as a means of sanctioning the social order. According to this line of thought, cultural institutions are invested with a spiritual, divine significance, so that people will more obediently go along with them.

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Christianity, on the other hand, is not supposed to be merely a cultural religion. To be sure, sociology’s laws and the tendencies of our fallen nature give us a penchant for human-made or culture-made faiths that often hijack the church. The Bible, though, outlines a much more complex approach to culture, one that offers a radical critique of culture while encouraging believers to engage their culture in positive ways.

In the Old Testament, God elects the tribes of Israel, giving them a law and a covenant that turns them into something like a holy culture. But, far from having their social practices sanctioned by their God, the Hebrews are constantly being chastised for their failures to obey God’s transcendent demands. Their kings, for example, are constantly being condemned for their unrighteousness by the prophets and the inspired writers of the historical books, something unthinkable by Israel’s Canaanite neighbors, for whom the king was an avatar of a god.

The people of God were strictly forbidden to follow

after the ways of their pagan neighbors. When they nevertheless adopted the lax sexual and ethical mores of their neighbors and developed a syncretic theology that allowed the God of Abraham to be worshipped in the same culturefriendly ter ms as in the pagan religions, they experienced the full measure of his wrath.

The coming of Christ complicates the believer’s relationship to culture even further. Christianity is to be a faith for all cultures, “for every nation, tribe, people, and language” (Rev. 7:9). Cultural differences are not to obstr uct Christian unity, as the controversies in Acts and the Epistles over the status of gentile believers demonstrate. Though Jesus tells his followers to be salt, light, and leaven in the world, he also warns that the world will hate them (Mat. 5).

Christian freedom and service extend to every dimension of life, yet Christians are warned about the temptation of worldliness.

Christians are commanded to obey the secular authorities (Rom. 13:1-7), and yet to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).

Then we have the curious counsel of St. Paul: “I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat” (1 Cor. 5:9-11). Apparently, we should not associate with immoral Christians, but we should associate with immoral unbelievers.

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Jesus, in his prayer in Gethsemane, sets forth the principle that his followers are to be “in the world,” but not “of the world”: “I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one....As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world” (John 17:14-18).

Christians are somehow to be separated from the world, while still being involved, redemptively, in it.

How are we to untangle these paradoxes? The question is especially urgent today. Our culture has virtually cut what ties it may have once had to biblical faith. An ascendant popular culture whose only values are hedonism, entertainment, and consumerism is sweeping away both the traditional values of the folk culture and the rational standards of the high culture and is now demanding supremacy in the church. Though Christianity is facing dangerous cultural contamination, we, as Christians, are still called to serve, influence, and communicate the gospel to this culture. In order to navigate through these cultural challenges, while maintaining both theological integrity and cultural relevance, Christians need to understand the double sovereignty of God. Theological Alternatives Richard Niebuhr, in his classic book Christ and Culture outlines the different possible relationships between the two, each of which has been advocated in the history of the Church. One option is to put culture above Christ.

In this view, Christianity serves culture, or, in the words of the National Council of Churches slogan: ‘The world sets the agenda for the church.’ When the culture changes, Christianity must also change to maintain its relevance.

This is the path of liberal theology.

There have been many different kinds of theological liberalism in church history. During the Age of Reason of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, many theologians jettisoned the supernatural teachings of scripture in an effort to turn Christianity into a “rational” religion. When the rationalistic vogue gave way to the emotional focus of nineteenth century Romanticism, the liberal theologians changed their tune and taught that Christianity is a matter of religious feelings. After Darwin, Romanticism gave way to a trust in utopian social progress, and the liberal theologians said that’s what Christianity is all about. The twentieth century has seen a plethora of intellectual fashions and social movements—existentialism, socialism, the peace movement, gay rights, feminism—and each has had its liberal theologians revising Christianity accordingly.

Today, in our postmoder n era, belief in the supernatural is once again socially acceptable, though the relativism now in vogue makes doctrine and absolute 16

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standards of morality highly suspect. Generally, people in our contemporary American culture want to have a good time, have their consumer needs met, and be left alone to their own values, beliefs, and vices. These new cultural attitudes have given rise, as always, to another form of liberal theology.

Churches that were once evangelical, boldly standing up for the gospel and the authority of the Bible against modernist culture and its liberal theologians, are now changing their teachings and their practices to keep up with the culture. They conduct market surveys to find what the religious consumers of their culture want, then they respond like any other successful business. They throw out time-tested modes of worship in favor of whatever styles are most popular. Told that people do not want to hear about how sinful they are, they switch to more positive messages of self-esteem. They comb the Bible for principles for successful living rather than preaching that Christ died for sinners. Though these Christians may have the best of motives in trying to reach their culture, they often fail to see that, instead, their culture has reached them. Though they often call themselves evangelical, those who uncritically follow the dictates of the culture are not evangelicals at all but simply the latest version of an old theology: they are liberals.

The problem with liberal theology in all of its manifestations is that it turns Christianity into what it must never merely be, a cultural religion. The Church, in passively agreeing with a godless world, and in trying so hard to be relevant, actually loses its relevance. Why should anyone go to church if it offers nothing more than what the culture has already provided? Disabled from being able to criticize or influence the culture and having surrendered its transcendent moorings, religion is reduced to the role that sociologists have assigned it— making people feel good about their society by peddling the illusion that their culture is the ultimate reality.

Instead of placing culture above Christ, as the liberals do, other Christians have, more nobly, placed Christ above culture. In this view, Christianity offers standards to which the culture should be made to conform. Those who place Christ above culture will attempt to develop and promote distinctly Christian approaches to art, music, economics, science, and every other sphere of life. Society should be reformed until it approximates a Christian civilization.

This option has also been found throughout the history of the church. The Lordship of Christ over the earthly kingdoms has been emphasized by medieval popes, Reformation commonwealths, nineteenth century social reformers, twentieth century liberation theologians, and some contemporary Christian political activists. Christians with this cultural stance have boldly stood up against social evils and in many cases have exerted a powerful influence MODERN REFORMATION

for good. Many have adopted this approach, from Puritan revolutionaries in seventeenth century England and eighteenth century America to today’s Reconstructionists who seek to make the Bible the law of the land.

There is no need for a distinctly Christian approach to music, plumbing, or computer science because all of these things … already fall under God’s sovereignty.

While I cannot find anything about theological liberalism to respect, I do admire those Christian reformers and revolutionaries who defy their cultures and attempt to make them conform to God’s law. And yet, there are problems with this position. In the first place, it often underestimates the effect of the Fall and the scope of human sinfulness. No human being, much less a culture, can in fact keep God’s law. No earthly kingdom, even one ruled by or consisting of Christians, can be a utopian paradise this side of Eden. All are transient and will prove disappointing, corrupted by injustice or pride, until Christ rules directly in the kingdom of heaven.

There can be no such thing as a Christian culture as such, because Christianity comes from faith in the Gospel, not the works of the Law, and God saves individuals, not nations. Not every member of a culture is going to be a Christian. Since conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is impossible to coerce or require anyone to become a Christian. The unregenerate cannot obey biblical principles so as to be part of a Christian culture. Neither, while they are in their fallen flesh, can Christians.

A culture ruled completely by Christ is a reality in heaven and will be realized on earth at his return, but attempts on the part of human beings to establish heaven on earth prematurely by their own efforts and on their own terms, are doomed to fail. At the worst, they result in the divinization of culture, with Christianity reduced, once again, to a cultural religion.

Another option cited by Niebuhr is Christ against culture. This view recognizes the sinfulness of human institutions and calls Christians to separate from the corrupt culture, withdrawing into distinct Christian communities. The church becomes an alternative to the mainline culture, and Christians refuse to take part in the culture as a whole.

This approach characterized the early monastic movement, the Anabaptist subcultures, fundamentalist separatism, and the various experiments in Christian communal living of the last few decades. The Amish are a continual example of a group of Christians refusing to compromise with the worldly culture, rejecting military service, contemporary dress, and modern technology as being unworthy of their commitment to radical discipleship.

Again, this kind of integ rity and radical commitment commands respect. But it too is problematic. Besides denying God’s sovereignty over the rest of the world, it violates the words of Jesus: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world....As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world” (John 17:15, 18). Jesus directs us not into the protection of a fortified bunker; rather, he sends us into the world in service and evangelism.

Furthermore, the option of separatism, in forming a Christian subculture, has the effect of reducing Christianity into just another culture. The Amish may end up defining themselves by their beards and buggies, rather than by a transcendent gospel. Christianity, once again, becomes a cultural religion.

Two Kingdoms Under One King The remaining possibility for the relationship between Christ and culture appears to be the one that best accounts for the scriptural injunctions. Niebuhr calls it “Christ and culture in paradox”; Luther calls it the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. This view accounts for the insights of the other positions, acknowledging that we are cultural creatures, that God is sovereign over every sphere of life, and that Christians must be both separate from the world and actively involved in it.

The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms has been explored not only by Lutheran theologians but by Augustine in his great work The City of God (see, for example, James Boice’s Two Cities, Two Loves) and probably describes the way most faithful Christians have always carried out their fidelity to Christ in their secular callings.

According to this view, God is sovereign both in the church and in the culture—but he rules the two in different ways. In the church, God reigns through the work of Christ and the giving of the Holy Spirit, expressing his love and grace through the forgiveness of sins and the life of faith. God also exercises his authority and providential JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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control through all of creation—upholding the very universe, so that the laws of physics, the processes of chemistry, and other natural laws are part of what he has ordained. Similarly, God rules the nations—even those who do not acknowledge him—making human beings to be social creatures, in need of governments, laws, and cultures to mitigate the self-destructive tendencies of sin and to enable human beings to survive.

