the-myth-of-secularism-jan-feb-2020 by Modern Reformation

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The Myth of Secularism

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FEATURES

Christianity and Secular Culture A W H I I N T E RV I E W W I T H U W E S I E M O N - N E T T O

Replacement Religion and the “Seculosity of Busyness” B Y DAV I D Z A H L

Christianity in a New Age BY STEPHEN ROBERTS

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ISRAEL G. VARGAS

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DEPARTMENTS

B I B L E S T U DY

BOOK REVIEWS

FOCUS ON MISSIONS

A Survey of the Johannine Epistles

The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart

What Has Athens to Do With Jerusalem?

BY HYWEL R. JONES

B Y B A S I L G R A FA S

REVIEWED BY J O H N J. B O M B A R O

Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

REVIEWED BY AY R I A N YA S A R

Humble Calvinism T H E O LO GY

Sin and Mental Illness

REVIEWED BY M AT T B O G A

B Y S I M O N E T TA C A R R

B A C K PA G E

Recovering the Language of Love BY ERIC LANDRY

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Review Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Production Assistant Anna Heitmann Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith

Modern Reformation (Subscription Department) P.O. Box 460565 Escondido, CA 92046 (855) 492-1674 info@modernreformation.org | modernreformation.org Subscription Information: US 1 YR $32. 2 YR $50. 3 YR $60. Digital Only 1 YR $25. US Student 1 YR $26. 2YR $40. Canada add $10 per year for postage. Foreign add $9 per year for postage.

LETTER from the EDITOR

To help us answer this question, we begin with an interview with the director of Lutheran Theology and Public Life, Dr. Uwe SiemonNetto, who is also a former religion editor for UPI and AP. In Michael Horton’s interview, Dr. Siemon-Netto explains the deeply religious foundation of much of our modern thinking, as well as ways Christians can speak into a culture at odds with many of our beliefs. Next up is our good friend David Zahl with an excerpt from his new book, Seculosity. “Seculosity” is a term Zahl coined to help explain the religious impulse that continues to haunt he Talking Heads’ song “Once in a even committed secularists. As Zahl explains in Lifetime” is punctuated by a series his article, this impulse is what drives modern of questions that all begin with, “You men and women to assign religious meaning (and may ask yourself . . . ” As Western practices) to everyday events and life choices. culture continues its dangerous decline, many It’s not that we have become less religious, Zahl pundits find themselves repeating those argues, but that we have invested everything with lyrics and asking themselves, “How did we religion and have cast ourselves in the role of the get here?” Over the next two issues of Modern savior. It’s a recipe for disaster that can be met Reformation, we’re going to arrive only by the claims of Jesus Christ. at some answers that will help you Finally, we conclude with notes make sense of the world in which from the battlefront—literally! you live. More than that, our hope is Chaplain Stephen Roberts of the “ YOU MAY ASK that knowing more about the state United States Army takes us on a of our world will encourage you to journey into the hearts and minds YOURSELF . . . lean into it with the good news of of America’s warriors—men and HOW DID WE Jesus Christ. women who no longer have even GET HERE?” In this issue, we tackle the myth the memory of the civil religion of secularism. Since the time of that used to permeate our nation’s Freud, social scientists have premilitary. In his article, Chaplain dicted that as a society grows in Roberts uses the soldiers to whom wealth and knowledge, its religious character he ministers as a kind of test case for our own will decline. Early secularists believed that reliministry in a rapidly changing world. gion is a projection of unmet needs of the poor Stay tuned for our next issue in which we will and disenfranchised. Modern thinkers point to explore the ancient foundations of our modern the decline of religious participation in Western confusion. Now is a great time to renew your subEurope as proof of this secularization thesis and scription or purchase one as a gift for a friend. a harbinger of the future of religion in America. Read together and be encouraged by the promBut is this thesis correct? Do people become ise of the gospel that continues to challenge and less religious, or do they change their religious change people in every era. practices to better accommodate new (but still religious) beliefs that exist harmoniously with their surrounding culture? ERIC LANDRY exec utive editor

B I B L E ST U DY

PA R T O N E O F A F O U R - PA R T S E R I E S

A Survey of the Johannine Epistles By Hywel R. Jones

here are three letters by John in the New Testament. Their titles, which indicate common authorship and order of composition, are only traceable to early church tradition and are not part of the sacred text. Even so, a strong argument has been mounted for their apostolic authorship 1 because of their similar words and truths. So evident is this stock of common material that attempts to break them up and distribute them to other imaginary writers have failed. In the estimate of many scholars, such features provide a basis for regarding the apostle John as

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the author of the Gospel and the Apocalypse (the 2 book of Revelation) as well. That is the position adopted here. The five writings of the apostle John span the largest tract of time in New Testament history, and taken together they form a rich theological and pastoral resource for the life of the Christian church. They can be associated as follows: the Gospel was intended to generate or strengthen belief that Jesus was the Christ of God, the Epistles to assure believers that eternal life was theirs, and the Apocalypse that such faith in Christ will conquer all. They are a mine of spiritual truth.

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THE THREE EPISTLES In this four-part series of expository articles, we will focus attention on the Epistles. Each of them contains some information about its own setting, but not one of them makes any reference 3 to either of the other two. They interrelate in a most natural way, so that not one of them can be considered in complete isolation from the others. But as their order is an open question— unlike Peter’s two letters (see 2 Pet. 3:1)—we will consider the Second and Third Epistles of John before linking them with the First. Marshall does this in his most useful commentary, partly because they have not been given due attention, living as they do under the shadow of First John, so to speak; but also because they provide an easier entry to its thought world. We choose to do so because it will emphasize that the apostolic word is to regulate the life of the Christian church. It has been customary to designate John’s Epistles as catholic, but this should not be understood as if he was putting things on record in the hope that they might be needed by some church, sometime and somewhere. Rather it should mean that they have something vital to say to every church, everywhere and all the

John’s Epistles as catholic . . . should mean that they have something vital to say to every church, everywhere and all the time.

time. Close inspection of all three will reveal that, although none of them uses a specific “address” as did Peter and Paul in their letters, each is directed to a current ecclesiastical circumstance. They therefore demonstrate that churches everywhere need the ministry of the word of God in order to be kept authentic and to mature. The book of Acts makes it clear that churches owe their existence to the proclamation of the gospel word, and all the Epistles make clear that they owe their continuance to it as well. Spurgeon aptly described the pulpit as “the Thermopylae of Christendom.”

SECOND AND THIRD JOHN RELATED John’s two shorter Epistles—each of which probably filled one sheet of papyrus—certainly look like letters, unlike the much longer first one. Each of them opens with a reference to a sender and an addressee. The Second Epistle is to “an elect lady and her children,” which is a metaphor for churches of course, and conveys greetings from her “elect sister.” While the locations of these congregations are unspecified, Ephesus and its environs are suitable. The Third Epistle, which is highly personal, is sent to an individual named Gaius, but it too is church related. In fact, it refers to two churches: the one where Gaius was located and the other where Diotrephes was to be found. The one in which Gaius was received strangers (like Demetrius) as brothers; the other, where Diotrephes was, treated brothers as strangers and worse. As John mentions to Gaius that he has written to that other church, it can be assumed that Gaius knew of it and perhaps might have had some influence there or that he needed to be forewarned about it. A strong contrast is drawn in the two letters between Gaius and Diotrephes, while Demetrius is an example of a reputable teacher-preacher. It should also be remembered that the First Epistle contains an allusion to a similar matter (see 2:19). Some, who were not true brothers but deceivers, had left its fellowship after causing a disturbance.

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A common situation therefore lies behind the shorter letters, in spite of their obvious differences. It relates to what kind of treatment should be accorded to itinerant teachers and preachers. In the latter half of the first century, it was not only apostles and their colleagues who took the gospel far and wide, but others itinerated as well. They needed hospitality, as inns were notorious as places of doubtful morality, and so Christians were called upon to open their homes to such “strangers.” But that of course raised the question of who should be received as authentic messengers of Christ and supported financially, so that onward travel and ministry might be possible (see 2 John 10 and 3 John 5–6). Dealing with such a matter had the potential for advancing the cause of the gospel by according its worthy messengers proper care (3:7) and promoting inter-church fellowship. But it also ran the danger of endorsing “deceivers” (2:7), corrupting the church, and providing a vacuum in which a power bid could be launched (3: 9–10). Notice has been taken of the fact that John does not identify himself as an “apostle” but only as an “elder” in these letters. It is thought that this diminishes the authority of his counsel on the important questions addressed; but, against that, the following should be considered. First, John is not denying his apostolic status by describing himself as an elder, because elders could be apostles (1 Pet. 5:1); he also identifies himself as “the elder” not “an elder,” which points to something more than his being one of a number. Second, there was no need for him to identify himself as “an apostle” in writing to a church that did not contest his office or in writing to Gaius, his beloved friend. Although Diotrephes was being dismissive of the apostles, claiming great importance for himself, John declares that he hopes to visit that church— and in doing so to confront Diotrephes and to do so publicly. John is clearly conscious of the fact that he has some authority to exert (v. 9b) and intends to make his presence felt (v.10). In this case, we think that John did not mean to designate himself as an elder in the church

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John is clearly conscious of the fact that he has some authority to exert . . . and intends to make his presence felt.

but as someone venerable, much like Paul did when, using a slightly different word, he wrote of himself as “Paul the aged.” John is therefore adding a note of winning appeal to his address, combining kindness and firmness—which is the hallmark of authentic apostolicity.

SECOND AND THIRD JOHN SUMMARIZED The matter of “truth” is often mentioned by John in these letters. He writes about “the truth” and “in the truth” or just “in truth,” as can be seen from their opening verses (see 2:2 and 3:1–4). By “the truth,” John means what has been made known; by “in truth” or something as “true” (3:11), he means what is produced by it. He is thinking, objectively and subjectively, of (divine) revelation and (human) response. “The truth in truth” is coherent theology and not contradictory tautology. Those two aspects of “the truth in truth” supply the criterion for identifying the genuine messenger and exposing the false. Second John deals with who should not be received and why not, and Third John with who should be received and why. It exposes “deceivers” and identifies “brothers.”

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Deceivers are marked out in two ways. They do not “confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” but present something that “goes beyond” that doctrine (2:7, 9). (This combination of Docetism and dualism is connected with a secret gnosis, which is given attention and repudiated in the First Epistle). It is the spirit of the antichrist (2:7). There may also be an inference that their motivation is for monetary gain in what is said by contrast about true brothers like Demetrius who “have gone out [into the world] for the sake of the Name, taking nothing of the Gentiles” (see 3:7). John does not identify the name, knowing full well that Gaius will not be at a loss as to whom he is referring. For the Christian, there is only one “Name” who is “the truth”—namely, Jesus who is “the Son of the Father” and “the Christ come in the flesh” (2:3, 7). This is the truth that is at stake. To know it is to know him, which results in “walking in / doing truth . . . in love . . . according to his commandments” (2:6; 3:3–5). Part of that includes receiving as brothers those who bring the message of God in Christ (2:10) and supporting them as “fellow-workers for the truth” (3:8), unlike Diotrephes who was (alarmingly) concerned for his own prominence.

ALL THREE EPISTLES RELATED “Truth” provides a focal point for the content and purpose of First John as well. Undergirded by the Old Testament idea of what is firm and sure as seen in the word Amen, John presents truth as ultimate reality (verbal) and unswerving integrity (moral), because God himself is “true” (1 John 5:20) and the Spirit is “the truth” in witnessing to Jesus Christ (1 John 5:6). The Triune God is total light without any kind of darkness—“no lie is of the truth” (1 John 2:21). There is a fundamental difference between “the spirit of truth” and “the spirit of error” (1 John 4:6), and Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ of God is the line of demarcation. Such truth never needs a supplement to keep it updated, let alone a counter-term to give it

balance or proportion, as is often advocated in our relativistic and pluralistic age.

CONCLUSION “True truth” is a dominant theme of the Gospel and the Apocalypse, where it is often combined with the adjectives “holy, faithful [and] just” (Rev. 3:7, 14; 15:3) to describe God’s words and ways (21:5; 22:6). What is said there and in the three Epistles is, of course, the consequence of what is said about Jesus in the Gospel being “full of grace and truth” (1:14) and truth incarnate (14:6). To the unbelieving Jews he declared, “I am the light of the world” (8:12); to sceptical Pilate that he was “a witness to the truth” (18:19), which would establish such a kingdom in a fallen world. His believing followers (8:12) show themselves to be “of the truth” (John18:37) by hearing his voice and abiding in him (8:31– 32), whereas those who do not are of the devil in whom there is no truth (8:44–45). God and the devil are therefore opposed on the basis of truth, which is that Jesus (the) Christ is the Son of God to whom the Spirit bears witness. There is no liaison between them. Jesus is the “true” light (John 1:9), and those who follow him do not walk in darkness but have the light of life. Christians are therefore to be watchful and maintain and practice the truth they have been taught so as to obtain a full reward. HYWEL R. JONES is professor emeritus of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

The next study in this series will be on 1 John 1:1–4.

