Christianity, Culture, Vocation
Thomas Holgrave says that the old distinctions among conservative Christians have faded and that the new divide–evident among both Protestants and Catholics–is between what he calls “evangelical conservatives,” who are strong on doctrine, and “liturgical conservatives,” who seek a richer mode of worship. He calls for an approach that would bring these two together. There is such an approach. It’s called LUTHERANISM! [Read more...]
The latest thing in contemporary Christianity is “radical Christianity.” From the Christian bestseller lists to programs in megachurches, Christians are being told that Jesus was “radical” and that they should give up their “middle class” “mediocrity” and start helping the poor. But how is this different from just liberal mainline Protestantism? And isn’t just another form of works-righteousness? For all the talk of the “demands of the Gospel” (doesn’t that turn the Gospel into Law?), I don’t hear anything about the Gospel. That is, Christ on the Cross atoning for sinners. Some of these teachers are making valid criticisms of typical evangelicalism, it seems to me, but they are slipping into some of the same mistakes, just in a different key. And it also reaches for the spectacular, minimizing ordinary life, a serious “theology of glory” rejection of vocation. (After the jump, read an account from Christianity Today and give me your take on this.) [Read more...]
Rev. Jonathan Fisk, the young pastor known for his lively Worldview Everlasting videos, has published a book entitled Broken – Seven “Christian” Rules That Every Christian Ought to Break as Often as Possible
The latest issue of Christianity Today has a brilliant cover story that accounts for much of what we see in American churches today. A century and more ago, many Protestant churches adjusted their worship and their ministries to accord with something that at first was quite separate: the revival meeting. (My historical parallel.) Now churches have adjusted their worship and ministries to accord with another separate activity: youth group! But, of course, there is more to it than that. From the article by Thomas E. Bergler [subscription required, but here is the opening]:
The house lights go down. Spinning, multicolored lights sweep the auditorium. A rock band launches into a rousing opening song. “Ignore everyone else, this time is just about you and Jesus,” proclaims the lead singer. The music changes to a slow dance tune, and the people sing about falling in love with Jesus. A guitarist sporting skinny jeans and a soul patch closes the worship set with a prayer, beginning, “Hey God …” The spotlight then falls on the speaker, who tells entertaining stories, cracks a few jokes, and assures everyone that “God is not mad at you. He loves you unconditionally.”
After worship, some members of the church sign up for the next mission trip, while others decide to join a small group where they can receive support on their faith journey. If you ask the people here why they go to church or what they value about their faith, they’ll say something like, “Having faith helps me deal with my problems.”
Fifty or sixty years ago, these now-commonplace elements of American church life were regularly found in youth groups but rarely in worship services and adult activities. What happened? Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly be called the juvenilization of American Christianity. Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for adults. It began with the praiseworthy goal of adapting the faith to appeal to the young, which in fact revitalized American Christianity. But it has sometimes ended with both youth and adults embracing immature versions of the faith.
Bergler goes on to document how that happened, including the larger cultural trend of American adults in general becoming more like adolescents. The cover story (who can identify who is pictured on the cover?) includes some responses by a megachurch pastor, a researcher, and a cultural critic (David Zahl of Mockingbird.com), all of whom say that Bergler’s thesis is basically right (though Zahl, being a Lutheran fellow-traveler, issues some caveats about definitions of spiritual “maturity”).
The article is adapted from Bergler’s new book on the subject: The Juvenilization of American Christianity
Ross Douthat begins with reflections on three recent cases in American religion: the popularity of prosperity-gospeller Joel Osteen; President Obama’s statement that the reason he now favors gay marriage is because he follows Jesus; and new statistics that find that non-denominational Christianity is now the third largest category, behind Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists. He then draws this conclusion and applications:
For decades, the cultural tug-of-war between the Christian right and the secular left has encouraged people to envision the American religious future in binary terms –as either godless or orthodox, either straightforwardly secular or traditionally Christian. But these examples and trends suggest a more complicated reality, in which religious institutions have declined but religion itself has not, and Americans increasingly redefine Christianity as they see fit rather than than abandoning it entirely.
We aren’t a nation of rigorous Richard Dawkins-style atheists and equally rigorous Pope Benedict XVI-style Catholics, in other words. Instead, we’re a nation of Osteens and Obamas, Dan Browns and Deepak Chopras –neither a Christian nation nor a secular society, but a nation of heretics.
To many Americans, this description no doubt sounds like a compliment. Because we’ve always been a nation from of religious freethinkers and entrepreneurs –from Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy –the word “heretic” often carries positive connotations in our religious culture. It’s associated with theological daring, spiritual experimentation, and a willingness to blaze new trails and push on toward new horizons.