Thus, God has a spiritual rule in the hearts and lives of Christians; he also has a secular rule that extends throughout his creation and in every culture. God reigns in the church through the gospel, the proclamation of forgiveness in the Cross of Jesus Christ, a message which kindles faith and an inward transformation in the believer. He reigns in the world through his law, which calls human societies to justice and righteousness.

Notice that, according to this view, morality is not a matter of religion. Contrary to those who would silence Christian objections to abortion, for instance, on the grounds that moral issues are inappropriate intrusions of private religious belief, the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms insists that God’s Law is universal in its scope and authority. As C. S. Lewis has shown in The Abolition of Man, it is simply not true that every culture and every religion has its own morality. Principles of justice, honesty, courage, and responsibility to one’s neighbor are universal. Though revealed most fully in Scripture, God’s law is written on the hear ts even of the unbelieving gentiles (Romans 2:14-16).

Human beings and cultures are, however, in a state of rebellion against him. No individual can keep God’s law and entire cultures are subject to corruption, injustice, sexual depravity, and every other kind of evil. While the world is condemned and all human institutions will pass away, God saves some in the ark of his church. Christians, strictly speaking, are no longer under the law at all—their new life of faith will make them spontaneously do what God requires, though because of their fallen nature full perfection will be found only in heaven.

In the meantime, Christians have a vocation in the world. They are called to evangelize, serve others, and do good works in the unbelieving world. Christians also must continue to play their part in their cultures, serving God in his secular kingdom in secular ways. A Christian farmer is expressing his love for God and neighbor by growing food for everyone, not just fellow believers; a Christian CEO serves God and neighbor by selling useful products, giving a livelihood to employees, making money for stockholders, and contributing to the good of the economy.

A Christian is thus a citizen of two kingdoms—the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of this world.

These spheres have different demands and operate in different ways. But God is the King of both.

This doctrine has sometimes been misunderstood to 18

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mean that the secular government has absolute authority as an agent of God. This is the farthest from the truth.

God is the king. His law judges the kingdoms of the earth. A governmental system, such as that of Nazi Germany, which is in stark violation of that law is in a state of rebellion and can demand no allegiance. A nation, however, need not be ruled by a Christian to exercise legitimate authority. The ruler’s faith is a matter of the other kingdom and a function of the gospel; even an unbelieving ruler, however, can be held accountable to God’s law and to its corollaries in the secular requirements of effective government.

Both kingdoms are binding, but they are not to be confused with each other. The secular values of the culture are not to be imposed upon the church. Nor may the spiritual realm be imposed upon the secular culture.

Saving faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit and cannot be a matter of coercion. Nor can the freedom created by the gospel be applied to unbelievers, who are still in their sins.

People today who oppose the death penalty, for example, because we should forgive, would be confusing the two kingdoms, as would pacifists who oppose all war because we are told to love our enemies. I recently came across a book that addressed the problem of crime by advocating that all criminals be released from prison. Jesus said that he came to proclaim release to the captives, the author argued. Therefore, we should do as he said, trusting that the gesture would transform the criminals’ hearts.

Christians must certainly express the love and forgiveness of Christ in their relationship with others, both inside and outside of the church. But God’s other kingdom operates in terms of power, coercion, punishment, and the sometimes harsh demands of justice.

The lawful magistrate is “God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” and “does not bear the sword for nothing” (Romans 13:4). As a citizen in both kingdoms, a Christian may thus operate in different ways in the two spheres. No Christian should take private revenge, but a Christian soldier, judge, police officer, or juror may well have to “bear the sword.”

If the government bears the sword, the church bears only the Word. Though the local church is also an earthly institution and so must be concerned with committees, by-laws, and even politics, the church is not to be run like a business, a nation, or the surrounding culture. It should be a haven of love and mutual forgiveness in the midst of a fallen, sin-sick world.

Christians exercising their vocations in the secular culture must assess their activity in secular terms, which are also under God’s sovereignty. A Christian artist may well express his faith in his art, but the quality of the art lies primarily not in its theological message but in its aesthetic excellence, since the laws of aesthetics have been ordained by God in his creation. There is no need MODERN REFORMATION

for a distinctly Christian approach to music, plumbing, computer science, physics, or wood-carving, because all of these things, no matter how secular or non-religious they appear, already fall under God’s sovereignty.

Conversely, the church must never uncritically capitulate to the culture. Money-making, marketing techniques, entertainment ventures, power politics, and intellectual fashions must never set the church’s agenda, which must be governed instead solely by theWord of God. The Two Kingdoms and the Culture Wars The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms is most often applied to the Christian’s obligations to the state, but it also illuminates the cultural controversies which are causing so much confusion in today’s church.

Should Christians get involved in politics? Yes, as part of our vocation in God’s secular kingdom. The goal should not be necessarily the election of Christian rulers, nor to make America a “Christian nation.”

Rather, it should be to apply God’s law in our social relationships and to establish justice and righteousness in our land. Abortion, for example, is a monstrous crime against the weakest and most defenseless in our society, and Christians are right to work against this evil, as against many others. Christians in politics must play by political rules, whether hard-ball power plays or the arts of compromise and consensus building. The church should be gentle and loving, while never compromising its doctrines. The rough-and-tumble of the political process, however, means that Christian politicians should not be prevented from exercising power or from making a tactical compromise by the charge that to do so is “not Christian.” That confuses the kingdoms. Christian politicians, however, like all politicians, must exercise their power justly and in accordance with God’s law.

Can a Christian take part in the expressions of the surrounding culture? Yes. Christians are still part of their culture and can be expected to share the tastes of their neighbors. A Christian can enjoy, perform, and get involved in secular art forms; they need not be religious, but they are subject to God’s law. Christians need to draw the line at music or any other form of entertainment that violates God’s canons of morality by tempting us to sin.

Can a Christian, then, like rock music? Yes, for the most part. This does not mean, however, that Christians should demand rock music in church. The secular kingdom, again, must be kept separate from the spiritual kingdom. Churches must keep themselves distinct from the surrounding culture.

To return to our earlier categories, a liberal would have little trouble accepting any brand of currently popular music and would even import it into the church.

By this way of thinking, the church must always give in and conform itself to whatever the culture is doing. A

Christian who believes in Christ above culture would reject secular music and try to devise a completely distinct Christian style, to which every subsequent piece of music should conform. A Christian who believes in Christ against culture would allow the world its own music but never listen to it, developing instead a separate Christian musical style.

A Two Kingdoms approach would allow the Christian to enjoy secular music, even, for those with the God-given talent, to pursue a musical vocation. The Christian’s standards for this music would be God’s moral law, but also God’s aesthetic laws, which were built into the created order and human nature by God himself. The Christian musician might express his or her faith artistically, but the work would be assessed not primarily by its theology but by its aesthetic merits, which also come under God’s dominion. The music, though, would not have to be explicitly religious at all— it is part of God’s dominion even in its secularity.

This same Christian musician, whether a rock ‘n’ roller or a concert violinist, would very likely object to electric guitars or chamber music in church. Art designed to please and to gratify the senses has its place, but worship belongs to the Word of God. Here, theological truth must take priority. The purpose is not to entertain the congregation but to convict them of sin and convert them to Christ. The audience is not the culture but God, whom the entire congregation is seeking to glorify—in his terms, not ours.

Kenneth Myers has said in his brilliant book All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes that the contemporary church has reversed Christ’s injunction to be in the world, but not of the world. Instead, he says, we are not in the world—with our separate schools, bookstores, music companies, and other cultural institutions, so that we seldom interact with non-believers—and yet, we are of the world. Our music, stores, schools, and corporate structures, may be separate, but they are exactly like their secular counterparts.

Recognizing God’s double sovereignty over all of life can enable Christians to be engaged in a positive, transforming way, with their culture without succumbing to the deadly, spirit-quenching sin of worldliness. It is a formula for both faithfulness and relevance.

Dr. Gene Edward Veith is Professor of Humanities and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University— Wisconsin. A member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Dr. Veith is also the author of Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), and a contributor to Here We Stand!: A Call from Confessing Evangelicals (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996).

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PosthumousTabletalk RICK RITCHIE t is easy when you are disenchanted with your own age to imagine that a time machine would solve all of your problems. Aside from a few choice discoveries—antibiotics and indoor plumbing to name a couple—I think that I could manage just fine without most of what the moder n age has produced. But such thoughts do nothing to help me figure out how to live in the time I have been placed.

I

A more instructive exercise is to consider how our century would look to wise Christians of the past.

Imagine if we had a time machine and brought forward three Christians from different centuries, allowing them a week to immerse themselves in modern life, and then gathered them together for a discussion over dinner, what might we learn?

Let’s choose for the journey St. Augustine (fourth century), Martin Luther (sixteenth century), and C. S. Lewis (early twentieth century). This trio offers us the advantage of seeing our own age at varying distances.

For maximum culture shock, I am transporting these men to Southern California. (If any reader is nosy and wants to know how we conquered the language barrier, the seven-year old Sunday school girl from the future who was thoughtful enough to send her time machine back to me also sent me some translation pills. She said that she didn’t know how they worked, but that they were a lot better than the old kind that made everybody dream in Pig Latin afterwards.) Also, I have snatched each man away well on in his career to offer us the most wisdom possible.