1. There are two details in the actual text that appear to militate against this view. There is the author’s use of the first pronoun plural at the opening of the first letter and also his self-designation as an “elder” in the two following. They will be commented on in due course. 2. See the discussions in commentaries by J. R. W. Stott (Tyndale Press, 1964); F. F. Bruce (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983); S. J. Kistemaker (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986); I. H. Marshall (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978); and the relevant chapters of An Introduction to the New Testament by D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992). 3. The letter referred to in 3 John 8 is here regarded as no longer extant.

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THEOLOGY

Sin and Mental Illness By Simonetta Carr

ife is complex. In our fast-moving world, we gravitate toward simple answers, clear definitions, and well-defined categories. At first glance, sin seems to fall into this classification. It’s an offense against God, and through Christ it is confessed and forgiven. But when it comes to mental illness, we lose many of our bearings, whether we live with it or around it. It’s especially so when we try to apply to it our simple definitions of sin. While mental illness has certainly no power to change the basic truths about sin and redemption, it can bring unexpected questions to their practical applications.

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BLAMING SIN The Bible teaches that evil, death, and the corruption of God’s perfect creation entered the world through the sin of Adam, the original representative of the human race. This corruption includes illness in all its forms. The problem arises when we move from a generic to a specific causation, trying to pinpoint a particular sin of an individual to his or her affliction. Since the Bible teaches that sin has consequences, we then tend to perceive negative situations as direct effects of distinctive sins. This is an attractive response, because it’s simple and goes along with our natural instinct

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toward justice and retribution. Lex talionis—“an eye for an eye”—and karma make sense. It also seems like a logical response, but it’s not. Just because a particular sin can result in physical or emotional affliction, that doesn’t mean each affliction is caused by a particular sin. The classic examples of this attitude in the Bible are Job’s friends who were convinced that his afflictions were the result of some personal sin (Job 4–23), and Jesus’ disciples who asked who had sinned in the case of a man who was blind from birth (John 9:2). This was also a pagan way of thinking, as evidenced by the sailors who took Jonah on board their ship (Jon. 1:7). As attractive and logical as this response might sound, it’s usually hard to establish a clear correlation—let alone causation—between an affliction and a particular sin. One problem with an automatic correlation is that it can be applied only one way. While we can assume that sin brings on an illness, experience teaches that repentance doesn’t always bring healing. In some cases, of course, the consequences of some particular sin do accelerate or aggravate a lurking condition. For example, alcohol or drug abuse is certainly detrimental to both physical and mental health, and unconfessed sins can trouble the mind in ways that may lead to obsession. But we can’t make of these specific cases a general rule, although the history of the church is filled with sad casualties of the tendency to do so.

THE APPEAL AND DANGER OF GENERALIZATIONS Could it ever be the other way around? Could it be that, in some cases, our bodily afflictions that include disorders of the brain, affect our faith and obedience to God’s word? I read an article that suggested that Vincent van Gogh’s confused mental state was due to his rejection of God. While that’s a possibility, could it be just the opposite? Could he have been suffering from a mental illness that clouded his

Just because a particular sin can result in physical or emotional affliction, that doesn’t mean each affliction is caused by a particular sin.

reasoning? It’s always dangerous to speculate on the mental state of people of the past, especially when there are few documents available. But it can be equally dangerous to speculate on the mental state of those around us, if we base our judgment on preconceived ideas. The possibility that mental illness can create situations where sin can’t be confronted in a presumed and prescriptive manner can be difficult to accept. And yet, there are cases of involuntary actions that require understanding and compassion (people with Alzheimer’s who deny their faith, people with Tourette’s who swear involuntarily, and so on). As a friend recently told me from personal experience, “Mental illness can manifest in ways that are almost instinctive to the afflicted, whereas spiritual care is more about approaching intentional acts. Often the sins of the mentally ill transact in a murky place somewhere before cognitive recognition and intentionality.” In my book Broken Pieces and the God Who Mends Them, I mention the story of a young man

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who killed a close relative (the person he loved most) during a psychotic episode. His action of course was sinful, but his mental and spiritual recovery was greatly enhanced by the fact that those around him (even those who were hurt the most) put his health and well-being above punishment. He eventually recovered through a 1 combination of medications and pastoral care. These might be extreme cases, but it’s important to be willing to sacrifice the convenience of set rules in order to judge each case on its own merit. John Newton—who had personal experiences with mental illness in his adopted daughter Betsy and his close friend William Cowper— wrote a lengthy letter on this subject, wishing that Christians could learn to be patient with fellow believers in whatever stage of life they might be. After all, he said, we call a building a house even while it’s still under construction and call an area “a field of wheat” when the plants are only budding. Newton wrote: It would be well if both preachers and people would keep more closely to what the Scripture teaches of the nature, marks, and growth of a work of grace instead of following each other in a track (like sheep) confining the Holy Spirit to a system, imposing at first the experience and sentiments of others as a rule to themselves, and afterward dogmatically laying down the path in which they themselves have been led, as absolutely nec2 essary to be trodden by others. A person with mental illness may not look like the majority of people who are sitting in

our pews. She might look confused, disturbed, anxious, suspicious of others, and unable to let go of negative feelings. She might have nervous habits, such as twirling hair or rocking back and forth. There are times when these signs might be predicting a crisis, and our knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of this person will help us to determine whether this is the case. These signs, however, can also be simple expressions of a persistent mental distress in a Christian who is struggling too hard to keep up a facade.

WISDOM AND HUMILITY There are times when sin has to be confronted. When my son was alive, I had to talk to him frequently about church attendance and marijuana addiction. When and how to do this was a matter of wisdom and required much love and humility. Indeed, wisdom and humility go hand in hand, because we can’t even start to cultivate wisdom if we think we have all the answers. The Bible tells us that “with the humble is wisdom” (Prov. 11:2), and it contrasts a poor and wise young person with “an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice” (Eccles. 4:13). Humility is admitting we don’t know everything. It’s admitting that something like mental illness might just exceed our preset, comfortable assessments. It’s admitting that we might need help from others who have more experience in these matters—including secular professionals. Sometimes, medications are necessary before a person can think coherently about his or her spiritual life. Conversely, it’s also possible for a

Humility is admitting we don’t know everything. It’s admitting that something like mental illness might just exceed our preset, comfortable assessments. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

THEOLOGY

person to become overmedicated and act irrationally as a result. Ideally, a pastor should try to work together with medical professionals for the well-being of the person involved. Overall, humility puts us in the correct frame of mind for a patient cultivation of biblical wisdom through fear of the Lord, prayer, study of Scripture, knowledge of facts and situations, advice, and experience. It also reminds us that we are all sinners and that our supposed mental stability might just enable us to hide our sins more efficiently than others.

LOVE AND FAITH In Galatians 6:1–2, Paul gives us general guidelines for helping a brother or sister who is struggling with sin. We must do so, he says, “in a spirit of gentleness,” remembering our own sinfulness and bearing one another’s burdens. In the context of mental illness, these burdens might

We might not understand how a specific mind is working, especially when it seems to work quite differently from ours; but we can still love the person as an individual made in God’s image.

include feelings of depression or paranoia that lead a person to misinterpret well-meaning words and exasperate feelings of guilt. In these cases, persistent introspection is never a good idea. As a friend recently reminded me, “The entire issue is a call to love, not necessarily to understand.” We might not understand how a specific mind is working, especially when it seems to work quite differently from ours; but we can still love the person as an individual made in God’s image and someone for whom Christ has died, counting him or her as more significant than ourselves (Phil. 2:3). In fact, we might end up being greatly enriched by those we set out to encourage. In my experience, many Christians who live with mental illness are aware of their sins and weighed down by guilt, so a proclamation of the gospel works better than reminders of the law. There are times when they are both necessary, but an emphasis on the gospel seems to bear greater and more lasting fruit—largely because thankfulness for what Christ has done is a greater motivator than guilt and fear. Besides, the gospel proclaims not only what Christ has done for us, but also what he continues to do in us through his spirit. Reminding others of this relentless, inner working can bring much comfort. The same realization can bring us peace and confidence, alleviating our frustrations and offsetting our natural desire to fix things quickly. The Lord has placed in my life wonderful examples of pastors who could show love and understanding in difficult circumstances without compromising the unmovable scriptural realities that provide an anchor in the storm. This is not an easy balance to maintain. It’s easier to go one way or another—either stand on the shore and tell a drowning person what to do, or get so caught up with his or her pain that we let go of the anchor. In fact, bearing one another’s burdens in a biblical way may sound just too difficult—especially when mental illness is involved. But God knew what he was doing when he called us to this task, and when he gathered his church as a community of weak

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and stumbling sinners, all with varying degrees of mental instability, all in need of each other, and all desperately dependent on his grace. SIMONETTA CARR was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy. She has

written for various newspapers and magazines and has translated the works of several Christian authors into Italian. She is author of the series Christian Biographies for

Young Readers (Reformation Heritage Books). She lives in Santee, California, with her family and is a member and Sunday school teacher at Christ United Reformed Church. 1. Simonetta Carr, Broken Pieces and the God Who Mends Them: Schizophrenia through a Mother’s Eyes (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2019). 2. In Grant Gordon, ed., Wise Counsel: John Newton’s Letters to John Ryland Jr. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2011), 120–21.

FOCUS ON MISSIONS

What Has Athens to Do With Jerusalem? By Basil Grafas

arco Polo describes a hidden city, Berenice, to his host and 1 captor Kublai Khan. It is really two cities, one above and another

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hidden from view, “behind the shops and under the stairs.” Evangelical Protestant missions is like that. There is a world you can easily see of structures, conferences, how-to manuals, and

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endless debates. Most of these seem to use the how-to manuals. That means that most of the debates that swirl around evangelical missions involve questions about how to do something. To be sure, we assert what we think are necessary ministries and actions, but we never penetrate behind the surface long enough or well enough to uncover the hidden cities, the cities of ideas that rise to the surface. We become champions of the visible projects. There are many, and we disagree with one another about them. Lately, the debates have become urgent and hot. What, then, are the hidden missions-related issues over which evangelicals fight?

HOW DO WE INTERPRET THE PAST? Tertullian, a North African Roman citizen living in Carthage, wrote, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the academy and the church? What 2 between heretics and Christians?” His questions were essential when he wrote them and remain essential now. Noting how the apostle Paul sized up the pagan philosophers, the intellectuals of pagan Greece, he concluded that regardless of their erudition and knowledge, theirs was false wisdom, a dangerous departure from biblical truth. His questions were not rhetorical. No early Christian better embraced the antithesis between the world’s ways and the deep truth of the Bible. His concern was exposing the

root of ideas so that if it proved heretical, the church could guard against it.3 He had a living sense of being engaged in spiritual warfare, and he devoted a great deal of time to considering the meaning of Christian martyrdom. The Bible was God’s word, not an amalgam of contextualized advice for Christians making their way in 4 a foreign land.

HOW DO WE TAKE PART IN MISSIONS TODAY? Tertullian’s questions still resonate with us, revolving around Christianity’s relationship to the outside world. The answers to the questions, however, differ from one part of the evangelical world to another, and Christians do not all agree on how to apply the Bible to their lives. They also clash because their actions emerge from their different engagements with intellectual ideas that impinge on biblical truth. Every missionary, minister, elder, scholar, and layperson lives in an intellectual universe they have shaped or that has been shaped for them. What sorts of responses to Tertullian’s questions flow out of evangelical (for want of a better word) ministry, especially missions? What are a few key battleground concepts that illustrate our differences? I think three sufficiently varied concepts help us see the underground cities of ideas that distinguish missions on the surface: “missio Dei,” “incarnational,” and “missional.” In this article,

Tertullian’s questions still resonate with us, revolving around Christianity’s relationship to the outside world. The answers to the questions, however, differ from one part of the evangelical world to another, and Christians do not all agree on how to apply the Bible to their lives. 14

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Incarnational ministry refers to continuing Christ’s ministry in the world, not the incarnation itself.

we will examine each of their origins or early use, how they have evolved, and how contemporary missions engages them. By doing that, we can see how our unstated presuppositions govern how we interact with these ideas today. As a Latin term, missio Dei has an ancient ring to it, but its current usage dates only to the late twentieth century. Originating from the pen of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin in the 1950s, it took the shape embraced by evangelicals in the 5 1990s. Newbigin used the phrase to describe the connection between the church’s missionary calling and the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit into the world, “rooted in the very being of God.” He also made sure that the church was God’s principal instrument of missions, but not entirely defined by its mission. The church cannot separate itself from missions, but the church is more than missions. Newbigin’s many books led to the creation of the Gospel and Our Culture movement, first in the UK in the early 1990s and then spreading to the US 6 and Australia. His influence has been deep and particularly profound with evangelical leaders such as Tim Keller.

