2.5 The Mixed Church (radical evangelicalism series)

2.1 The State of Faith in America
2.2 Dunk and Run
2.3 Lasting Conversion
2.4 Joining a Club
_______________________
2.5 The Mixed Church
20. If the baptisms and conversions of the church right now are not inductions into a church club, what are these individuals supposed to be joining?

The answer is of course the people of God. They are joining a kingdom. It is the kingdom of God and his Messiah, Jesus the Christ.

This may seem all too obvious, but it's inevitable that there will always be some hay, straw, and wood mixed in the gold and silver (1 Cor. 3:12-13). While the true church is invisible, it always meets in visible form. The word of God is pure, the word of the preacher will inevitably be mixed.

It is a sacred charge for those who lead the church to do their best to permeate it with the "pure milk of the word" (1 Pet. 2:2) and to reduce the inevitable cultural baggage to a minimum.

21. But it does regularly get mixed with all-too-earthly stuff. Sometimes the mixture is fairly harmless. At other times, it can be mixed with the truly vile. It is important for us to know the difference.

I am always struck by a story from 1899 when white people living around Atlanta went to church and then took excursion trains afterward to participate in the lynching of Sam Hose. They tortured and burned him. They took souvenir body parts. Photographs were taken. Hose had killed a white man, quite possibly in self-defense, but sensationalized reporting turned his death into a public spectacle.

You have to wonder what was preached that Sunday morning.

22. In this current climate, a fair amount of politics is being mixed into in the pulpits across America right now. No doubt positions are being taken on all sides of the political spectrum. Some of these sermons are no doubt truer to Scripture than others. It is important for us to be aware of what we're mixing.

In normal times, pastors have tried to stick more to the principles of Scripture and to let the individual Christian apply them in terms of specifics. For example, a pastor might preach on abortion without explicitly saying, "Now go vote for the Republican." There is definite value in keeping such implications more implicit and allusive than explicit. For one, it allows a church to minister across the political spectrum.

But in these polarized times, preaching has often become more specific on both sides. In response, you hear different reactions. Some say, "Don't get political, preacher" -- often because they don't like the angle the preacher is taking. 

I have mixed feelings about this response. There is surely a point where a pastor should call out explicitly the ungodliness of its leaders. For example, shouldn't the pastors of Nazi, Germany have said something about what was happening there? Those who did were often arrested. So, we can all surely imagine a point where preachers should call out political evil.

Yet, in more normal times, you surely want to minister to both Republicans and Democrats. Isn't it best most of the time to try to point out good and bad values on both sides? Yet, again, there is also the danger of drawing a false equivalency. Aren't there times when one party is more unbalanced than at others? I can hear "both sides" saying "YES!"

23. So how can we do our best to baptize new converts (or young people returning to the faith of their childhood) into the kingdom rather than into a club or tribe of human making? 

First, let's make it clear that it is a heavenly kingdom. Paul tells the Philippians -- some of whom may have been Romans citizens -- that their real citizenship was in heaven (Phil. 3:20). [16] Hebrews 11 also emphasizes that we are seeking a heavenly city and country, not an earthly one (Heb. 11:10, 16). 1 Peter calls believers "aliens" and "exiles" in the earthly country they live in (1 Pet. 1:1; 2:11).

Hebrews 13:14 puts it starkly: "We don't have a city here that will last."

We're thus mixing hay in with the gold when we confuse any earthly country with our heavenly citizenship. No earthly country is pure enough. Even ancient Israel, while intended to be a theocracy run directly by God, failed miserably at the goal. Only for a brief time under Moses and Joshua did it seem to work and even then the people repeatedly failed their God.

24. Part of the dross of American Christian culture is to confuse America with the kingdom of God. It sounds outlandish to say so, but it's true. We have American flags on our pulpits right next to where the word of God is preached. Why would we think that was an appropriate place for the flag of an impure, earthly kingdom? We treat soldiers like saints, and some almost treat fallen soldiers as Christian martyrs. 

But you don't automatically go to heaven because you die for your country. You go to heaven because you put your faith in Jesus Christ. 

The American church is more likely to celebrate July 4 than Advent or Lent. Our church calendars pay special attention to Memorial Day and Veterans Day. They are less likely aware of periods that have been on the Christian calendar for almost two thousand years.

Most of the time, I have personally found these mixtures somewhat innocuous.  Robert Bellah called these dynamics of American Christianity, "civil religion," the elevation of our country to religious status. [17] The key is that the reverence for country not reach the level of the worship of Christ. It's like the veneration of Mary in Catholic circles -- as long as it doesn't cross the line into actual worship, it's iffy but God will probably be merciful.

25. In our current moment, civil religion has blurred into what is often called, "Christian Nationalism." [18] While civil religion might innocently (and unreflectively) think of America as the modern equivalent of ancient Israel, Christian nationalism tries to make it so. Its goal is to force a particular Christian vision on the country and set up a sort of "theocracy" or rule by God as they see it.

I grew up with pastors occasionally quoting 1 Chronicles 7:14 in relation to America. We needed to humble ourselves, repent, and pray for God to heal our land. Like Jeremiah 29:11, no thought was given to the fact that this verse was for ancient Israel rather than contemporary America. Also missing was the realization that America has never technically been a Christian nation, although you could argue that some Judeo-Christian values undergird its Constitution.

There is a lot of mixed faith in here. If the church itself is a mixture of gold and straw, then the attempt to fuse it with a political vision is even less likely to be pure. The mixture of church and state has rarely moved a nation closer to God. It is truly shocking to see what happened when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. [19] You had monks murdering people because they didn't have the right view of whether Jesus had one or two natures.

In England, it led to multiple people -- both Catholic and Protestant -- being burned at the stake. Henry VIII made himself head of the church and burned Catholics who questioned him. Then Bloody Mary burned at the stake Protestants who opposed her. Then Queen Elizabeth similarly put to death those who undermined her. Europe fought for thirty years in the 1600s in what basically laid out as a struggle between Lutherans and Catholics for political control.

Puritan New England is often the model for Christian nationalists, but the Puritans came to America because they had failed to take over England. The English ousted them from power after they dethroned the king and tried to rule for a short time. We like to say they came here looking for religious freedom, but what they came here for was a place where they could impose their vision of a Christian rule on everyone within their purview. In the process, they both murdered and exiled those who disagreed with them.

This background explains why the Founding Fathers forbid that America would have an official religion in the First Amendment. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Christian nationalists would like to remove that from the Constitution.

When worldly authority is confused with heavenly authority, there is always dross. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." [20] This is true no less of the church than a nation. Almost inevitably, the fusion of church and state doesn't turn out to be the true Church at all, just a twisted version of the state pretending to be the Church. An idolatrous kingdom gets substituted for the true one which, again, is ultimately invisible.