After assuring our distinguished travelers that they would be redeposited at the same time and place where they were taken from, each man agreed to be part of the experiment. St. Augustine was intrigued and said that this undertaking confirmed some of his opinions on the nature of time. C. S. Lewis found it amusing that we grabbed him while he was searching his wardrobe for a coat. And Martin Luther thought that one of his princes had kidnapped him yet again to keep him out of enemy hands. We boarded our guests in a rented house overlooking the beach, and told them that they could be chauffeured anywhere they wished, and could spend their 20

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time as they saw fit. After a week we all agreed to meet to discuss their findings.

Our conversation took place at the Five Crowns, an English country restaurant in Newport Beach, which I had chosen to compensate for the lack of cultural depth they encountered during their visit. We taped the following exchange after our plates had been filled with prime rib, and our glasses with hearty burgundy. (Don’t sneer. CURE was picking up the tab, so I was on a tight budget!)

St. Augustine: This has truly been a most confusing week. Human invention has changed the world in so many ways. The preacher in Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun. In your world, I wonder if there is anything old. Most of the people are as old as most of the houses, and I don’t remember seeing even one graveyard during the entire week. People are not reminded of their mortality. And without seasons, your world has a false timelessness about it. The comfort was that despite the changes, I was able to use the time profitably. I found a church in which to say my prayers in the morning, and the university library had a book called a Bible concordance which made the whole journey worthwhile. Just wait until I get back to write another treatise against the Pelagians! No wonder I haven’t seen any Pelagian churches in this city.

Martin Luther: As a Christian, I must say you are living in an evil age. This is a city the devil would love for men to live in. It is a city where all necessities and pleasures are available, but nobody knows of Christ. Like St. Augustine, I found myself able to use the time well, however. This world would be a great place for any Christian who could keep himself from getting too caught up in the whirl.

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C. S. Lewis: I agree with my colleagues in that I find myself having mixed feelings about your time. I have not come so far to visit. Even in my time, I had an inkling of where the culture was headed, and I see that I was correct. Some things are worse than I would have imagined. But there are some hopeful signs as well.

Ritchie: Like what?

Lewis: Like the current popularity of myth. Early twentieth century England was so dominated by rationalism that most children grew up imaginatively starved. I just watched the Star Wars trilogy and loved it.

Your cinema may be connecting the current generation with those who have gone before in ways that were not possible in my time. To a child acquainted with Luke Skywalker, a tyrant will look like someone to fight against any odds, not someone to appease and grovel before. I do worry that people are forgetting how to amuse themselves by reading. But myth from the cinema is better for the imagination than the petty everyday life drivel that many in my generation were reading in their youth.

Ritchie: Already I can see that you men spent your weeks very differently. St. Augustine tried to use his week like any other week, in prayer and study. From what you have said and other discussions, I take it that Professor Lewis spent much of his time walking the streets and taking in movies and videos. He also read a stack of novels. And Dr. Luther, how did you spend your time?

Luther: Since I knew that I was returning home soon, I did not feel that anything that I could do for your world would accomplish more than anything I have already done. What I have written I have written. I spent some time in my room in prayer each day, but beyond that, I set out to enjoy myself. I went to a music concert one night that was particularly good. A performance of Handel’s Messiah. I spent another day touring a printer’s shop to see how the work had changed. With all of the advances, jobs were still running late.

And as you well know, I spent every afternoon with you and Dr. Lewis at Hudson’s Grill drinking beer. There is one thing I need explained to me before I go mad, though. I thought that in my day the church had sunk as low as it could go. I was wrong.

St. Augustine: That is disturbing. What did you find?

Luther: I visited a monastery where the Papacy has given up every pretense of being Christian. From the outside, the monastery looked like the one place where everything had stayed almost the same. The monks had shaved heads and chanted like all monks do. Their robes were orange, but that was no shock. (After a few

centuries they might want to wear a new color.) But it was when I walked inside that I could see that something was terribly wrong. There was no crucifix at the front of the chapel. The monks sat in front of a giant gold statue, and I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to represent Jesus or the Virgin Mary or...

Ritchie: Dr. Luther, I think that was a Buddhist monastery, not a Roman one.

Luther: Who are the Buddhists? A new sect? Were they those people you said broke off from Zwingli’s bunch after the Reformation?

Ritchie: No. Those were the Baptists. The Buddhists are an old pagan religion.

Luther: Thank heaven! So why did they use the word monastery? Don’t the pagans have a word of their own?

Ritchie: There is probably a Chinese word for such a place, but they want people to understand what it is, so they choose the closest equivalent in English.

Luther: What an evil perversion of language. Don’t people realize what that kind of thing does? Before my time, the gospel was lost to the church for centuries because of the improper translation of one Greek word that you in English translate “repentance.” It could happen here too. If the Buddhists can call their religious place a monastery, what is to keep some other pagan group from using the word “church”?

Ritchie: They do it all the time.

Luther: And Christians don’t protest? What are those outside of the church to think if they hear the same word applied to Christians and pagans? They will think that all religion is the same. It is confusing enough when you share these words with heretics. You need to win this word back!

Ritchie: You’re right, of course, but I think it’s hopeless. We can’t outlaw their use of the word. To get back to the subject, however, I wanted to find out what you three men think of our popular culture.

St. Augustine: I still do not understand the ter m. You use it like our word “civilization,” but a little differently.

Luther: I don’t understand your use of the term either. I thought you wanted to know what we thought of your world because our insights might help the church.

Ritchie: That is what I had hoped. But I wanted to know what you thought of our novels, our movies, our music. It seems like the two of you kept as clear as possible from them. Only Dr. Lewis appears to have spent his time in a way helpful to the topic.

Lewis: In my time, the word culture was used to describe the elevation of taste. To speak of popular culture would JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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have been nonsense. To be popular means to lower taste.

I had no interest in taste as such. I happened to love literature, and wanted to help people to enjoy books. I knew they could do this better with good books than with poor books. Your use of the word culture is that of the anthropologist. Am I right in thinking that you wish to use the products of popular culture as a means of understanding the spirit of the age?

Ritchie: Yes. That is exactly what I wanted to do. But you are the only one who immersed yourself in popular culture in a way that allows me to find anything out.

Lewis: You are wrong on that point. Dr. Luther made an insightful observation about your culture, and you missed it because you were looking for a narrower kind of insight. Dr. Luther’s comments on the misuse of language are perhaps as telling as anything he might have observed in a twentieth-century film or novel.

Ritchie (outflanked): You’re right, of course.

St. Augustine: It surprises me to think that just because I spent most of my time in a library you think I was away from your world. At every moment, I was intensely aware that I wasn’t in my own.

Ritchie: I apologize. I suppose I had a preconceived idea about what I wanted to learn from you before we came together.

Lewis: Most of my students come to study under me in the same condition. It is common enough, but real learning can happen when that is overcome.

Luther: It is true that I didn’t read a novel.

A new type of writing demands a lot of concentration, and I was busy enough learning how to do day-to-day tasks.

Television is different—so easy to watch.

It is the most surprising invention your age has produced. But it reminds me of the printing press. It took a genius to invent it, but any blockhead can spread nonsense with it. A few days ago I was watching one of your so-called after noon talk shows and I was astounded. There was no order to it at all. Some idle women sat on a stage and bickered with one another.

Then I found out that one of them was a man dressed as a woman, but before I had the chance to look at the man carefully to see whether it was so, the show’s host said they would be back after some messages. This was followed by an even more surprising scene. A singing cleanser bottle danced into a bathroom where it was joined by a chorus of singing toilet bowls. Now, I think that you have improved on plumbing since my time, but dear Mary and All Angels, I don’t want to listen to toilets sing!

Ritchie: I agree that those afternoon shows are mindless, but the singing toilet bowls were not part of the show, 22

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but part of a commercial, a break in the normal program where a product is sold.

Luther : I am familiar with the practice. We had something similar in our church services under the Papacy. It was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now.

But what I found troubling was not that people would watch the program, or even the commercials. What concerned me was that everyone takes the discussion seriously, as if a moral question had received thorough treatment. I overheard some people on the street discussing the program I had watched. The young man said that he thought that the cross-dresser was born with a problem and wasn’t responsible on that account. I remember the cross-dresser claiming he was born that way, but I don’t even remember a bad argument being made that we aren’t responsible for inborn inclinations. I wrote a whole book, The Bondage of the Will, to defend the idea that we are responsible for such things. My opponent, Erasmus, wrote a feeble treatise in reply, but he at least argued his case. In your time, nobody even has to offer the semblance of an argument. A bare assertion made on television settles the matter.

St. Augustine: I wonder if I was too quick to rejoice in the fact that the Pelagians are gone. I hadn’t realized that the world could do worse than fight over the truth. People may actually reach a point where they no longer even ask the question of what it means for man to be morally responsible before God. Lewis: I wouldn’t be so hasty in my conclusions, gentlemen. People in any age are often careless when judging matters that do not concern them directly. But when a modern is wronged, he becomes a moral philosopher. If the cross-dresser on the show stole a car from the young man Dr. Luther mentioned, the young man would tolerate no nonsense from him about an inborn tendency to steal.

Ritchie: Do you think television is harmless, then?

Lewis: No, but I wonder if the greater danger is not in what it does, but in what it causes to be left undone.

Books are not being read on account of television. Nor are they being written or published. Silence becomes rare. So does conversation.

St. Augustine: What I noticed was how rude people are to each other on television. And I hear people being rude to each other on the streets.

Luther: What I observed was that when someone on television is insulted by another, he fails to react. The insult is made for the sake of humor, not to portray character. The insults do make me laugh, but I fear that people will emulate what they see. They may find that MODERN REFORMATION

when they try out the insults on their friends that the reaction is different from what they saw on television.