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Our second word is incarnational. It is an interesting word because it is widely used in evangelical circles and because it is controversial. Like missio Dei, it shows the lack of unity concerning missions in evangelical Christianity. Darrell Guder embraces the term but qualifies it. Incarnational ministry refers to continuing Christ’s ministry in the world, not the incarnation itself. He does this, however, by separating the bringing of love from the bringing of the institutional church. “Christ did not come to 7 bring a church but healing love to the world.” Scot McKnight, for one, offers a corrective that affirms much of Guder’s statement, while making a stronger case for placing the visible, historical church at the center of missions. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch popularized incarnational missions for a generation 8 of evangelicals. For them, incarnational churches were effective only when they shaped themselves to fit a cultural context to change it. That means constantly changing the church without compromising the word of God. As they assert, these changes might be so profound that a church may in fact become unrecognizable. The visible historical church takes on secondary if not tertiary value. They build on the standard features of the missional church, which is our third term: “The missional church is incarnational, not attractional. It does not create sanctified spaces. It dissembles itself and seeps into the cracks and 9 crevices of a society.” As it does so, it becomes a genuine part of the people group’s culture without damaging either the group or the gospel. In their view, it is better to take the risk than avoid trying. Reformed theologians such as Michael Milton attempt to salvage the phrase without having to accept its more radical implications. In his view, he wants to avoid the hijacking of “missional” by giving it a definition that harmonizes with his own Reformed beliefs. A missional church is an ecclesial community of word, sacrament, and prayer where pastoral staff, officers, and members are

FOCUS ON MISSIONS

united in their commitment to the Gospeldriven practice of the Great Commission of Jesus Christ in every area of ministry 10 and life. Curiously, this understanding aligns well with the early statements of Vatican II. The heart of his construct extends the Great Commission into specific communities with great intentionality and “situational awareness.” Evangelistic enthusiasm for the missional church and incarnational mission is far from universal. Reformed scholar Todd Billings, for example, strongly but carefully disagrees with missional Christians modeling the incar11 nation. He agrees with Guder’s distinction between imitating the ministry Jesus engaged in on earth (good) versus imitating the act of the eternal word becoming incarnate (impossible). The latter is unrepeatable. Billings takes the point beyond Guder at this point. Since the

Evangelistic enthusiasm for the missional church and incarnational mission is far from universal.

consequence of Christ’s incarnation, resurrection, and ascension is our union with him, we can take part in the mission to the world as a new humanity, in the world but distinct from it. Therefore, he thinks it wiser and more precise to view missions as a participation in Christ rather than some kind of extension of 12 the incarnation. What Billings points out is that the discussion of missio Dei tends to ignore the central role of Christ. At its worst, missio Dei functionally subordinates Christ to the Holy Spirit. In all cases, it erases any sense of missional priority. A fundamental of the Reformation, not to mention all three of the ecumenical creeds, however, was the simultaneous prioritizing of Trinity and Christology. Missio Dei and its adjuncts produce an imbalanced understanding of missions. Others, such as Mike Breen perhaps in a related way, forecast failure for missional movements because, with all the time spent on understanding and moving into the communities of the world, the church spends precious little time making the disciples who can fuel that ongoing ministry. Failing to disciple people leaves them vulnerable to the ideas of the world that they seem to reach. The functional outcome of these ideas is a fundamental rejection of Hirsch and Frost’s core commitments. At the other end of the Reformed evangelical spectrum are those who see the way forward as remembering and reviving the past. Innovation is far less of a priority than rekindling the evangelistic fires that raged from the Reformation through the American Great Awakenings. The missional wing of the church may see this desire as somewhere between an anachronism and a forlorn hope. I see it in social media as cynicism. This all underscores the reality that as evangelicalism (to include Reformed evangelicalism) ages, one may see cracks and lines. The older it gets, the deeper they become. At present, these differences become the ground upon which Reformed evangelical believers fight. We rarely fight well, however, because we fight blind most of the time. The danger is that if they

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Wedges are driven routinely between academies, mission agencies, churches, and the field as fundamental definitions divide rather than unite. It is worth thinking about—whether you want to or not.

grow far enough apart, it may be difficult to salvage evangelical denominations, and perhaps evangelicalism. From what I can see, this disintegration is probably well under way. These formative ideas translate into the present. I am ambivalent about social media, but I benefit from eavesdropping on Facebook threads. For a little experiment, I monitored two of the longer ones and then listed, in my old-school notebook with my fountain pen, the variety of disputed areas argued over by pastors and elders in conservative evangelical churches. The variety of gripes was dazzling, particularly since I studied only two threads. A sampling included: failing to discipline doctrinal error, the lack of denominational diversity, the inability to balance common grace and antithesis, the inability to function in a post-Christian culture, the need for church renewal, too much political conservatism, the infection of the church by non-Christian culture, the definition of mission, the clash between missiology and the gospel, the need for parish ministry that focuses on the non-Christians in a community, the Benedict Option, and whether or not LGBT is a missional frontier and, if so, in what way. The fundamental disagreements concerning words such as missio Dei, incarnational, and the missional church sit underneath most of the visible friction. They point out the fragility of the evangelical enterprise and perhaps its necessary collapse. More to my point, they

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divide the church in its pursuit of the mission that God gave it. Wedges are driven routinely between academies, mission agencies, churches, and the field as fundamental definitions divide rather than unite. It is worth thinking about— whether you want to or not. BASIL GRAFAS is the pen name of an American missionary

working overseas.

1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Orlando: Harcourt, 1974). 2. Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, The Prescription Against Heretics, ch. 7. 3. Gerald Lewis Bray, Holiness and the Will of God: Perspectives on the Theology of Tertullian (Atlanta: John Knox, 1979), 7. 4. Bray, 79. 5. Geoffrey Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 165, 167. 6. See, for example, Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1953); Signs amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994); The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978). 7. Darrell L. Guder, The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 23. 8. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003). 9. Frost and Hirsch, 12, 37. 10. Michael A. Milton, “What Does It Really Mean for a Church to be ‘Missional’? Is it Important?” Christianity Today (June 5, 2019), http://www.christianity.com. 11. J. Todd Billings, Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). 12. Billings, 124.

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THE THEOLOGICAL TERM FOR THE ENERGY WE EXPEND FOR THE SAKE OF FEELING RIGHTEOUS IS ‘SELF-JUSTIFICATION,’ AND IT CANNOT BE OVERSTATED AS A MOTIVATION IN HUMAN AFFAIRS.”

CHRISTIANITY AND SECULAR CULTURE: A WHI INTERVIEW WITH UWE SIEMON-NETTO

REPLACEMENT RELIGION AND THE “SECULOSITY OF BUSYNESS”

CHRISTIANITY IN A NEW AGE

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A WHI I N T E R V I E W W I T H U W E S I E M O N - N E T TO

I L LU ST R AT I O N BY I S R A E L G . VA R G A S

CULTURE

AND

CHRISTIANITY

W White Horse Inn radio cohost Michael Horton interviewed Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, former religion editor of United Press International, international columnist, and Lutheran lay theologian. He is also a Senior Distinguished Fellow of 1517 The Legacy Project.

WHI: Please tell us the story about how you came back to your Lutheran upbringing. US-N: This was in the mid-1970s in the after-

math of the 1968 revolution in Germany and all around Europe. I took over as managing editor of a daily newspaper in Hamburg, where my staff consisted of three factions: old-fashioned social democrats; guys who had no opinion; and rabid, extreme leftists—who were, of course, the noisy ones. They always wanted to argue with me, and they always wanted to have headlines that were ideologically from their perspective but that wouldn’t sell a single newspaper to any sane reader. At one point, I had enough and said, “Look, you are all Marxists, and I am not. But I can tell you that a newspaper can be led only from the top on down like a pyramid. Your problem is that I am on top and you’re down.” That ended the discussion. In those days, I was never an atheist or even an agnostic, but I just thought I could keep God at a safe distance. I thought he could look away while I was having fun. So one day, after a violent debate I had with these guys, the most rabid feminist lesbian Trotskyite member of my staff

said to me, “We all realize, of course, that you are by far the best expert on Marx here in the newsroom.” I said, “Yes.” She said, “But you’re not a Marxist.” I said, “No.” She said, “If Marx does not drive you, who does?” And here I heard myself say, “Well, Jesus Christ.” The thought hadn’t crossed my mind for many years. I was far too busy covering wars and doing all sorts of things. She went back quietly to her desk, and I went into my office and thought, what did I just say? If I said it, then it must be true. I then rushed back home to the pastor of the congregation I would have belonged to had I been a member of the church, and I said, “Listen, I want to join the church again. Can I come by this afternoon before I have to go back to this editorial conference and fight with these left-wingers again?” He said, “No, no, stay where you are. Everyone else is leaving the church, and you’re the only one I can sign up, so this is how it goes.”

WHI: That’s wild. Your PhD dissertation under Peter

Berger, whom we recently interviewed, was titled “The Luther Cliche,” published in Germany and then its English language edition. US-N: No, I wrote it in English; then in order to let the Germans have some fun as well, I translated it into German. But the book in English is called The Fabricated Luther: Refuting Nazi Connections and Other Modern Myths. The thesis is that Luther was Hitler’s progenitor, that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms had actually led Germans to become a bunch of wimps and weirdos who succumbed so easily to Hitler. This is theologically absolutely false, but in order to show this, you have to show the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms: the kingdom to the left, which is where God reigns in a hidden way through his creation, through us, his masks; and, of course, the kingdom to the right where God has revealed himself in Christ. So you have this constant tension in Lutheran theology between the two realities of a Christian who operates in two directions: vertically to God and horizontally to his fellow man. That is

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YOU HAVE THIS CONSTANT TENSION IN LUTHERAN THEOLOGY BETWEEN THE TWO REALITIES OF A CHRISTIAN WHO OPERATES IN TWO DIRECTIONS: VERTICALLY TO GOD AND HORIZONTALLY TO HIS FELLOW MAN. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

distinctly Lutheran. The paradoxical relationship and interplay between Christ and culture has always been turned in a primitive fashion on its head by many of Luther’s antagonists, actually all the way back to the sixteenth century and then specifically during World War II, blaming Luther for everything. Hitler was an ex-Catholic, and most of the Nazi leadership was ex-Catholic. Three quarters of the concentration camps were Austrians and by definition ex-Catholic—not that I want to blame the poor Catholics for the Nazis. The Nazis were anti-Christian. They were, by and large, either atheist or had a totally different theology from ours. I showed in my dissertation how, in fact, Lutheran thinking and Lutheran law-andgospel thinking actually made the leaders of the German resistance against the Nazis, led by the mayor of my hometown, Carl Goerdeler. In my book, I showed that Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms, and their clear distinction between God’s twofold reign as the hidden God and the revealed God, had a massive influence on this resistance movement. For example, Luther very clearly said that when the horseman lost his mind, he must be removed from the driver’s seat. Then Luther added, but only after you have found another way or have found a replacement for him. In other words, you can’t let the coach run wild without a coachman. This is precisely how the resistance in Germany, especially Carl Goerdeler, planned their actions. Unfortunately, they did not succeed.

WHI: You’ve lectured on apocalypticism—or enthu-

siasm, as our forbearers would have called it —that enflames a lot of the revolutionary and even repressive regimes around the world. When you compare it with the age of the Reformers and the radical Anabaptists trying to take over the City of Münster for example, how important is eschatology? U S - N : Thomas Muntzer was Luther’s chief antagonist, and he called Luther a monkey because he followed Scripture so cautiously. Muntzer thought you should be influenced by the Holy Spirit. Now the problem is, of course,

that you very often confuse the spirit of the time with the Holy Spirit, and then you get your knickers into a fierce twist. You don’t know what is next, and you think the Holy Spirit ordered the destruction of the Jews or the construction of the Berlin Wall, simply because it happened to be the spirit of the time. The big fight between Luther and Muntzer was precisely over this issue: whether man is called to give God a hand in creating paradise on earth. It’s been going on now since the sixteenth century when Muntzer thought he could create a paradise for revolutionary peasants. Friedrich Engels referred in his writings directly to Thomas Muntzer, as did Alfred Rosenberg, who was the chief ideologue of the Nazi party. They’re not the only ones, but they referred to Muntzer. What was it that the Communists tried to create? A personal and private little paradise for workers and peasants.

WHI: Does my memory serve me correctly that

when I was in East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, Muntzer’s image was on the currency? U S - N : Yes, Muntzer was on the money, and schools were named after him. He was one theologian who had high marks in Communism.

WHI: As you look around today, do you see a kind

of religious enthusiasm or apocalypticism, or whatever you want to call it, as sort of Muntzer-like, even among non-Christian leaders? US-N: Oh absolutely. Take all the “isms” that

rule our day. All those are Muntzer-like. On the Left are radical feminism (I’m not talking about the demand of women to be paid equally, which of course is another issue altogether) and homosexuality as an ideology (not as another form of sin like so many others). On the Right, you have radical evangelical groups that think the world should be governed according to the gospel. That’s not possible. We are called to serve God (the horizontal relationship with God) by serving our fellow man, and we are given the law.

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We are given the law, and we are given practical reason—which is under sin but nonetheless helps us find our way around this world. It is a finite world, but it still has to be managed; as opposed to the infinite kingdom of Christ, where we are forgiven sinners and which illumines our reason if we are Christians. Nonetheless, if you now talk about the point of the gospel the whole time you’re discussing politics, I think this is enthusiasm. You cannot argue against abortion with an atheist based on Scripture, because Scripture doesn’t mean anything to an atheist or an agnostic. But you can argue against abortion based on natural law, which is the law written upon every man’s heart. Therefore, you can say that no civilized society throughout the ages (pre-Christian or whatever) would have found it acceptable to murder the most innocent—namely, the children in their mothers’ womb. In the final analysis, these evangelicals and I want the same thing. I want this heinous genocide, which has killed more than fifty million since Roe v. Wade, to end right here and now. But don’t argue this based on something the majority of people no longer know.