[16] Philippi was a Roman colony. If you were a citizen of the city, you were a citizen of Rome. In fact, it was like living in Rome itself, as far as citizenship was concerned. This makes Paul's statement all the more striking.

[17] Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America" Daedalus (1967), reprinted in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World.

[18] For a more detailed analysis, see Miranda Cruz, Faithful Politics: Ten Approaches to Christian Citizenship and Why It Matters (IVP Academic, 2024).

[19] See Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 years – Violence, Politics, and the Origins of Church Authority (HarperOne, 2011).

[20] A famous quote from a letter by Lord Acton in 1883.
_______________________
1. What is Evangelicalism?
1.1 Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
1.2 The "New" Evangelicalism
1.3 The Poltical Takeover

2.4 Joining a Club (radical evangelicalism series)

2.1 The State of Faith in America
2.2 Dunk and Run
2.3 Lasting Conversion
_______________________
2.4 Joining a Club
12. My first real adventures into sociology came from my study of the New Testament. [13] I became exposed to how differently people thought in Bible times than how I thought growing up in America. I learned that the ancient world was a group-oriented culture, while I had grown up in an "individualist" culture. I learned that, while my culture emphasized being "true to yourself" and thinking independently, the ancient world was an "honor-shame" culture.

Honor-shame cultures prize being true to your group. You wanted to bring honor to your group and avoid bringing your group shame. Meanwhile, I had been taught that ethics were the same for everyone. As an American, I had been taught that there should be "equal justice under the law." I had been taught that every citizen gets to vote and that everyone's vote should count.

Even more, I had grown up thinking that these were biblical, Christian values too. Love your enemy meant that you treat those outside your group with respect. "All truth is God's truth" meant that truth was truth no matter who was saying it or where it came from. If an atheist says something true, it's true, and if a Christian says something that's false, it's false. Truth is truth, no matter where it comes from.

Group cultures value loyalty. But I grew up thinking -- both as a Christian and an American -- that the real truth trumped your group's interests. Right and wrong involved absolutes, and absolutes apply no matter who you are or what group you belong to. But in group cultures, protecting the reputation of your group is more important than the truth. "We protect our own."

13. As I've observed humanity in the course of my life, I've come to believe that Western individualism is really the exception. Most cultures in history -- in fact, most people even in the West -- are group oriented. We are tribal by default. As a philosopher, I have come to think that humanity is a "herd animal" -- at least fallen humanity. Aristotle put it more tactfully -- we are a "political" animal.

I've come to believe that we have to be trained to be individualistic. Now, we don't have to be trained to be selfish -- that's something different. But we have to be trained to think in categories like universal rights or universal values. We have to be trained to think that I get to decide what I think and what I should do. The human default is to think like your group.

The human norm is peer pressure. The human norm is what in 1 Corinthians we might call a "party spirit." "I am of Paul." "I am of Apollos" (1 Cor. 1:12). In short, my group is better than your group. "You can't be a Christian and be a Democrat." "Trump supporters are deplorables, clinging to their guns and religion."

Racism is the human norm -- my race is better than your race. The same with sexism -- men are smarter than women. Paul surely didn't really mean that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not 'male and female'" (Gal. 3:28). The human norm is to put our groups into a hierarchy, not to form judgments on individuals based on their individual merits.

14. Sociology calls this "in group/out group" dynamics. [14] My group is good. Your group is bad -- or at least inferior. When someone in my group does something good, I point that out as exactly what my group is like. If someone in your group does something bad, I point that out as exactly what your group is like.

I used to visit my elderly mother a couple times a year and a particular news outlet was always on. It seemed to me that there was a regular stream of news segments with a person of color or an undocumented immigrant doing something bad. I thought to myself, "If I watched this channel all the time, I probably would end up thinking that all illegal immigrants were evil criminals." Of course, the statistics don't bear that conclusion out. [15]

15. Like every country, America has always had its groups. High-minded thinkers might say things like "all men are created equal," but the ordinary person has more typically lived in groups. When I was a boy, we told Polack jokes and blond jokes. The public school tried to train "group think" out of us. I didn't realize it, but the reason there were black students and teachers at my middle school was because of desegregation. For me, it was just normal.

But the human default -- group identity -- has always lurked there, below the surface.

In America today, group culture is very much on the rise. Indeed, it seems to me that, at its heart, the Trump phenomenon is not really so much a conservative versus liberal phenomenon as it is an individualistic versus group culture conflict. Many conservatives have repeatedly critiqued the Trump administration. The response has been to call them "RINOs" -- "Republicans in Name Only."

In other words, you are being disloyal to the group. Those conservatives are evaluating Trump according to universal truth and conservative principles. His response is, "I am the leader of the group and you're being disloyal." As is the case with group cultures, the truth is what's true for my group, not some universal truth.

16. Let me give an example from a recent post made by the president:

You can see the "us-them" nature of the post, expecting total loyalty from his group. Any lack of conformity by the "in-group" will be met with expulsion from the group. Meanwhile, the out-group is depicted as thoroughly evil.

This is classic group culture. What is true is what the President says is true. The good people are, by definition, those who are part of his group. Disloyalty to the group will not be tolerated.

Mind you, these underlying dynamics to group culture are often clothed in rational argument. Indeed, it can take great feats of intellect to find explanations for claims or behaviors that on the surface seem to obviously point to a different conclusion than the one your group wants to think.

Yet the most loyal to the group will believe such explanations every time. What's important is that there is an explanation, not whether it actually makes sense.

17. You may be wondering what this has to do with the church. The church is not immune to group culture. Indeed, it has fewer guardrails against it than the Western world. The American Constitution is meant to preserve individual rights and values. I believe these actually reflect some of the Judeo-Christian fumes of our founding.

But fallen human nature pushes us to form groups. We are Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics. Our group has the right answers -- the right interpretations of the Bible, for example. We make creedal statements and then insist that you must agree to them to be in our group. If you fall out of line, we'll kick you out.

Free thinkers don't do well in these contexts. We really don't want people reading the Bible and coming to their own conclusions. We want them to read the Bible and assume our conclusions.

18. You might say, "That may have been the past, but people don't care much about denominations any more." That's true. The group identities have changed. They're still there. They're just different.

I always smile when people say, "I go to a non-denominational church. We just follow the Bible." Tell me what your church teaches. Tell me how and when you baptize. Tell me whether tongues are approved or rejected. 

Actually, you probably don't even need to tell me. Give me ten minutes at your church and I'll tell you which group -- which tradition -- you are part of without knowing it. Chances are, you're Baptist with a twist. 

For the most part, the new group is white evangelicalism. It has flattened out the old denominations into a gray Baptist melange. The fries are tongues and the charismata. "Would you like tongues with that?" This is your typical megachurch -- Baptist with or without the tongues.

19. But the kingdom of God is not a fallen human group. The kingdom of God is neither Democrat nor Republican. It is neither Trump supporting nor following any other human leader or figure.