St. Augustine: Maybe television teaches people to receive insults as well as give them. When I first watched a comedy, I thought that the insulted character was a pious Christian who refused to return evil for evil. Then I learned that the whole situation was created for the sake of comedy. Since then I have seen people on the street receive the insults the same way as the characters on television. What was once an act of high character is now done for trivial motives. A pious Christian receives an insult because a holy God is watching. A modern man receives an insult because bored people are watching.

Lewis: These changes in culture slip by, and I would venture to guess that nobody notices them. Such observations require time and reflection. As people become busier, they have less time for reflection, and all of the institutions that were created to support and shelter such fragile practices fall into disuse.

St. Augustine: “He that hath little business shall become wise,” says the Wisdom of Solomon. I agree with Dr. Lewis. Nations would have gone to war to acquire the treasures I found in the university library, but it stands unused. I was also surprised that such a wonderful collection of books is housed in such an ugly setting.

Ritchie: This surprises me, since you are known for having been somewhat of a puritan. People expect you to prefer a bare-bones approach to things. After all, you weren’t known for favoring ostentation.

St. Augustine: Those external matters mean little to me, but there is the matter of proportion. The sacramental bread is just as holy in a wooden bowl as in a gold one.

And I would prefer it to be in a wooden bowl rather than see the poor neglected. But if everyone is eating out of fine golden vessels at home, more is demanded of us at church unless we are to be charged with despising God. The university library would be a suitable building for another time or place. But when your bank buildings and businesses have marble walls, your libraries should have marble walls. I know what your culture values when I compare the adornment of churches with the private homes I have visited.

[I look over and see Professor Lewis lighting a cigarette.]

Ritchie: I’m sorry, Dr. Lewis. You can’t smoke in here.

It’s against the law.

Lewis: Smoking is illegal in your time?

Ritchie: Only in public buildings.

Lewis: You didn’t tell me this place was a government restaurant.

Luther: He has gotten me hooked on the things, and I won’t be able to find them when I get home. He is a naughty boy who deserves to be disciplined.

[Luther shakes his finger at Lewis.]

St. Augustine: He doesn’t look like a boy.

Luther: I am more than four centuries his senior. That makes him a boy to me.

Ritchie: Dr. Luther, there are Christian groups who do believe that smoking is a sin.

Luther: Who? The Buddhists?

Lewis: No, the Anabuddhists. [We laugh, although St. Augustine’s might have been a courtesy laugh. I don’t think he understood the joke. He had been suspicious of Lewis and Luther all week. We silently resumed eating for a few minutes since all of our prime rib meals were getting cold.]

St. Augustine: I have been watching CNN for the last few nights. What amazes me is the interest that people take in things that occur so far away.

Luther : In my time, when the Holy Roman emperor was in another country, we forgot all about him and got on with our work. In your time, your interest in your president is different. He commands attention whether he is doing anything significant or not, just because he is an important figure. Someone local might be the real hope or the real danger, but you direct all your attention to the president. I think that people who feel insignificant feel a sense of power when they can watch the powerful. They believe that someone has the power to change the shape of human life for them.

St. Augustine: I think our host’s expectations of how we would have spent our time support your thesis, Dr. Luther. It has occurred to me that he sees the three of us as major figures, as past Christian nobility, who would have a strategic vision of the world and modern life and how we could overhaul all of it, as if we created heaven and earth.

[My three guests have a hearty laugh at my expense.]

Ritchie: No, I don’t think that at all. But all three of you did interact with the culture of your day. You offered Christian counsel on a variety of cultural topics. St. Augustine, you wrote a treatise on music. Another church Father, Tertullian, even wrote a work titled “On the Dress of Women.” When we discuss these specific topics, larger issues relating to an overall sense of life always arise quickly.

St. Augustine: True enough. I am just worried that you take your own position in the world too seriously. I have learned from the Christians I have met in your time that they tend either to be completely unaware of the issues JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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at stake in the world around them, or if they are aware, seem to think that they command a degree of control or influence that they do not have. Most people are unaware of the state of civilization, or as you call it, culture. But those who are aware seem to want to save the whole culture without contributing to it. In the new book area of the library I saw all these books on the decline of education, but I wonder if anyone is being persuaded to teach. We aren’t called to be spectators in a drama of doom, but faithful Christians.

Ritchie: We are a consumer culture, and cultural criticism is consumed like anything else. It can be seen as another form of entertainment.

St. Augustine: I understand. Some of that is true in any age. In my time, after a good fiery ser mon, the hearers would be convinced that Rome had been cleaned up—until they headed back to their homes. I recognize this from my own time.

Luther: You asked earlier about popular music. I have a strong background in music, but I can’t make sense of your popular music. People’s ears must have changed over the centuries. So many people seem to be convinced that modern music is good music. Could I alone be right in thinking that there is something wrong with it? Am I alone right when everyone is wrong? Now that sounds like the question the devil throws at me regarding the gospel. I’ll stand alone for the gospel, but not for my musical opinions.

Ritchie: Does anyone else have an opinion on the music?

Lewis: The popular music is headed in the same direction I saw it going in the late thirties. The same cynicism is combined with the same poetical trend toward intentionally ambiguous or secret meaning. It is as difficult to be certain of the meaning of any line of REM’s Michael Stype as it was of T. S. Eliot.

Ritchie: Would you compare the two men in terms of talent?

Lewis: I would not begin with that question. The popular music of my day was never as well crafted as the best poetry, nor was it intended to be. What strikes me more deeply than questions of morality or quality is what such an approach tells about the culture that creates and listens to it. Meaning has become a private enterprise. There is no public meaning to these songs.

This is a greater break with popular music of the past than any change in style.

Ritchie: What should a Christian artist do in such circumstances?

Lewis: A small minority will probably choose to ignore modern innovations in favor of more traditional forms.

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Some artists, however, probably have backgrounds and training, not to mention strong inclinations, that lead them to produce modern music. To them I would suggest that a broad familiarity with the past may even prove to be a way forward. Perhaps they can see what kinds of past innovations were significant for the long haul, and in so doing be better able to spot those trends which are worth following. They would then avoid those which are mere whims of fashion. I am not a musician, but that is my suggestion.

Ritchie: That method did prove helpful to you in your own field. Your books still sell, while the trendy theologians of your time have almost been forgotten.

St. Augustine (to Lewis): So you aren’t shocked by contemporary music?

Lewis: Not at all. The desire to shock always leads in the same direction, and after a fairly short time, everyone is bored.

I could already see Dionysian motifs showing up in music, along with unbridled sensuality. What inevitably came with it was a bored audience.

St. Augustine: l wonder if it isn’t the existence of the church that keeps these movements alive.

Ritchie: How so? I would think that it would be one force in the culture headed in a different direction.

St. Augustine: In my time, the pagans were also rather bored by sensuality. Most of them settled into routine lives, without moral restraint but also without passion. It was those who were reared in the church who were different. They were reared with hope. They were taught to recognize an infinite desire inside themselves. The pagans had usually all but extinguished that feeling.

When a Christian did turn away from the faith, he had all of that desire to turn to the world. Once he got over his shame, you would see no more frenzied spectator in the gladiatorial games than a lapsed Christian. Maybe the same is true of your music.

Ritchie: It is an intriguing idea, but one I don’t know how to evaluate.

Lewis: I am surprised at the staying power of these forms. I hear that some of these songs on the radio are more than thirty years old. I would have thought they would be forgotten overnight. It makes me wonder whether a shallow culture can become deeply rooted, or whether there might be more powerful forces at work.

St. Augustine: Demonic forces?

Lewis: Perhaps they play a role, but I had something else in mind. You spoke of desire earlier, and I wonder if the staying power of modern music is not in the beauty of its form, but in a promise it makes to fulfill a desire that cannot be fulfilled by anything earthly. I used to believe MODERN REFORMATION

that the Dionysian symbolized only lack of restraint. I have changed my mind. It represents transcendence to those whose spiritual tissues are thirsty for it.

Ritchie: The song “Dreams” by the Cranberries may have gained some of its popularity on that account. If it is false transcendence, should we tell people to shun the music?

Luther: I myself have no inclination to listen to it, as I have said, but prohibition doesn’t work. If you are right about the music, it is like the use of religious images in the churches. Some radicals of my day thought that they could make better Christians out of people by toppling statues of the Virgin Mary and burning crucifixes. All they did was create a big ruckus and make people superstitious in the other direction, thinking that the images, and not their wayward hearts, were the problem.

If they really believed that God was there for them, they would forget the images in due course. The music will be the same. The contact with the transcendent that the music promises needs to be preached as being offered by God in Word and Sacrament.

St. Augustine: People in my age were often wrong about religion, but everyone sought a world beyond. In your world, music could either be seen as a false religion, or a reminder that there is another world, depending on whether people can see beyond it.

Lewis: Hard-headed sensible people always believe that mankind can do without a world beyond, and whenever they push it away in one area, it comes back full force in another.

St. Augustine: Dr. Luther sees danger in prohibition as a Christian stance, and that is a new position I have never heard argued. Is there a danger in going the other direction?

Ritchie: I think so, even when the attempt is sincere. I remember when I was in college reading an angry evangelical author who was out to fight the cramped pietistic spirituality he had seen in so many of the people he grew up around. Now this writer did me the great service of convincing me to cut down on the frenetic Christian activity I was involved in so that I might have time to spend in my vocation as a student.

But in addition, I was somehow given the impression by his book that watching unrated foreign films at the local art theater was a back-door approach to the pursuit of sanctification.

Lewis: Ah yes. John Milton’s error. The verse “to the pure all things are pure” is quoted to secure the license to expose oneself to anything.

St. Augustine: It completely ignores those passages which say that certain sins are unmentionable. How a steady diet of perversion can be justified as entertainment for Christians is beyond me.

