Why Millennials Leave, and What to Do About It

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Matt

There are two temptations a Christian encounters whenever he reads about why young people are leaving the church. The first is to seek to transform the church into whatever young people want it to be in order to retain them. This, of course, always becomes an abandonment of both the Gospel and the Great Commission. The second temptation, however, is to dismiss the analysis entirely in order to avoid the first temptation. We can learn from these studies. But in order to do so, we must read them through the lens of Scripture.

Consider, for example, this analysis by Rachel Held Evans who, like myself, was born with one foot in generation-x and one foot in generation-y. To get the obvious out of the way, an orthodox Christian cannot pursue her vision of transforming the church into an advocacy group for liberal political goals like the affirmation of sodomy and the promotion of environmentalism under the Christianized moniker of “creation care.” Regardless of what one thinks liberal politics as such, the church’s function, according to Scripture, is instead to baptize and teach what Jesus taught. Nevertheless, assuming her analysis is accurate, there are several ways in which her conclusions can still be useful to a congregation that follows Christ rather than fashionable politics.

Perhaps the most obvious is as an aid to resisting temptations that we should be resisting anyway. For example, many congregations, scared of the increasing number of gray heads they see on Sundays, feel compelled to throw out beautiful liturgy, hymns, and ceremonies, in favor of music and atmosphere that those same gray-haired baby-boomers believe millennials will think is just “groovy.” Like many others, Ms. Evans has found that, if anything, the church-marketing strategies of the past few decades hurt rather than help millennial attendance. We have been marketed to more than any previous generation, and we simply do not like it. It’s true enough that contemporary worship would be ill-advised even if it really drew a crowd, but knowing that it doesn’t still makes it easier to reject.

The second low-hanging fruit is when the analysis reveals that youth are looking for something that we’re supposed to be providing anyway, but are not. The fact is, sometimes the church neglects its God-given responsibilities, and sometimes that neglect happens to drive people away. Consider Ms. Evans’ finding that “millennials long for faith communities in which they are safe asking tough questions and wrestling with doubt.” We absolutely should be doing this already. As I wrote in As Though It Were Actually True:

Too often, Christians deal with doubt in an improper way. …We often tell ourselves or even others “you just need to have faith” as though faith were something that we work towards rather than something God gives us. Too often, we… try to suppress feelings of doubt without ever dealing with the fact of doubt. It is true enough that a Christian should not doubt God, but simply advising her to “stop it” does not cure doubt anymore than it does sin. Humans have a God-given need for truth and understanding. Ignoring those needs by suppressing doubt makes about as much sense as ignoring hunger or thirst in hopes that it will simply go away.

Rigorous teaching is usually accompanied by students who ask and wrestle with difficult questions. We should find the same thing in the Church. Hard questions are not something we should be afraid of; rather, as Peter tells us, “Always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” When someone comes back from college having heard that the New Testament is an unreliable copy of a copy of a copy, we shouldn’t just command them to have faith; we should show them how the manuscript evidence proves otherwise. Our intellect should not be divorced from our religion.

Finally, there are the more difficult subjects. “We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.” “We want a truce between science and faith.” “young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between … compassion and holiness.” These may very well be accurate statements about young evangelicals. However, the Church’s raison d’etre is to teach what Christ taught—even those unpopular teachings about creation, sodomy, and sin. For example, while we should certainly welcome LGBT people to the forgiveness we share in Christ, we can hardly expect them to feel welcome when we teach that same-sex liaisons are an abomination. And yet we must teach exactly that because that is what Christ taught. Theistic evolution may be the quick and easy way out of the faith/science conflict, but it’s contrary to what Christ taught, and so we must avoid it.

What then shall we do with such findings? Even if the easy prescriptions must be cast aside, we can still use the findings to indicate where we need to teach apologetics. Is there a conflict between Christianity and science? Let’s teach them where that conflict comes from, the flaws in the scientific method, and the evidence for a young Earth. Are the youth perplexed as to why fornication is forbidden? Let’s teach them about God’s holistic design for men, women, and sex. Do they think they have to choose between compassion and holiness? Let’s teach them to discern the difference between true compassion and mere sentimentalism, for only the latter is at odds with holiness. In short, let us prepare our youth to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.” Then we can send them out into battle without fearing for their souls. We may not be able to abandon the field when it comes to undesirable conflict, but we can at least teach them how to prevail on it.

Posted in Apologetics, Christian Youth, The Modern Church | Leave a comment

The Rise of the Superstitious Left

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Matt

I happened across a rather strange headline today: The Rise of the Religious Left: Religious Progressives Will Soon Outnumber Conservatives. I found this puzzling given the current trends in American religion. I generally think of the religious left as the mainline protestant denominations (along with liberal members of the church of Rome), but I don’t think of them as growing. In fact, liberal denominations are still emptying out and dying a fairly brisk pace, and so any growth of a religious left must be occurring elsewhere. Accordingly, I took a closer look at the study to see exactly what they meant by “religious” progressives. It turns out that their criteria for distinguishing liberalism from conservativism on their “theological orientation scale” is threefold: “belief in personal vs. impersonal God, belief in literal vs. non-literal interpretation of the Bible, and a preservationist vs. adaptive view of religious tradition” with conservatives holding the former positions and liberals the latter.