The kingdom of God is the kingdom of, well, GOD. It is the kingdom of Jesus Christ. It cuts across all human loyalties and is oriented around the King of Kings. If any human group lays absolute claim on our loyalties, it is anathema. Let it be accursed.

Jesus is Lord. Not Caesar. Not my church. Not my political party. Not my family.

Jesus. God and God alone.

[13] Groundbreaking here was Bruce Malina's The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Westminster John Knox, 1981).

[14] There is an underlying reason why sociology has come under fire in Florida, and it isn't the surface reasons being given. Sociology exposes what's really going on in human culture underneath the surface. It lays bare the underlying motives and dynamics of human interaction in ways that bristle against group culture. It is no surprise that the "group" wants to shut it down.

That is not to say that there aren't group dynamics and extremes in much sociology teaching at state schools. Nor is it to deny that many state school subjects are taught with "anti-supernaturalist presuppositions." I am merely claiming that these political moves are likely more group driven than truth driven.

[15] Very common in present culture is what is known as the "you also" fallacy (tu quoque). You critique something on one side, and the response is "but you didn't critique the other side." It's a more sophisticated version of the "He started it" accusation of our childhoods. It's a deflection technique.

But the underlying dynamic I am pointing out here is the difference between group think and truth think. "Truth think" certainly involves bias, but its goal and method is universal truth. "Group think" has no universal standard for truth. It only aims to support the claims of its group by whatever means works. Unfortunately, the rise of postmodernism in the 1990s and 2000s has given a sophisticated green light for culture to be untethered from "truth think."

All media has bias (though probably some more than others). But not all media has as its aim the establishment and reinforcement of group identity. The rise of this sort of media in America has been a key feature of the twenty-first century.

_______________________
1. What is Evangelicalism?
1.1 Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
1.2 The "New" Evangelicalism
1.3 The Poltical Takeover

Notes Along the Way TF7 -- Diverse Traditions in the New Testament

continued from the previous post
_________________________
1. Knowing that I was going to Durham, I began to dive more into James Dunn's writing. I will have a hard time remembering when I learned which aspects of his thinking. When he passed in 2020, I did a series walking through his writings in twelve posts. That was when I still had an office at work and at home, and all my books were readily accessible. I have been living in book purgatory since 2021.

Sadly, my copy of Unity and Diversity in the New Testament seems to be in storage, along with Christology in the Making. I started working through the first in anticipation of Durham. I must have worked through the second at least by my first year there.

Unity and Diversity was eye-opening. For obvious reasons, Asbury focused extensively on the literary text of the Bible. Inductive Bible Study at Asbury excelled at the skill of observation of the text. I would tell my students for decades that these skills could enable them to critique world class scholars because of the attention to the text it cultivated.

Scholars sometimes fall into the trap of "parallelomania." You know a parallel from some obscure piece of ancient literature and you connect it to the biblical text. But of course it doesn't matter whether you know some obscure bit of text from the Talmud if it isn't likely to have had any connection with the biblical text.

Perhaps there has been an occasion or two in the past where a scholar has known too much. For example, Philo says in Embassy to Gaius that the emperor Caligula was mistaken to think that the "form of God" could so easily be counterfeited (110). Could Paul have known this when he said that Jesus emptied himself of the "form of God" (Phil. 2:6)? [1]

Probably not. But knowing these sorts of parallels has sparked many a creative theory.

Of course, with the internet, it has become more and more possible for individuals with no real sense of the relationships between documents to imagine completely impossible connections. The 1978 book, When God Was a Woman, is a good example of someone who knew a lot of parallels, but wasn't trained to be able to tell the difference between similarity and dependence.

2. So, while Asbury had done a spectacular job of teaching me how to observe the "world within the text," as Ricoeur put it, there was a tendency to flatten it. In other words, my background had been heavy on the unity of the text but not so strong on its diversity.

Dunn's book was quite the opposite. By the time he was "done," it felt like the unity he saw was fairly slim. But it was good to balance out the extremes of my own background. The biggest unity was the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus. 

To be frank, there is something suspicious about the fact that various groups have electric fences that forbid you from drawing certain conclusions. If we are really interested in the truth, if the truth is what God thinks, then we would want to follow the evidence to its most likely conclusion most of the time.

England was a breath of fresh air in that regard. All opinions were treated with respect (sometimes I thought outlandish ones). The point was whether you could argue cogently for your positions, not what your positions were.

3. I'll talk more about Christology in a moment. What struck me was the concept of different social groups within the early church. Jewish Christianity. Hellenistic Christianity. Apocalyptic Christianity. Early Catholicism. I find these far too blunt of instruments now, but it was a fairly new concept to me then. [2]

I had never thought of there being creeds, hymns, and other traditions lurking in the New Testament. I had little sense of the tensions between the theologies of the Gospels or the other parts of the New Testament. And the sense that there were different ecclesiologies among different early Christian communities was a completely new thought. 

4. Christology in the Making was even more impactful. Basic understandings that I have of key Christological titles like "Son of God" and "Lord" flowed naturally from his thorough and "scientific" investigations of the text. Principally, he made it very clear that these titles found their locus in the resurrection of Jesus and were royal titles.

[As a side note, Dr. Wang at Asbury had first introduced the question of the timing of "Son of God" in Romans class. What did Paul mean in Romans 1:3 when he said Jesus was "declared to be the Son of God in power by the resurrection of the dead"? Wang emphasized the "in power" qualifier.]

Dunn was not unusual for the 60s and 70s to see the development of early Christology as a movement from resurrection to incarnation, from Paul to John. In 1988, Larry Hurtado would start a trend that continues to this day among many if not most scholars. Hurtado argued that a "high" Christology was present before any of the New Testament writings were written, present there in Paul.

Perhaps Dunn's most controversial claim in Christology is that the Philippian hymn did not refer to the pre-existence of Jesus. On this interpretation, Dunn has definitely proved to be in the minority, although less so when he first proposed it. He argued that the Philippian hymn of 2:6-11 was an Adamic Christology. Like Adam, Dunn argued, Jesus was in the image of God. But unlike Adam, who grasped at equality with God, Christ did not grasp. [3]

Few have gone with Dunn for this interpretation. I remember a brief conversation with Bruce Longenecker about Dunn's Christology (Bruce also studied with Dunn). He said he didn't feel the need to follow Dunn on that score anymore. 

But I found most of the book persuasive. And, indeed, I suspect there is much less pre-existence in Paul than many think. (I remember thinking his treatment of 1 Corinthians 15 was brilliant.) I always have found it refreshing when someone has been able to show me where I was unaware of the glasses I was wearing. Dunn opened my eyes to a third dimension to the Bible. 