Ritchie: Yet I don’t feel like I can go back to the old way

of shunning all culture that isn’t Christian.

Lewis: Of course not. You have been presented with the false antithesis between culture as the devil’s playground and culture as a sacrament. Pope Gregory found a mediating position that avoids both extremes. Culture is a tool we are to use for the sake of the gospel.

Ritchie: You had better watch bringing up popes in front of Dr. Luther.

Luther: Not at all! Gregory was the last of the good bishops of Rome.

Besides, my exposure to your century suggests that there is stiff competition for the title of antichrist between the bishop of Rome and other ruling bishops of other churches. It requires wisdom in any age to distinguish Christ from antichrist.

Ritchie: Dr. Luther, you and St. Augustine are two of the most influential men in the history of the church.

Your influence can even be seen in the shape of modern secular society and the family. Are you able to see some of the results of your work today?

Luther: What I see is something great achieved that is in the process of being lost. During my career, we were trying to place the family on a new footing. Everyone thought you had to be a monk or a nun to be saved. We rejected that belief. I can see from your movies and on your streets that our assumptions were widely accepted as the norm. But now the family is dying. I am both cheered and grieved. To know that your endeavor made a difference for centuries is a dream come true. But I have now seen my dream in its death throes.

St. Augustine: Your world is less pagan than ours, yet more immoral. I would hardly have guessed that God would allow a society to decline like this and yet survive.

He must be accomplishing something unguessed. This must be the most immoral age since the flood.

Lewis: Speaking of my own age, I would say not, although perhaps from your gentlemen’s perspective, our host and I come from the same age.

Luther and Augustine (together): You’re dressed the same!

Ritchie: I am dressed up. And as for Professor Lewis, the only reason nobody is staring at him and his out-ofdate suit is that they can’t pull their eyes off of you two!

Lewis: Why this suit is out-of-date in my own time, as my fellow faculty members are so quick to remind me.

But back to the subject, the early part of the century was no golden age. Sexual morality was a little better. But there are other concerns. It was a wonderful thing this week to walk past a university and see a full generation of youth alive on the campus. I have seen young men of JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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two generations die. Something is right about seeing people live.

St. Augustine: You aren’t saying that you just want them alive and don’t care how they live, are you professor?

Lewis: Certainly not! The decline in sexual morality is a scandal. But there are other sins. And I wouldn’t be taken for a pacifist. But if you knew how mass warfare could devastate a continent, you might see the age you are visiting as an improvement, in some ways, over another age.

[The dessert tray is carried over to the table by Holly, our waitress.]

Holly: Is anyone ready for some dessert?

[Orders were taken after Holly gave explanations of the choices. She was surprised to be asked what chocolate was.

St. Augustine chose the pear torte, since he knew what a pear was.

Luther chose the lemon cake for the same reason. Professor Lewis, knowing more about twentieth century cuisine, chose English Trifle.]

Ritchie: Gentlemen, dig in.

Luther: St. Augustine, you seem to have retained your fondness for pears you did not pay...

St. Augustine: What’s that? Oh, my. I forget that a writer’s words are so well remembered by his readers.

Lewis: I am surprised by your mundane dessert choice, Dr. Luther. Whatever happened to “Sin boldly”?

Ritchie: Dr. Lewis, I was surprised you didn’t order Turkish delight.

Lewis: I didn’t see that offered as a choice.

Ritchie: That’s because they have improved on it by creating Snickers bar pie.

Lewis: My friend Owen Barfield used to call the idea that anything from the present was superior to anything from the past chronological snobbery.

Ritchie: He had never had Snickers bar pie, now, had he?

Lewis: And you will never know the pleasures of the table as they were known in the Edwardian age. Poor lad.

Ritchie: Before we adjourn, I was wondering if each of you could offer some parting comments on Christianity and culture.

St. Augustine: Don’t forget the heavenly city. Your civilization may be replaced by another one. Rome fell and was followed by other empires. The world will survive whether or not your society survives. Don’t take the matters of this world so seriously.

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Luther: I agree with Augustine on the priority of the heavenly city over the earthly, but I think that God wants us to spend much of our time laboring for the sake of the earthly city. What I think is always in danger of getting lost is that we do this for the neighbor. How is my neighbor helped by my cultural effort? If my labor secures for my neighbor a natural gift from God, this is a good thing. I suspect that your age has fallen back into the ways of thinking that characterized things under the papacy. People want to know if this or that is allowable, and allow and forbid the strangest things. If they understood the command to love the neighbor, they could pursue legitimate callings with an easier conscience.

Lewis: That is a very important point. I would want to remind people to be broad readers of authors who lived before their own time. No past age was a golden age, but human folly changes over the centuries. You will recognize the mistakes of past ages easily. But through the eyes of the past you might see your own ages folly more easily as well. Aside from this, the books that survive tend to be worthy of survival.

Ritchie: Gentlemen, I thank you for joining me in this discussion of modern culture. I hope this type of conversation becomes more common as Christians learn to discuss their culture in the light of past Christian wisdom.

[Here the tape ended.]

Rick Ritchie, CURE staff writer and a contributing author of Christ the Lord: The Reformation and Lordship Salvation, is a graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

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WHAT DISTINGUISHES “POPULAR” CULTURE FROM OTHER VARIETIES OF CULTURE? hile discussing “high culture’s willing embrace [in the last several decades] of the characteristics of popular culture” in his All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, Ken Myers pauses to review some of the tendencies of popular culture and of traditional or high culture. He cautions that this list is only a caricature, and that, if viewed in isolation, it is a bit simplistic. Nonetheless, the list is very useful in highlighting some of the tendencies of popular and high culture.

Additionally, as the reader will note in reading Mr. Myers’ article in this issue of MR, if space permitted a more extensive list, one might explore further the tendency listed below of popular culture to have both “content and form governed by requirements of the market.” Indeed, as Mr. Myers has recently noted, popular culture is, to a great extent, a function of the commercialization of modernity. Aided by the technological developments in transportation and telecommunications, the modern producer of popular culture is able to target a market niche much narrower than was a producer prior to the advent of these technologies. The modern producer is thus “freed” from place, and from all of the purposes and meanings of any particular local culture. This is often referred to as the “disembedded” economy. In this sense, there is room for further exploration of the interesting contrast between the calculated commercial aspects of popular culture and the multi-purpose aims of the producers of local or folk culture.

MR is grateful to Mr. Myers both for the permission to reprint this list here and for the further suggestions offered in his article in this issue of how to refine our understanding of popular culture.

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POPULAR CULTURE

TRADITIONAL AND HIGH CULTURE

Focuses on the new Discourages reflection Pursued casually to “kill time” Gives us what we want, tells us what we already know Relies on instant accessibility; encourages impatience Emphasizes information and trivia Encourages quantitative concerns Celebrates fame Appeals to sentimentality Content and form governed by requirements of the market Formulas are the substance Relies on spectacle, tending to violence and prurience Aesthetic power in reminding of something else Individualistic Leaves us where it found us Incapable of deep or sustained attention Lacks ambiguity No discontinuity between life and art Reflects the desires of the self Tends toward relativism Used

Focuses on the timeless Encourages reflection Pursued with deliberation Offers us what we could not have imagined Requires training; encourages patience Emphasizes knowledge and wisdom Encourages qualitative concerns Celebrates ability Appeals to appropriate, proportioned emotions Content and form governed by requirements of created order Formulas are the tools Relies on formal dynamics and the power of symbols (including language) Aesthetic power in intrinsic attributes Communal Transforms sensibilities Capable of repeated, careful attention Allusive, suggests the transcendent Relies on “Secondary World” conventions Encourages understanding of others Tends toward submission to standards Received

This list is taken from Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1989), 120.

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Reaching Unchurched Heinrich and Marie LEONARD R. PAYTON Can a man take fire to his bosom and not be burned?

– Solomon his story is about Christians in a different place and time from ours. It is a period about which we Americans have formed some unfair opinions. Indeed, the opinions we have formed as a result of this time have allowed us to believe, for some decades, that we are basically good. God, no doubt, has permitted our depravity to compound interest to the point that many in our country—both Christians as well as unbelievers—are seeing our moral bankruptcy for what it is. Enough about that.

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As you read this story, it is important not to judge the characters too harshly. I have it from good sources that these people were very zealous for the gospel, that they had a passionate desire to see their fellow citizens come to faith. Remember that they did not see the flaws in their thinking or motives. After all, as Jeremiah said, “The heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things.” Their most fateful error, one common to all people, was to believe that matters of culture are neutral, that they can be used almost equally in service of the gospel or of the devil. astor Detlev Wohlhausen was concerned about the decreasing role of the gospel in his society. He had watched a steady drop in church attendance over the past few

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years, most noticeably in the state churches. What was especially worrisome was the mass exodus of youth. Indeed, “Hitler Jugend” had become a religious institution supplanting the church.

On one hand, the state churches were complying with an obviously pagan and malicious government.

As they did, they lost more and more of what was distinctively Christian. But Wohlhausen was a free church minister. It did not surprise him to see the state churches cave in under duress.

On the other hand, Wohlhausen had watched Godfearing pastors band together to resist the government’s militant anti-Christian tendencies. He saw those pastors disappear, their congregations scattered.

Some of them were Wohlhausen’s free church brethren. What good did it do to be ministering to small flocks, to denounce the government, and then to have the congregations go pastorless? No, these were dire times, times demanding a fresh new approach to the gospel.