WHI: Many evangelical Protestant Christians in

America want the church to be a powerful force for transforming culture. You have covered, and still cover, a lot of big stories and headlines around the world, and you’ve seen quite a few transformative movements. Your work obviously straddles both kingdoms, so how do you as a Christian draw from your own theological categories in order to negotiate these and hope for transformation, but not to see the church as the source of that? US-N: Christ as the transformer of culture is a puritan and a social gospel type of theology to which I do not subscribe. As I said, I believe in the Lutheran concept of Christ and culture being in paradox. I’m proposing to teach a journalism course. In this course, I hope to impart to these students (most of whom will probably be Christians) the idea that they are not called to preach the gospel from the pulpit or handle the silverware at the altar. That’s not what journalists

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do. We all have our calling, and according to Scripture, we are called to serve our neighbors. This is what Luther stressed over and over again. This comes right out of the Sermon on the Mount and Ephesians. We are called to serve our neighbors. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of those who resisted Hitler and was hanged for it, called us “little Christs”—you and everybody else, irrespective of whether they are Christians or not. My focus as a journalist has to be my reader and not myself. Now you have few good journalists who have readers and listeners in mind rather than themselves. Think of Lou Dobbs. He grows bigger and bigger and bigger on the cover of his books every time you see him. In the end, he’s going to outgrow it (he’ll have to wrap himself around his next edition!). It doesn’t matter whether it’s Left or Right. This is not our job as journalists.

WHI: Basically, you’re saying that the place for any impact on the culture directly is not the church and its solemn assemblies and pronouncements, but rather Christians exercising their calling for the good of their neighbors? U S - N : Yes, and in this way the unordained Christian—that is, every plumber or homemaker—becomes a member of the universal priesthood of all believers, not by berating or clobbering people with a Bible over their heads. There are some who actually think that brain surgeons, before they cut open somebody’s skull, should share the gospel. This is not their job. Their job as a Christian is to work as responsibly and lovingly as they can as a brain surgeon. Then, hopefully, pastors in their pulpits will preach the gospel correctly. As Luther would say, “Preach it like black bread”—that is, nutritious. This is where we find things confused. Preachers should be preaching law and gospel, but the gospel ultimately has to be strong in it, and celebrating the Eucharist—giving us Christ’s true body and blood. That’s good enough. Educate the kids and visit the sick and let us journalists do our journalism. Let the plumbers do their plumbing, the politicians their politics, and the students their studying.

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MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

BY DAV I D Z A H L

I L LU ST R AT I O N BY I S R A E L G . VA R G A S

˝SECULOSITY OF BUSYNESS ˝

AND THE

RELIGION

REPLACEMENT

A A friend recently shared an image on social media showing the Disney cartoon villain Cruella de Vil, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, hands clutching the wheel of her infamous coupe, black-and-white hair waving wildly in the wind, oversized fur coat flapping behind— in a word, crazed. Over the image someone had typed: “Me trying to excel in my career, maintain a social life, drink enough water, exercise, text everyone back, stay sane, survive and be happy.” Beneath the picture, a caption read: “Every day.” It was followed by a string of comments, “Amen,” “Yep,” “Like lookin’ in a mirror,” and so on. People could relate, and not just the same old suspects. After taking a quick survey of the peanut gallery’s profiles, I couldn’t help but notice the breadth of demographics represented, male and female, old and young, black and white. (Then again, it’s Instagram, so who can say for sure?) But this much was clear: It takes one of Disney’s trippiest images to capture the white-knuckle pace of modern life. You don’t need a clever meme to deduce this. Just ask the next person you see how they’re doing. The stock reply used to be “fine” or “well.” Today, there’s a very good chance they’ll respond with “busy.” Reflexive and unoriginal as this answer may be, it is not dishonest. I think of my friends Jen and Ted. They are currently balancing two fulltime careers with raising three young children. Anyone who follows their family on social media knows that Ted is coaching T-ball this spring and Jen can hardly keep up with the demand that her side project on Etsy is generating. Less public

would be the fact that Ted’s father has recently been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and the papers on Jen’s sister’s divorce have yet to be signed. So when I asked them the other day how they’re doing and they responded with an emphatic “busy!” they weren’t lying. What bothered me about the interaction was not their answer, so much as the way it reminded me of how I must sound when using that same word—which I do at least ten times a day. It sounds like I’m complaining about the super abundance of activity, when in truth I actually prefer it that way. Idleness makes me far more uncomfortable than busyness, and a blank to-do list is considerably more nerve-wracking than an overstuffed one. What would it mean about me if I didn’t have enough commitments to fill my schedule? Nothing good, that’s for sure. To be busy is to be valuable, desired, justified. It signals importance and, therefore, righteousness. Busy is not just how we are but who we are—or who we’d like to be. Salvation itself waits for those who never stop hustling. Welcome to one of America’s favorite replacement religions, what we might term the “Seculosity of Busyness.” Perhaps we should back up. Bombarded with poll results about declining levels of church attendance and belief in God, we assume that more and more people are abandoning the faith and making their own meaning. But what these polls fail to report is that the marketplace in replacement religion is booming. Even a cursory look at the way we live today reveals that the religious impulse is easier to rebrand than to extinguish. Meaning that religious observance hasn’t faded apace with “secularization” so much as migrated—and we’ve got the anxiety to prove it. We’re seldom not in church. That’s a bold assertion to make, I know, and one that depends greatly on your definition of “religion.” If you’re going with the common conception—of robes and kneeling and the Man Upstairs, what we might call “capitalR” Religion—then, yes, people are bailing in unprecedented numbers. The landscape shifts, however, if you opt for a more expansive view

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LISTEN CAREFULLY AND YOU’LL HEAR THAT WORD ENOUGH EVERYWHERE, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO THE ANXIETY, LONELINESS, EXHAUSTION, AND DIVISION THAT PLAGUE OUR MOMENTS TO SUCH TRAGIC PROPORTIONS. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

of religion. Writer David Dark, for example, defines religion as “a controlling story” or “the question of how we dispose our energies, how we see fit to organize our own lives and, in many 1 cases, the lives of others.” According to this definition, religion is not merely that which explains the inexplicable but is the lens through which we sort the data of our days, rank our priorities, and focus our desires. We’ll call this “small-r” religion. A person’s “religion” is shorthand for the shape that lens takes—namely, the specific ways it refracts what we see and directs our longings. This can be a set of unconscious assumptions about the world, or it can be a perspective that’s deliberately adopted, like an “ism” of some kind. Most often, it’s both. While a solid starting point, I wonder if Dark’s definition veers a tad too close to that dreaded term “worldview.” Religion in real life is more than a filter or paradigm—or even a matter of conscious worship. It is what we lean on to tell us we’re okay, that our lives matter, another name for all the ladders we spend our days climbing toward a dream of wholeness. It refers to our preferred guilt-management system, and everyone has one. Our small-r religion is the justifying story of our life. It is that which we rely on not just for meaning or hope but enoughness. Ritual and community and all the other stuff come second. Listen carefully and you’ll hear that word enough everywhere, especially when it comes to the anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion, and division that plague our moments to such tragic proportions. You’ll hear about people scrambling to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, wealthy enough, influential enough, desirable enough, charitable enough, woke enough, good enough. We believe instinctively that were we to reach some benchmark in our minds, then value, vindication, and love would be ours—that if we got enough, we would be enough. And yet, no matter how close we get or how much we achieve, we never quite arrive at enough. (How much money is enough, Mr. Rockefeller? Just a little bit more.) Our lives attest that the threshold does not exist, at least

not where fallible and finite human beings are concerned. Instead, as journalist Will Storr writes, “People are suffering and dying under the torture of the fantasy self they’re failing 2 to become.” This is not a secret. Pretty much every wisdom tradition lays it plain. Nevertheless, we spend our days chasing the mirage, often to the detriment of our well-being and that of our neighbors. What gives? The answer has something to do with the research that moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt recounts in his book The Righteous Mind. He writes in the introduction that “an obsession with righteousness . . . is the normal human 3 condition.” The longing for some form of righteousness is not an aberration perpetuated by capital-R Religion but a foundation of what it means to be human. In other words, we cannot shake the specter of enoughness, because it lives in our DNA. This obsession is invaluable when it comes to the formation of groups and survival of the species. But there are downsides—significant ones. Experience, not to mention the Bible, confirms the veracity of Haidt’s claim. We want to feel good about ourselves, and so we edit our personalities to maximize the approval of others. Or we exaggerate hardships to make ourselves seem more heroic or others more villainous. The theological term for the energy we expend for the sake of feeling righteous is “self-justification,” and it cannot be overstated as a motivation in human affairs. If you want to understand what makes someone tick or why they’re behaving the way they are, trace the righteousness in play and things will likely become clear. Your colleague who can’t stop working? Odds are, she equates busyness with worthiness. Your perpetually single friend who can’t seem to find someone who measures up to his standards? It could be that he’s looking to another person to “complete” him—to make him feel like he’s enough. What about you? Maybe the reason you can’t stop scrolling through your social media feed is because it confirms how right(eous) your opinions are about others or yourself. Or maybe, on

some level that you can barely admit to yourself, you believe that if your latest post on Facebook gets enough likes, you will finally like yourself. While enoughness may not be a direct synonym for righteousness, it’s not far off. After all, enough only makes sense if there’s some kind of line demarcating it from not enough. It implies a standard of some kind. Yet we avoid the word righteousness because it sounds too religious, too old-fashioned, too judgmental, too close to self-righteous—and we know we don’t like that. Righteous sounds ominously absolute and therefore authoritarian, as though it could impinge on the lives of those around us. Enough, on the other hand, has a more subjective and therefore less threatening connotation. In practice, there’s very little difference. Those dogged by a sense of not-enoughness know all too well that “I’ll know enough when I see/ feel it” isn’t any lighter a burden than “reach [X, Y or Z] objective standard.” Both are classic spiritual treadmills, and the former may even be more taxing due to its slipperiness. Whatever the case, the problem of self-justification is not a linguistic one. A major problem for those of us with “righteous minds” comes when our conception of righteousness differs from that of our neighbors, or when we feel they are standing in the way of our attainment of it. Innocuous-seeming differences in perspective balloon overnight into showdowns over good versus evil. And nothing allows us to more easily excuse ruthlessness than when we’ve painted our neighbor as an adversary to all that is true and holy. There’s a deep irony at work here: enoughness is a universal human longing. The yearning for it binds us together across party, country, gender, race, and age. It provides the glue that holds our most altruistic movements together. Yet, the specific expression of this obsession in each person’s life is often what alienates us from others. The tighter the in-group, the larger the out-group will be. Depending on the content of the righteousness in question, this drive can spark our most dehumanizing judgments of other people and inspire us, sometimes unconsciously, to conceive of the world in terms of us versus them.

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INNOCUOUS-SEEMING DIFFERENCES IN PERSPECTIVE BALLOON OVERNIGHT INTO SHOWDOWNS OVER GOOD VERSUS EVIL. AND NOTHING ALLOWS US TO MORE EASILY EXCUSE RUTHLESSNESS THAN WHEN WEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;VE PAINTED OUR NEIGHBOR AS AN ADVERSARY TO ALL THAT IS TRUE AND HOLY.

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Doubtless this is what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr meant when he observed that “there is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life of man than the cruelty of righteous people.” He was referring to what we in the church call “Pharisaism”—an overreliance on superficial indicators of righteousness that in practice belie their opposite; e.g., following the letter of the law to the degree that it contradicts the spirit. What people don’t always see is that the same oppressive spirit afflicts replacement religions, too. Self-righteousness tends to follow selfjustification, regardless of backdrop, and the higher we climb on the ladder of self-justification, the longer it gets—and the farther apart the rungs grow. How else do we account for the fact that the most accomplished people feel more, rather than less, pressure to succeed? Or that people who are better-looking perceive their blemishes so acutely? You might say that the cost of an ideal of righteousness is the reality of unrighteousness, pure and simple. Whether or not we have the resources to cope with that burden is a different question. Why is it that we seem more fixated on righteousness, on enoughness, than at any time in recent memory? At the risk of gross oversimplification, for centuries capital-R Religion provided a place to go with our guilt and shame, somewhere we could off-load the burden. As theologian Steven Paulson put it, the clergyman was your “local forgiveness person.” For more and more people in the modern world, the church no longer feels like an advisable or available option. Some, like Friedrich Nietzsche, predicted that we would find peace in the deconstruction and emerge into a new and gloriously liberated mode of human existence. Without a divine law to make us feel poorly about ourselves, words like guilt would lose their meaning. We would no longer require a buffer from the unsightly aspects of reality; we would have the courage to face things head-on. A glorious, post-religious age of human flourishing would dawn. Alas, if our current cultural climate tells us anything, it’s that the needs addressed by Religion—for hope, purpose, connection,

justification, enoughness—haven’t diminished as churches have become taprooms and theaters. All that angst and energy involved hasn’t evaporated. It can’t. It has to go somewhere. With altars off the table, fresh targets have cropped up all over the place, from the kitchen to the gym to the computer screen to the bedroom. Righteousness, you might say, is running amok and breeding mercilessness wherever it goes. Where once we chose between an array of different schools to attend, now there’s the one that will ensure our future success—and the many that will squander it. Where once there was a sea of nice people to date, now there’s Mr./Ms. Right—and everyone else is a waste of our time. What’s more, it often seems that the farther we retreat from a shared Religion, the more contenders emerge to harness our floundering religiosity. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this “the nova effect,” likening it to an explosion of religious pluralism. These new religions go by different names but function more or less the same, maintaining all the demand (and much of the ritual!) but none of the mercy of the capital-R variety. If we used to go to church once a week, we now go every hour. It’s exhausting, to put it mildly. Of course, most people don’t like being told they’re religious—and not just those who identify as atheists. The ever-increasing demographic of the “spiritual but not religious” suggests that religion is a dirty word across the board. What’s more, there does seem to be a discernible difference between grounding your hope in something material and something spiritual. Which is why I am proposing a fresh term: “seculosity.” Think of it as a catchall for religiosity that’s directed horizontally rather than vertically, at earthly rather than heavenly objects. And yet, the objects of our seculosity—food, romance, education, children, technology, and so on—aren’t somehow bad. Quite the opposite—they are by and large great. It’s only when we lean on these things for enoughness, when we co-opt them for our self-justification or make them into arbiters of salvation itself, that they turn toxic.