What I'm talking about is the transition from reading the Bible from the standpoint of the story in the Bible to reading the books of the Bible in the story of history. This is basically what Hans Frei talked about in the first chapter of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. The pre-modern reader reads inside the text. The "modernist" reader sees the biblical texts as moments in history. 

It's the difference between thinking the Gospels must be first because they are about Jesus (who came first), to realizing that the Gospels were written after Paul's writings, probably in the order Mark, Matthew, Luke, John. It's realizing that, as far as its dating is concerned, it doesn't matter if Job pictures the patriarchal period. When a book is written has almost nothing to do with what it's written about.

This is more of learning how to read the Bible in context.

[1] Larry Hurtado explored this on his blog in 2017 before he passed.

[2] I later found John Meier and Raymond Brown's, Jerusalem and Antioch much more helpful (Paulist, 1983). They suggest four groups as I recall: Jerusalem Christianity, Pauline Christianity, Judaizers, and Libertines.

[3] N. T. Wright had what was to be a very confusing examination of the possibilities in a chapter of his The Climax of the Covenant. I was enamored with Wright in those days for a couple years. In retrospect, I would love to rewrite that chapter for him to make it clearer.

2.3 A Lasting Conversion (radical evangelicalism series)

2.1 The State of Faith in America
2.2 Dunk and Run
_______________________
Lasting Conversion
8. So what is a lasting conversion, an eternal conversion? What is the conversion that ultimately matters?

Let me start by speaking practically rather than technically. The most imporrtant conversion is one that lasts to eternity. It is true that a person can be truly converted and yet fall away (Heb 6:3; Jude 24). But the end result is as if the person was never truly saved at all. They are like the seed along the path, scorched by the sun, or choked by weeds. They are Israelites that do not enter the promised land, "whose corpses fell in the desert" (Heb. 3:17).

9. How does a lasting conversion begin? It is ultimately a matter of the Holy Spirit. This is the repeated message of the New Testament. 

Repentance is a precursor to conversion. Faith is an essential lead up. All along the Holy Spirit has been involved, drawing you to Christ. Baptism is significant, an "outward sign" of God's working inside us.

But, according to the New Testament, the Spirit is the moment of conversion. "If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they are not his" (Rom. 8:9).

The Spirit is God's "seal" of ownership on us (2 Cor. 1:22). The Spirit is the "guarantee," the "downpayment" of our future inheritance (2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:14). Without the Spirit in us, we are not yet truly and fully converted.

We see this in the book of Acts. In Acts 8, in Samaria, a group of individuals have been baptized, but they have not received the Holy Spirit. This is a problem because Acts 2:38 gives the clear pattern: Repent, be baptized, and you will receive the Holy Spirit. Something was wrong.

By the same token, conversion can happen without baptism. In Acts 10, Paul has hardly finished presenting the good news to Cornelius and his men before the Holy Spirit has come upon them. In that incident, baptism simply enacts what the Spirit has already done inside of them.

10. How do we know if we have received the Holy Spirit? I suspect that, for most of us, it will chiefly manifest itself as a "peace that passes understanding" (Phil. 4:7). [10] As the hymn goes, "blessed assurance, Jesus is mine; oh, what a foretaste of glory divine."

However, Paul tells us explicitly what the presence of the Holy Spirit looks like, and this is true not only in me as an individual but in the church collectively. He tells us that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Gal. 5:22-23). 

Are these the characteristics that most would use to describe the American church? Not likely. In that respect, we have to wonder how much of the American church is actually truly converted.

The Parable of the Weeds makes it clear that not everyone in the church is actually part of the Church (Matt. 13:24-30). The true Church is "invisible." It does not coincide with the people who hold up a Bible or quote Scripture. Indeed, Satan has the entire Bible memorized (e.g., Matt. 4:6).

Matthew puts it sharply, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 7:21). The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats also puts it starkly. Those who did not use what God gave them in the service of those in need turn out to be goats rather than God's sheep. They find their end in eternal judgment (Matt. 25:45-46). [11]

11. We have to conclude that either a good deal of the American church is either not truly converted or not fully converted. My pastor used to put it this way. "Don't worry. You're all still going to heaven. You're just not fully converted yet." [12]

I would put it this way. Some in the American church are not truly converted. But many others are not fully converted. Like Paul's description in 1 Corinthians 3, their faith is mixed with hay and straw (1 Cor. 3:12). 

That is one of the main purposes of this book, to call the American church to a truer and deeper faith. It is a call to recognize where our faith has been corrupted. And for those with fake faith, it is a call to genuine faith.

[10] There are individuals whose "peace receptors" are damaged. While 1 John 3:20 probably was not psychologizing originally, there is great truth to the fact that, when our consciences are not working properly, God knows the real story. Once upon a time, I found David Seamands' book, The Healing of Memories (David C. Cook, 1986) very helpful on this score.

[11] Note that the Parable of the Talents immediately preceeds the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. While this parable is often read as a capitalist manifesto, in context, the investment of talents would seem to be giving away what God has given us to those in need. We miss this context because of the glasses we are wearing when we read.

[12] Steve Deneff, College Wesleyan Church.

_______________________
1. What is Evangelicalism?
1.1 Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
1.2 The "New" Evangelicalism
1.3 The Poltical Takeover

2.2 Dunk and Run (radical evangelicalism series)

2.1 The State of Faith in America
_______________________
5. In the Parable of the Soils, Jesus talks about four different kinds of soil that the word can fall on (Mark 4). Some seed is immediately snatched by birds -- the word of the gopel goes in one ear and out the other. Then there is rocky soil. The wheat springs up immediately but lacks depth and is scorched by the sun. The seed that falls among weeds is choked by the cares of life. Finally, some seed falls on good soil and not only grows but multiplies.

It's fairly obvious that not everyone who "comes in the door" of the church ends up in the kingdom. Different Christian traditions deal with this phenomenon differently. A Calvinist might say such a person was never truly a believer to begin with. My own tradition can take the text pretty much like it is -- some people start off in Christian faith but do not endure to the end.

I already mentioned 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, where Paul suggests that even he might not make it into the kingdom if he does not continue disciplining himself as a spiritual "athlete." Hebrews presents the starkest imagery of this sort in the New Testament. Hebrews 6 suggests not only that it's possible to fall away, but that one cannot return if one does (6:3-6). Such a person is like a field that, despite constant watering, only yields thorns and thistels (6:7-8).

However one wants to process this phenomenon theologically, the long and the short of it is that not everyone who gets baptized will end up in the kingdom of God. We see this happen in Acts 8, where many Samaritans are baptized, but they have not yet been truly saved (8:4-25). One of them, Simon the sorceror, is remembered in Christian history as the earliest heretic of Christianity.

