The neo-Babylonian captivity of (some) evangelicals

Around September 1520, Matin Luther published a tract. Along with his other writings, he would be invited to repudiate it at the Diet of Worms in 1521. When Erasmus read this particular tract he is reported to have blurted out “The breach is irreparable” for it was seen by Luther’s contemporaries as his most incendiary writing to date. It attacked the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, which Luther maintained had actually held the Church in a kind of servitude. His aim was to set the Church free. The tract was called “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church”. It seems that today part of the contemporary church may have fallen prey to its own modern version of captivity. We all run the risk of being held captive by the culture which surrounds us. It configures us to think in certain ways, and not think in others. It has an ability to weave a spell that for the most part we are unaware of. It is always a challenge to break free.

For the Christian (in the Biblical sense) culture is particularly problematic where it is suffused with ideas and values opposed to the way the Creator would have us think. That there is such a thing as “the way the Creator would have us think” is of course highly contested in modern culture. Some maintain there is no Creator. Others maintain that even if there is He/She/It is unknowable (at least in any practically important way); one can therefore live as a practical, if not a philosophical, atheist. Then there are those who are happy to wander around in an agnostic fog, probably because it frees them to live as they see fit. This will have the added advantage of allowing them to fit in with the culture that surrounds them, of which they will be largely unaware. For my part, I am convinced that there is a Creator to whom I owe my existence. I am also convinced that He has revealed Himself in the Bible, not as the remote watchmaker of the deist, but the loving Father who goes to inordinate lengths precisely so that the He might know me, and I Him. As this is a minority view (and always has been) there is a potential clash between ways of thinking and behaving taught in the Bible (properly understood and applied), and those taught or even mandated in the surrounding, non-Christian, culture.

Such a clash is exactly the state of affairs that prevailed when the first Christians began to preach the Gospel, the good news of Jesus’ rescue mission (the one we’ll be celebrating in a few weeks). The Gospel was so counter-cultural in their time that living it and preaching it cost many of those first believers their liberty and their lives. That doesn’t of itself constitute evidence that the Gospel is true. Men and women in history have given their lives for all sorts of causes. But it does indicate that Biblical thinking and living has and can be costly. There are areas in the world where this is true today. But because broadly Biblical ideas and values came to predominate in the “West”, while there have been periods of difficulty, it would be hard to argue that, at least in recent times, we have experienced having to pay a high, let alone the ultimate, cost for following Jesus. And there have even been places where it has been reasonably comfortable for “evangelicals”. 

I mean of course the U.S. where historically it has not only been relatively easy to be a Christian believer, but in recent decades one could argue it has been desirable. Evangelicals in the US have had a political presence in the US since the 19^th century. However in the second half of the 20^th century, they emerged across the Protestant denominations to form a more clearly defined block, albeit with fuzzy edges. In the 1970’s moreover, they began to form a coherent voting bloc, coalescing around a number of political issues, particularly abortion. As a bloc they were of course actively courted by one Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and as a bloc they apparently supported him. This was always a transactional relationship. Trump promised to put conservative justices on the US Supreme Court and announced himself to be an ardent “pro-lifer”; the evangelicals voted for him in large numbers, even if some of them held their noses as they did so. Back in 2016 there were those who pointed out that Trump did not pass some fairly basic tests that evangelicals should have been interested in. For Max Lucado he didn’t pass the “decency” test that he would apply to someone who wanted to take his daughters out for an evening, let alone run the most powerful country in the World. Russell Moore elicited a Twitter rebuke from Trump, when among other things he called him one of "two immoral options". For Al Mohler too, Trump didn’t pass the smell test, although the other candidate was at least equally unpalatable. Mohler is a smart man, who made a ton of cogent points at the time. That he has now changed his tune has led some to question his motivation. Other evangelicals are reported to be heading in the opposite direction, experiencing what sounds like frustration and a degree of buyer’s remorse. But the fact is that in their support for Trump they were prepared to prioritize the political over the theological. They got what many of them wanted. But they got a lot more besides.