Wohlhausen asked the younger people in his congregation why they never brought visitors with them to church. They looked sheepish, shrugged their shoulders and said things like, “Well, you know,” as if it were self-evident. But it wasn’t self-evident to Pastor Wohlhausen, so he pressed them harder. Eventually it came out: their friends saw Christianity as a religion for weaklings; Jesus was a spineless pacifist; they found pastors to be pathetically deluded, sentimental individuals who had nothing relevant to say to the problems of being German, problems like Lebensraum (space to live), unemployment, etc.

It was clear that the Nazis had done a first-class job MODERN REFORMATION

of marginalizing Christianity, using Christians as unwitting accomplices in the slander. Wohlhausen knew better, and it angered him. He thought of Jesus the carpenter with hardened muscles. He thought of James and John requesting permission to call fire from heaven.

He thought of Jesus single-handedly driving the parasites from the temple. He thought of Paul demanding his right to have his case heard by Caesar.

No, Christianity was not a religion for weaklings, but he and his fellow Christians would have to do a better job of presenting an accurate faith.

The elders of Freie Evangelische Gemeinde agreed with Pastor Wohlhausen’s assessment. Yes, it would be good to make much of the fatherhood of God, to show his mighty acts and the courage of his people without drawing too much attention to its Jewish connection. This should be their focus. It was of paramount importance that young people see the relevance of the Christian God. As the elders prayed and brain-stor med, an unexpected act of providence befell them. When the government auctioned off a large amount of buildings in the fall of 1938, Detlev Wohlhausen and his small congregation seized the opportunity to reach out with daring. There could hardly be a better location for launching the aggressive gospel.

The structure was a prominent five-story building on Roland Square right in the heart of Bremen. More street cars crossed lines there than anywhere else in the city. Until the previous year, the building had housed a shoe store and factory, Mendelssohn and Sons. But the Mendelssohns were gone, the store empty.

Meanwhile, the elders changed their name from Freie Evangelische Gemeinde/Bremen to Himmelreich Gemeinde (Kingdom of Heaven Congregation). The older name had been too dowdy to attract any attention. And, of course, “Das Reich,” most specifically, “Das Dritte Reich (the Third Regime),” was on everyone’s tongue. This new name they placed in huge block red letters right where the Mendelssohn and Sons sign had been.

The entryway overlooked the statue of Roland. To integrate their institution into the activity of the square, they made poured concrete statues of James and John wearing a similar dispassionate expression to that of Roland. These they placed on either side of the expanded entryway. James and John, however, were bare from the waist up, displaying long, muscular bodies. At about eye level, each held up a heavy net, lightning bolts emanating downward from their biceps.

Himmelreich Gemeinde had spent so much money on the statues that they could not afford an organ. This didn’t matter...they had no intention of using organ music. No, they hired a medium-sized brass band to play a heraldic call to worship and accompany congregational singing. “A Mighty Fortress” was their favorite hymn

along with several texts to Joseph Haydn’s great melody, that melody which had been lifted from the Austrians to become the German national anthem. They even went so far as to set Christian lyrics to some of Richard Wagner’s more popular choruses. On especially spirited Sundays (like the Sunday after the invasion of Poland) they sang “Deutschland Ueber Alles.” See how God is blessing the fatherland! The Spirit of God was palpable, none of that defeatism so common in other churches.

The church also installed a loud speaker system, a phenomenon unheard of in church buildings to that point. It was purely pragmatic; they planned on reaching large crowds with the gospel.

The inside of the building was intentionally plain except for the front wall behind the pulpit. On its black background, in huge red, block letters read, “Kaempfe den guten Kampf des Glaubens; ergreife das ewige Leben!”

(Fight the good fight of faith; seize the eternal life!) einrich Sporli was a thirty-six year old clerk in the post office: five feet, nine inches tall, one hundred, thirty-five pounds, dark hair, brown eyes, a few residual pimples and obstreperous freckles, glasses. Whatever else he was, Heinrich was not the strapping embodiment of the Aryan myth.

Like most fatherland-loving German men, Heinrich had volunteered to join the Wehrmacht. It was a blow to his ego to be rejected. The reason they gave was his having to wear glasses. He could tell by the recruitment officer’s smirk that the unspoken reason was that they suspected he was a Jew. Heinrich was not a Jew. Rather, he was of that obscure central European tribe of Alamans. His grandparents came from Baden to Lower Saxony in order to buy inexpensive farm land. At that time, entire Lutheran villages had moved to North America when their enlightened petty despot decided that there would no longer be any difference between Lutherans and Catholics as far as state churches were concerned. So the Sporlis, not being especially religious, profited handsomely. Heinrich now wished he had his grandparents’ lurching and slipping accent, passing naturally for a southern German, rather than a Jew. The long and the short of it was that Heinrich had big felt needs. He was accelerating into middle age without having had a serious girlfriend, much less a wife, and no prospects on the horizon. Every girl wanted a man in uniform. But worst of all was this false Jewish blight on his image. He was a ripe plum when a coworker invited him to Himmelreich Gemeinde.

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arie Ziegenhals also had needs. Born in 1915, she was the youngest of seven—the first six being boys. Most families would rejoice at a change of gender after such a

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string. Not the Ziegenhals family, however. You see, the Kaiser had promised personally to be the godfather of any seventh son in Germany. Marie’s mother had never forgiven her. As a consequence, Marie grew up becoming a boy by sheer force of will in every way except the undeniable. Now in her late twenties and built like a draft horse, she began to yearn to love and be loved, to be someone’s sweetheart and to have children at her breast.

She labored under the nagging knowledge that her work at the Folke-Wulf Works, like Heinrich’s at the post office, did not offer a plethora of prospective mates.

Certainly, Wohlhausen’s sermons were solid, biblical preaching. All of 1939 had been devoted to the mighty acts of God It would never have occurred to Marie to darken the door of a church. Still, she noticed with some curiosity, the red-lettered sign where she had previously bought her sturdy size forty-two’s. It grabbed her by the jaw and barked, “Look at me!” each time she changed streetcars to and from work. The statues at the entrance were even more riveting.

Marie was a perfectionist, scowling most of the time on the job, not because the work was boring, but because the frames of the fuselages she was welding were so important to the fatherland. She was a good welder.

So was her co-worker, Gerda Tiefenbacher. Gerda was a bit older, built like a large sausage with dish-water blonde hair. Gerda cared about the fatherland, too, understanding the significance of the fuselages. Indeed, two of her brothers were Luftwaffe pilots. But unlike Marie, she usually was content, untroubled by little stumbling blocks in her way. If a seam were not just so, Gerda patiently corrected the imperfection. She did not seem to mind staying ten or fifteen minutes after work just to solve a little problem.

Gerda was plain, in every way nondescript except that she had a calming magnetism about her, a liquid contralto chuckle which could dissolve the angst of all within ear shot. She was un-self-conscious, well-liked 30

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and trusted by all. Marie was fascinated by her.

One day as Marie and Gerda changed street cars in Roland Square, Gerda said, “That’s my church over there.

Would you like to come with me on Sunday?” Marie was dumb-struck. The crow’s foot wrinkles around Gerda’s eyes disarmed her, thawing her like a shot of schnapps. Christianity was for weaklings; Gerda was not weak in any way. Church buildings were sentimental museums; Himmelreich Gemeinde, however, bristled with activity and force. As an exercise leader for Hitler youth, Marie had difficulty justifying a visit to a church. And yet, Gerda’s soft-spoken invitation was compelling. n Palm Sunday, March 17, 1940, Gerda Tiefenbacher, Marie Ziegenhals, Heinrich Sporli, and three thousand other people were enveloped in the outstretched arms of the Sons of Thunder into a packed hall bristling with anticipation.

Marie immediately noticed that most of the people in the crowd were between twenty and forty years old.

There was a healthy sprinkling of soldiers decked out in uniforms. All faced forward, waiting.

Precisely at ten o’clock, a single trumpet blasted.

Pastor Wohlhausen strode mechanically to the pulpit, the hard soles of his shining riding boots thumping like a bass drum on the wooden platform. He wore a dark gray shirt and black arm bands with red crosses on them.

He yelled into the microphone, “Das Himmelreich is nahe herbeigekommen (The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand)!” Instantly, all three thousand present stood up as the brass band introduced St. Theodulph’s ancient hymn, “All Glory, Laud, and Honor.”

Of course, the dark gray shirt and arm bands were no accident. On one hand, the elders did not want the gospel associated with the Nazis and their brown shirts.

Still, the powerful potential for communication could not be ignored. For this reason, in the early development of Himmelreich Gemeinde’s vision, the elders hired the consultation of Professor Doctor Eberhard von Schleppfuss, professor of psychology and communications at the university. On his advice, the Aggressive Gospel Committee conducted a door-todoor survey of twenty thousand Bremen residents.

The survey was quite simple. Each surveyor carried two dark gray poster boards. In the middle of one was a black piece of construction paper with a red cross superimposed on it. On the other was a red piece of construction paper with a black cross. The survey question: “Which looks stronger to you?” Eighty-six percent identified the red cross on the black paper. That settled the matter. rother Uli Zender, an elder since 1932 at Freie Evangelische Gemeinde/Bremen, had begun to

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protest Pastor Wohlhausen’s methods. Like Wohlhausen, he dearly wanted to see people come to faith. As he watched the numbers swell from 40 in 1935 to 8,000 in 1941, his concern rose that Himmelreich Gemeinde did not demand of disciples that they take up their crosses and follow Christ. Indeed, there seemed to be growing confusion between “Das Himmelreich” and “Das Dritte Reich.” Certainly, Wohlhausen’s sermons were solid, biblical preaching. All of 1939 had been devoted to the mighty acts of God including the creation, the global flood, the plagues loosed on Egypt, the exploits of Samson, Gideon, Jepthah, David, and others.

