Retro-Christianity by Michael J. Svigel, and this review is by David Moore. Dave is the founder of Two Cities Ministries (www.twocities.org) and the author of forthcoming, Pooping Elephants, Mowing Weeds: What Some Business Failed to Tell You.

I have read many “critique” books of evangelicalism.  Authors such as David Wells, Mark Noll, James Davison Hunter, George Marsden, and Os Guinness, along with many others, have provided me with extremely helpful insight.

Svigel’s book is also a critique of evangelicalism, but it differs from the authors above.  Svigel’s book is challenging without being a jeremiad.  To be sure, Svigel has some pointed things to say, but there is a grace and generosity of spirit which shines through.  To chase to the end of the book first, Svigel offers some wise and gentle applications for those who want to see the evangelical church reformed.

Instead of doing your typical review, here are several things which I greatly appreciated about the book: [Read more...]

Jonathan Merritt knows the inside story of evangelicalism’s flirtation with power in the last two decades. Some might say he knows too much; some of it he has experienced himself; he shows the underbelly of some of the Southern Baptist Convention’s gamesmanship when it comes to political issues — including (sadly) environmentalism. His account in A Faith of Our Own is discrete but not unafraid to say “the jig is up” on being too comfortable in the halls of power. Some of us would say of the evangelical flirtation with power that “the powers, after all, have no clothes — nor did they ever have them.”

There is a rising number of Christians who are not tempted, and they are establishing a better way for Christian witness.

What are the specific instances where you think evangelicals and progressives have gotten too close to power? Where are you seeing an “enough is enough” attitude? Is proximity to state power seductive? Do you think progressive and evangelicals have been used as a voting bloc?

They will not let the Christian issues be reduced to one or two talking points or issues in the culture war. Why, they ask, is abortion so important but nuclear war not? He writes about Tyler Wigg Stevenson, Bethany Hoang and IMJ…  that is, the “Christian agenda” is broadening. I find Jonathan’s perception here entirely accurate… things are changing among the next generation.

When I hear pastors “disappointed”  with some senator’s deceits and conceits I have to admit my response is not so much cynical as it is non-plussed: Power corrupts, or at least humans with power tend toward corruption. The more power the more temptation to corruption. Pastors, of all people, ought not to be registering disappointments when astute observers have been saying that very thing for years. I, for one, was not surprised one bit by President Obama’s support of same-sex marriage; I was surprised by pastors who were surprised. [Read more...]

There was a dustup late last week stirred up by Al Mohler, who accused Andy Stanley for soft-pedaling when it came to homosexuality, and then Mohler ramped up the rhetoric by wondering if megachurches were the new liberalism. Denny Burk chirped up some support for Mohler. Then Rick Warren got into the act and told Mohler he was libeling thousands of megachurch pastors in his comment about liberalism.

CT posted a sketch of the story, and led it off with these unambiguous words: “His message was troubling,” said Dennis Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College. “It was ambiguous at best. It was a total capitulation to the spirit of the age at worst.” The word “troubling” is the new big theological frown and it is used by those who have their theological ducks quacking at the same time. Burk then chased Andy Stanley down the slippery slope to total capitulation (at worst). That comment made me ask if he wondered what might have been the best read of the situation.

This whole story reminds me of two stories about Jesus and his Pharisee critics, two stories when he befriended those whom the others thought unacceptable.  [Read more...]

It is one thing to claim God loves us unconditionally; it is another thing to grasp God’s love. But it is yet another to comprehend God as a cosmic therapist who sits there, listens to us with an analytic mind, lets us say what we want so that we come to terms with our inner self — and then get healed from coming to terms with who we are before God.

Well, that’s a theme in T.M. Luhrmann’s 4th chap in her book, When God Talks Back. The subject of the chp is the evangelical heart, its heart religion and its concern with heart transformation.

I have to admit that I don’t personally encounter much of what I read in this chp, so I’d be interested in how widespread this is? Therapeutics — of course, God heals. But how central is this: Is God the healer pervasive enough to comprehend God as a therapist? How is this a need? How is this overdone?

1. Unconditional love is harder to comprehend than many know; there are no complete human analogies for such love. Some have really good parents, but no one indwells an unconditionally loving world or relationship. And the God of the Bible doesn’t always seem unconditionally loving — though that is the mantra so many repeat. So she picks out some wrath-of-God stuff and then Jonathan Edwards and knows that in the history of the church God’s holiness, wrath and judgment have often been uppermost. With this as the background for so much of theology, comprehending God’s unconditional love is not natural or normal or easy.

2. Humans, and she studies Christians in the Vineyard, have to grow and learn that they are lovable and loved by God. Her discovery is that the Vineyard folks see sin as separation and that it is not God who as separated but humans — in part by turning away from God but even more from not being open to the all-present love and goodness of God that is there for the reception. [Read more...]

It happened under Reagan, and it is American evangelicalism’s political sin. When evangelicalism aligns itself with a political party, which happened under Reagan (I call it “Reaganology”), it seals its doom as a credible gospel witness. We are beginning to reap what we sowed.

From Reuters:

(Reuters) – Americans are increasingly uneasy with the mingling of religion and politics, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, in the midst of a campaign season punctuated by tussles over the role of faith in the public square.

Back in 2001, when Pew first asked the question, just 12 percent of Americans complained that their politicians talked too much about religion.

That number has risen steadily ever since and hit a record high in the new poll: 38 percent of Americans, including 24 percent of Republicans, now say their political leaders are overdoing it with their expressions of faith and prayer.

And more Americans than ever, 54 percent, believe churches should keep out of politics. That’s up from 43 percent in 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. [Read more...]

Christopher Benson, in his review of John Stackhouse’s portion of the book the spectrum of evangelicalism, makes this closing, and it’s worth your careful read — and a response.

Where do you think such a person can find a home? Canterbury? Rome? Wittenburg? Geneva?

Earlier I said I embrace Stackhouse’s criteria of generic evangelicalism “as far as it goes.” I qualified my praise because, however much the definition contains an inner logic, I am still restless with “evangelical” (uppercase, in my reading) as a descriptor of my own religious identity. That restlessness owes to what I perceive as the cultural captivity and politicization of the movement during my lifetime. Add to this “the anointed” authority structure, pointless heresy hunting, institutional weakness, ad hoc liturgy, anti-intellectualism, middlebrow aesthetics, and flaccid theology (“moralistic, therapeutic deism”)—and you will begin to understand the winter of my discontent. (There are exceptions to the above generalizations, but apologists often make too much of those exceptions.) Some of my evangelical contemporaries have found vernal promise in Catholicism or Orthodoxy. I investigated both traditions and could not be at home there for theological reasons. [Read more...]