6. In America, Baptists are the largest Protestant group, and they have had enormous influence on American Christianity. Every tradition has its potential weaknesses, and the greatest danger from the Baptistic influences on Christianity  is what I might call "dunk and run." The majority of Baptists in America believe in "eternal security" or "once saved, always saved." It's the belief that, if you get truly saved, you will make it to heaven no matter what.

In a popular form, it can reduce to "Read the prayer on this card and you'll make it to heaven no matter what you do." This is not official Baptist belief, but it's how the doctrine can play out on a local level. The result has sometimes been an emphasis on baptism in American Christianity without nearly as much attention to what comes afterward.

This flavor has made its way into the culture of the American megachurch. Although many such churches call themselves non-denominational, many are functionally Baptist or Baptist with a charismatic twist. [8] Of late, we have seen more and more "baptisms on the spot" in these churches. Appealing to the book of Acts, they bring out the tubs and baptize people right there on the stage, sometimes with little or no preparation.

The danger has always been that there would be no follow up. This was an early critique of Billy Graham's crusades. Many people came forward to give their lives to Christ, but initially there was no system in place to get these individuals into the ongoing discipleship of a church. Thankfully, in the later decades of his crusades, a structure of follow-up by various area churches was put in place. [9]

Similarly, most mega-churches today have created systems to try to get the newly baptized into small groups. Still, it is hard not to get the impression that these streams of American Christianity are "front heavy" with inconsistent follow up. The danger is that someone who gets baptized might think they are fully cooked and that they need not worry too much about their walk with the Lord thereafter.

7. Paul himself ran into the problem of getting baptism out of perspective with the Corinthian church. A man named Apollos had followed him to Corinth. Because he had formerly been a follower of John the Baptist, baptism apparently played a more significant role in his teaching than it did for Paul. Paul is frustrated enough that he said he was glad he only baptized a handful of people there (1 Cor. 1:14-17).

Why? Because they were getting things out of focus. At Corinth, they had come to view who baptized them as a matter of prestige. They missed the point of baptism. It represented the cleansing of their past sins and their inclusion into the body of Christ. It was a beginning, not an end point.

One danger with the current climate of Christianity in America is that we focus so much on getting people wet that we miss the long haul of faith, which is actually the more crucial part in the end. We don't want to miss "running with patience the race that is set before us" (Heb. 12:1-2). Because it is not starting the race that ultimately matters. It is finishing it. To use an illustration from the book of Hebrews, all of Israel started off the journey in the wilderness. But they did not make it to the Promised Land (Heb. 3:16-19).

The danger of evangelical "conversionism" has long been a lack of discipleship. This is one area where John Wesley excelled, one of the earliest evangelicals in the 1700s. His rigorous system of discipleship made sure that a new believer did not simply evaporate away. George Whitefield, another evangelical of that day, once remarked that those who had been saved under his preaching were a rope of sand in contrast to those saved under Wesley. He had no system for discipleship.

[7] "Eternal security" is actually a mutation of two quite distinct theologies. Its base is Calvinism, which holds logically that if you are predestined, then you will endure into the kingdom. But Baptist belief mixed this idea with the later idea of the "assurance of salvation." This is the quite distinct tradition that you can know now whether you have truly become a child of God. Mix the two together and you have a theological Frankenstein: 1) if you know you are saved now then 2) you know you will make it to the end.

[8] Even the Assemblies of God church, which is one of the largest denominations in America, could be said to have the flavor of a Baptist church with tongues and other spiritual gifts added in.

[9] Bill Hybels also lamented this about his legacy at Willow Creek.

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1. What is Evangelicalism?

• Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
• The "New" Evangelicalism
• The Poltical Takeover

2. The State of Faith in America (1)

1. What is Evangelicalism?

• Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
• The "New" Evangelicalism
• The Poltical Takeover

__________________
1. The big news in a recent Pew study was that the decline of Christian faith in America had paused. [1] The theme of previous years had been the "rise of the Nones," individuals who claimed not to have any specific faith at all. [2] A few years ago, that was the fastest growing religious demographic. In this more recent study, the percentage of young men in particular has held steady and was roughly equal to young women who professed faith.

The Devil is in the details, of course. What is this data really saying?

An intriguing theory is that the retention of male faith might have something to do with influencers like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Wes Huff. [3] There is much talk about recovering masculinity within Christian faith, and these voices seem to be having an impact among young men.

However, it does not seem that they are bringing young men at large toward faith. Whom they seem to be helping are young men with some sort of background in Christianity. That is, they are helping a small swath of young men retain faith by inspiring them to live responsible lives.

Meanwhile, the fastest decline in faith would seem to be among young women. One of the more striking findings of the study was that young men and women had evened out in their faith -- as opposed to earlier days when the faith of young women significantly outpaced that of young men.

2. At the same time, we can ask what faith they are retaining or are being converted to. Here, the exit of women from the church may give insights. Why are they leaving? Are they leaving, for example, because the church has largely ignored them -- even as their voice has been empowered more and more?

Just a few years ago, the #MeToo movement called attention to the pervasive bullying and abuse that women get in society. According to one study, 82% of women have experienced sexual harrasment or assault in their lifetime [4] According to another study, almost half of all women (45.1%) have experienced some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetimes. 21% reported completed or attempted rape, and 39% reported unwanted sexual contact. [5] 

Did the MeToo movement change anything? According to the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University, no. [6] The question for the church is not merely whether male behavior has changed in society (it hasn't). The question for us is whether the church has offered women any reason to believe the situation is any different among believers (it hasn't).

3. A person saved is a person saved. If I genuinely come to believe in God because I thought I saw a unicorn eating lunch at Denny's, that is still a soul saved. It's important to keep that in mind. If a man keeps his faith because of a skewed version of Christianity, that's still a soul saved if the conversion is genuine.

At the same time, it is not enough to dunk and run. Paul is quite clear, despite protests to the contrary. "Run that you might receive the prize... I discipline my body and make it my servant so that I might not be disqualified after myself having preached to others" (1 Cor. 9:24, 27).

What we don't want to happen is to "inoculate" people to faith. We don't want to give them a taste and then for them to spit it out of their mouths. We want them to partake of genuine faith and to stick around for eternity.

4. I thus consider this a fair summary of faith in America at the moment. While it may have experienced a slight uptick or plateau in the last couple years, we do not know how the graph will continue. The trendline for the faith of young women is in steep decline. What is holding the demographic is that some young men who grew up in a Christian context are returning to the faith of their childhood.

Will that be a permanent return? That is another good question and one that should cause us to make sure that the faith we are advertising is genuine Christian faith. We would hate these converts to be seed on rocky soil -- or seeds among weeds or bird food (Mark 4).

Are we converting these young men to a club (while losing the young women) or are we bringing them to a lasting, well-anchored faith? That is a key question for this chapter.

[1] Religious Landscape Study, Pew Research Center (February 8, 2025), conducted from July 17, 2023 to March 4, 2024.