There has always been an anti-intellectual strain in US evangelicalism (and perhaps evangelicalism in general). By that I don’t just mean a dislike for intellectual endeavours outside of the Scriptures some of which like philology, history and science, were used to attack orthodox Christian belief. Thinking hard about that very belief has sometimes seemed too much like hard work for some evangelicals. There is something simple in the Gospel that is attractive (“Jesus loves me, this I know”), but the New Testament is clear that we should progress from milk to meat (1 Corinthians 3:1-3; Hebrews 5:11-14). Where teaching, training and thought are lacking, churches become vulnerable to being captured by influences and teachings other than those found in the Scriptures (Eph 4:14). It was the this sort of thing that Mark Noll diagnosed in the 1990’s:

“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. An extraordinary range of virtues is found among the sprawling throngs of evangelical Protestants in North America….. Notwithstanding all their other virtues, however, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.” (Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind).

Just over 25 years later, that hollowing out of evangelical thinking, intellectual, apologetic and theological, has led in some churches to partisan politics trumping (pardon the pun) Scripture. Those churches have entered a new Babylonian captivity. We shall see whether they return, and in what state.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic we have no reason to be complacent. We either hear and appropriately respond to the warnings of Scripture and grow up in our faith, or we too run the risk of entering some or other captivity.   

Life in the pandemic XXVIII More atheist wobbling…..

I’ve got a lot of respect for honest atheists. They have a long and interesting heritage. Many are thoughtful about why they think as they do, and the problems it creates for them. They have concluded that there is no God, some because they find the evidence wanting, others because they reject the implications of there being a God. Some are of course thoroughly religious; many Buddhists are, as a matter of definition, atheists. Others have a problem as much with religion as with the idea of God. I don’t think atheism has gone away, nor do I think it will. But it I do think it is having a bit of a hard time.

I’m not going to discuss here the particular brand of atheism called “new atheism”, because I’ve touched on it before. It is/was fairly ignorant of its antecedents and forebears, and equally ignorant of many of the things it sought to criticise. As I’ve noted its death has been announced. Even other atheists have pointed out that “it contains little that is novel or interesting”¹. It would be tasteless to pick on it in its weakened state. Indeed it would be to indulge in what some of its adherents were prone to do: pick on the worst and most ludicrous examples of theism, claim that they were representative or typical, illustrate their folly, ridicule them thoroughly with a mixture of argument and brilliant wordplay, and then claim to have destroyed the intellectual respectability of all theism. Straw manism at it glorious worst.

But on this occasion something different caught my eye. An article by Jonathon Van Maren recently appeared entitled “Grave MenFacing a Grave Faith”, and was picked up by a number publications and blogs. It deserves a wide reading. It begins with interview excerpts from historian Niall Ferguson, but goes on to discuss the views of other atheists and agnostics such as Douglas Murray and Tom Holland (he of the recently published Dominion, discussed here). Among other things, Ferguson is quoted as having concluded that “atheism, particularly in its militant forms, is really a very dangerous metaphysical framework for a society.” He thinks that in the church (although not necessarily in faith it would seem) we have a good framework for an ethical system that can support those values he holds most dear, essentially those that he was brought up with. Certainly what theism, particularly Christian theism provides, is something more than what has so far emerged from a Godless and purposeless evolutionary process.

For Murray a major worry is how to support key ideas such as human equality and the sanctity of life. These and other Judeo-Christian concepts find their foundations in the Bible. But the Bible is only of passing literary interest if it is not, or does not contain, the word of God. If God, and His Bible, are repudiated (as of course they both widely are) can these values (and along with them the “liberal, democratic West”) survive? According to Murray, Ferguson and others, atheism and secularism seem to be having a hard time providing secure foundations for ideas which they claim are foundational to the kind of society they want to live in. I’ve no doubt that this is something that might very well be disputed by others. They might point out that on one hand human misery and suffering continued apparently unabated all through a period when “Christian” values had been in the ascendant. And on the other hand there are lots of non-Biblical, non-God (or god) dependant ethical systems to choose from. Both of these contentions are true. But many of these alternatives seem to allow things that Ferguson et al are uncomfortable with, and don’t provide sufficient support for the sort of society they have been living in, and want to live in. Then there are some systems which are clearly based on non-Christian and even atheistic ethics that do appear to making progress in the world today. Returning to Ferguson, he sees totalitarianism as “gaining ground not only in China but in subtle ways in our own society”. He sees totalitarianism as a danger and as a source of disasters; this he says is one of the major lessons of the 20^th century. It is a lesson that we appear to be forgetting in the 21^st. And with the demise of Christianity, he is making the case that we are losing an important bulwark against such systems and the unacceptable ethics that flow from them.