How shall we parse this criteria? The primary difference between a personal or impersonal God is whether this God reveals and communicates himself to us or whether we experience it in some other way such as our feelings or in patterns we observe in nature and society. Of course, we would have to exclude observed patterns that would require personal attributes like intelligence, and so this belief in an impersonal God can narrowed down to your typical American mysticism. Here we find things like the Western new-age appropriation of Karma (basically reduced to “what goes around comes around”) or the more vapid contemporary versions of “God is love” (which, as C.S. Lewis points out, generally means “love is God”–that there is divine significance to human affection.)

What are we to make of the second criterion: reading the Bible“literally?” Though undoubtedly a religious conservative by most reckoning, I myself don’t always read the bible literally—I read, for example, the Psalms as poetry and Revelation as highly symbolic apocalyptic literature even as I read the Gospels as literal historical narrative. Nevertheless, I think most people would say that I read it all literally simply because I believe it is all identical with God’s word and therefore inerrant. In other words, Americans don’t use the word “literally” literally when it comes to how we read the Bible. People generally say that a person reads the Bible literally merely if he thinks it’s actually true. Because this was a survey of the general population, we must go with this more colloquial understanding of the word. So according to this criteria, the liberally oriented religious folk are identified by rejecting the idea that the Bible is actually true. They believe it may contain nuggets of wisdom from God and is therefore worth perusing, but they must extract these nuggets from the rest of it according to their own sensibilities—whatever those may be.

The third criterion of “preservationist vs. adaptive” with respect to tradition is simpler. It mainly has to do with whether we are more likely to receive what our forebears hand over to us and pass it on, or whether we use it as inspiration for religious views that are primarily products of our own minds, feelings, experiences, and circumstances. Once again, religious liberals follow the latter path which is focused on internal, subjective religiosity rather than any standard outside of themselves. Calls of “doctrine divides” and “deeds not creeds” find themselves at home here.

I believe all of these traits of “liberally oriented theology” add up to the contemporary notion of people who are “spiritual but not religious.” They do not belong to any of the dying liberal denominations, but still think about theological matters. They have a vague consciousness of divine activity and meaning in life, but perceive that activity with minimal input from external sources. Think of it as old protestant liberalism without any of the academic rigor, history, or traditions: basically a matter of whether they attach a certain divine significance to their feelings and experiences, perhaps based on a few tidbits they may have heard about God at some point in their lives. As it turns out, there was already a word for this growing segment of the population long before “spiritual but not religious” came on the scene: Superstitious.

According to dictionary.com, superstition is “a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like” as well as “any blindly accepted belief or notion.” I think this sums up “spiritual but not religious” very well. Even old protestant liberalism, which I’ve called out for being wrong & even heretical, doesn’t quite fall to the level of superstition. Though their theologians proceed from numerous false assumptions and their academics rely on terrible methodology, their beliefs and notions are still based on (poor) reasons and (false) knowledge. Likewise, people may consider conservative Christians to be wrong, but though our faith is a gift of God, our positions are well-supported by reasons and evidence that are complimentary to that faith and that have been handed down to us by our fathers in the faith. For better or worse, we have an external standard on which our beliefs are based.

The irreligiously spiritual, on the other hand, pretty much make it up as they go. For example, they may proclaim that God accepts homosexuality because they have a gay friend and feel sympathy for lesbians they knew who were picked on in school. Now, any non-religious person might give homosexuality a thumbs-up on that basis, but there is no reason at all to attach any divine significance to that thumbs-up. The irreligiously spiritual, however do attach such significance (and the corresponding “ominous significance” to any contrary position), and they do so without any reason beyond their own liver shivers. The irreligiously spiritual may believe that God really wants them to save the planet. However, they believe that simply because they think the planet needs saving. Again, any non-religious person might share that goal, and they might have good or bad reasons for doing so—that part of it isn’t superstition. The superstition of the irreligiously spiritual is found in that they attach divine significance to their enthusiasms without any objective word from God on the subject. They are superstitious, not because they are liberals, but because of they are spiritual liberals.

If this is the growing trend in American spirituality, we are not looking at a growth in the religious left, but the superstitious left. They may call this “progressive” if they like, but while Christians being outnumbered by superstitious pagans may be new to older Americans today, it’s hardly new to the Church or to the world. The renewed use of superstition as a vehicle for political power indicates that there are dark days ahead, but nothing that Christ hasn’t carried His Church through before.

Posted in Culture, Spiritual But Not Religious, Theological Liberalism | Leave a comment

Nobody Wants to Commit

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Matt

“Men just don’t want to commit.”