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THEOLOGIAN REINHOLD NIEBUHR . . . OBSERVED THAT “THERE IS NO DEEPER PATHOS IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MAN THAN THE CRUELTY OF RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE.” MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

This is not a neutral phenomenon. Take busyness again as an example. Research on the issue paints a foreboding picture, health-wise. Unremitting busyness reliably predicts chronic stress and therefore heart disease, sleeplessness, higher blood pressure, and shorter life spans, to say nothing of general fatigue. As tired as it makes us, busyness remains attractive because it does double duty, allowing us to feel like we’re advancing on the path of life while distracting us from other, less pleasant realities, like doubt and uncertainty and death. When we move rapid-fire from task to task, we (theoretically) minimize the mental space available for painful feelings, while at the same time accruing extra points in the enoughness column. So we stay busy to keep the rivers of affirmation and reward flowing in our direction. We are afraid they will stop if we’re not generating the current. No wonder so many of us wear our exhaustion as a badge of honor. Complaining of being “crazy busy” may be today’s definitive #humblebrag. If the protagonists in Jane Austen novels gloried in their idleness—their distance from the harried lower echelons of society who have no choice but to work—a couple centuries later, the opposite holds sway: keeping up with the Joneses now means trying to out-schedule them. Busyness has become a status symbol, a.k.a. a public display of enoughness. For an increasing amount of the population, then, to be alive in the twentyfirst century is to wonder privately how much longer you can keep feeding the beast before you keel over. The very phrase “feed the beast” could not be more apt. It conjures the image of a ravenously hungry creature whose appetite demands satiation, lest it carve out its pound of flesh. It brings to mind a prowling monster that can be momentarily appeased but never fully satisfied. A life of feeding the beast recasts our activities, and the rewards they bring, as momentary offerings on the anxious altar of Enough. A little melodramatic, I know, but hopefully the description rings some bells. Because what we’re talking about when we talk about chronic busyness is “performancism,” one of the hallmarks of all forms of seculosity.

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Performancism is the assumption, usually unspoken, that there is no distinction between what we do and who we are. Your résumé isn’t part of your identity; it is your identity. What makes you lovable, indeed what makes your life worth living, is your performance at X, Y, or Z. Performancism holds that if you are not doing enough, or not doing enough well, then you are not enough. At least, you are less than those who are “killing it.” Losing may hurt, but in a performance paradigm so does winning—just in a different and more deceptive way. Apart from some momentary gratification, victory doesn’t usher in contentment or peace so much as fear, paranoia, and the pressure to maintain. Feed the beast, or else. Performancism turns life into a competition to be won (#winning) or a problem to be solved, as opposed to, say, a series of moments to be experienced or an adventure to relish. Performancism invests daily tasks with existential significance and turns even menial activities into measures of enoughness. The language of performancism is the language of scorekeeping, and just like the weight scale or the calendar, it shows no mercy. When supercharged by technology, the result can even be deadly. Indeed, our devotion to the dogmas of performancism lies at the root of much of the skyrocketing anxiety, loneliness, and fatigue that saddle so many hearts and minds today. We see this devotion particularly, but not exclusively, in young people. To wit, the rash of “suicide clusters” in affluent areas of the United States (Palo Alto, California; northern Virginia; western Chicago; Fairfield County, Connecticut; etc.). These are places afflicted by high school suicide rates four and five times the national average—high-achieving enclaves where the pressure to meet the highest possible standards of academic and athletic excellence has left those prone to self-harm even more isolated than adolescence already accomplishes on its own. By no means is the phenomenon limited to secondary schools, though. Elite colleges have long served as clusters unto themselves. The

University of Pennsylvania made national headlines when the campus witnessed an astounding six student suicides in a thirteen-month stretch in 2013–2014. In response, the administration formed a task force to study mental health on campus. Their final report cited something called “Penn Face,” defined as “the practice of acting happy and self-assured even when sad or stressed.” Penn Face, the authors surmised, derives from the “perception that one has to be perfect in every academic, cocurricular and social endeavor.” Effortlessly perfect, that is; only the most casual mastery will get you to the top of the Ivy League scoreboard. Spending excessive amounts of time in this mode “can manifest as demoralization, alienation or conditions like anxiety or depression.” Expectation and isolation are a fatal combination. After Penn released its report, The New York Times followed up with an article of its own in which they profiled an undergraduate named Kathryn DeWitt. She recalled how upset she had been on learning that she had scored, uncharacteristically, in the sixties on a calculus exam. “I had a picture of my future, and as that future deteriorated, I stopped imagining another future,” she confessed to journalist Julie Scelfo. Following the news of a beloved classmate’s suicide around the same time, Ms. DeWitt contemplated taking a similar route. That is a lot of power to ascribe to a single grade on a single exam. Then again, when we’re gripping the wheel as tightly as Cruella, even the slightest nudge can steer us over the cliff. One incontrovertible failure may be all it takes to confirm whatever deeper doubts we harbor about ourselves, and in a world devoid of redemption—a state of mind exacerbated by depression—self-harm is merely the instantiation of the damnation already enacted upon us. Perhaps this explains, at least in part, why some people would rather end their lives than confess that they’ve lost their jobs or made a bad investment. Make no mistake, any scheme where salvation is reserved for those with the most impeccable track records is a religious scheme. It may be unconscious, but that only makes the dynamics

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BELIEVERS OFTEN CAN’T HELP MEASURING THEMSELVES AGAINST THEIR FELLOW CONGREGANTS, DROPPING HINTS OF HOW OFTEN THEY READ THEIR BIBLE, HOW MUCH MONEY THEY GIVE, OR HOW MANY SHIFTS THEY PICK UP AT THE SOUP KITCHEN. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

involved more dangerous. This is the precise understanding of religion parodied so brilliantly in the sitcom The Good Place, in which it is revealed that people accrue points during their time on Earth according to their deeds. Their sum total determines whether they go to “the good place” or “the bad place” when they die. For example, remaining loyal to the Cleveland Browns nets you +53.83 points, while overstating a personal connection to a tragedy that has nothing to do with you will ding you -41.84 points. It’s telling that the performancism is both immediately recognizable to audiences and its pitfalls so endlessly entertaining. Of course, performancism is neither unique to postmillennial life nor a purely secular force. In fact, some of the most toxically performancist environments exist inside the church, where anxious people frantically try to outdo one another in the good-works department, whether those be acts of charity or acts of devotion or both—as if our spiritual résumé was the ticket to God’s approval. While few would ever admit to such outright heresy, believers often can’t help measuring themselves against their fellow congregants, dropping hints of how often they read their Bible, how much money they give, or how many shifts they pick up at the soup kitchen. In lieu of “Penn Face,” you have “Sunday Face.” That is to say, far too many churches resemble their secular replacements than the faith of the saints, once delivered. Faith that more often than not begins with an admission of losing and need morphs into a hectic competition for justification, in which we baptize our busyness with religious language. Soon, God ceases to be the Good Shepherd and turns into the Taskmaster-in-the-Sky, or worse, he becomes another name for the persecutor within. The targets may be ostensibly more righteous, but the exhaustion and anxiety they produce are identical to their secular corollaries. “I just couldn’t keep it up anymore!” is the refrain I’ve heard from many a refugee from performancist churches. And for those who stick around, the pressure to uphold a veneer of perfect holiness can foster all manner of dysfunction and double lives.

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“THAT’S HOW YOU ACQUIRE THE RESOLUTION FOR SURVIVAL THAT THE COMING YEARS ARE ABOUT TO DEMAND. YOU DON’T EARN IT. IT’S GIVEN.”

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If there’s a difference today, it has to do with the vanishing of outlets where the pressure of perfection might be vented. It’s easier to develop a sense of enoughness, for example, when your pool of peers is in the hundreds rather than the millions, when the primary venues of comparison close shop at 5:00 p.m. Similarly, it’s a lot harder to recover from a youthful indiscretion when the Internet has made the record of your adolescence permanent and searchable. Capital-R Religion once provided a space to come clean and maybe even be absolved of shortcoming and guilt. Church wasn’t busy. If anything, it was boring and full of silence, a respite from the noise of daily demand, a place to receive rather than achieve—the good ones at least. Churches devoid of performancism may have largely vanished from the landscape, but the glimpses they offered, at their best, of an alternative way of approaching ourselves and the world still flit across our line of sight from time to time, thank God. When it happens, we don’t forget. In her memoir Cherry, Mary Karr recounts just such an instance. When she was fourteen years old, while her parents were out of the house, a miserable Mary tried to do herself in by swallowing a handful of pills. She was unsuccessful and wound up sick. When her mother and father returned home, they tenderly nursed her, without suspecting the suicide attempt. They attributed the vomiting to food poisoning. After a while, her father asked her if there was any food she could stomach. All she thought she could eat would be a plum. But plums were out of season, and so she went to bed. The next morning, her father came into her room with a bushel of plums, having driven through the night from Texas to Arkansas to get them for her. Mary remembers: But it’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin. And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against

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yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody—anybody—who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. . . . That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to 4 demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given. In that blinding instant, the justifying story of Mary’s life switched tracks, her performance revealed to be at best beside the point, at worst a liability, when it came to what really mattered. And what mattered was the magnitude of the uncoerced generosity, so towering and inconceivable in proportion to the not-enoughness that had clouded her vision. Unlike Cruella, she hadn’t even needed to get behind the wheel. Adapted from Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do About It, by David Zahl copyright © 2019 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission. DAVID ZAHL is the founder and director of Mockingbird Ministries, editor-in-chief of the Mockingbird website (www. mbird.com), and cohost of The Mockingcast. A licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal diocese of Virginia, David serves on the staff of Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville where he supervises its college student ministry.

1. David Dark, Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious (Downers Grove: IVP, 2006), 18. 2. William Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us (London: Picador, 2017). 3. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2012), xix–xx. 4. Mary Karr, Cherry: A Memoir (NY: Penguin Books, 2001).

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BY ST E P H E N R O B E R T S

I L LU ST R AT I O N BY I S R A E L G . VA R G A S

NEW AGE

IN THE

CHRISTIANIT Y

I In 2015, a Pew survey on religion was released that confirmed the greatest hopes of some and the greatest fears of others—Christianity 1 is in decline in America. Or is it? After digging through the data, Ed Stetzer pointed out that “convictional Christianity” is actually holding steady but “nominal Christianity” is hemorrhaging. The real story, Stetzer concludes, is the swift drift of millions from “nominals” 2 into “nones.” Yet even this conclusion is unintentionally misleading, and the ramifications for how we approach the culture is huge. Practically speaking, these nones are not atheists and agnostics—there are categories for those labels. The nones are not those who have no religion, but those who have no religious preference. This simple reality casts doubt on whether our society is truly becoming more secular or more (small “s”) spiritual. Of course, biblically and philosophically speaking, we know there is no rise in irreligion, because there is no one who is actually irreligious. The apostle Paul explains that “since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen,” yet men “suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Rom. 1:20, 18). Indeed, the fervor to discuss things of a spiritual nature may be increasing. Last year, I conducted a Facebook poll, asking my fellow soldiers whether they like to talk about religion, spirituality, meaning, purpose, and so on. Ninety-seven percent responded in the affirmative. So if our society is not secularizing, then what worldview is it actually embracing? After counseling thousands of young adults over the

past ten years, I have come to believe that most people are narcissistic nihilists disguised as hedonists. As Christians, we often pay attention to the latter part, but it is the former that is more important. Most of my soldiers, for example, do not cohabitate before marriage in order to “play the field” but because they were raised to do so, and they fear the consequences of failing at marriage like their own parents did. Remember, these are the children of the sexual revolution and its aftermath. Behind the desperate pleasure seeking is a vast void of nihilism. Freud was right in connecting father figures with God in the mind and heart of the child. He was wrong in that God is not a projection of our fathers; our fathers (and parents more broadly) are projections of God. They reflect the character of God to their children— for better or worse. They also create a mini-world in the home that teaches their children what the world outside those walls is really about. Broken homes are not the marginal cases anymore, but the mainstream. And that’s what has created the pervasive nihilism of our culture. We often focus on destructive trends such as divorce and abuse, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Some parents permanently cohabitate rather than marry, while others simply switch partners over and over. Perhaps the fastest-growing trend I see today is polyamory (open marriages). All of these trends undermine a child’s view of God, notions of love, trust, security, and acceptance, and paint a decidedly bleak picture of the world they will soon enter on their own. If much of the younger generation can’t trust their parents to impart truth and meaning to them, then where do they look? They are instructed to look within, as we well know, to discover their own path to self-esteem and self-fulfillment. Happiness is made normative without either an explanation or any objective means of achievement. Repurposing Lewis’s line in The Abolition of Man, we “castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” How has this generalized upbringing shaped the thinking of our culture? Across demographic lines, it has robbed men and women not only of their hope but also of their ability to reason.