All well and good. But it’s not clear to me that what Ferguson, Murray and the rest miss is really Christianity. They seem to hark back to aspects of a bygone culture in which they felt comfortable (if only in retrospect). Ferguson’s parents left the Church of Scotland to bring him up “in a Calvinist ethical framework but with no God”; Murray doesn’t like the Church of England giving up “the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer”. What they really appear to miss is good old-fashioned 18^th century Deism, not Christianity. Deism was precisely an attempt to remove supernaturalism in general and the revealed God in particular from Christianity, in the hope of leaving a philosophical and ethical edifice that would still have some coherence and benefit. No cross, no blood, no God – but no good. The last three hundred years have shown that this is unsustainable. Deism degenerated into atheism, and what we appear to be hearing from at least some atheists are stirrings of discontent as chickens come home to roost and pennies drop.

Christianity is much more than an ethical code. At its centre is a transforming and sustaining personal relationship with Jesus, crucified, risen, ascended and returning. Take Him out of the equation and you might have an ethical system that is coherent (and many would argue that you do not), but you do not have one that is convincing, satisfying or sustainable in the long term, for individuals or for societies.

1. John Gray “Seven types of atheism”, p7

Don't ask me how I'm feeling

Full disclosure – I’m a Scot. We have a reputation for being a dour, miserable lot. Some argue that this explains why we took to Calvinism so enthusiastically. Mind you, proving the direction of the causality (were we Calvinists because we were dour, or dour because we were Calvinists?) is probably impossible. This is all a bit unfair to both Scots and Calvinists. However, as it is emotion I'm about to discuss, I thought I had better point out I might be accused of having a problem with it!

In contemporary culture, emotion is important. We’re told to read it, explore it, own it, express it. Not to do these things is to be repressed. We don’t just need intelligence, we need emotional intelligence. How I feel is what really matters, and trumps almost everything else. Even in science, those interested in cold cognition are increasingly interested in emotion (or its proxies). How we feel is as cool a subject of study as how we think. Not all emotion is good of course. There are good and bad emotions, and the aim of modern life is to maximise the good and minimise the bad. Happiness good, sadness bad. Guilt bad, the satisfaction that flows from being self-justified, good. The “right sort” of emotional state is an objective for life. It’s healthy to pursue feeling good.

So it might be argued that it is just as well that there are churches that seem to focus on meeting this need to feel good. A recent article on the BBC website (“Hillsong: A church with rock concerts and 2m followers”; 13^th August) left me feeling that I needed to think about emotion. It ended with a quote from a young man who, for various reasons, had left Hillsong. He clearly still felt warmly towards. He was quoted as saying: 

“The music is so beautiful and uplifting and it makes you feel better. I don't think there's anything in the Bible that says we can't feel good.”

If you’ve never heard of Hillsong, it’s worth knowing that it is a rapidly growing group of churches, originating in Australia. It is perhaps best known for its music, and it has given to the church at large songs that are probably now sung somewhere every Sunday (you’ll find lots of examples on YouTube). The music and vibe attracts a mainly young audience to its large weekly gatherings, with stadium-sized conferences running more occasionally. Hillsong’s weekly live audience runs into the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), with many more watching and listening online.

