Christianity without Transcendence

April 24, 2024 By Gene Veith

Conservative Christians have long criticized the social gospel of liberal theology, with its this-worldly focus, its presumptuous attempt to build Heaven on earth, and its replacement of evangelism with left wing social and political activism. But today some conservative Christians are turning to a social gospel of their own, the same idea but with right wing social and political activism.

Christians should indeed address problems of this world and, by virtue of their vocation as citizens, they can do this by political means. But they must be careful not to confuse their political convictions, whatever they might be, with the gospel of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world so that we might have everlasting life in God’s eternal kingdom.

Carl Trueman has written a thoughtful reflection on Christianity and politics in his essay for First Things entitled The Gateway Drug to Post-Christian Paganism. He tells of re-reading Robert P. Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler, which describes how once orthodox theologians, little by little, step by step, succumbed to the Nazi temptation.

Trueman contrasts those theologians with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and, even more so, the confessional Lutheran theologian Hermann Sasse. Trueman praises the earlier Bethel Confession, written by those two Lutherans, as far superior to the more well-known Barmen Declaration, written primarily by Karl Barth. The Bethel Confession, says Trueman, “makes clear that the reason Bonhoeffer and Sasse were able to understand their times was that they placed the transcendent God, his Word and sacraments, and his church above all earthly powers.”

(Trueman links to Faith in the Face of Tyranny: An Examination of the Proposed Bethel Confession by the Swedish scholar Torbjörn Johannson, which includes an English translation of the Bethel Confession. The book was translated by the long-time reader and commenter at this blog Bror Erickson.)

He says of Bonhoeffer and Sasse, “it was their grasp of the transcendent God and his gospel that immunized them to the blandishments of Hitler. They did not collapse the transcendence of God into the immanence of political exigency. And it was that very concern for the transcendent that made them wise actors in the world of the immanent.” Let that last sentence soak in. Their transcendence did not mean that they neglected the problems of this world, such as Nazi totalitarianism. Rather, their transcendent focus made them more effective in addressing immanent, this-worldly concerns, than the theologians who conformed with the culture and went along with the Nazi social gospel.

Trueman then applies all of this to today:

One of the striking lacunae on both the right and left wings of the Christian political spectrum is the general absence of any reference to the transcendence of God and the supernatural nature of the church. Immanent concerns rule the day. The pundits on both sides seem more concerned with making sure that no criticism goes unmocked and no critic’s character goes unsmeared than with relativizing the affairs of this world in the light of eternity.

But the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of social media is only one part of the problem. The deeper issue is that exemplified by the contrast between Bonhoeffer/Sasse and Kittel/Althaus/Hirsch: the inability to resist collapsing the transcendence of God into the immanence of the political moment. When Christians, right and left, do that, they are no longer espousing Christianity—for Christianity that is of interest only because it is politically useful or because it is thought to work in this earthly sphere is merely a gateway drug to post-Christian paganism.

And this leads to an odd, though very Pauline, conclusion: The secret to political integrity and discernment for Christians is a high view of God, his Word and his gospel. Only when this world is set in context of the next can we hope to avoid allowing the perceived demands of our political moment to overwhelm our fidelity to God and, by way of consequence, to those made in his image.

Photo: Hermann Sasse (1937) via Picryl, public domain

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A Culture of Pilates

April 19, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Andrew Fowler has a thoughtful post-Holy Week meditation at RealClearReligion on Pontius Pilate. He says, in the words of its title, we presently live in A Culture of Pontius Pilates.

When Jesus was before his Roman judge, he said, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). Whereupon Pilate responded, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

Fowler says that we aren’t sure what Pilate meant or what his tone was, whether he was being sarcastic or skeptical. But Pilate does seem to recognize truth at some level.

Later, after hearing the Jews’ charge that Jesus claims to be the Son of God, Scripture says, “when Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid” (John 19:8). He must have had the terrifying thought that Jesus is who He said He is. So he must have had some inkling that Jesus may indeed Himself be “the truth” (John 14:6). And then when Pilate spoke to the crowd, he said something that he knew to be true: “I find no guilt in him” (John 18:38).

But despite that “true” verdict and his perception that Jesus may be connected to a larger “truth,” Pilate ignores what he knows to be true. Despite his authority and power, he was afraid of the mob. St. Mark tells us that Pilate turned over Jesus to be crucified because he was “wishing to satisfy the crowd” (Mark 15:15).