It’s a charge that seems to come up fairly often when we ponder the sexual immorality and illegitimate children around us, and it is probably true. As I’ve written before, sexually barbaric men tend to be polygamous, and the men who stand accused could very well want to avoid a relationship in which their partners are permitted use the legal system to punish them for unfaithfulness. If you want to sin and keep your options open, you probably want to do so as safely as you can.

However, the error that is routinely made when people point this out is an attempt to portray women as morally superior. Why are there fatherless children? Why are families breaking down? It’s because bad men don’t want to commit to good women who are doing the best they can.

This conclusion of moral superiority is exploded when we look at the other end of commitment. It’s well-known that about half of marriages end in divorce. What’s less well-known is that (depending on which study you look at) between 2/3 and 4/5 of divorces are unilaterally inflicted on husbands by their wives. This is popularly called “no-fault” divorce. Apparently, women are not so keen on commitment as is generally believed. In light of such facts, the usual explanation for our predicament—that women want commitment but men don’t—looks terribly implausible. A better explanation is needed—one that fits all the facts.

It may be that women want their boyfriends to marry them, but at the end of the day, it would seem that marriage isn’t actually a commitment for many women. It is simply a way of securing commitment from their partner through the legal system. After all, legal marriages can be dissolved at any time and for any reason (or no reason at all). Men certainly can do this, but in reality they do not do this nearly so often as women. This is probably because the family courts that preside over the dissolution routinely take away a man’s children, property, and a portion of future income in order to give them to his ex-wife. By getting married, a man is making a legally enforced commitment of his future. A woman is not—regardless of what she intends at the time. We may then conclude that while a woman who wants her boyfriend to marry her is indeed seeking a commitment, she may very well be just as stingy about offering one as her boyfriend is.

Men and women are both utterly sinful, and this is what sinners do—we seek to gain as much advantage as we can from our neighbors without offering anything in return. Sinful men seek things like sex, companionship, and faithfulness from women, and if they can secure that from women without exclusively committing to them, they will do so. Sinful women also seek things like sex, companionship, as well as material support, and if they can secure that from men without committing to them, they will do so. Such is the nature of selfishness.

This is one reason why Christians get so little traction when teaching sexual morality to the next generation. Instead of teaching the virtue of chastity, we’ve spent the past few decades teaching the far shallower concept of “no sex outside of marriage.” While this is absolutely a Biblical teaching, the word “marriage” means something radically different in a society in which serial monogamy (i.e. successive polygamy) is the norm. A relationship in which the vows aren’t taken seriously because of the giant “break in the event of unhappiness” label on it still isn’t chaste even if people call it marriage.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote (well before our current woes of people wanting to force others to pretend homosexual relationships are marriages) that even in the same nation, secular and Christian society should have two different definitions of marriage and sets of rules concerning it. The advantage being that people would know what they are promising to their partner and what their partner is promising to them. Lewis also points out that if marriage is not understood as a permanent commitment, it’s better to stay unmarried and fornicate than to degrade real marriage by playing make-believe and using it to acquire property and social status. Of course, it’s far better to neither fornicate nor play make-believe.

I do not know if Lewis’ recommendation of parallel marriages is the best path or not. However, I do know that if Christians want to uphold their charge of teaching the whole counsel of God, we need to give up the illusion that women are basically good and men are basically bad when it comes to sexual morality. We’re all basically bad. We also need to teach chastity rather than abstinence. But whether secular or Christian, a society that wants to be chaste would be wise to make marriage less of a one-sided commitment.

Posted in Chastity, Ethics | 1 Comment

The Father is Not A Metaphor

Posted on June 22, 2013 by Matt

What’s the deal with all that “father” language in the Bible anyway?

The gender-explicit language of Scripture has long been a stumbling block to theological liberals. Under the influence of feminism, many have sought to relegate all the masculinity of the God of the Bible to the cultural prejudices of the times in which it was written. Accordingly, they feel comfortable purging Scripture of patriarchy by either neutering the language or adding feminine language into it alongside the masculine. Why restrict ourselves to praying “Our Father who art in Heaven” when we could pray “Our Mother who is within is” or “Father and Mother of us all in whom is heaven”? Why put God in a masculine box?

Of course, some of these people might claim that I’m misrepresenting the situation because the Bible already uses feminine language for God, and this was simply repressed/ignored by the evil patriarchs running the Church in the past. “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you” says the Lord in Isaiah 66:13. “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” says Jesus in Matthew 23:37. See? God is just as much a mother as a father, and Jesus might just as well be a daughter as a son!

But such claims betray the underlying beliefs of those who want to neuter the Bible. The key word in such passages is “as.” “As one whom his mother comforts.” “As a hen gathers her brood.” That word makes these verses similes. A simile is an explicit kind of metaphor in which one thing is straightforwardly compared to something else in order to illuminate a shared quality. If one takes these metaphors as a license to call God “mother” just as he instructed us to call him “father,” then one is treating both “mother” and “father” as metaphors.