The thing about music, particularly well written and well played music, is that it is a brilliant way to induce a mood, evoke an emotion, create an atmosphere. And I don’t have any problem with that. I like music, of all sorts (and play music of some sorts). It’s clearly important in church too. Christians have always sung together, taking much of their early material from the Psalms in the Old Testament, Psalms which themselves had been sung for millennia by Israel. Some of this singing is sad and poignant. But much of it is joyful and uplifting. Indeed this upbeat note is probably where the balance lies. After all, the instruction in Psalm 100 v 1 is to make a joyful noise, not a mournful one. And in the New Testament the instruction is to sing out of thankfulness; I’m assuming that this means it will be will be on the up side rather than the down. And I don't really see a problem if this really does help us feel better. So in one sense Hillsong aren’t really innovators in giving church music a key, upbeat role. But here is my problem: don’t we need something beyond feeling better, feeling good? 

Singing, particularly singing together, is powerful. But powerful enough? Maybe it would be a good idea to know why  we’re singing, and to know why we're singing what you're singing. Singing, and the feel-good factor that it can engender, doesn’t ever seem to be the primary objective in Scripture. There is nothing in the Bible that says we can't feel good. But there's lots in the Bible that suggest there are things that need attention before we get to feel good. Maybe if simply feeling good is our objective, we're missing something important. Because when singing to feel good becomes the objective, the song is all that there is. Maybe that's when the song becomes hollowed out, and becomes less than it could be. 

Something else of interest recently happened, this time among the ranks of Hillsong musicians. One of their more accomplished writers and performers decided that Christianity just may not cut it for him anymore. Posting on Instagram (since removed, but picked up by others), among other things he wrote:

“This is a soapbox moment so here I go … How many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place, all ‘coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet—they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people. But it’s not for me.” (quoted more extensively  here)

There’s a familiarity about this; these are issues that have been, and are, discussed, widely. They are questions that have answers. The fallibility of Christian leaders is well known and often reported (sometimes gleefully); there are websites and blogs dedicated to it. But then who was he following, or being encouraged to follow? We’re all fallible, and we all fail. That’s why the Gospel focuses not on a man, but on Jesus (who while a man, was also God). The role and reality (or otherwise) of the miraculous is another often talked about subject (some Christians seem to talk about nothing else). But miracles in the Bible, are relatively rare and usually serve a particular purpose. And that purpose is rarely evidential. Contradictions? While the claim is often made that the Bible is "full" of them, it has consistently failed to stand up to scrutiny.  The problem of suffering is a key, important and difficult issue for many, but hardly a new one. He also says: "Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion.” I admit I’m not entirely sure what this even means. But a cursory read of this blog (and much more besides) will show that science is no competitor to faith, at least not the kind of faith the Bible talks about. So what’s going on?

Could it be a simple as this: if the music’s all you’ve got, then when the music stops you’re in big trouble. If all you have is a good feeling, an uplifted mood, based on feel-good songs, this will be a  fragile and temporary state of affairs. It will not be enough to effect a fundamental change in life-direction; it will not stand the test of time, nor stand up to a skeptical and hostile culture. Maybe, after all, life is not primarily about how we feel. It has to come back to what we know. It is true that the philosophically sophisticated puritan theologian Johnathan Edwards said: “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections". But the same Psalmist who tells us to make a joyful noise, immediately sings: “Know that the Lord, he is God” (Ps 100:3). Scripture doesn't make the sort of rigid distinction between feeling and knowing that we have tended to in Western culture. Throughout Scripture knowing and feeling are linked and are not two rigid and separate categories. So all knowing and no feeling is no great improvement on all feeling and no knowing.

But it does seem to be clear that feeling (and singing) need a proper foundation. They need to spring from right knowing. To focus only on how we feel is to focus on the wrong thing, to have things the wrong way round. If we make how we feel our primary objective, we short-change ourselves. So, as Alistair Begg said once, “Don’task me how I feel, ask me what I know”. He, incidentally, is also a Scot.

What an odd thing to do on a Saturday night…

Here I was sitting in a tent on a Saturday night. Perhaps in and of itself not that odd I’ll grant. But it was a rather large tent, holding about two-thousand people. Fair enough, not unknown in the summer, even in the UK. After all, there seem to be more and more festivals popping up all the time, many of them involving tents.  But here we were on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century, thinking about words written in the first century; seeing in those words something of relevance to the present day (and indeed the future). Nor was this a gathering of crusty old enthusiasts, a wistful looking back by a bunch of old hobbyists to a bygone and much missed era. No, this was about now. Finding in those words direction for living now, with an orientation towards an event yet to come. Much about this is really quite odd in today’s terms.