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WHILE THE LOSS OF CULTURAL PRESTIGE AND POLITICAL POWER MAY SEEM DISHEARTENING, THE HARVEST IS PERHAPS RIPER FOR THE CHURCH THAN AT ANY OTHER TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Except for isolated pockets, rationality has been supplanted by experience as authoritative. Lost amid all the cross-cultural and political shouting matches is the fact that we wouldn’t do much better if we spoke in more measured tones. Neither sales pitches nor syllogisms have much of an effect anymore. How do we engage a culture that is so quickly changing? We should first rest in the fact that our God does not change (Mal. 3:6; James 1:17), nor does the truth and power of his word change (2 Tim. 2:8–9). One of the great treasures J. Gresham Machen passed down to the contemporary church is the reminder that experience is rooted in truth, not the other way around. Machen elsewhere said that if you want to move the world, you first need a place to stand. We have that. So far so good. Rooted in the immutability of God’s character and invincibility of his word, we can better assess the culture. While much of what we are seeing is new to us and to our culture, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccles. 1). Other cultures have experienced vast societal and familial decay. The marginalization of Christianity is the historical norm, not the exception. The idol of experience has battled the idol of reason for supremacy in countless cultures. If we take God at his word, then none of this is a surprise to him. In fact, he reigns over the present evil age as much as any other and intends us to engage it to his glory in “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). While the loss of cultural prestige and political power may seem disheartening, the harvest is perhaps riper for the church than at any other time in American history. The church has often been treated by liberals and conservatives as a means to a given social or political end. Perhaps now the church can be viewed as simply the church, with the glory of God as our transcendent end. The decline of nominal Christianity also means a more clearly defined Christianity. Almost a decade ago, I visited soldiers in the California desert, asking who identified as Christians and what that meant to them. Virtually all of them offered a vague platitude about being a good person. In the past, there was often social capital in calling

yourself a Christian. It was an attestation to your character and provided an opportunity for social, professional, and even political advancement. There was no real need for plumbing the depths of that definition. Now, you must understand what you believe and why you believe it or become another statistic in the next Pew survey. Another perk to this historical moment: the destruction of idealism and triumphalism. You might compare twentieth-century American modernism to a city with vast towers devoted to the pride of human achievements and the triumph of science and reason. Most of these towering idols came crashing down around Watergate, Vietnam, and the Sexual Revolution. The ensuing postmodern milieu in America looks much more like the ruins. It looks like being unplugged from The Matrix, where all was tidy and neat, and discovering that you really live in a wasteland. Thankfully, since the aftermath of Eden, the wasteland has proven to be familiar terrain for God’s people. We live in tents and tabernacles, looking forward to the city whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 11:10). It is Christ who will transform the wilderness into a new and better Eden.

EXPERIMENTAL APOLOGETICS Now that we have a better view of our culture and corresponding opportunities, how do we engage it with the gospel? At this point, it would be easy to introduce a principle or concept, define it, and then give examples. Such a Western, lecture-style format is useful for keeping consistent lines of logic, but it turns out that people generally learn best by seeing how something works before learning the principle. Toward the end of a long day of work, you notice your coworker, Jeremy, with his head in his hands. You ask him if something is wrong. He tells you that he’s having a tough time right now. At this point, the more callous Christian might say, “I’ll pray for you” (don’t be that guy), but you say, “Really? What’s going on?”

Jeremy tells you that he drinks, but no more than a handle of whiskey a week (some people do that in a day). His wife has long threatened to leave him if he didn’t stop. His drinking has also led him to be late to work four days this week, and the boss just told him he’s fired. Now he must go home and tell his wife. Knowing you’re a believer, Jeremy asks, “Why would God allow this to happen to me?” At this point, many faithful and zealous Christians would come at Jeremy from one of two angles. Let’s call the first the evangelistic angle. In this case, you might walk Jeremy through the basics of the gospel and call him to faith in Christ. Let’s call the second the apologetic angle. In this case, you might defend the justice of God in the face of clear human irresponsibility. But knowing what you do about our culture, you wonder if this seemingly rational question by Jeremy is actually what psychologists would call a “presenting issue.” It’s not at the heart of Jeremy’s struggle and may even be an attempt by him to keep you away from the real sources of struggle, pain, and doubt. So, setting aside your desire to vindicate God’s character, you invite Jeremy out one-on-one for a beer at a local pub, or both him and his family over to your house for dinner later in the week. It is in one of these venues that you start digging deeper with Jeremy. It turns out that he has been abusing alcohol his whole adult life, often in response to common stressors. You gently ask him more about his upbringing and learn that his dad did the same thing and eventually destroyed the family in the process. Jeremy swore he’d never be like his dad, but that upbringing had shaped his picture of the world, and his dad’s behavior was the only model he had for coping with this broken world. Now Jeremy feels incredible shame for being like his dad. His shame keeps him from accepting responsibility and owning the unintended similarities. He feels helpless and hopeless to change and is angry at both his dad and himself. If God is real, he doesn’t really blame him for his own behavior, but he does blame him for his broken upbringing. “Why would God allow that to happen to children?”

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ANOTHER PERK TO THIS HISTORICAL MOMENT: THE DESTRUCTION OF IDEALISM AND TRIUMPHALISM. YOU MIGHT COMPARE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN MODERNISM TO A CITY WITH VAST TOWERS DEVOTED TO THE PRIDE OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS AND THE TRIUMPH OF SCIENCE AND REASON. MOST OF THESE TOWERING IDOLS CAME CRASHING DOWN AROUND WATERGATE, VIETNAM, AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION.

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RECOMMENDED READING

For better understanding the culture, read Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal by Ben Sasse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), and The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999) for the decline of and need for “third places.”

For holding down a conversation, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Gregory Koukl (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009) is very helpful, and The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between, also by Koukl (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), shows how only biblical Christianity explains and brings hope to suffering.

For engaging the culture, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist by Larry Alex Taunton (Nashville: Nelson, 2016) provides an exemplary view of a loving, uncompromising friendship between believer and unbeliever.

Biographies, such as Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) and Even in Our Darkness: A Story of Beauty in a Broken Life by Jack Deere (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), are especially helpful.

Without knowing it, Jeremy has given you his trust and the data necessary to more effectively engage him with the gospel. If you’d tried to shortcut the process, you would have misfired. Now you can talk to Jeremy about how broken households shape broken belief systems—and you can show sympathy to him. Jeremy’s father failed and misrepresented the character of God in the process. In Jeremy’s situation, you know you might have made many of the same choices. Jeremy’s grief also testifies to biblical truth. This

broken world is worthy of our tears. Even Jesus wept! Yet why does Jeremy grieve? He knows that God exists, he knows something of the design of this world, and he knows that something went wrong. He also knows that whatever broke is also broken in him. At this point, you can start to share the gospel with him as it pertains to broken homes. God cares about those orphaned by broken parenting (Ps. 27:10). You can talk about the character of the heavenly Father (Ps. 103:13). Jeremy needs

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In employing experimental apologetics, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters by Tim Keller (New York: Penguin, 2009) is a useful tool, as are an array of books and pamphlets provided by the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF). Finally, experience itself will provide you with the intuition necessary for engaging your friend’s heart. As Luther once told Melanchthon, “Sin boldly!” Pray. Engage. Repent. Grow.

to know that there’s hope, but that this hope comes through following the Father who doesn’t fail us. That means getting to know Jesus Christ, our elder brother. Now all of this is overly simplistic, but let’s notice a few things that happened in this exchange. First, you displayed patience. You don’t always need to swing for the fences, but rather put the ball in play and earn more at-bats. One easy way to slow yourself down is to remember: “Basics, background, beliefs.” Start with the

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basics: “What’s going on?” Get the conversation started. Proceed to the background of someone’s life by hearing their individual story of sin, suffering, and common grace. It is important you do this before engaging beliefs. The more you learn about a person’s life, the more you can surgically strike with God’s word rather than carpet bomb and hope you get your target. Second, you recognized that rational objections in today’s culture often present issues. While it is tempting to engage such objections, the conversation often gets lost in the tangled web of well-rehearsed abstractions. Don’t mistake logic and sophistication for depth. Instead, you invited Jeremy to unpack his psychological baggage and the worldview that sagged underneath the weight of that baggage. As a result, you discovered false idols, false identities, and false ideas about the world shaped by untrustworthy experiences and sources of authority. Third, you have engendered trust and cultivated a relationship. Against a backdrop of broken trust, you have provided a safe place for Jeremy to share his pain and divergent beliefs without fear of rejection. The fact that you are a Christian and Jeremy is not is largely irrelevant. If Jeremy trusts you with his heart, he will also trust you with his questions. Over time, gospel conversations almost inevitably follow. This approach to engaging unbelieving friends in the present culture might best be labeled as “experimental apologetics.” With this approach, we show fellow sinner-sufferers that only God’s word makes sense of and gives hope to their brokenness. We cannot shadowbox with abstractions. There is a difference between what people believe to be true and what they really believe. To engage their true belief system, we must trace the contours of their lives. Effective apologetics no longer necessitates a logician but a counselor. As with other apologetic methods, experimental apologetics recognizes the power of God’s word and the necessity of God’s Spirit to convert, but it diverges from other methods in that it seeks to engage and deconstruct one’s practical belief system. We are not looking for

logical fallacies but for practical inconsistencies in how one interprets one’s experiences. We are seeking to dethrone autonomous experience, not autonomous reason. We recognize that everyone has a religious worldview; and rather than directly assault that worldview, we seek to unearth, engage, and expose that worldview in the context of friendship.

THE RISE OF THE THIRD PLACE One of the great, underreported stories of our time is the collapse of community in modern America. Job stability cannot keep pace with job opportunities. Social and economic mobility often require geographic mobility. The number of deep friendships for your average American has plummeted. And many of the old civic and communal organizations are dying. This collapse is both a crisis and an insuperable opportunity. It takes a community to raise a family, and the lack of external support for families is devastating. It also is a major contributor to the present “loneliness epidemic,” in which most Americans lack the vertical bonds of spirituality and horizontal bonds of community that provide identity and meaning. For risk of using a politically loaded term, there is a huge opening here for Christians to be community organizers. One way to do this is by cultivating “third places” as the setting for engagement. In sociological terms, homes are the “first place” and work is the “second place.” Historically across cultures, people have enjoyed “third places” where they can engage others for a pint or a bite with a neighbor, friend, or colleague. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg notes the past prevalence of these places—from the British pub to the American soda fountain or beer garden.3 The main street of small towns used to encapsulate this sort of meeting place. Today, most of those places are gone. They were zoned out of suburban America as our homes became our castles. Americans were increasingly left with the polarity of home and work, with little in between or alongside.

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Yet healthy human flourishing requires more than work and family. We understand this in the church, but the same proves true of society. Communities are the cradle for raising healthy and productive individuals and families. For Christians, the idea of the third place is neither new nor unique. Does the White Horse Inn ring any bells? As in past ages, the pub is the quintessential third place. It seems less than coincidental that the rise of craft beer pubs— which tend to cultivate conversation more than intoxication—has accompanied the modern collapse of community. In a sense, pubs have emerged as the new town halls and Mars Hills of our culture, where important conversations can take place. The beer (in moderation) is not incidental. In a society that often lacks social graces, beer provides a social lubricant. For people who would rather amuse themselves to death rather than risk vulnerability, it can help tap the sealed containers of the heart and soul. Of course, the pub is not the only vehicle for recreating community and engaging the surrounding culture with the gospel. Another staple of Christian life and practice—hospitality—is more valuable now than ever. Most of our unbelieving friends (and many of us) grew up in broken families or in homes that weren’t safe, and so they have rarely ever witnessed the gifts of repentance and forgiveness. Now picture them around the dinner table with a family that reads a devotion, prays, and engages in substantive, gracious conversation. Even more, picture them in a messy Christian home where Mom needs to repent for snapping at the kids and Dad needs to repent for not really listening to what Mom was saying. God’s grace reigns supreme in the home—especially in the mess. The unbelieving friend will see that Christians are also a mess, but that they’re God’s mess. When we open the doors of our homes, we also open the doors of our hearts. Others see us in our weakness and vulnerability and find the safety and freedom to do the same. More than that, they see Who gives us the freedom to be weak and vulnerable—the One whose grace is sufficient—and they get a window into the gospel.