For rather than seeing the Bible as God’s Word, theological liberalism sees it as a record of individuals and communities encountering God and trying to make some kind of sense of their experiences. Being the patriarchal people they were, they noted that God behaved like the human fathers that they were more familiar with (and were mostly oblivious to the ways in which God acted like a mother). And behold: “God the Father” was born of man! So when Jesus calls God “Father” and instructs us to do the same, theological liberals think Jesus was merely condescending to use the popular metaphor of the time in which he lived. The resultant idea is that people may experience God as father (or as Jesus, or as the Holy Spirit, for that matter), but God is not really a father, let alone the Father.

But if the Father is simply a way in which we experience God, or one of the ways in which God has revealed himself, then the Father is not God at all and is instead simply a ‘way’ that exists primarily in our own thoughts and experiences. This is nothing else than the ancient heresy of modalism—the belief that The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not God, but are simply “modes” in which God interacts with the world. Unlike its ancient counterpart, modern modalism might not care whether God is three persons or only one, but it shares the same root problem: confusing God Himself with something in our minds and hearts that stands between us and the “real” God. This is the danger of thinking that the “father” language of scripture is some kind of optional metaphor. Metaphors stand between us and what they represent—if we worship them, they therefore become idols. If you pray to a mother, and/or a neuter, and/or a being who is both male and female, then you are not praying to the one true God at all.

“But the Bible says God is a Spirit! The first person of the Trinity doesn’t have a body like us, so he’s not really male or female at all!” Too many people labor under this Gnostic assumption—that everyone is really a neuter spirit inhabiting a male and/or female meat-sack—and extend their false assumption even to God. But the relationship of God and “father” is just the opposite of what theological liberals presume. Humans didn’t encounter a neuter and/or female God and clumsily grab the closest somewhat apt metaphor at hand. Instead, God created fathers, body & spirit together, specifically to be a representation of Himself. Theological liberals think that “God the Father” is a pale shadow of the real God because the real God is less of a father than the fathers we see on a regular basis. The reality is that He is more of a father. He is The Father. Human fathers are the pale shadow of the real Father God, just as patriarchal orthodox Christians have always known Him.

Some mainline denominations have opted to expand their language of the Trinity to additional poetic phrases such as “Mother, Child, and Womb.” While there’s nothing wrong with describing God poetically, they feel free to add their poetry alongside God’s self-revelation of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” because they think that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” are merely poetry in the first place. But the ecumenical creeds of the Church catholic do not express a belief in poetry or metaphors. Theological liberals might as well refer to their god as “Molech, Astaroth, and Baal,” because they do not worship the same God proclaimed by orthodox Christianity.

Posted in Feminism, Theological Liberalism | 7 Comments

Please Stop Working Together

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Matt

One of the most common complaints I hear about contemporary politics is that the two primary political parties are always at each others’ throats.   “If only we could all work together, then we could finally get something done and solve this country’s problems!”

As I’ve said before, I do not want our two parties to work together.  The only thing our two parties really agree on is screwing over the American people for the sake of maintaining & growing their own power.  When they do work together to get stuff done, the rest of us lose.  The on-going NSA controversy is a clear example of this.

“Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Tuesday called Edward Snowden, the contractor who leaked details of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs, a ‘traitor.’  ‘He’s a traitor,’ Boehner said on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America.’ ‘The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk.  It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are, and it’s a giant violation of the law.'”

The “conservative” speaker finds himself in good company:

On Monday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Snowden’s leaking of NSA information was treasonous.  ‘I don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower. I think it’s an act of treason,’ Feinstein said. 

At the end of the day, nothing will be done about reigning in the government’s intrusion into the lives of its enemies citizens.  But we can all agree that we need to get the guy who told everyone what was going on.  Isn’t bipartisanship great?

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

The Secular Virtue of Faith

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Matt

Christians talk about faith a great deal. It is, after all, through faith that we are saved. When we speak about this kind of faith, we’re referring to a kind of trust in God and His promises to us. It saves us because it is by this trust that we receive those very promises of God. Though it is not primarily an activity of the intellect, faith manifests itself in the intellect inasmuch as we possess one. This is why we speak of the faith and how it normally requires certain knowledge such as who God is and what his promises are. This is why the Christian kind of faith excludes those who follow a different God (who reject the Father, Son, and/or Holy Spirit) or reject what God has promised to us (e.g. forgiveness through the vicarious atonement accomplished through the death of Christ). In short, faith in anything other than Christ is useless to save.

This, however, is not the only way the word ‘faith’ can be used. There is another kind of faith–one whose nature is ethical. Though useless to save, is not entirely useless; for this faith helps us to serve one another on Earth. It is a virtue possessed by people of different religions and consists merely of trust in the far fuzzier concept of a benevolent higher power–a disposition towards acting as though the world will ultimately unfold as it should and that the buck does not stop with me.