But the heretical imperative in America’s religious life has usually existed in a kind of fruitful and creative tension with more conservative, institutional, and historically-rooted forms of faith –first denominational Protestantism and then later the Roman Catholic Church as well. And the post-1960s decline of these churches has taken a significant toll on our common life, in ways that both religious and secular observers should be able to recognize.
For one thing, individualistic and do-it-yourself forms of religion are less likely to bind communities together, encourage stable families, assimilate immigrants, and otherwise Americans to live in healthy fellowship with one another. It is not a coincidence that as the institutional churches have lost their purchase among poor and non-college educated Americans, that population’s social ills have multiplied and its economic prospects have dimmed.
At the same time, self-created forms of faith are also less likely to provide a check against the self’s worst impulses –whether it’s the kind of materialism that Joel Osteen’s sunny promises encourage, or the solipsism that percolates under the surface of popular spiritual memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love.” Many of America’s contemporary crises, from the housing bubble and the financial crash to the collapse of the two-parent family, can be traced to just this tendency — encouraged by too much contemporary religion — to make the self’s ambitions the measure of all things.
Finally, when strong religious impulses coexist with weak religious institutions, people become more likely to channel religious energy into partisan politics instead, and to freight partisan causes with more metaphysical significance than they can bear. The result, visible both in the “hope and change” fantasies of Obama’s 2008 campaign and the right-wing backlash it summoned up, is a politics that gives free rein to both utopian and apocalyptic delusions, and that encourages polarization without end.
via ‘A nation of Osteens and Obamas’ – Guest Voices – The Washington Post.
British evangelist J. John has re-formulated the Ten Commandments in an effort to make them more relevant for today. His effort is getting some good press, and some 600 churches in England have bought into the program. This article tells all about it. You do have to, literally, buy into the program, because the commandments are presented, discussed, and taught in a DVD program called Just 10 for Churches (not available, at least yet, in the USA, as far as I can tell).
The article linked above tells about the new commandments but doesn’t give a list of the entire 10. So thanks to the SOWER blog for digging them out, giving the traditional version (with Protestant numbering) followed by the new formulation:
1. You shall have no other gods before Me…“know God”
2 You shall not make for yourself a graven image…… “catch your breath”
3. You shall not use the Lord’s name in vain……..“take God seriously”
4. Remember the Sabbath…………..…“live by priorities”
5. Honor your father and mother……………..…..“keep the peace with your parents”
6. You shall not murder………………… .……..….“manage your anger”
7. You shall not commit adultery………….“affair-proof your relationships”
8. You shall not steal……………………………..“prosper with a clear conscience”
9. You shall not bear false witness……………….….“hold to the truth”
10. You shall not covet…………..“find contentment”
via S.O.W.E.R.: New 10 Commandments?.
What do you think about this? A dynamic equivalent translation with the virtue of putting the law in positive terms rather than all of those negative “thou shalt not’s,” thereby removing obstacles to evangelism and church growth? Or an attempt to defang God’s Law by turning it into easy to follow self-help principles that turn Christianity into a different religion? Or what?
Tony Woodlief at Image (an important journal on Christianity & the Arts) argues for a connection between bad Christian art and bad theology. His points are usefully specific and pointed:
I’m convinced that bad art derives, like bad literary theory, from bad theology. To know God falsely is to write and paint and sculpt and cook and dance Him falsely. Perhaps it’s not poor artistic skill that yields bad Christian art, in other words, but poor Christianity.
Consider, for example, some common sins of the Christian writer:
Neat resolution: You can find it on the shelves of your local Christian bookstore: the wayward son comes to Christ, the villain is shamed, love (which deftly avoids pre-marital sex) blossoms, and the right people praise God in the end. Perhaps best of all, we learn Why This All Happened.
Many of us are familiar, likewise, with that tendency among some Christians to view life as a sitcom, with God steadily revealing how the troubles in our lives yield more good than ill. . . .
Sometimes we suffer and often we fail, and there is no clear answer why, no cosmic math that redeems, in our broken hearts, this sadness. The worst Christian novels seem to forget Oswald Chambers’s insightful observation, which is that God promises deliverance in suffering, not deliverance from suffering. And so they lie about the world and about God and about the quiet, enduring faith of our brethren in anguish.
One-dimensional characters: In many Christian novels there are only three kinds of characters: the good, the evil, and the not-so-evil ones who are about to get themselves saved. And perhaps this saved/not saved dichotomy—more a product of American evangelicalism than Christian orthodoxy—accounts for the problem.