Says Fowler, “Rationally, Pilate was possibly in political and physical harm, so by placating the mob, he clung to power, preserved his own life and saved his reputation — all of which he, and we, are afraid to lose.” We are like Pilate in denying what we know to be true because we fear what others will think of us. Fowler concludes:

The decline of religiosity in America and the plague of moral relativism — better known as “your truth” — indicates we are deeply in a culture of Pontius Pilates. For one can delude oneself that money, fame and possessions are worth more than eternity; or falsely believe that life away from religiosity loosens restrictive bonds in order to explore life to the fullest. . . .

Nowhere is this moral relativism more evident than in the ongoing debates on gender, abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia, and so on. But instead of facing the “mob,” we often cower — or affirm things that are not so, saying it helps the other person’s mental state, but, in truth, it helps us escape harm (or cancellation).

Not only Pilate but our whole culture of Pilates are in sore need of Jesus, “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:3), who further said, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8: 31-32).

Illustration: Ecce Homo by Antonio Ciseri (1871) via Wikipedia, public domain.

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Babyboomer Childhood

April 18, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Yesterday I came down pretty hard on Generation Z. Since turn about is fair play, today I will give the same treatment to my own generation.

I came across some clickbait entitled 23 Things Kids Did in the 60s That Would Completely Horrify Parents Today. I couldn’t resist clicking. At first, I laughed. Then I waxed nostalgic, since I did nearly all of these things. And then I started thinking. Does this hold a clue to why we Baby Boomers messed up the culture and the subsequent generations?

Here are the 23 things we did:

(1) Driving without seatbelts or carseats. [My parents got a “station wagon pad” for our boat-sized Chevy wagon, turning the back into a vast play area.]

(2) Public space smoking. [Second-hand smoke was the aroma of our lives.]

(3) Unsafe cribs. [Nevertheless, I survived.]

(4) Hitchhiking. [Only when my truck broke down.]

(5) Toy gun playtime. [You should have seen my arsenal.]

(6) Non-Store Bought Halloween costumes. [You should have seen me as the Mummy.]

(7) No parental controls on TV. [But that is because no one needed them. The networks all had a Department of Standards and Practices that protected even parents.]

(8) Lawn Darts. [I never got into that sport.]

(9) No outside supervision. [We played baseball, roamed the neighborhood, and rode our bikes all over town without an adult in sight. I read that crime was no less then that it is today, and possibly even worse. And yet neither we nor our parents seem to have worried that much about it.]

(10) Bicycling without helmets. [Of course not!]

(11) Children walked to school without adult supervision. [I walked six blocks to and from school from the time I was in the first grade.]

(12) Sunscreen not popular. [And yet we were outside all the time.]

(13) Garden hose drinking. [Where else would we get a drink while mowing the lawn?]

(14) Playing outside until dark. [And sometimes after dark.]

(15) Trampolines without nets. [Trampolines have nets?]

(16) No childproofing. [We could get into anything. As for safety, I remember our school playground having monkey bars that we climbed on at recess. It was installed over concrete.]

(17) Using fire hydrants to cool off. [That’s what they did in the big cities. We just used the garden hose.]

(18) Blood brothers and sister. [I never did that, two friends pricking their fingers and touching so as to “share the same blood.” We did have strong friendships, though. My impression is that today such friendships are sexualized, creating an inhibition against them or the assumption that “I must be gay!”]

(19) Free play = Not as much extracurricular activities. [We played however we wanted! The thought of “extracurricular activities” structured and supervised by adults and taking up all of our time would be the opposite of fun!]

(20) Peanut Butter–School lunch staple. [I know peanut allergies are real and can have terrible consequences. And yet I never ran into them during our peanut-butter saturated school lunches.]

(21) Participation trophies not a thing. [I have to laugh at that one.]

(22) After school and summer part time jobs. [Does this really not happen any more? I always worked, to my great benefit. Not long ago, I took my grandson to the local Dairy Queen. I told him how I knew all about DQ soft serve, including how to make that little curl to top everything off, because I used to work at a Dairy Queen. I think I impressed him with my cool job, but then he said, “Well, why did you get fired?”]

(23) No screen time. [As I always have to explain to my incredulous grandchildren, in the days when I, their ancient ancestor, was their age, cell phones and personal computers had not been invented yet. Nor were microwaves, DVD players, or color TV sets.]

Can you think of others, beyond these 23? For example, corporal punishment was commonplace. And parents always took the teacher’s side. A spanking from the teacher was generally followed by another spanking from the parents.

Now here are my questions, which perhaps you can answer in the comments:

(1) Although we Baby Boomers for the most part loved the kind of childhood we had, when we grew up, we typically didn’t raise our children in the same way. Why not?