The event was of course the first evening session of the middle week of the Keswick Convention. Since 1875, Christians from a variety of denominational backgrounds have met in Keswick to hear Bible teaching. The speakers too have always been drawn from a range of backgrounds. However, at its heart has been the conviction that the Living God speaks through a book (the Bible), and so the “Bible Readings” (daily Bible-based talks often covering a single book or section of the Bible) are one of the main aspects of the convention.

Even among Bible-believing Christians, Keswick has not been without its critics. In the early days, in the late 19^th Century, it was treated with suspicion by some evangelical leaders. More recently criticism has come from the “reformed” end of the evangelical spectrum (eg see this from Kevin DeYoung). Much of this will seem overblown to your average convention goer today, who is happy to listen to a range of Bible teachers who take Scripture seriously and want to explain it simply. What’s odd is that this is still going on at all.

The culture around us is in a state of continual flux. Different movements and ideas wax and wane. On one reading of history, Christianity has been in terminal decline, at least in Western Europe, for a while. That of course was part of the great modernist project. Religion in general, and Christianity in particular belonged to humanity’s adolescence. With the arrival of the enlightenment and the achievements of science, it was time to grow up and move on. Poor modernism. It’s death was declared by the post-modernists. Then it transpired that postmodernism was a bit of a dead end, and it went into decline. In the religious sphere there was the rise of the “new” atheists. But even their demise has been announced (although they may be unaware of this).  

I first came to Keswick when I was a student. Back in 1985 (34 years ago!) a bunch of us were here when Eric Alexander taught at the Bible readings on 1 Corinthians (I still have the book somewhere). I was back last year to hear Chris Wright on Micah. In the world I grew up in as a student, Christians in general were to be tolerated, and the Bible-believing fundamentalist sort were to be pitied. But thousands of the latter type gathered at Keswick every summer. The culture in the UK has moved on. Those pesky fundamentalists are still around, but now they have to be kept out of the public square, or maligned in the cyberworld, because of their dangerous multiphobic views. But here we were in Lake District, in July, listening in a tent, on a Saturday night, to prescient warnings about such circumstances, written originally by a guy called Peter in the first century.   

This would all strike the average person as odd if it struck them at all. After all,unless you knew about the Keswick convention, you wouldn’t know about it! But think about it. The Bible is a book that has been maligned, slandered, criticised, censored, banned, misinterpreted, mistranslated and mishandled for as long as it has been around. Yet, somehow, it remains potent. I suppose you could try to make the same observation about the Quran (although it’s a relatively youthful 1400 years old) or the Communist Manifesto (somewhat out of fashion currently). And there are other books and scriptures that have their adherents. I don’t find those alternatives persuasive. I do find the Bible persuasive. It presents a coherent account properly understood of the God who is there, of His rescue mission to and for humanity, and of the demands He has on my life now. In my own local Church (Bridge Chapel in South Liverpool), its message struck a couple of individuals last Sunday with such force and vitality that the direction of their lives has been altered. They are different to me, with different backgrounds and personalities, yet somehow the message of the Bible spoke to them the same way it speaks to me. And now we now share in the same central relationship, and the same living hope that here in Keswick we were considering last night, from the first letter of Peter to a bunch of first century, first generation Christians, that he called exiles.

The people Peter wrote to were seen as odd. In their own day some called them “evildoers” (1 Pet 2:12) and they were slandered (1 Pet 3:16) and maligned (1 Pet 4:4). In contemporary non-Christian and anti-Christian writings, they were called everything from cannibals to subversives to atheists! You’ll find examples of similar things (and worse) in the Twittersphere and on the interweb. Perhaps soon we'll find the same types of charges being made against us in the non-virtual, non-cyber world. But then Jesus was seen as odd, very odd. I’m happy to share that oddness, and was happy to think about it last night in a tent at Keswick. 

Which is, when you think about it, a bit odd. 

Unless it isn’t.