Like Aristotle’s virtues, the virtue of faith is the mean between an excess and a deficiency. The excess receives a great deal of attention in our society and is captured well in a popular joke: A man has climbed up onto his rooftop during a terrible flood, but the water is still rising and he has no way off. A group of neighbors come by in a boat and invite him on-board, but he refuses, saying that God will save him. Later on, another boat floats by with the same invitation which he again refuses, certain that God will save him. As the water still rises and begins to consume the rooftop, a helicopter flies by and drops a ladder down to the man. This too, he refuses, saying that God will save him. Less than an hour later, the roof is completely submerged and soon the man drowns. When he arrives in heaven, he approaches God and asks why He did not save him. God replies, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter. What more did you want?” As we can see from this example, an excess of faith is characterized by a kind of complacency about what is going on in the world. We fail to help the suffering because we think it won’t matter in the end. We tolerate injustices that we should not tolerate because we think someone else will take care of it somehow. Whether on a local or a global scale, complacency generates irresponsibility, and our neighbors are deprived of our help.

There is, however, an other side that we don’t generally talk about—a deficiency of faith. Though we don’t talk about it, it is perhaps a bigger problem in American society than complacency. Faithlessness manifests itself in the mindset that because there is no higher benevolent power that we can trust, it is up to us and us alone to solve all of the problems of the world, and we must therefore do whatever it takes. Accordingly, we can refer to the deficiency of faith as “desperation.”  Earlier this year I wrote about how the American response to tragedy is typically desperation. We must find some way—any way—to make sure such things never happen again. Our president, for example, in response to recent shootings has famously indicated that if even one child’s life can be saved through our action, then it is our responsibility to take that action. This is desperation. While it sounds noble in that it expresses the incalculable value of a single human life, it is actually horrible because it removes all boundary from how we might go about protecting that life. To save that child’s life, many people seek to disregard the Constitution, remove an important protection against tyranny, and deprive millions of innocent people of their means of defending themselves against violent criminals leading to the death of many more children. We see the same thing when it comes to abortion. We faithlessly believe that there can be no adequate help, aid, comfort, or benefit for a pregnant woman who doesn’t want a child. And so we do whatever it takes to make sure she can completely take away her problem, and we tolerate and support an abortion-industrial-complex responsible for tens of millions of murdered children. So much for our vaunted nobility in doing whatever it takes to save even one child’s life. Just as visiting a hot dog factory might change your perspective on your Memorial Day barbeque, doing whatever it takes to save someone takes on a different character once you see the mountain of bodies involuntarily sacrificed on the altar.

In many ways, the bloody history of the 20th century is the history of this deficiency of faith. Governments across the world sought to manage their people in such a way that poverty and suffering could be relieved for everyone, without exception. They knew there was no power higher than humanity to save the poor & the oppressed and could leave no child behind. They therefore gathered power unto themselves in order to accomplish their noble work, and they starved, imprisoned, and murdered their way to utopia. As J. Budziszewski described it in The Revenge of Conscience, “All for the sake of paradise, the tyrants of our generation stacked bodies higher than Nimrod stacked bricks; yet they came no nearer heaven than he did.” When we suffer from desperation, inasmuch as other virtues exist, they exist without boundary. For the desperate, denying themselves any means of helping their neighbors is indistinguishable from abandoning them, for there is nothing else to help them and no one to bring good out of misfortune.

The golden mean of faith is when we are freed from this dangerous and unbearable responsibility to save the world—not for the sake of slothfulness, but in order to practice the other virtues well. While we do as best we can, we are not driven to do whatever it takes because there is no need to. Though the heavens fall, we are still free to do what is right. We are, for example, freed to help the poor in sensible and responsible ways even if those ways do not end poverty. We are not forced to infantalize the needy by creating broad, overreaching, and harmful programs simply because only a broad and overreaching program could possibly be big enough to help every last person. Parents are freed to raise their children as best they can—we don’t have to take children away to be raised by professionals to make sure they’re all raised properly. We don’t need to force massive bureaucracies on people in an attempt to live their lives for them because they might make a mistake and hurt themselves if left to their own devices. We can let a child go out and get bruised, get an ‘F,’ and learn to explore & live in a world that’s dangerous—we don’t have to hover over them or sequester them at home. Those with faith see no need to step beyond the bounds of virtue because though all the good we can do is not enough to save the world, we still have faith that the world is in good hands despite our own inadequacy.  There is other help to be found, and if not, then the suffering and pain we see may yet be redeemed and turned into good.

This is why there is so much talk of a creator and inalienable rights in our founding documents. It’s not because America is a Christian nation. It is simply the practical reality that without the virtue of faith, freedom is impossible.

But beyond the social applications, knowing that there is a second type of faith and understanding its nature helps Christians to keep the two distinct. We confuse the two when we think of saving faith as a kind of ethical virtue that makes us better people. This blends faith and works together in salvation and leads to unhelpful worries like whether one has enough faith to be saved or is trusting in God hard enough. We confuse the two when we respond to doubts about the truth of Christianity by telling the doubters that they just need to have faith. This too turns the Gospel into a work—a work that is at odds with intellectual integrity. Far better to explain why and how God and His promises are trustworthy. We confuse the two when we think that only Christians can be good citizens—or that distrusting atheistic materialists with power is the same as thinking only Christians can be good citizens. We also confuse the two when we hear a Christian talking about faith as though it were a virtue and then immediately accuse the person of teaching works-righteousness. This sort of confusion inadvertently teaches people that saving faith is actually opposed to good works and breeds antinomianism.