(2) Did our idyllic childhoods make it hard for us to grow up? So that in some cases a latent immaturity sabotaged our marriages, our parenthood, and our work life? And that even now that we’re old we think of ourselves as young, with many of us trying to look and act young to the point of making ourselves ridiculous?

(3) Did the relatively untrammeled freedom that we enjoyed in our childhood contribute to the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies, which was the beginning of so many of our current cultural and personal problems today? Now I do think that our large dose of freedom was accompanied by a large dose of responsibility–that combination was indeed character-building, though I think quite a few of us threw out the responsibility part when we left the nest.

Photo: Children at Play on the Street at Oak Ridge via RawPixel, public domain

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DISCUSS: The “Pre-War Era”?

April 12, 2024 By Gene Veith

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After a Russian missile entered his country’s airspace, the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, had some sobering words for the rest of Europe:

“War is no longer a concept from the past, it is real.”

“The most worrying thing is that every scenario is possible. I know it sounds devastating, especially for the younger generation, but we have to get used to the fact that a new era has begun: the pre-war era.”

A large-scale conventional war, characterized by both old-style trench warfare and new-style drone attacks, is being waged between Russia and Ukraine. Israel waged a bloody war against Hamas, and though its invasion of Gaza has been halted, Iran along with its surrogates Hezbollah and the Houthis are threatening to ignite a wider war. Nations in South and Central America are torn by narco-wars, with Haiti collapsing into anarchy and some of those nations threatening to go war with each other. There is fighting in North Africa, Nigeria, and Sudan. In Asia, Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is torn by bloody ethnic conflict, and the Syrian civil war continues. ISIS is back. Afghanistan has resumed its role as a haven for terrorists, now that the Taliban is flush with its victory over the United States. And China has greatly expanded its military and is rattling its saber. Wikipedia is keeping a list of ongoing armed conflicts.

What does this resurgence of global warfare mean for the United States? We are already deeply involved as arms suppliers to Ukraine and Israel, but our own military is short of supplies, manpower, and morale. Can we stay out of all of these conflicts? Should we intervene in some of them? Is there any way of calming things down?

In short, do you agree with Prime Minister Tusk that we are in “the pre-war era,” his conviction that a large-scale global conflict is coming? If so, what should we do to prepare and/or to fend it off?

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It’s Mostly the Liberal Churches That People Are Leaving

April 10, 2024 By Gene Veith

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The conventional wisdom is that church affiliation is plummeting because Christians support right wing politics, are intolerant of LGBTQs, and hold to other culturally conservative beliefs. Those are surely factors in many cases, but the churches that are showing the biggest exodus are the denominations that promote progressive politics, support the LGBTQ agenda, and are culturally liberal.

The Public Religion Research Institute conducted a study of the retention rate of churches, including both the “churning” of church affiliation–that is, members leaving one denomination for another–as well as “disaffiliation,” in which members leave to become “nones.”

The study report, entitled”Religious Change in America,” found that “White evangelical Protestants have one of the highest retention rates of all religious groups.” In 2023, they retained 76% of their members. This is actually an improvement. In 2016, their retention rate was 66%. “White mainline/non-evangelical Protestants also continue losing more members than they replace and at higher rates than other Protestants.” In 2023, their retention rate was 58%.

Religions with the highest retention rates were Black Protestants (82%) and Jews (77%). White Catholics had a retention rate of 62%, with Hispanic Catholics at 68%.

Of those who left their churches to become unaffiliated with any church, 35% were mainline/non-evangelical Protestants; 35% were Catholics; and 16% were evangelical Protestants. Those leaving non-Christian traditions were only 8%.

Why did they become unaffiliated? The biggest reason given was simply that they no longer believe in the church’s teachings, at 67%. And of those beliefs, 47% cited the church’s “negative teaching about or treatment of gay and lesbian people.” Most of those must have been responding to the official Catholic teachings, since 35% were leaving liberal Protestant denominations that for the most part support the LGBTQ cause.

To be sure, “‘Unaffiliated’ is the only major religious category experiencing growth,” to the point that 26% of the American surveyed are no longer members of any church. A major reason given, though, for giving up church entirely is that their family was not all that religious while they were growing up, cited by 41% of the unaffiliated.

A different study of young adults aged 18-30 found similar results, and it has the virtue of spinning out the confessional Missouri Synod Lutherans from mainline liberal Lutherans. Consulting data from the ongoing General Social Survey, the Catholic periodical The Pillar found that in the 2018-2022 cohort a shocking 42% say that their religion is “none,” with 29% saying they are Protestant, and 19% saying they are Catholic.

In 1978-1982, 19% of young adults were members of the Protestant Mainline. In 1998-2002, that number had declined to 11%. In 2018-2022, that number was only 5%!