[2] Ryan Burge, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, 2nd ed. (Fortress, 2023).

[3] Cf. Anthony Delgato, "Comeback Christians."

[4] "Rates of sexual harassment and assault nationwide still high after #MeToo movement" (September 16, 2024).

[5] National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2023/2024 Sexual Violence Data Brief.

[6] The study quoted in n.4 is found here: #MeToo 2024 Report.

What is evangelicalism Part III (The Political Takeover)

1. What is Evangelicalism?

• Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
• The "New" Evangelicalism
  

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The Political Takeover
9. Most religions have their "fundamentalists." A fundamentalist is somone who is zealous for what they see as the fundamentals of their religion. In itself, this sounds pretty good. In fact, it's something like what I'm arguing for in this book.

But the word has a tone -- words aren't just what they say. Their meaning is really in what they do, and this word has a tone.

As we currently use it, it has a militant tone. It's a fight tone. It's a rigid tone in the sense that it refuses to consider that it might be wrong about the way it understands the fundamentals. It's anti-modern in the sense that it fights to preserve its traditions and imagined past. [7]

10. In the 1950s, "new" evangelicals like Ockenga and C. F. H. Henry wanted to distance themselves from groups they deemed "fundamentalists." They regarded those groups as less intellectual. These were groups like holiness revivalists, dispensationalists, and Pentecostals. 

They also saw these groups as separatists, Christians in retreat, while they wanted to "engage" the culture. One might say that they were ambitious to have a seat at the public table.

Seventy-five years later, the groups they considered inferior have taken over their movement. Eventually, the majority of "traditional" Christians would rule over the intellectuals. If you flash forward to today, mainstream "evangelical" thinking has become thoroughly political and extensively loosed from its intellectual and "respectable" beginnings. In my view, politics has become more central to the movement than theology, opening the door for the rank blasphemy pictured at the beginning of the chapter.

11. Jerry Falwell in the 1980s is as good a place as any to begin tracing this shift. Originally, he would not have identified himself as an evangelical, nor would evangelicals of that time have identified themselves with him. He deemed his movement, "The Moral Majority."

He rose to national prominence through the anti-abortion movement. Before that, his original fight was to preserve tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. Suffice it to say, that is a less powerful origin story.

The Reagan presidency saw the fusion of Republicanism with conservative Christianity. The result is that, even today, many evangelicals aren't sure that a Christian can vote for a Democrat. This has to be one of the most impactful developments in American religious history in its fusion of politics with religion. The result is that, as the Republican Party goes, so goes evangelicalism.

Here are some examples of issues where you might expect some spectrum of thought among evangelicals, but you don't really get it. Most evangelicals oppose gun control. The single most significant indicator of whether someone will be opposed to climate change is if someone is a white evangelical. Opposition to universal health care, pro-immigration? You could easily argue that these are biblical values.

Yet evangelical Christians not only tend to be monolithic on such issues. They tend to line up strongly on one side. Why? 

Arguably because of the fusion of Republican politics with evangelical Christian faith. 

The Latest Evangelical Pillars
12. Bebbington, in effect, has proposed evangelism, the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the cross, and engagement with the culture as the cornerstones of historical evangelicalism. Let me suggest that these have largely morphed into club, culture war, conquest, and control.

Of course, not all evangelicals fit these descriptions. My claim is that the flavor of evangelicalism has nevertheless shifted dramatically in these directions in the last few years.

Club. We see a big emphasis on getting people baptized, but how deep does the transformation go, and what are people being transformed into? Might the prophets call out some of our baptisms the way they called out sacrifices once upon a time (Micah 6:6-8)? To what extent have our efforts to convert become tribal inductions rather than heart conversions? We are getting people in the club, but are we getting them in the kingdom?

Culture War. We are witnessing an amazing thing in this moment. You can talk Bible all you want to evangelicals, but the values of their subculture trump the real Bible. There is still talk of the Bible, of course. But it is a banner, a symbol. Get into the actual values of the Bible, and shields go up. Ironically, after thinking for so long that evangelicalism was pushing back against ungodly culture in a culture war, it is unable to see that its own subculture is in the driver's seat -- not the Bible.

Conquest. Ironically, the cross showed that losing one's life could be gaining it. Suffering could be victory. Losing could be winning. But evangelicalism is presently at war. It has no interest in "milquetoast" Christianity. It wants Bonhoeffer the assassin, not the real Bonhoeffer, who the vast majority of the time was a pacifist.

Control. The activism of evangelicalism wants to take over the state. It rejects and hates the very notion of the separation of church and state. It wants a theocracy, a Christian nation of its imagination. It is no longer Niebuhr's "Christ the transformer of culture." It is pure "Christ over culture" -- as in take over the culture.

Not sure you agree? Keep reading. In the pages that follow, I want to call evangelicalism back from the brink to its roots. I want to call us beyond the club to true conversion. I want to pull the rug out from under the culture wars by going back to the Bible itself. I want to suggest that conquest and control are the opposite of Christ's values. We will transform the world by becoming its servants rather than its lords.

Won't you join me on this journey to the roots of the "evangel," the good news of Jesus Christ?

[7] I realize my approach to fundamentalism is in some tension with some prominent names in this area of history, namely, Mark Noll (see n.5) and George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University, 1980). We'll have that conversation later. 

What is evangelicalism? Part II (New Evangelicalism)

continued from last week
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Neo-Evangelicalism
5. Jump forward to the 1950s. With great intentionality, "neo" evangelicalism is born. [3] It loosely combined these two previous streams. On the one hand, you have Billy Graham the conversionist. For over fifty years, he channeled D. L. Moody and Charles Finney in his crusades around the world. Millions came forward to accept Jesus. (The follow-up at first was less stellar.)

Representing the other stream were the likes of Harold Ockenga and C. F. H. Henry, watchdogs of evangelical orthodoxy. The century before had seen the rise of biblical criticism and evolution. Traditional Christianity was in defensive mode. These "new" evangelicals aimed to go on the offense.

Fuller Seminary was founded. Christianity Today was sent for free to pastors everywhere in America, financed by oil tycoon J. Howard Pew. The "National Association of Evangelicals" (NAE) was born. Graham took it on the road. A movement was born.

6. David Bebbington has tried to systematize evangelicalism over the centuries. [4] This is a somewhat artificial task, because the meaning of words changes over time, and groups change over time. The values of the Democratic Party in the 1850s were quite different from its values today. In that sense, his four pillars of evangelicalism run the risk of flattening and imposing a system on people and movements from different times. 

The four key emphases he identified were 1) conversionism, 2) biblicism, 3) crucicentrism, and 4) activism. The first was an emphasis on evangelism. The second referred to the authority of Scripture. The third was the centrality of the cross and the necessity of atonement. The final commitment was to change the world rather than withdraw.