There is no question which kind of faith is more important. Nevertheless, this does not authorize Christians to neglect the virtue altogether. For the sake of our neighbors, Christians should be able to understand and talk about faith as a virtue even as we continue to teach sola fide when we speak of salvation.

Posted in Ethics | Leave a comment

Doing Lines

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Matt

Where is the line that separates abortion from infanticide?  A rather remarkable video has been making the rounds in which a Planned Parenthood representative argues for the legality of post-birth abortion at a Florida legislative hearing.  The question is whether abortionists should be required to provide medical care to unexpected abortion survivors.

“If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

“We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician”

And so, as the grisly reality of abortion in Philadelphia is slowly finding its way into the public consciousness (despite the best efforts of major news outlets), we must also consider the ongoing efforts to keep shifting that all-sanitizing line between abortion and infanticide a little bit further out.

Now, it is entirely understandable (which is not to say reasonable) that a woman who undergoes a botched abortion would want to finish the job.  She walks into an abortion clinic afraid or indignant or repulsed at the thought of raising a child, but also expecting the unpleasant and unwanted circumstance to finally be terminated.  And then, simply because a doctor screws up, all of the sudden, some cold and clinical figure is explaining to her that she is now a mother and that her child has somehow became sick or injured & requires treatment.

How could such a thing be?  It’s quite absurd that the subject of an abortion suddenly becomes off-limits simply by virtue of having moved a few feet.  It’s absurd that a procedure that prevents motherhood should suddenly and without warning actually make someone a mother.  Why should such absurdities be allowed to stand?  Who wouldn’t want a do-over in such circumstances?  Even our President doesn’t want her to be punished with a baby.  So why shouldn’t the mother and her physician be able to decide to make good on their original plan to murder her child prevent an unwanted motherhood?

And so Planned Parenthood and others try to nudge that line a little bit further out so that post-birth murders can be called “abortions” just like pre-birth murders already are.  If we can just make a few adjustments, they think, then these absurdities can be resolved and women will no longer have to suffer them.

But that line, wherever it may be placed, doesn’t distinguish between an innocent human being and something else.  It doesn’t distinguish between a child and a tumor.  Indeed, it’s so blurry and difficult to find as it flickers from one place to the next that it cannot help distinguish anything at all.  It’s sole purpose is as a salve to the consciences of the murderers, the mothers who hire them, and the lobbyists who earn their blood-money at hearings.  It doesn’t need to be visible to do that; it just needs to be located a little bit off to their left so that they can tell others they’re on the right side.  And if nobody else can see the line or tell where it is?   Well, that just makes it easier to exclaim how they are properly placed in relation to it.

But in the end, situations like these are not absurd because the line needs to be adjusted.  They are absurd because abortion doesn’t prevent women from becoming mothers–it’s merely one bloody way in which mothers deal with the children they already have.  The reality is that the line on which their peace of mind depends doesn’t actually exist.  Christ have mercy on us all.

Posted in Abortion, Ethics, Politics | 1 Comment

Closer to God

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Matt

How do we get closer to God?

The question occurred to me while I was reviewing a passage from William P. Young’s The Shack for a class I plan on teaching this spring on the heresy of Modalism (among others).*  The book, of course, is about a man who is called by God to a shack where he spends a weekend retreat hanging out with Young’s version of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Through this emotional narrative of fellowship and conversation, the protagonist overcomes the twin horrors of personal tragedy and catechesis** and becomes far closer to God than he ever thought possible–maybe even as close as women are naturally.***

When one looks back at history, one finds that every era has its own insights and blindspots.  The Church is no exception, and so different groups of Christians over the centuries have had different (and often unbalanced) answers to the question at hand.  The monastics thought the key to proximity with God could be found in complex systems of ritual and ceremony.  In the early Modern era, many tried to reach God through the intellect.  By pursuing philosophy and theology, they could discover more about God and meet Him in their understanding.  Later on, still others tried to connect with God through their will.  They thought that they could become intimate with God by reforming their behavior and living pious lives.  The Shack is an example from our current Postmodern era, in which the key to relationship with God is thought to be the emotions.  According to this understanding, we are closest to God when we feel close to Him, and we can get our hearts to feel rightly through conversations with God, stories, and the spiritualization of our own personal narratives.