The results were dramatic when Pastor Wohlhausen appeared in a black robe rather than his usual dark gray shirt.

Still, there were attitudes afoot which Wohlhausen’s sermons seldom touched, and when they did, they seemed to make little difference. Zender could almost feel the chill in a prayer meeting when he asked for God’s mercy and comfort on Christian brothers in Czechoslovakia and France, and when he requested that the Holy Spirit would work in the hearts of Jews to turn them to Christ. He suspected that, while the message of Himmelreich Gemeinde was biblical, her style reinforced everything which was wrong with German culture at the time. Zender privately voiced his complaints to Pastor Wohlhausen, who listened politely and then made no changes.

“I become all things to all men,” replied Pastor Wohlhausen.

“Detlev,” said Zender, “St. Paul never said, ‘to the Nazi I became a Nazi.’”

That stung. Wohlhausen had no delusions about Hitler or about the Third Reich. He was one of the few people in Germany who had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf from cover to cover. He could see that most of Hitler’s agenda was ungodly, and he even anticipated the extent of his evil actions. It was all there in plain view on the pages of Mein Kampf. Still, Hitler’s style had captured the

imagination of the German people. If he could just extract the style.... Indeed, it was working. Average Sunday morning attendance for the first half of 1941 was around 6,300 spread over three services. Zender was wrong. n September, 1941, the Germans advanced deep into Russia. Attendance at Himmelreich swelled to 8,000.

In October, the advancing forces were bogged down in the mud. In November, the mud froze. On December 6, 1941, the Russians turned back the Germans just twenty-five miles outside of Moscow. Himmelreich stopped growing.

In January of 1942, Brother Zender brought his concerns to an elder meeting. Pastor Wohlhausen listened politely but with anxiety.

In June of 1942, seven hundred British bombers unloaded on the Focke-Wulf Works. A stray bomb landed on Gerda Tiefenbacher’s housing block, killing her.

In August of 1942, Brother Zender disappeared.

Another elder was caught stealing sacks of flour and was shot on the spot.

Sunday afternoon, September 2, 1942, the SS quietly kidnapped Pastor Wohlhausen and took him for an hour-long ride through the country. They slowed to a crawl on one small lane as they passed an unmarked grave. Nothing was said during the whole journey.

Nothing needed to be said. Wohlhausen walked up the steps of his house, a changed man.

The following Tuesday, Pastor Wohlhausen paid a visit to Hadrian Zender, whose health had been poor for the past two years and was now failing since the disappearance of her husband. It was Detlev’s first real pastoral visit in about two years. Administrating a huge church and preparing for multiple worship services required hiring extra clergy to visit the sick.

Besides his own mother, there was probably no one on earth who knew Detlev Wohlhausen better than Uli and Hadrian Zender. And while Detlev had his differences with Uli, he had unshakable respect for him.

Uli’s disappearance was an acute loss.

As a child, Hadrian had changed Detlev’s diapers and sung him Bible songs. His first Bible memory was under her tutelage. Now he might have to care for her.

It was not a long visit. Hadrian Zender, while not incoherent, seemed to drift between this world and the next. Together with her husband, she had always looked far ahead “to a heavenly city.” She did, however, pay close attention as Detlev recounted his Sunday afternoon excursion with the SS. He omitted no detail and the significance was not lost on her.

When Detlev finished, Hadrian went to the bookshelf and removed a copy of “The Theological Declaration of Barmen.” “Here,” she said. “Uli would

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want you to have this.” Detlev leafed through it, finding only one passage circled. He mumbled: ...let no fear or temptation keep you from treading with us the path of faith and obedience to the Word of God, in order that God’s people be of one mind upon earth and that we in faith experience what he himself has said: “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” Therefore, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

When he looked up, Hadrian was smiling but not breathing. li Zender had been right after all, but changing style at Himmelreich Gemeinde was easier said than done. In the first place, the entire building had been designed around the trappings of a specific worship service. The results were dramatic when Pastor Wohlhausen appeared in a black robe rather than his usual dark gray shirt. Some stopped coming, and the contention was palpable. Then there was the Sunday when all the usual activities were set aside for a full hour of intercessory prayer. That, too, loosed noxious clouds of discontent. Some Sundays, the power went out during the service, cutting off all communication from the pulpit. When Pastor Wohlhausen registered a complaint with the local electrical authorities, they merely responded that there was a shortage of power; electricity needed to be conserved for the manufacturing of airplanes and submarines. Christianity was a luxury.

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n April 17, 1943, the Eighth U. S. Air Corps bombed the Focke-Wulf factory, leaving it completely inoperable.

Marie Ziegenhals, now unemployed, moved in with Gerda’s aunt and uncle, who had been members of the Freie Evangelische Gemeinde/Bremen since 1925. Gerda’s death had been a serious blow to Marie. She was angry with God. Still, she continued to attend Himmelreich Gemeinde, caring less and less about James and John. She had little tolerance for the quarreling over Pastor Wohlhausen’s black robe. She was numb.

Pastor Wohlhausen was numb, too. The SS was raiding his congregation often. Once they even executed an elder in the foyer. Not surprisingly, attendance dropped off sharply after that.

Wohlhausen felt trapped. He wanted desperately to move away, plant a new church, having learned from bitter mistakes. But these people in Bremen were his sheep. He began to look ahead toward—and to see—a heavenly city.

It was during an intense prayer as he was contemplating the heavenly Jerusalem that he did not hear the air raid sirens. On April 17, 1944, one

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thousand, two hundred heavy bombers struck cities along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts, among them Bremen. Himmelreich Gemeinde took a direct hit with Pastor Detlev Wohlhausen lying prostrate in his office on the third floor.

He survived long enough to be taken to the hospital a few hours later. There were no antibiotics, especially not for a pastor. He lay delirious for days, often the butt of jokes. One nurse, however, listened to the words repeated over and over in his delirium: “...I will fear no evil for thou art with me....”

Afterword Pastor Wohlhausen survived and planted a new church after the war. He had the pleasure of joining Marie Ziegenhals and Boris Kusnezow in marriage.

Boris was a Russian prisoner of war whom Gerda’s aunt and uncle sheltered secretly from forced repatriation.

Heinrich Sporli stopped attending Himmelreich Gemeinde sometime in early 1943, never returning to a church again. He died of lung cancer in 1961.

Marie and Boris had two children, Bodo and Peter.

To this day, these children have not come to faith, ostensibly because of the shame associated with Himmelreich Gemeinde. After the war, everything which smacked of Naziism became a stench to the succeeding generation.

Both Bodo and Peter married and each had two children. Of the four Kusnezow grandchildren, the first two are confirmed atheists active in the Green Party.

The third moved to the United States, joining the Metropolitan Community Church. The youngest, the apple of Marie’s eye, graduated from a small Bible school near Kassel this past spring. He accepted a pastorate at a small free church two months ago. On his first Sunday, he stepped up to the pulpit (a portable music stand) and quietly said: “Our reading for today is from the gospel of St. Matthew, chapter three, beginning in verse one: ‘In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”’”

A graduate of The Master’s College and the University of California in San Diego, Dr. Leonard Payton first conceived of this article while studying in Germany and reflecting on the American church growth movement. Dr. Payton is currently Chief Musician at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

MODERN REFORMATION

R EVIEW CHRISTIANS AND THE AESTHETES: by Rick Ritchie A REVIEW OF WILLIAM D. ROMANOWSKI’S POP CULTURE WARS: RELIGION AND ENTERTAINMENT IN AMERICAN LIFE To which army in the culture war do you owe allegiance? Are you a populist church growth advocate pushing the envelope of contemporaneousness in a wellmarketed church? Or are you a high-brow cultural conservative who ventures from a wellprotected elitist world only when an opportunity arises to cast a monkey wrench into the workaday machinery of the mass-produced modern world?

A title like Pop Culture Wars might make readers of this review suspect its author was a cultural conservative. If not the title, then the fact that it was being reviewed in modernRefor mation might clinch it.

But William Romanowski does not write as a high-brow cultural conservative.

His book calls for an immediate cease fire in the culture wars.

The author claims that we have made a fundamental mistake in engaging in battle before we understood about what we were fighting.

This book is readable, clear, and well-documented.

Readers may find few strikingly original ideas here, yet the overall impression it leaves is unexpected. Many of the things we have heard elsewhere are connected in such a way that we can see that the landscape we thought we knew so well is unfamiliar.

The most helpful service Romanowski provides is to show how the church was in the same dilemma with the culture at the turn of the century, and that when it engaged the culture as we engage it now, it went unheeded. This is a hard reality, but it is followed by the comforting news that the church woke up, adopted another stance, and won the day. When the church found constructive solutions to offer to pressing social questions, society listened.

The church tends to take one of three stances toward secular entertainment. It either ignores it, attacks it, or mimics it. While in any given case one of these stances may be appropriate, none is a cure-all. Before choosing a position, it is best that we understand what we are confronting.

Few people about to engage the culture ask how our modern pop culture arose. How did the entertainment industry become so big in a nation founded on the Puritan work ethic?

In the beginning, our culture was an agrarian society composed of Anglo-Saxon immigrants who thought alike on the most basic social issues. Any good history of Puritanism will explain how the society of nineteenth century America was a compromising of the original Puritan vision of a biblical commonwealth. Yet even after the compromise between religious vision and capitalist opportunity, the work ethic did hold together a society which would have appeared homogeneous to an outsider. Two factors transfor med that landscape: industrialization and immigration.

