Category: Agnosticism

RE-CENTERING SPLINTERING EVANGELICALS

RE-CENTERING SPLINTERING EVANGELICALS

“Have you heard this podcast going around Christian circles?” My friend asked, referring to the Holy Post Podcast, Why We’re Divided & Positive Pluralism with Bob Roberts. Full disclosure, I have not listened to it. But Roberts references The Splintering of the Evangelical Soul, by Christianity Today Editor in Chief, Timothy Dalrymple, which I have read. My friend continued, “I have a close group of Christian college friends where this divide is blatantly evident. I would be curious to hear your thoughts as I think it is a big issue facing the Church.”

Dalrymple frames the issue in his lead:

New fractures are forming within the American evangelical movement, fractures that do not run along the usual regional, denominational, ethnic, or political lines. Couples, families, friends, and congregations once united in their commitment to Christ are now dividing over seemingly irreconcilable views of the world. In fact, they are not merely dividing but becoming incomprehensible to one another.

This blog is too short to cover all the issues Dalrymple raises in his 3000-word article. But I can tell you three fundamental things that are missing. And without those fundamentals, evangelicals have no center.

First and foremost is Christ and his gospel. But we immediately have to ask, whose Christ, whose gospel? Is he the Jesus of the New Testament who created the world, came to die a substitutionary atoning death for sinners, rose from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of God?[1] Is he the head of the body, the Church, the firstborn from among the dead, who has supremacy in everything?[2] Is he the same Christ who said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”?[3]

The first thing that is missing is the centrality of Christ. Is he the Christ that Christians must obey, or is he only someone whose opinion we should consider? Dalrymple says the “sense of commonality grew increasingly strained as groups not formerly identified as evangelical came to be lumped together, defining the category “evangelical” less in theological terms and more in social, cultural, and political terms.” But “Evangelical” divorced from its fundamental theology is not evangelical at all.

The second thing that is missing is the influence of our sinful nature.[4] Dalrymple talks about how desire and experience shape our “plausibility curve” but makes no mention of the spiritual forces shaping our desires.

“The heart has reasons reason knows not of.” When our sinful nature wants something, and it always wants something other than God’s way, it will cling to any rational explanation for abandoning the Biblical Worldview.

One college course questioning the authorship and authority of scripture is not enough to unravel a young believer’s moral code unless that code was already under assault by the sinful nature.

The third missing piece, already alluded to, is a commitment to the Biblical Worldview that flows from a commitment to the authority of scripture as inspired by God. Our world and everything in it, including humankind, was created good. But men and women rebelled and brought all of life on earth under the curse and fell into bondage to sin. That is the source of all of our problems. Christ’s mission, and thus the mission of his Church, is to redeem what was lost: men, women, children, civilization, and the earth. He will return one day to restore all things and bring all who oppose his righteousness to account.[5] We should analyze every social, moral, ethical, political, and personal issue through that rubric. Without that, evangelicals have no common ground, only the vagaries of experience and whichever information stream we tap on a given day.

As John Stonestreet often says, evangelicals need to walk and chew gum at the same time. If we subject everything we hear to the Lordship of Christ through the biblical worldview, we will arrive at conclusions that upset right and left, moderate and progressive, but we will be faithful to Christ.World News Group avoids these extremes and holds itself accountable to the biblical worldview. Its process for doing so is very well-defined. They write as people who know that they will give an account to God, and it shows. I commend them to you.

[1] Romans 3:25; Hebrews 2:17; 1 John 4:10.

[2] Colossians 1:18-20.

[3] Matthew 24:35

[4] Romans 7:18

[5] Romans 14:11; Philippians 2:9-11

GOOD FRIDAY AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

GOOD FRIDAY AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

One of the great questions of the skeptic, the greatest objection to Christianity as we know it is: How can a good God let bad things happen to good people? How does Christianity deal with that question?

The standard answers run something like this:
 He loves us but he isn’t powerful enough to do anything about it.
 He’s powerful enough to do something but he really doesn’t love us.
 He’s not there.

But when we look at Psalm 22 and see that David prophesied all of it 1000 years before Christ quoted it from the Cross, it opens up an answer that we hadn’t considered:

God is doing something to overcome evil that we never would have dreamed.
• He is wrestling evil to the death in the body of the king of goodness.
• He is swallowing all injustice in the suffering of the just one.
• He is putting out the fire of death in the unquenchable life of the Living One.
• He is breaking the power of sin and the curse by nailing it to the Cross of the sinless one.

What did God do with the problem of evil? He absorbed it all in the person of his son who sang the great question out of the depth of his soul while nailed to a cross.

SEVEN TESTS OF TRUE FAITH

Do you ever wake up in the morning and not feel like a Christian? Wait, let me re-phrase that. Do you ever wake up and, even after your first cup of coffee, not feel like a real believer? What do we do with that?