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Venues like these are not incidental to experimental apologetics. The space laboratory, with its views of distant exploration, has been supplanted by Starbucks and the quest to explore the inner self. Lecture halls have been supplanted by lounges. This experientialist culture has discovered—even created—the venues that are most suitable for conversations. People don’t want to be recipients of information, but participants in a conversation. Keep that in mind when finding an appropriate place to meet. While the local church is where we want unbelieving friends to end up, the jump over the chasm between the church and broader culture is more daunting than ever. We often need these intermediary venues, not as replacements for the church but as instruments for drawing people into the church. They want neutral turf. We’ll give it to them and show them that we have no problem bringing biblical truth into the marketplace of ideas.

THE CHURCH IN A NEW AGE This brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: how this all relates to the church. Grand philosophies, sweeping plans, and a host of new programs are no substitute for the means of grace and communion of the saints. As John Piper once noted, missions exists because worship does not. What is the point of any endeavor that does not ultimately lead back to the glorification and enjoyment of our God? To this end, I would like you to picture an empty swimming pool. Say you want to fill up this pool; so you open a nearby spigot, but the water just gushes out on the ground. There’s no piping connecting the spigot to the pool. You can run that water all day long, but none of it will reach the pool. And you’ll probably get wet. And you’ll probably have a hefty water bill. But that’s beside the point. There is little that still connects the broader American culture to the church. We don’t share the same presuppositions or vocabulary; and with nominal Christianity quickly evaporating, there is little instinct to seek God at a local church

I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O B Y N A M E H E R E

IT IS AN EXCITING TIME TO BE A CHRISTIAN IN OUR CULTURE. “SEEK THE THINGS THAT ARE ABOVE, WHERE CHRIST IS, SEATED AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD.”

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in a time of crisis. It is time to concede that, in America, we are now engaged in a cross-cultural mission field. We are reintroducing Christianity from the ground level up. Imagine that pipeline between the spigot and pool once more. Let’s say you need three pieces of pipe—one connected to the spigot, one connected to the pool, and one connecting those two pieces together. Imagine the same thing in a pipeline between the culture and church. You need points of engagement with preexisting community groups (e.g., running clubs, Toastmasters, volunteer groups), with groups connected to the local church (e.g., Bible studies and fellowship groups), and finally, third-place groups that bring people from the one to the other. The broader approach of the pipeline is more user-friendly for the whole local church. Many Christians are already part of groups in the community, and many churches have some form of Bible studies or community groups. Perhaps there are a few zealous young adults in the church who are eager to engage others with experimental apologetics in a third place. Christians who love hospitality can host churchbased groups, older adults can disciple younger ones, and the elderly can pray for the labors of the more able-bodied. Not only does this approach not take away from the centrality of the church, but it also calls the whole church with the varied gifts of the body into action. This pipeline also fits the experiential, relational mind-set of the present generation. It recognizes that conversions don’t often occur in a moment but over time, through ordinary people and events under the rule of King Jesus by his word and Spirit. In the belly of the culture, we focus on the basics of establishing relationships: in third-place venues of our choosing, we delve into the deeper waters of background and beliefs; in church-based community groups, we begin to teach others the basic vocabulary and presuppositions of the biblical worldview and faith in Christ. And all along this process, our goal is to draw lost sheep into the fold of the local church in order to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd.

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THE GREATER STORYLINE You must see, brothers and sisters, that it is an exciting time to be a Christian in our culture. “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1). Are his rule and reign in any way diminished by the current state of our culture? Has the king abdicated his throne? Is this woebegone era a parenthesis in an otherwise uninterrupted history of grace upon grace? When Saul of Tarsus sought to strike the heel of the infant church and set them to flight to the surrounding regions, he was unwittingly doing the bidding of King Jesus, who promised, “You will be my witnesses . . . to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Even the flight of God’s people is blessed by the soaring providence of a gracious and heavenly Father. If our God remains unchanged and his word retains its power, then we need not fear. Rather, we can roll up our sleeves and get to work in accordance with the gifts and opportunities he gives us. And we also get to work with this comfort: “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). King Jesus will continue to build, sustain, defend, and preserve his church by his Holy Word and Holy Spirit. He is now and will forever be undefeated in this task. And we are the privileged beneficiaries. STEPHEN ROBERTS is a US Army chaplain and has written

for The Washington Times and The Federalist.

1. Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Research Landscape,” May 12, 2015, http://www.p ewfor um.or g/2015/05/12/ americas-changing-religious-landscape/. 2. Ed Stetzer, “‘Nominals to Nones’: 3 Key Takeaways from Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey,” Christianity Today (May 12, 2015), https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2015/may/nominalsto-nones-3-key-takeaways-from-pews-religious-lands.html. 3. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999).

WHITE HORSE INN CLASSICS. IN THE EARLY YEARS of the early church, Christians had to rediscover the gospel, “the power of God for salvation” (Rom. 1:16), which Paul preaches to the church in the book of Romans. The apostle himself could not have known the enormous effect his letter would have on the world. In the sixteenth century, the great Reformer Martin Luther wrestled with the meaning of this Epistle that, in part, led him to nail the Ninety-Five Theses on the doors of the castle church in Wittenberg. This medieval request for a conversation and plea for a return to “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) was the spark that lit the fires of the Reformation around Europe and throughout the world. Now in the twenty-first century, our White Horse Inn Wednesday classics will feature our beloved series “Romans Revolution.” We call it this, not because we want to start a new movement, but because we want to see a new reformation in our churches. Such reformations always have something to do with rediscovering this Epistle. Understanding Romans is a revolutionary experience!

JOIN US FOR THE ROMANS REVOLUTION IN 2020 What if your Christian faith has less to do with what you feel than what you know? The strongest Christians are those who can ground what they experience day to day in what they know every day. Do you know what you believe and why you believe it?

“ THANK YOU FOR THE INSIGHT FROM THE ROMANS REVOLUTION FOCUS. THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THAT I HAVE EVER UNDERSTOOD THE GOSPEL!” — P HI L, WH I LI STEN E R

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BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews 56

The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Heart

Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

Humble Calvinism

by Harold L. Senkbeil

by Lydia Brownback

REVIEWED BY

John J. Bombaro

Ayrian Yasar

Matt Boga

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By J. A. Medders

BOOK REVIEWS

The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart by Harold L. Senkbeil Lexham Press, 2019 290 pages (hardback), $21.99 fter nearly three and a half decades of parish ministry and two dozen more teaching and as the executive director for spiritual care for DOXOLOGY: The Lutheran Center for Spiritual Care and Counsel, Harold Senkbeil, trusted author of Dying to Live: The Power of Forgiveness and Sanctification: Christ in Action, pens a real gem for pastors and seminarians with The Care of Souls. The readability, profound insights, and biblical truth permeating the pages signal that this work is destined to be a benchmark study and resource on pastoral care. With scandals reverberating throughout news outlets due to unconscionable behavior within the Southern Baptist Church and Roman Catholicism, and the public repudiation of biblical theology by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the once unquestionably trusted office of holy ministry is now the object of suspicion and derision, which makes this book a timely resource. With the public feeling that they need to be protected from predator priests and heretical pastors, Senkbeil brings his readers— more pointedly, pastors and priests themselves—back to God’s purpose for the pastoral office (to manifest and distribute God’s love, care, and gifts), the heart of pastoral formation (proximity and devotion to Christ), and the source of all spiritual care—the gracious and merciful Triune God. Senkbeil accomplishes all this

without a hint of angst or edginess, but rather with the heart of a loving and faithful pastor. Senkbeil’s disobliging prose is warm and familiar—the sort of conversational tone one would expect from a seasoned minister and sage mentor, whose disposition exudes not a battle-wearied spirit but enduring humility and joy for the remarkable privilege of shepherding the people of God and serving as Christ’s “errand boy.” His warmth is felt through personal anecdotes, as he shares experiences (some quite tragic) from both his family life and decades of parish ministry. These stories illuminate and unfold the principles he delineates by inviting the reader into real-world experiences in the care of souls, even the souls of a pastor’s own children. To considerable effect, Senkbeil opens by drawing correspondence between the vocation of husbandry (such that he observed in his childhood on the family farm) and the vocational responsibilities of pastoral ministry. The parallels are fitting and posit key principles, such as: “Frenetic busyness undermines careful pastoral work. . . . So pastors need to hunker down for the whole growing season [of those entrusted to your care].” Additionally, “Christ’s sheep are not all that easy to tend,” and “Work done for the right reason is its own reward.” These earthy observations find substantiation and fortification in creedal and confessional theology, true to the Bible’s teaching. The opening chapter advocates for “the classical model” of holy ministry, as opposed to the pastor as CEO or life coach or anything else. Christ commissioned the office of holy ministry with specificity, the particularities of which have been preserved in “the classical model.” True, readers may have heard this before, but Senkbeil goes further and halts the dichotomy between

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pastors and missionaries, and between shepherding and evangelizing, by situating all of the aforementioned in the manifold duties of Christlike care for human souls. This brings home the author’s central point in the book that pastoral “action flows from being; identity defines activity.” A clear vision of what the pastoral ministry is, Senkbeil writes, leads to a clearer understanding of what a pastor does day by day. What a pastor does is practically and devotionally habituated (extoling the notion of habitus), so that Christlike care becomes second nature or, more to the point, the basic identity of the minister or priest as Seelsorge—a person who provides care for the soul, a physician for souls. Following an introduction to the pastoral craft, succeeding chapters unfold the classical model of pastoral care through the word of God, ministry’s source and norm. Chapters 3 and 4 explain how the pastor proceeds toward the cure of souls through attentive diagnosis and intentional treatment. The fifth chapter depicts sheep-dogging and shepherding as the noble task and calling of the pastor, followed by a helpful look at guilt and shame. Chapter 8 extends the seventh chapter on holiness by articulating it through the idea of proximity to the Lord: that is, drawing near to God in Christ so that God’s own self-giving through the Son and Spirit can bring holiness, healing, and constitute our sanctification. In chapter 9, the invisible powers of spiritual warfare find fresh nuance, and missions, the care of souls as Christ’s ambassadors pursue the lost, and fostering steadiness in ministry round out the twelve chapters. The Care of Souls isn’t psychobabble but rich biblical fare, replete with theological fortification. It’s entirely Christocentric, christological, and Christotelic in content, outlook, and application. Christ is the answer, and the care and cure of souls can be found only in bringing people to Jesus and bringing Jesus to people. Even though The Care of Souls was cast to an audience significantly wider than confessional Lutherans by way of its Lexham Press imprint,

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nevertheless Senkbeil commendably asserts the essential importance of the sacraments for pastoral care. Holy baptism, holy absolution, and Holy Communion are not muted or marginalized as availing instruments in the soul-physician’s medical kit. These, too, are the performative word of God—the word made visible and personally applied to heighten confidence in the Lord’s presence and self-giving. The charitable foreword from Michael Horton finds considerable common ground in the high value that Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans

Christ is the answer, and the care and cure of souls can be found only in bringing people to Jesus and bringing Jesus to people.

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have placed on intentional pastoral care and the art of holy ministry to bring Jesus Christ to everneedy, ever-symptomatic souls. While this book should be required reading for all pastors and seminarians, rightly belonging on every pastoral theology course syllabus, The Care of Souls also should be read and its teaching absorbed by all who assist the pastor in the care of souls—elders, teachers, geo-missionaries, deacons, deaconesses, Stephen Ministers, directors of Christian Education, parochial school teachers, parish secretaries, and every church officer. Parishioners themselves would do well to sit under Senkbeil’s tutelage to understand the scope and challenges of the vocation of pastor—aiding and empowering the Seelsorge in their own lives, so that their ministers do not succumb to pastoral burnout or wane in their care of the flock. JOHN J. BOMBARO (PhD, King’s College, University of London) is the associate director of Theological Education for Eurasia, based at the Rīga Luther Academy in Latvia.

Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus by Lydia Brownback Crossway, 2019 139 pages (paperback), $12.99 n her latest book, Flourish, Lydia Brownback challenges readers to think carefully about their lives and to begin Christ-centered living rather than self-focused living. She begins by pointing out what types of things can cause us to lack joy in our Christian life, and she explains her goal of helping readers use the truths of Scripture to discern unbiblical thinking—their own, the world’s, or other Christians’. “We want to see how wrong teaching about God can give us wrong ideas

about God and how these wrong ideas keep us from flourishing” (12). Flourishing is not about possessing health, wealth, beauty, influence, power, friends, or family but an ardent love for Christ. “It’s about getting beyond the ho-hum, going-through-motions sort of Christian living and knowing Christ as our greatest delight” (11). With flourishing in Christ as the goal and biblical understanding as the tool to accomplish this, Brownback studies how our self-focus robs us of a thriving and vibrant life. In the first chapter, Brownback addresses our obsession with ourselves as she articulates the snare of self-consciousness. She points out that others’ opinions of us so often fill our thoughts and fuel our actions that we end up cultivating a fear of man instead of a reverence for God and freedom in his gospel. We forget how Christ is perceived by the world and become more concerned about other people’s opinions of us. This, in turn, shapes motherhood decisions, such as how we birth or educate children. It’s not that these are unimportant decisions, but the motivation behind them shouldn’t include self-consciousness or fear of what others will think. She also points out how others’ opinions shape our approach to our bodies. Not only is the world active in influencing women on this front, but Brownback points out how even church-sponsored workout sessions, while not intrinsically sinful, can be a potential pitfall for women if they approach exercise without the right motivation. The solution to being obsessed with what others think of us, and therein self-focused, is to realize the wonderful freedom we have in Christ to not think so much about ourselves. If we shift our gaze away from ourselves and up to the Lord, we find that he is trustworthy and faithful to be all he has promised to be and to do all he has promised to do . . . as our trust grows: our thoughts are a lot less self-oriented, and there’s new joy in living. We taste the freedom that comes from living under the gaze of One. (26)

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While God is the source of power for change, Christian discipleship and self-improvement are not the same thing, and [Brownback] reminds readers that it all begins with who we are in Christ.