Romanowski argues that industrialization channeled people into jobs comprised of boring and repetitive tasks. Those performing these tasks had more leisure time and more discretionary income than those of generations before. It is no surprise that leisure became a bigger question under these conditions. Churches saw this as a threat, since time and money spent on entertainment were not given to the Church. The typical pastoral response was to castigate worldly amusements—often in religious revivals conducted in a circus-like atmosphere.

If it were merely a question of an Anglo-Saxon world maintaining the status quo, the churches might have succeeded despite bad tactics. But in addition to the conditions mentioned above, the country was experiencing a major influx of immigrants from JANUARY FEBRUARY 1997

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countries which knew nothing of the Puritan work ethic. The country wasn’t going to hell in a handbasket; hell was arriving from overseas. In rhetoric which reminds one of Dole in his more xenophobic moments (I voted for him, but cringed during every commercial on illegal aliens), pastors saw immigrants as either a threat to Protestant civilization, or so much raw material to Victorianize.

Many of the cultural elite adopted the antiChristian philosophies of Social Darwinism (only the fittest should survive in the economy) and culture worship. Accepting the theory of the descent of man from the animal kingdom with some shame, the elite saw high culture as a way of marking self-made man from the beasts and immigrants. Some Christians unwittingly adopted the same attitude though they were ignorant of its origin.

Romanowski believes that if we become aware of these ideas’ origins, we might join in the postmodern abolition of the distinction between high and low culture. Pointing to shows like Les Miserables and Evita, which use popular music in the traditionally high-brow medium of musical theater, he argues that the culture is abandoning a distinction which was always based on dubious notions. If the culture is engaged in a form of repentance, is it not strange if the Church is barricading itself in on the side of impenitence?

Some Christians have found better ways of engaging the entertainment culture. The Catholic Church has adopted a plan to teach media awareness in its schools so that its students might be educated about this vital aspect of their lives. Instead of passively asking their priests whether a given movie is allowable viewing, the successful student of such a curriculum could make his or her own choice, perhaps choosing to view the movie, but through more informed eyes.

Romanowski’s book made me see one journalist through more informed eyes. To any reader who opts to read this book, I suggest reading G. K. Chesterton’s essay “Christmas and the Aesthetes” concurrently— which forms one of the chapters in his book Orthodoxy.

Chesterton managed to see through the illusions of early twentieth century high culture (He elsewhere said the term usually referred to motoring and playing bridge!) while maintaining a critical stance toward the popular.

In one part of the essay, he disagrees with those who laud the aims of the Salvation Ar my while questioning its popular methods. Chesterton says that he does not know whether its aims are good, but he knows its methods to be excellent. In one brilliant sentence he says that “anyone can see that banging two cymbals together must be a good idea.” He ridicules the elitist worship of high culture, claiming that such reverence is only possible toward a beautiful lie. Real 34

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believers are not reverent. All they know is laughter and war. The irony is that those high culture devotees who worship every relic salvaged from the cultures of the past, would in the times of those cultures have found them to be vulgar. The proof is that they think Christmas to be vulgar. It is strange to find a Christian journalist defending the commercialization of a holy day, but Chesterton’s luminous clarity regarding high and low culture causes one to ponder the question anew.

Together, Chesterton and Romanowski provide a stereoscopic vision of popular culture.

I would recommend Romanowski’s book to any reader. It is a perfect introduction for those who are new to thinking about the connection between Christianity and popular culture. Those familiar with the subject will find this book to be up-to-date, having been published in 1996. Readers from the front lines in the culture wars may be disappointed to have some of their activist enthusiasm deflated, but even they should appreciate this book. The time they would have spent picketing and writing cantankerous letters to the media might now be spent exploring the world and asking “How does the Gospel address this?”

Rick Ritchie is a CURE staff writer.

MODERN REFORMATION

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture Kenneth A. Myers (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1989).

Where did popular culture come from? Why is it the way it is? How does it influence Americans in general and Christians in particular?

Ken Myers provides fascinating answers to these questions. He sees pop culture as a culture of diversion, preventing people form asking questions about their origin and destiny and about the meaning of life. Two aspects stand out—a quest for novelty and a desire for instant gratification. In addition, this culture offers something very appealing—the illusion that you set your own standards, you can choose, you are the master of your fate, you deserve a break, you’re worth it. $13.00 Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture Gene Edward Veith, Jr. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994).

This book is a walking tour of contemporary thought and culture.

As such, it ranges far and wide, examining academic philosophy and popular TV shows, art and politics, social changes and the new religions. Dr. Veith explores the history of both modern and postmodern thought, describing the new paradigms that characterize contemporary thinking, from the deconstructionism and post-Marxism of the universities to the relativism of popular culture. $13.00 Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism Michael S. Horton (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991).

What were the factors contributing to the present form of evangelical Christianity in this country? Were they predominantly “American” or predominantly “evangelical”? Dr. Horton ranges from consumerism to pragmatism, and sentimentalism to individualism, questioning assumptions about contemporary evangelical theory and practice. $14.00

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Neil Postman (New York: Penguin, 1985).

Television has conditioned us to tolerate visually entertaining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs. New York University Professor Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. $12.00 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology Neil Postman (New York: Knopf, 1992).

Postman argues that the machine is close to tyrannizing man at the end of the twentieth century. This book chronicles our transformation from a society that uses technology to one that is shaped by it. Particularly, he traces technology’s effects on what we mean by politics, intellect, religion, history, and even truth. $11.00 Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media Quentin J. Schultze, Roy M. Anker, and others (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).

An illuminating study by six Calvin College professors on the symbiosis between the television business establishment and the adolescent consumer culture. $15.00

All book recommended by MR are available through CURE at (800) 956-2644. Phones are answered from 8:30am through 4:30pm Easter n Time, Monday through Friday.

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WHITE HORSE INN SERIES SCHEDULE FEATURING HOSTS MICHAEL HORTON, KIM RIDDLEBARGER & ROD ROSENBLADT Feb. 16–April 6 Here We Stand (8 shows) A series based on the book of the same title by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, focusing on the solas of the Reformation.

Includes interviews with Robert Godfrey, James Boice, Sinclair Ferguson, Gene Veith & Others.

April 13–20 Christianity & Popular Culture (2 shows) Does popular culture affect Christianity?

How do the two relate, and what are the dangers? Includes an interview with Ken Myers.

April 27–May 11 What is Ministry?

(3 shows) Does the “priesthood of all believers” teach that we are all“ministry? How should we view “parachurch” organizations?

Includes a Round Table discussion with ACE council members.

May 18–June 1 Word & Sacrament (3 shows) Focusing on the Word of God, Baptism & The Lord’s Supper as means of grace.

Includes a Round Table discussion with Ace council members.

June 8–29 The Cross of Christ (4 shows) Featuring discussions on the meaning and necessity of Christ’s atoning sacrifice.

Includes a Round Table discussion with Ace council members.

Tapes of these White Horse Inn shows will be available to order only after broadcast date.

WHITE HORSE INN STATION LISTINGS Arizona Phoenix KRDS 1190 AM, Sun. 2 pm California Lake Tahoe KNIS 91.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Los Angeles KKLA 99.5 FM, Sun. 9 pm Mammoth KNIS 89.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Modesto KCIV 99.9 FM, Sun. 9 pm Palmdale KAVC 105.5 FM, Sun. 9 pm Riverside KKLA 1240AM, Sun. 9 pm Salinas KKMC 800 AM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 3 San Diego KPRZ 1210 AM, Sun. 9 pm San Francisco KFAX 1100 AM, Sat. 6 pm & 12 Mid Ventura KDAR 98.3 FM, Sun. 9 pm Colorado Colorado Springs KGFT 100.7 FM, Sun. 10 pm Denver KRKS 94.7 FM, Sun. 10 pm District of Columbia Washington, DC WAVA 105.1 FM, Sun. 8 pm & 12 Mid. Idaho Boise KBXL 94.1 FM, Sun. 10 pm Illinois Chicago WYLL 106.7 FM, Sun. 11pm Kansas Wichita KSGL 900 AM, Sun 8 pm Massachusetts Boston WEZE 590 AM, Sun. 2 pm 36

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Missouri St. Louis KFUO 890 AM , Sat. 11:05 am Montana Bilings KCSP 100.9 FM, Sat. 8pm & Sun. 12 Noon Nebraska McCook KNGN 1360 AM, Sat. 1 & 6 pm New York New York WMCA 570 AM, Sun. 12 Mid & Mon. 11 pm Nevada Reno/Carson Ctiy KNIS 91.3 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Pennsylvania Philadelphia WFIL 56 AM, Sun. 6 pm & 12 Mid Pittsburgh WORD 101.5 FM, Sun. 6 & 12 Mid Texas Austin KIXL 970 AM, Sun. 11 pm Dallas KWRD 94.9 AM, Sun. 11 pm Houston KKHT 106.9 FM, Sun. 11 pm San Antonio KDRY 1100 AM, Sun. 9:30 pm Virginia Lynchburg WBRG 1050 AM, Sat. 11 am Washington Seattle KGNW 820 AM, Sun. 9 pm Wyoming Casper KCSP 90.3 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon

MODERN REFORMATION

PHILADELPHIA CONFERENCE ON REFORMED THEOLOGY 1997

CHICAGO April 4–6, 1997 PHILADELPHIA April 25–27, 1997

Dr. John Armstrong • Rev. Alistair Begg • Dr. James Boice • Dr. D. A. Carson • Dr. Michael Horton also featuring a Thursday pre-conference seminar on “Doing God’s Work in God’s Way” Group rates start at $35 per person. Call 1-215-546-3696 for information or registration.