I think we might craft better characters if we accept that every one of us is journeying the path between heaven and hell, and losing his way, and rushing headlong one direction before abruptly changing course to dash in the other, and hearing rumors about what lies ahead, and hoping and dreading in his heart what lies each way, and grabbing hold of someone by the arm or by the hair and dragging, sometimes from love and sometimes from hate and sometimes from both.
Sentimentality: Like pornography, sentimentality corrupts the sight and the soul, because it is passion unearned. Whether it is Xerxes weeping at the morality of his unknown minions assembled at the Hellespont, or me being tempted to well up as the protagonist in Facing the Giants grips his Bible and whimpers in a glen, the rightful rejoinder is the same: you didn’t earn this emotion.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s warning against cheap grace comes to mind, a recognition that our redemption was bought with a price, as redemption always is. The writer who gives us sentimentality is akin to the painter Thomas Kinkade, who explicitly aims to paint the world without the Fall, which is not really the world at all, but a cheap, maudlin, knock-off of the world, a world without suffering and desperate faith and Christ Himself, which is not really a world worth painting, or writing about, or redeeming.
Cleanliness: I confess that the best way to deter me from watching a movie is to tell me it’s “wholesome.” This is because that word applied to art is a lie on its face, because insofar as art is stripped of the world’s sin and suffering it is not really whole at all.
This seems to be a failing—on the part of artist and consumer alike—in what my Orthodox friends call theosis, or walk, as my evangelical friends say. In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.
And if we remember that theology is the knowing of God, we have to ask in turn why so many Christians know God so weakly that they need such wholesomeness in order for their faith to be preserved.
This, finally, is what especially worries me, that bad Christian art is a problem of demand rather than supply. What if a reinvigorated Church were to embed genuine faith in the artist’s psyche and soul, such that he need no longer wear it on his sleeve, such that he bear to see and tell the world in its brokenness and beauty? Would Christian audiences embrace or despise the result?
HT: Stewart Lundy
Life as a sitcom! Good guys vs. bad guys, and we are the good guys! Tear-jerking sentimentality! Positive messages! Of course, these are also features of pop culture entertainment. Could it be that pop culture is influencing contemporary Christianity, which, in turn, is trying to turn out its own versions of pop culture?
The actual heritage of Christianity in the arts is in the realm of high culture; that is, the creation of serious, complex, creative-rather-than-conventional works of art. Christianity has produced Dante, Spenser, Milton, Rembrandt, Bach, Donne; also wildly creative innovators such as Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot, and Rouault. Even the seemingly less-sophisticated Christian author John Bunyan wrote a rich, complex masterpiece that falls into none of the above traps. And these are just some explicitly theological writers. Christianity has also profoundly shaped the works of authors and artists who specialized in seemingly “secular” works, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Coleridge, and on and on, including modern authors such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, and more. There are even great Christian movies–have any of you seen the works of the Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer?–but they too are complicated, like Christianity and like life. I suspect that there are indeed Christian artists trying to emulate these kinds of artists, but will other Christians support them and become their patrons?
On Sunday, Pastor Douthwaite at our church gave one of the best comments on the Harold Camping fiasco. From his sermon on John 14:
Thomas and Philip didn’t quite understand all that Jesus was saying. They ask questions. Their knowledge isn’t quite right or complete. But don’t mock them or think less of them for this – for who among us understands all this? Especially the mystery of the Trinity which Jesus here is teaching. But give Thomas and Philip credit for this – though they didn’t fully understand, they looked to Jesus for the answers. They clung to Him tenaciously.
That’s not only a good example for us, it is what a certain Mr. Harold Camping missed this weekend. I’m certain that you’ve heard of him. The media has paid an unusual amount of attention to him and his prediction that the end of the world was going to begin yesterday. I don’t want to go into the details of all that he said. But you know what he missed? Christ. Not that he’s not a Christian. I’m not saying that. I don’t know what’s in his heart. But in all his study of the Bible, he looked for numbers and clues and codes and all sorts of things . . . but he missed Christ. And that’s what the Scriptures are all about. They’re not about hidden clues, secret teachings, mysterious numbers, and being able to calculate days and times. They’re all about Jesus. About his death and resurrection. That dying and rising with Jesus is the truth, and the way to eternal life.
via St. Athanasius Lutheran Church
Camping is not alone in spinning a Christless Christianity. I have read “Christian” books going into all kinds of profound theology and teachings about Christian living that did not so much as mention Christ. I have heard sermons, even evangelistic sermons, that left out Christ. I have heard expositions of the Bible that said nothing about Christ. I have heard personal testimonies and evangelistic witnesses that leave Jesus out of the picture. I have looked at lots of Sunday school curriculum and “Christian” children’s books that are pure moralism, without a shred of Jesus and His gospel. Since the root of “Christianity” is, you know, “Christ,” how is this possible? Don’t you have a different religion if you leave Jesus out of your Christianity?