And how about those people who attended church and sang the songs and said the prayers and served the community but whose life choices now seem totally out of sync with biblical ethics? What do we do with that? How do we come to grips with our fickle feelings and feckless friends when it comes to spiritual things? How do we know if we or anyone else is truly in the faith?

It is not a new question.

The Apostle John answered similar questions in his first letter to the churches. He gives us seven tests of faith that help us distinguish between true and false believers. They also comfort and confirm us on those days we doubt our salvation when our emotions are wiggly, and our faith is weak.

The overarching test, the one that provides the foundation and frame for the whole letter, is the Christological, or the “Christ” test. We see it in 1:3; 2:22; 4:2-3 and 5:7-12, among others. It maintains that Jesus Christ is God’s Son in the flesh who lived a real earthly life, died for our sins and rose from the dead, ascended into heaven to sit at God’s right hand, and will return to rule one day. If we do not believe that, we are not “in him.”

This belief is no mere intellectual assent or culturally acceptable confession. Ask just about anyone on the street if he believes in Jesus and, he will say yes. (OK, ask it in the South. I can’t vouch for other parts of the country). Belief, in the New Testament, means the complete acceptance of and compliance with Jesus’s claim to be Messiah, the Son of God, the only atonement for our sins and, the only hope of eternal life. It means he has our ultimate loyalties.

But as Jesus taught in the parable of the wheat and the tares, and as we see in the lives of Judas and other people in Scripture, it is possible to fake it. That’s why John provided six other tests.

  1. The light test, 1Jn.1:5-7. True faith lives in truth or with biblical ethics. Lives characterized by wickedness and error are in the darkness. Lives of holiness and truth are in the light.
  2. The humility test, 1Jn 1:8-10. True faith practices humility about personal sin. If we recognize and confess our sinfulness, he cleanses and purifies us. If not, “we make him out to be a liar.”
  3. The obedience test, 1Jn. 2:3-6. True faith obeys. If our lives are characterized by obedience to his commands, we “know we are in him.” If we say we are his, but our lives are characterized by disobedience to his way, we are lying to ourselves and everybody else.
  4. The love test, 1Jn. 2:9-11. True faith lives in love. Lives characterized by love for others, including those outside the faith, are in the light. If not, we remain in darkness.
  5. The worldliness test, 1Jn. 2:15-17. True faith loves the things of God. Covetousness, lust, and boastful pride belong to the world.
  6. And finally, the persistence test, 1 John 2:19-25. If we depart from the faith as it was handed down by the Apostles, we do not have the Father or the Son. But if we persist in that faith, we remain in him (v.24).

18 Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. 19 This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: 20 If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.[1]

Feelings will lie to us, and friends will sometimes forsake the way. But God’s word is true, and you can count on it.

[1] The New International Version. (2011). (1 Jn 3:18–20). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

AN ALIEN IN YOUR DRIVEWAY

AN ALIEN IN YOUR DRIVEWAY

If an alien from outer space landed in your driveway and asked, “What are all those buildings in your town with pointy spires and crosses on top? What is that about?” Could you answer accurately?

That’s the question C.S. Lewis—author of the Chronicles of Narnia—and Oxford College Chaplain, Walter Hooper, knocked around one day. “We wondered how many people, (who did not flee) apart from voicing their prejudices about the Church, could supply them with much in the way of accurate information. On the whole, we doubted whether the aliens would take back to their world much that is worth having.”

Hooper and Lewis were speculating because at that time, in the mid-twentieth century, several autobiographies of former bishops and preachers had flooded the market explaining why they could no longer accept the faith. Lewis believed that much of the ignorance of true Christianity was due to the flood of “liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel.”

Nothing much has changed. Today, many people reject Christianity because of prejudice. They’ve been disillusioned by a bad Christian or injured by a fraudulent one and rejected the faith out of anger. And a spate of recent statements and books by former evangelicals such as the late Rachel Held Evans, and former pastors Rob Bell, and Joshua Harris contributes to confusion. “If professionals can’t follow it, how can I?”

But as Hooper writes in his preface to God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics by C.S. Lewis, “…it is impossible to decide whether Christianity is true or false if you do not know what it is about.” Spiritually hungry skeptics must ask themselves, “Am I rejecting something I fully understand? Or am I using negative examples as an excuse not to investigate it?”

If you are ready to learn what Christianity is about, Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity, is a good place to start, as is Lee Strobel’s, The Case for Faith. But if you prefer talking it out among friends you would enjoy the Alpha Course. It’s a ten-week introduction to basic Christianity that’s designed to encourage questions and build friendships with others on the same journey. Our church is hosting its ninth Alpha Course this year. If you come, we promise to feed you well, treat your questions with respect, and above all, not treat you like an alien from outer space.