We have already seen broadly how these played out over the last three centuries. Conversionism is probably the most longstanding characteristic. Then in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a focus on the authority of Scripture and the necessity of the cross became more important in reaction to modernism.

In the 1950s, activism was key to the neo-evangelical rise. People like Harold Ockenga strongly criticized those Christians whom he saw as retreating from the world. Soon they were calling these individuals "fundamentalists." Mark Noll later identified such "retreaters" as dispensationalists, holiness folk, and Pentecostals. [5]

I'll have some thoughts on that later.

Blind Spots
7. Neo-evangelicalism was mostly white and aspiring middle class. It was "color blind" in the sense that it didn't much see those who weren't white. Like so many of the day, Graham advised Martin Luther King Jr. to move slower and avoid disruption. Evangelicalism has never had a large black demographic, and most white evangelicals did not participate in the Civil Rights movement.

In fact, the ancestors of the evangelicals today in the South were known for their flight to "segregation academies" in the mid-twentieth century. The government said to integrate. So they left the public schools to stay with their own kind.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that evangelism "exploded" in the 1970s. [6] This seems to be a predictable pattern. When white evangelicals get uncomfortable with social critique, they shift hard into conversionism -- which has a heavy focus on our insides, distracting from social injustices. (The same pattern has arguably also taken place in the last few years.)

As a quick note, a number of evangelicals over the centuries have healthily combined both evangelism and social action. John Wesley certainly did in the 1700s. Many evangelical reformers of the mid-1800s certainly did, playing significant roles in the abolitionist and women's rights movements. There were evangelicals like Ron Sider who were deeply engaged in the civil rights movement. But it is more a feature of modern evangelicalism to sever the two.

8. Another critique of this neo-evangelical movement is that it used the tools of modernism to argue against it. To fight modernism, it largely adopted its rules. You might argue that this undermines the critique. It hardly seems a winning strategy. We can wonder if a number of young people have lost their faith over the years as a result.

There are other options, as we will see. 

[3] I found Mary Worthen very helpful here, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University, 2013),

[4] Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1970s (Routledge, 2004).

[5] Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994). Nevermind that a series of writings called The Fundamentals had been produced by intellectuals.

[6] Evangelism Explosion was the mantra of D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The church would become an epicenter in the culture wars of the late 1900s.

Notes Along the Way TF6 -- A Dunn Deal

continued from the previous post
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1. I mentioned my college honor's project on holiness. I mentioned the independent study I did with Dr. Bauer on Hebrews. Since my fleece had turned toward teaching, my eyes were now set on where I might do my doctoral work.

My first year as Teaching Fellow, I presented an academic paper to a few people at Asbury. The title wasn't very clear: "Hebrews and the Rest of God." My friends were curious where the rest of God might be. Apparently it must be hiding in Hebrews.

That probably would have been a much more entertaining paper to listen to. I forget which friend it was who said they didn't understand a word I said. I would go on to present it at a regional SBL in Atlanta that spring, I think 1991. 

It felt like a cattle trough. I went up. I read. I came down. Quite underwhelming. I hadn't really left any time for questions -- partially by intent. I threw in a couple German and Hebrew sentences to show I was scholar material. You know, fake it till you make it.

2. Bauer and Dongell had gone to Union Seminary. I wasn't too interested, but I considered it. Paul Achtemeier would have been the person to study with, since he was Paul and the more epistolary part of the New Testament. But as it turned out, he was retiring anyway.

I looked at Notre Dame, but I pulled a classic Ken move. Since their materials said the degree was in theology, I concluded that they didn't have a doctoral program in New Testament. That was before the internet, but I didn't ask anyone either. Even more significant was the fact that Harold Attridge decided to go to Yale.

It seems like I sent a letter to Richard Hays at Duke, but I don't think he was interested in supervising any dissertations on Hebrews at that time. (or maybe it was me)

3. I sent a letter to James Dunn at Durham. If I couldn't go to the Durham in the US, what about the one in England? I think I have mentioned that his Baptism in the Holy Spirit had come to me by way of Bob Lyon, and it had influenced my understanding of Acts fairly significantly. 

So I sent a letter. I mentioned that Baptism had been formative for me. I might have also picked up a copy of his new Parting of the Ways at Joseph Beth. In it, he suggests that perhaps Hebrews combines a Platonic cosmology with a Jewish eschatology. It seemed a kind of extension of Barrett's thesis. That was the angle I suggested I might explore. [1]

He was receptive.

He was a great advocate to have. By the time it was all done, I received an Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS) that brought my tuition down to British cost. He connected me with St. John's College, where I served as Residential Tutor (and fire alarm runner). That gave me free room and board when the dining hall was open. I taught Greek to university students, which gave me a little spending money as well.

As it turns out, if I had not gotten the ORS, teaching Greek would have granted me free tuition. That's quite annoying. It took me 20 years to pay off my loan debt for something that would have been free. Funny how no one mentioned that to me.

4. Dunn was invited to speak at Asbury Seminary during my final year in Wilmore, and I was invited to the dinner. The Q & A after his presentation was probably fairly typical. I remember one fellow being clearly disturbed by it. I don't remember what it was on, but I can imagine a couple areas where he might have been less than orthodox. My guess is that he made more room for a non-Christian Jew to be right with God than would be orthodox.

Dunn inhabited a curious space. He was frequently sought out to speak at evangelical institutions, even ETS. And yet he wasn't fully orthodox in those circles. He told me he didn't look at what he was signing when he signed the inerrancy statement to speak at ETS. He had come from a fairly evangelical Scottish background, I would say. Then he had done his doctoral work at Cambridge under Charlie Moule, I believe.

What I liked about him is that he was really interested in what was true. That doesn't mean he was always right. Not at all. But I loved his method. He really tried to let the chips fall where they would. He rigorously wanted to come to the most likely conclusion given the evidence and sound reason.

At that dinner, Joe Dongell sat next to him. Being a bit mischievious, Joe asked, "So, are there any positions you've taken over the years that you regret? Like, maybe your interpretation of Romans 7?"

Leave it to Joe. In Dunn's two volume Word commentary on Romans, he took what was at the time a traditional view of Romans 7 -- that it is a believer struggling with Sin. Of course, that was about the time that a pivot took place. A strong majority of Romans scholars today -- the consensus in fact -- believe that Romans 7 is a dramatization of a person who wants to keep the Law but doesn't have the Spirit to be able to do so.

But Paul goes on in Romans 8 (as he anticipated in Romans 6 and the beginning of 7) to talk about victory over the power of Sin through the Holy Spirit. The consensus interpretation, by the way, fits very well with Wesleyan theology. In that regard, Dunn's commentary was almost out of date on Romans 7 when it came off the press.

But his response to Joe was unsurprising. "No, I feel very comfortable with my conclusions on Romans 7."