P.S.: This is the reason to discuss Camping and not just to ignore him, as some of you were recommending: To discern how his particular spirit may be manifesting itself in other contexts closer to home. That’s the theme of this post and the one below.
Russell D. Moore, dean of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes in the Wall Street Journal about nondenominationalism:
Are we witnessing the death of America’s Christian denominations? Studies conducted by secular and Christian organizations indicate that we are. Fewer and fewer American Christians, especially Protestants, strongly identify with a particular religious communion—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, etc. According to the Baylor Survey on Religion, nondenominational churches now represent the second largest group of Protestant churches in America, and they are also the fastest growing.
More and more Christians choose a church not on the basis of its denomination, but on the basis of more practical matters. Is the nursery easy to find? Do I like the music? Are there support groups for those grappling with addiction?
This trend is a natural extension of the American evangelical experiment. After all, evangelicalism is about the fundamental message of Christianity—the evangel, the gospel, literally the “good news” of God’s kingdom arriving in Jesus Christ—not about denomination building.
The post-World War II generation of evangelicals was responding to congregations filled with what they considered spiritual deadness. People belonged to a church, but they seemed to have no emotional experience of Christianity inside the building. Revivalists watched as denominational bureaucracies grew larger, and churches shifted from sending missionaries to preach around the world to producing white papers on issues like energy policy.
The revivalists wanted to get back to basics, to recover the centrality of a personal relationship with Jesus. “Being a member of a church doesn’t make you a Christian,” the ubiquitous evangelical pulpit cliché went, “any more than living in a garage makes you a car.” Thus these evangelical ministries tended not to talk about those issues that might divide their congregants. They avoided questions like: Who should be baptized and when? What does the Lord’s Supper mean? Should women be ordained? And so on.
The movement exploded. Before 1955, there were virtually no megachurches (defined as 2,000 people per worship service) in the country. Now there are between 850 and 1,200 such churches and many are nondenominational, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Evangelicalism wanted to open its doors to all believers and it often lacked roots in the traditions of particular congregations. So many evangelical churches have a generic identity. This has changed the feel of local church life.
Where hymnody once came from the spontaneity of slave spirituals or camp meetings, worship songs are increasingly now focus-grouped by executives in Nashville. The evangelical “Veggie Tales” cartoons—animated Bible stories featuring talking cucumbers and tomatoes—probably shape more children in their view of scripture than any denominational catechism does these days. A church that requires immersion baptism before taking communion, as most Baptist traditions do, will likely get indignant complaints from evangelical visitors who feel like they’ve been denied service at a restaurant.
But there are some signs of a growing church-focused evangelicalism. Many young evangelicals may be poised to reconsider denominational doctrine, if for no other reason than they are showing signs of fatigue with typical evangelical consumerism.
via Russell D. Moore: Where Have All the Presbyterians Gone? – WSJ.com.
I would add to these statistics the churches that actually do belong to a denomination but act as if they didn’t.
Is it not true that a good number of these nondenominational congregations do have an implicit theology and follow an implicit–usually Baptist–tradition? For example, do they baptize infants or not? Does anyone know of a nondenominational church that does? Or will if a parent requests it?
What I’m asking–because I don’t know, so please enlighten me somebody–is if a non-denominational congregation still has a distinct theology or are all theologies or most theologies acceptable? Are there non-denominational Calvinist churches, non-denominational Pentecostal churches, etc.? Or do non-denominational churches allow members to hold to any of these theologies? Or is there a distinct set of “non-denominational” teachings that everyone adheres to?
Protestantism tends to sort itself out either by doctrines or, perhaps more so, by polity. Is today’s nondenominationalism also a matter of a seminary or Bible School graduate just going out and starting his own church? Unfettered by denominational approval, processes, and supervision? Is that it?
Some of us are more interested in actual, worked-out, rich, theology. Also meaningful, non-generic worship. I guess that sends people to denominations. For me, when I found Lutheranism, I did not just just find a “denomination,” I found the Church. Not that Lutherans are the only one true church, but I found a sense of Church as existing through time and eternity that does includes non-Lutheran Christians but this universal but non-generic Church is manifested in our local congregation.
“Denomination” just means, literally, “name.” Of course churches within a particular tradition need to have more in common than a name. Unless it is the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Is nondenominationalism the new ecumenism, so that in generic Christianity we are seeing the fulfilment of the dream of Christian unity? Or not?
If the Church were to go through another Reformation today, what do you think needs reforming? What are the issues today?
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