Ironically, these misguided methods of becoming closer to God all have the effect of driving most people further away.  The monasteries were the only places one could perpetually devote himself to ritual and ceremony.  Neither does everyone have kind of intelligence required to reach the loftiest heights of philosophy and theology.  Only the holiest of rollers could keep up with the necessary system of rules and regulations to keep the will in line (assuming you had even chosen the right system from the diverse selection that pietists came up with).  Similarly, trying to find God in feelings of community ends up making Christianity the sole province of the highly extroverted (most of whom are women).  Indeed, the ways the emergent folks (and other postmodern Christians) like to worship tend to resemble neighborhood coffee shops, pop concerts, and other highly social or emotionally charged contexts.  Introverts and men need not apply.

So how then do we become closer to God?  Perhaps we should look less at ourselves and more at Him.  Where does God promise to be close to us?  He has promised to be with us always–to the very end of the age–in the Church’s distribution of Christ’s teaching and her application of the Sacraments.  We are closest to God when we hear what he has spoken to us by his Apostles and prophets.  We are closest to God when we are buried with him in baptism and when we receive his body and blood in the Lord’s Supper.  That is where he has promised to be, that is where he has promised to deliver his gifts, and He makes these things available to everyone.  One doesn’t need to be extroverted to hear God’s word nor an intellectual or ascetic to be baptized.  They are not tools which can be skillfully used to reach God; they are gifts by which God reaches us.

Of course, we must always be wary of avoiding one error by falling into a different one.  Word and Sacrament do create closeness with God, but that closeness persists beyond the pulpit and the altar.  That closeness manifests itself in the church’s ceremonial life (which is why iconoclasm is in error).  That closeness manifests itself in the intellect and the desire to learn more and more about God (which is why the anti-intellectual and anti-doctrinal strains of Christianity are in error).  That closeness manifests itself in how we choose to go about our daily living (which is why, I’m sorry to say, many 2nd-use-only Lutherans are in error).  And finally, that closeness manifests itself in our feelings and our own personal stories (which is why, when the pendulum swings back and shatters postmodernism, there will be yet another error to contend with).

The answer, as usual, is to the receive the whole counsel of God, deliver it unabridged to others, and let the Holy Spirit sanctify us through His chosen means.  It is through these that we enjoy participation in a closeness that He provides and will not take away from us.

—————————————–


*What does The Shack have to do with Modalism?  Well, that’s a topic for another blog post.

**Yeah…  also a topic for another blog post

***sigh…

Posted in The Modern Church | 1 Comment

Why We Don’t Worship With You

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Matt

It’s not because “those are our rules.”  It’s because we believe our religion is actually true.

That’s the long and the short of it.  And as shocking as the concept might be in a postmodern age, the fact that our religion is true makes others false inasmuch as they contradict ours.

If we are correct, then the consequence is that when Christians stand up and preach, we are not doing the same thing that pagans are doing when they stand up and preach.  Pagans might make people feel better.  Pagans might offer emotional comfort in times of distress.  Pagans might foster a sense of unity in a community in the face of a shared tragedy and help people get a sense of closure and move on with their lives.  Christians also might do these things when they stand up and preach, but they are only doing these things because they are actually telling people what God has actually spoken.  Christians might offer words of comfort to those who are grieving.  However, those words are only comforting because they are actually God’s promise of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Any atheist can tell you that these prayers, homilies, and assurances are hollow if they are not true.  The pagans’ are not true.  The Jews’ are not true.  The Muslims’ are not true.  The Christians’ are true.  If you want to take issue with that by saying that Christianity is false, then that’s fine.  Many of us would be happy to go over the evidence that demonstrates how you’re wrong.  But don’t expect us to blithely stand up with pagans and pretend that what we’re doing is the same thing as what they’re doing.  It’s not.

This might rain on your parade.  It might stymie your plans to provide emotional comfort and community unity.  So be it.  God’s promise of grace to all who believe in Christ is more important than community unity.  It is more important than a sense of closure.  The Gospel we have to offer is the power of God unto salvation.  We will not cheapen it by likening it to what the pagans have to offer.

Posted in Lutheranism | 5 Comments

Rightly Understanding Good Works: Purpose vs. Substance

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Matt

To say that the value of our good works is their benefit to our neighbor is nothing more than an extension of the doctrine of justification.  Our works do not make us righteous before God–Christ has completely taken care of that for us.  Having received His imputed righteousness, there’s nothing for us to add.  Neither do our works benefit God, who is already perfect and omnipotent.  However, God has chosen to provide for the world through worldly means–means that include human beings.  For example, God feeds infants, but he does through through mothers.  The mother’s work of providing nourishment is therefore of benefit to the child God has given into her care.  Accordingly, it is fair to say that the purpose of our good works is to serve our neighbors, as Lutherans consistently teach.

Unfortunately, some Lutherans end up going too far–usually when they are asked for ethical advice on difficult subjects.  “Is it a sin to watch R-rated movies?”  “Is it a sin wear these kinds of clothes?”  When hearing such questions, this kind of Lutheran piously tells them that, as Paul & Isaiah instruct us, everything we do is sinful.  “We’re never going to become pure in this life, and living in a fallen world means that we will always be exposed to sin.  So when you consider what you should do and how you should behave, don’t worry about whether or not it’s sinful–it will be no matter what you do.  The question you should ask yourself is whether and how it is going to help your neighbor.  That, after all, is the purpose of your good works.”