The category of “other Protestants” fared much better. In the words of the report:

The group labeled as “Other Protestants” includes more evangelical denominations, including the various denominations of Baptists, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, and the African Methodist Episcopal communities, as well as non-denominational Protestants.

These evangelical and non-denominational Protestants decreased from 38% of young respondents in 1978-1982 to 24% in 2018-2022. This is still a very significant decline, but not as large as among mainline Protestants.

Breaking it down still further,

The number of young adult respondents claiming membership in every single named Protestant denomination had declined by 65% or more over the last 40 years. Baptists had declined the least, at 65%, while Lutherans had seen the largest decline at 75%. But across the board this was a change which can only be described as a collapse.

Meanwhile, non-denominational and other Protestants had actually seen their share increase slightly among young people.

That share increases in the three cohorts from 15.1% to 15.6% to 15.7%. This is more evidence of the greater retention in more conservative traditions. The chart showing this data has a prominent asterix, with a note saying “*Missouri Synod Lutherans are included in Non-Denom/Other.” That’s odd for the LCMS to be included with the non-denoms, which doubtless improves our numbers. But this is still better than other evangelical categories, such as the Baptists, whose numbers have gone down from 23.3% to 17.4% to 8%.

None of this is reason for complacency, much less self-congratulation. All churches need to do a better job of retaining their members and especially their young people. But the answer is not simply capitulating to the non-Christian culture. Churches that go that route are faring even worse than those that resist it.

After all, if there is no difference between what the church teaches and what the culture teaches, why get up on Sunday mornings to go to church? Churches must offer the “unaffiliated” what they do not have, but what they need. When the culture and the church are at odds, it isn’t surprising that church affiliation declines. What else could we expect? But as the culture crashes and burns, churches can tend to the casualties.

Illustration by Carol M Highsmith via Rawpixel, CC0

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A Problem When Muslims Convert to Christianity

April 9, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Yesterday we blogged about the surge in adult baptisms in France. As many as 10-20% of those are reportedly coming from former Muslims who are converting to Christianity. But sometimes the legacy of interfaith dialogue, in which Christians are urged to accept Islam as an equally valid religion, is driving away them away!

We’ve blogged extensively about the phenomenon of Muslims turning to Christ, and how confessional Lutherans in Germany and Scandinavia are reaping that harvest.

This is happening in France also, but some Catholic parishes don’t know how to respond. The National Catholic Register has published an article by Solène Tadié entitled Boom in Muslim Conversions to Christianity in France: How Is the Church Responding? with the deck, “This little-documented phenomenon is forcing dioceses to deploy new pastoral services to better welcome these converts, who often have difficulty integrating into their new Catholic communities.”

The Archdiocese of Paris finally secured the help of Father Ramzi Saadé, an Arab priest of the Maronite Church in Lebanon, which is in fellowship with Rome. He identified a major problem that was causing some converts to leave the Catholic church:

“I realized that many new converts from Islam had left the Catholic Church, not because the faithful were unkind to them, but because they often want to show themselves so favorable to Islam that they come to explain that we worship the same God and that, in the end, there’s no need to become a Christian to access salvation,” said Father Saadé, stressing that this misguided approach concerned both clergymen and laypeople.

“Yet many of those who join Christ do so at the risk of their lives: Some have left their countries, have been rejected by their families; they are in real danger — the last thing they need is to be sent back to their Muslim identity.”

In his view, the interreligious dialogue implemented by Church authorities over the past decades, which has been very beneficial for the mutual understanding of cultures and peoples, can also sometimes be a source of misunderstandings about the duty of Christians in the West to announce.

“Many people of Islamic origin arriving in a parish to become Christians are often welcomed in a way unsuited to their situations, as if they were still Muslim when in fact they are no longer,” he continued.

“The search for consensual dialogue is a typically Western approach,” explained the reporter, citing Fr. Saadé, “not often understood by Eastern Arabic culture.” He went on to observe, “If we Christians are ashamed of our identity, we will disappear in the face of an expansionist Islam in the West that forces us to question ourselves.”

The ecumenical movement of the 20th century tried to reduce Christianity to a lowest common denominator according to which all Christian traditions are accepted as equally valid. This has been succeeded in the 21st century by the interfaith movement, according to which all of the world’s religions are accepted as equally valid.

But the interfaith movement amounts to a relativism–if not a polytheism–that guts all religions of their content. This is certainly true of Christianity, which must give up the claims of Christ, the First Commandment, the Trinity, the Gospel, and evangelism, among other things.

Illustration: Interfaith Banner by Sean, via Flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

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