In the second chapter, she examines the trap of self-improvement. Brownback looks behind the goals we set for ourselves and examines the motives that spur change: specifically, self-focused discontent and a desire for self-actualization. She encourages readers to pursue change as a way to glorify God versus self-focused discontent. She explains what victory in the Christian life looks like and why we can’t overcome particular sins. Then she discusses how the Christian’s fundamental position toward sin has changed because of Christ and what a changed life really consists of. She also highlights how a false view of God and the consequent moralistic therapeutic deism, which has crept into Christian circles, influence Christian understanding of the difference (or conflation) of self-improvement and sanctification. While God is the source of power for change, Christian discipleship and self-improvement are not the same thing (36), and she reminds readers that it all begins with who we are in Christ. We went with Christ into his death, but then we were raised with him from the dead,

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which gives us a whole new reality from which to form our goals. . . . Our impulse to “improve” is still good, but by the work of the Spirit, it has been reoriented toward God and centered on Christ. (39) Building on this distinction between selfimprovement and sanctification, the third chapter discusses self-analysis, in which Brownback shows the problematic tendency of living life directed by pure emotion. While acknowledging that happiness is not a bad thing, making happiness our ultimate goal will necessarily lead to disappointment. She examines how the preeminence of feelings shapes our culture and has even manifested itself as self-help evangelical resources. As a result, we don’t see anything wrong with aiming more at personal gratification than at God’s glory in the plans and choices we make, in some part because we believe that our earthly happiness is the primary way God’s glory is showcased. (47) The solution is to understand that “God’s glory is our happiness, and to the degree that we fixate on him instead of how we feel, we will come to know firsthand how true this is” (48). She contrasts biblical analysis of self with selfanalysis that can cause anxiety and discontent, reminding readers that “a life curved inward, analyzing and evaluating every mood change and desire, is a stunted, joyless life. Why live there even one more day? Christ is where fullness is found” (55). In the fourth chapter, Brownback focuses on a particularly pernicious consequence of self-analysis: self-indulgence. By dissecting our conception of self-care and pleasure, she reminds readers that while these are not inherently sinful, we should be careful about how we enjoy the pleasures of the world. “When we sate ourselves on the things of this world—pleasures and comforts of whatever kind—we become spiritually sluggish” (58). She also looks at the

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root of self-indulgence (ingratitude toward God) and how walking by the Spirit is key to breaking the bonds of self-indulgence. “As we walk by the Spirit, we are led away from ourselves and directed toward Christ. We become increasingly preoccupied with him. In this process, we come to look more like him. We reflect not the consequences of self-indulgence but the fruit of self-control” (70). The unfortunate side effect of self-indulgence is usually a lack of self-control; whether in eating, speaking, or spending, the inability to govern our behavior in a Godglorifying manner in a serious sin, bringing guilt, shame, and condemnation. The fifth chapter examines self-condemnation and how we allow past sins to impact the present in negative ways. She addresses how we assume self-condemnation from others’ opinions of us, as well as from the sins we commit; how we can call things “sin” that are not sins according to Scripture; and the necessity of exercising wisdom and discernment in all our actions to avoid the twin pitfalls of legalism and license. She points readers to their standing in Christ and how he frees us from dwelling in guilt

because of our sins: “Neither our past nor our present defines us. Our sin doesn’t define us. Only Christ does, and ‘there is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 8:1)” (86). Taking into account the fact that it’s common practice today to view all of our sin through the lens of how we’ve been sinned against, the sixth chapter addresses self-victimization and helps readers to understand who is actually a victim and how victims should view themselves. She speaks to those who have been abused and addresses questions about the problem of evil, addiction, and how we deal with past hurt—all with a view to developing a biblical response to these issues. While not exhaustive, Brownback does give readers a great starting point for dealing with these difficult situations, and she challenges readers to see and understand their identity as ultimately in Christ (not in their abuse) and demonstrates how Jesus’ sufferings should shape how we can now heal from the wounds that have been inflicted upon us. Great for young teens or adults, Flourish is straightforward, engaging, and touches on

[Brownback] speaks to those who have been abused and addresses questions about the problem of evil, addiction, and how we deal with past hurt—all with a view to developing a biblical response to these issues. 60

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pertinent topics for young, old, and those in between. This short book is also full of helpful examples, and chapters are divided into subsections—Dig, Discern, and Flourish—to address each chapter’s main topic in a variety of ways. Furthermore, the study guide included in the back is a great tool, facilitating thoughtful reflection and providing conversation topics for group studies, as she encourages her readers to live a Christ- and gospel-centered life. AYRIAN YASAR holds an MA in biblical studies from West-

minster Seminary California and is an associate editor at www.beautifulchristianlife.com.

Humble Calvinism By J. A. Medders The Good Book Company, 2019 128 pages (paperback), $12.99 f you’ve been part of Western Christianity for the past fifteen or twenty years, you’ve probably run into a brand of Calvinism—or I should say Calvin-ist—that can’t easily be described as “humble.” It’s this issue that Jeff Medders confronts in his excellent book Humble Calvinism, by rightly pointing out that if you’re a Calvinist, then having a heartunderstanding of the doctrines of grace should make you humble, not arrogant. In the opening pages, he recounts the stor y of Geor ge Whitefield being asked if he and John Wesley would see each other in heaven. Whitefield replied, “No, I don’t think we will. . . . Mr. Wesley will be so near the throne and I will be so far in the back that I will not be able to see him” (27). This type of Calvinism reminds us that we’re united in something greater than our differences, and Medders does this by cracking “down on the five points, not so we can learn how to take down the opposition but so we can see what happens when the points get into our hearts” (29).

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The book is written not from a reactionary impulse to scold offending Calvinists, but from the heart of someone who has done a lot of personal introspection on the subject and come out the better for it. For this reason, many of the experiences he describes will hit home for readers. If you’re a Calvinist, and willing to admit it, you’ve probably been the arrogant Calvinist found in the author’s stories. As he puts it, “There’s a fine line between rejoicing over the God we know and rubbing the doctrine we know in people’s faces” (21). If we’re honest, we’ve done the latter more than we would like to admit. Medders puts a different perspective on the doctrines of grace in order to push back against

BOOK REVIEWS

the theological elitism of some Reformed circles, and to remind Calvinists of the great love and mercy of God in Jesus Christ. For instance, he reframes “total depravity” as “Total Dependency” to emphasize that our depravity implies that we are wholly dependent on Christ for everything (69). Medders does not remake the doctrine into something that it formerly wasn’t. Instead, he shifts his readers’ focus so that we see our depravity not just as an existential condition and a willful violation but also as a condition creating a need that only God’s grace can satisfy. When Medders discusses election, he reminds us that its purpose is not our inclusion into a select club, but our praise of God’s grace (93) and the glory of his name. His chapter on the “L” petal of the TULIP—“limited atonement”—stands out in particular. Like many others, Medders is not fond of the word limited and changes it to “definite.” The word limited carries with it the implication that there are only so many spots in heaven; and even though many more people want in, God— heaven’s fire marshal—won’t build the place out to accommodate a greater occupancy (98). The author reminds us that the actual span of God’s grace is greater than, not lesser or equal to, what we can imagine (98). He writes that those unpersuaded by “definite atonement” generally remain that way because they feel: (1) it’s just a logical step taken from the doctrine of election and not something found explicitly in God’s word (98); and (2) it defines redemption negatively—in terms of what God didn’t do—instead of positively—in terms of what God has done (96–97). By focusing on passages such as Matthew 1:21 and John 10:14–16, he demonstrates the doctrine’s biblical origins and enables the reader to better understand all

that is entailed in limited atonement, moving beyond the caricature to the depth and breadth of what salvation for the lost in Christ means. The force of his arguments is made all the more persuasive by his conversational tone and thoughtful articulation. One might think that writing an attractive, arresting book necessarily compromises the content, but this is not the case. While taking care to accommodate his language and tone to readers of every level, he does so without sacrificing insight or biblical integrity. Almost every page left me echoing the psalmist’s praise—“What god is great like our God?” (Ps. 77:13)—as I gave thanks to the Lord for the salvation of his redeemed. In keeping with his plan to help everyone better understand the theological distinctives of Calvinism, Medders includes a helpful “bridge chapter” where he provides a brief history of the doctrines of grace, common misconceptions about TULIP, and term definitions, all of which make it an invaluable resource for both new and curious students of Scripture and theology. If you’re a Calvinist, this is a helpful refresher on notoft-considered aspects of the doctrines of grace. If you’re not—and maybe even hostile toward Calvinists/ism—this is a good introduction. Either way, “Humble Calvinism—real Calvinism—is about both orthodoxy and orthopraxy: about right doctrine and the right practice, posture, and passion.” This is something every Christian should consider, and Medders has written an edifying aid to all of us looking to grow in both areas. MATT BOGA is the associate pastor at Reality Church of

Stockton in California. In his free time Matt enjoys reading, building with his hands, and playing basketball. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattboga.

VOL.29 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

GET MORE CONTENT AT “THE MOD.” H O M E T O W E B - E XC LU S I V E A R T I C L E S BY M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . Every week, we feature brand-new articles discussing the social and theological topics of the day, as well as reviews of the books we and our contributors are currently reading, along with monthly contributions from our esteemed colleague and longtime MR contributor Dr. Carl Trueman.

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B AC K PAG E

Recovering the Language of Love by Eric Landry

ne of the sad realities of our day is that Christian marriages have as much difficulty and nearly the same rate of divorce as nonChristian marriages. The rate of Christian teen sexual activity is nearly identical to the surrounding culture, with the best estimates saying that they postpone intercourse for one to two years later than their peers. The Song of Solomon is key in enabling us to recover the lost language of love. First, husband and wife (mother and father, son and daughter) do not fear frank discussion. You cannot read this book without being confronted by the discussion of intimacy and romance that it offers. For instance, in chapters 4 and 7, the writer describes the beauty of the woman with terms that in some cases are funny (“your hair is like a flock of goats”) but in other cases are quite explicit (“your two breasts are like two fawns”). Intercourse is even described. Although veiled in poetry, it’s unmistakable: “My beloved has gone down to his garden to the bed of spices, to graze in the gardens and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he grazes among the lilies.” Take a lesson from Scripture and speak frankly of love to one another. Failure to do so is not a sign of great piety; too often it is an indication that you do not understand what the Bible means when it talks about our bodies. If you value the body as Scripture does (part of God’s good creation, subject not only to the fall but also to redemption), you will see that your body becomes

a vehicle for worshipful living, an experience that doesn’t stop at the bedroom door. Second, strive for lovely language in your relationship and in your home. Your home must be more than central command where people gather for daily orders before being sent out into the battle field. It must also be a banqueting house (2:4), and in it you sing your lover’s praises. Taking the Song of Solomon as our cue, it can be so much more. Romantic love in the book encompasses all the senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Let your own language of love reflect those senses using both words and gestures. Third, remember that the language of love is a fruit and picture of the gospel. The sort of relationship for which we strive (and often fail in achieving) is not ready-made from a how-to manual. It is the fruit of a new life in Christ that no longer considers its own needs primary, but looks to serve and love others out of a love and service given to them by Jesus Christ. Because Jesus is our husband and because he loves perfectly in the place of our imperfect love, we can venture out tenderly into the sphere of love again—loving not for what we might get or only when the other person is lovely, but out of the abundance of the love given to us. When we do so, our spouses feel loved, and we also point them to the greatest love of all by letting our language of love echo the gospel announcement that God in Christ has covered us with his banner of love (2:4). ERIC LANDRY is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

VOL.29 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

HELP THE NEXT GENERATION. B E C O M E A PA R T N E R T O D AY. In a time when the â&#x20AC;&#x153;nonesâ&#x20AC;? (or those claiming no religious adherence) are, according to pollsters, growing and when our own churches are stagnant or shrinking, it is more important than ever to identify and celebrate the gospel: the glory of God manifested in the grace he shows to those who deserve the very opposite. This is Christcentered Christianity at its best, and with the support of our partners we produce resources that help transform churches, prisons, families, and individuals.

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WHEN WE OPEN THE DOORS OF OUR HOMES, WE ALSO OPEN THE DOORS OF OUR HEARTS. OTHERS SEE US IN OUR WEAKNESS AND VULNERABILITY AND FIND THE SAFETY AND FREEDOM TO DO THE SAME. MORE THAN THAT, THEY SEE WHO GIVES US THE FREEDOM TO BE WEAK AND VULNERABLE— THE ONE WHOSE GRACE IS SUFFICIENT—AND THEY GET A WINDOW INTO THE GOSPEL. ST E P H E N R O B E R T S