That sounds reasonable.  It seems like a logical extension of Biblical teaching.  It contains a great deal of truth, and indeed, Scripture does tell us to consider whether a work is helpful to our neighbors (e.g., 1 Cor. 6).  And yet, a subtle shift occurs halfway through.  “Don’t worry about whether something is sinful.”  Here the Lutheran errs, for he has not simply taught that the purpose of our works is to serve our neighbors–he has made service to our neighbors the very substance of our good works.  In other words, serving our neighbors is no longer simply what our good works are for–it is the very thing that makes them “good” in the first place.  In attempting to piously highlight the doctrine of justification, he not only fails to provide ethical guidance to someone in need, he inadvertently makes man the ethical measure of all things.  After all, his neighbor must judge what is harmful and beneficial, but he has instructed his neighbor not to consider what is sinful.

So if not sin, then what is harmful to our neighbors?  What counts as serving them?  Well, it’s up to us at that point and whatever ethical philosophy we happen to subscribe to.  You might peruse the 10 commandments in a literalistic fashion, but only because they are ethical principles that are nearly universal across cultures–not because they are God’s instructions.  Or you might not.  If you’re a utilitarian, the far simpler measure of a good work would be whether your neighbor is pleased by it.  This opens up literally any activity that happens to please someone else.  Theft?  Well, Robin Hood shows us how much theft can please people.  Murder?  We’re already deep in the business of getting unwanted babies and those problematic elderly out of the way–in service to our neighbors, of course.  Homosexuality?  Well, my gay neighbors seem pretty pleased with it, and if you pick the right studies, even science tells you that it doesn’t harm anyone.  At the end of the day, if serving our neighbors is the substance of a good work, then any sin becomes good as long as you have an accomplice.

Most Lutherans would then back off and say that their advice is only applicable on issues where Scripture is silent (others would not;  I’ve encountered, for example, Lutheran homosexual activists who use precisely this argument to advocate same-sex relationships.)  But those who do back off might then say that while theft, murder, and adultery are straightforwardly condemned, the Bible doesn’t specifically mention, for example, the appropriateness of watching HBO’s Game of Thrones.  So because Scripture is silent on these subjects, we should fall back on considerations of whether we would harm our neighbors by watching it.  But Scripture is not silent on such subjects.  For Paul tells us in Ephesians 5 that “sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints.  Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.  For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”  Naturally, Luther teaches the same thing.  In the Large Catechism, he writes “[The 6th] commandment is also directed against every form of unchastity, no matter what it is called.  Not only is the outward act forbidden, but also every kind of cause, provocation, and means, so that your heart, you lips, and your entire body may be chaste and afford no occasion, aid, or encouragement to unchastity” and also, “live chastely in deed, word, and thought.”  So God’s Word is not silent on the subject after all.

“Well yes,” they say, “but it doesn’t tell us whether a given racy TV show is impure or filthy–or whether simply watching some of its scenes counts as unchastity or provocation to lust.”  Quite right.  It does not.  And as a result, we must not lay down some kind of one-size-fits-all rule for all Christians.  That would exceed the authority we have been given in Scripture.  We must instead judge for ourselves whether such things are or are not impure or filthy (and nothing but Enlightenment hyper-individualism says that this judgment must be entirely encapsulated within each person’s own mind.)  Furthermore, we aren’t merely to judge whether it will harm or help our neighbors.  Paul precedes his instruction by telling us to “be imitators of God” and follows it by exhorting us to “try and discern what is pleasing to the Lord.”   The substance of a good work–what makes it good–therefore remains whether it is God-pleasing.  It is something we have to discern and reason out based on His word and the Law written on our hearts.

This doesn’t exclude personal judgment from the matter.  Different people’s thoughts may react in different ways to different stimuli, and so, say,  nudity in film is not always a provocation to lust.  Likewise, not all nudity is necessarily impure.  We have no hard and fast rules for navigating which is which–it requires discernment.  And indeed, science adds its 2 cents as well;  if we find out, for example, that pornography messes up our brain chemistry and therefore violates the 5th commandment as well as the 6th, then that is one more reason to avoid it.  Nevertheless, the seat of our moral judgments remains in God’s Word as indications of what harms our neighbor.  That means Lutheran pastors and theologians need to be prepared to offer ethical guidance when they are asked the hard questions–not to dismiss well-intentioned Christians and presume them to be seeking works-righteousness.  Sometimes a simple “God’s word doesn’t give specifics, so use your good judgment based on what His Word does say” would be adequate for these questions.  But reframing it as “all action is sin, so don’t worry about avoiding sin, but don’t go out and sin freely or anything, and don’t hurt your neighbor” does nothing but muddle the issue.  Lutherans must recover a Christian understanding of human moral judgment instead of seeing it as a threat to justification and/or sola scriptura.

Posted in Ethics, Lutheranism | Leave a comment