5. I remember also having a side conversation with Joe at that dinner. (He was the beloved disciple next to Dunn. I was Peter having to ask him to ask Dunn questions.) I asked Joe about Matthew 24:34: "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all is fulfilled." The context clearly indicates that the conversation is about the second temple, the one destroyed in AD70.

But the second coming has not happened yet -- not if it is the literal return of Jesus. I have yet to hear a completely satisfying answer to this conundrum. The best I have had to offer is that the near and the far sometimes blur when you are looking at them in a line of sight.

Joe did offer an answer. He suggested that there is a clear break in referent at 24:29. The first half of the chapter is about AD70. The second half about the second coming. I didn't find it completely satisfying. Bill Patrick and I sometimes mused about Joe's confidence. Things were increasingly complicated to us.

[1] I can't remember if it was purely providential or great luck that he had taken a similar position in Partings to Barrett. Did I realize the overlap or was it completely unintentional?

When God Seems Silent (2)

Possibly a series "For the Honest Seeker."

Introduction 
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1. I lived in England in the middle of the 1990s. While I was there, I read a book by John A. T. Robinson called Honest to God. [1] He had written the book in the 1960s, during a time when England was undergoing a sort of faith crisis in the decades after World War II. This was also around the time that some were beginning to talk about the "death of God" in America. In the book, Robinson recalled a time in seminary when he realized several students did not find prayer as eventful as they might have expected. That passage stood out to me. 

Throughout my teens and twenties, I had constantly prayed for experiences of God like the ones I saw at church camps and heard preached throughout the sermons of my childhood. I grew up in what you might call a "revivalist" tradition. We had regular "altar calls" where people went forward to pray as they felt led by the Spirit. The impression I had was that God zapped us all the time, almost like how God talked to Moses.

But aside from occasional moments of peace, I did not have many dramatic, emotional religious experiences in my teens. I am not a particularly emotional person. Indeed, growing up, I identified strongly with Mr. Spock from Star Trek, who thoroughly suppressed any emotion deep inside himself. During those years, living a life of constant and deep introspection, I did not have many experiences I had been led to believe should be commonplace.

To be frank, my teens were a time of torture for me. I was constantly seeking God's forgiveness for sins I couldn't even identify. Most of the time I did not feel peace, but I didn't know what sins I needed to confess. My intention to do the right thing was almost on the spectrum, and I could list on one hand the times I had deliberately done something I knew was wrong. In some ways, I envied the rebellious young people whose rebellion was so obvious that they experienced incredible release when they finally surrendered themselves to God.

As I matured, I began to experience more and more peace. But the lack of dramatic religious experience continued to haunt me. In my mid-twenties, I would cry out to God (inside) both during prayer and church prayer times, begging God to speak to me in some direct and undeniable way. Sometimes, I even begged him to punish me for asking, just so that I would know he was there.

In the end, the biggest faith struggles of my late 20s were not ultimately intellectual, although that was clearly part of them. But on a more fundamental level, they were personal. Why doesn't God talk to me like God talked to Moses and the other people in the Bible? The Christians around me sure seemed to think he should.

2. At some point, it struck me that Moses didn't have any of those dramatic experiences of God until he was 80 years old (Acts 7:30). It also dawned on me that I was not Moses. Somehow, the preaching of my youth had normalized dramatic religious experiences. Maybe I wasn't as special as I had been led to believe.

When I lived in England, I knew a young man who felt a call to ministry. I could see in him some of the anticipation I grew up with. Over the years, I've known more than one young man (and a woman or two) training for ministry who somehow thought they were going to be the next Moses. Some have undergone faith struggles when it turned out their emotional highs weren't backed up with the divine encounters they expected. 

I've always wondered if some had an inflated sense of their own calling. Some lost their faith, perhaps left empty at the realization of their normalcy. Then again, it seems to me that there are plenty of prominent leaders in the church who put on a good show, but you wonder how much spiritual substance they have. I've wondered if, when they hit a moment when they realized much of their spiritual life was hype, they just kept going.

On the other hand, I know other people who do experience God's voice regularly. Miracles seem to follow some of them around. Usually, they are not looking for followers or an audience. They are quietly going about their lives, and the world around them is always changing for the better.

Paul talks about spiritual gifts in some of his letters. For example, in 1 Corinthians 12:9, he talks about the gift of faith. I find this very helpful. We talk about being "justified" by faith, so everyone should have a certain baseline of faith. But there also seem to be some who have a gift of faith, the kind of faith that moves mountains.

3. What if some of us are more wired to have religious experiences than others? [2] I know this idea will get strong pushback from some of my friends in ministry. But I'm not writing for them. I'm writing for those of you who are puzzled because of what seems to be the silence of God.

Even the most devout experiential types can undergo something called "the dark night of the soul" where they may go through a long period without feeling God. [3] 

But what if the "silence" is more normal for many than the dramatic? What if it is the striking prayer experiences that are more unusual? If that were true, then we may be unnecessarily setting up a certain personality type for faith crisis -- and another for regular hallucination.

I want to be very careful here. My goal is not in any way to discourage a sense that God speaks to you. But for some, it might be more healthy to see those divine moments as unexpected joys. Otherwise, we may be setting some people up for regular disappointment.

I might add my suspicion that some people put their trust in other people's experiences, and that works. They think, "If I were more holy, I'd have those experiences too." Or maybe they think, "I don't have that kind of relationship with God, but so and so does." And they bank their faith on that. In that way, they are not troubled by their own "silence" because they trust that other people are regularly hearing from God.

4. In my college years, as I was trying to have the kind of devotional life I had heard promoted so often, I had a strange thought. Maybe I would feel more like I was having an actual conversation with God if I pictured that I was really talking to someone. This is a strange thought because, surely, that's what prayer should have been for me all along.

But the thought revealed to me what I had been doing all along when I prayed. It had actually been a monolog. In other words, prayer for me had really been talking to myself. (Mind you, I'm sure God was listening.) Then it dawned on me. How many prayers had I heard in the church -- including many from the pulpit -- that had actually been self-talk or, in some cases, subtle sermons?

"Lord, we know that you hear our prayers when we call." Who are you talking to? Of course, the Lord hears. How many a pastoral prayer is actually a secret sermon to the congregation. "Lord, we know there are people out there who are asking whether they should come forward to the altar." Who are you talking to? God or the congregation?

I was also impressed at one time by David Seamands' book, The Healing of Memories. [4] As I continued to struggle with the lack of clear response from God in prayer, Seamands' claim was that some of us, often because of previous trauma, might have difficulty hearing directly from God. He talked about "damaged love receptors" and broken love antennae. 

The idea is that God may be beaming the signal of his love to you, but you may not be able to receive it because your antenna is down. (Clearly this metaphor worked better before our current Wifi and Starlink.) In such cases, Seamands argued, God more typically works through other people to help fix your antennae. He doesn't usually fix it directly.

5. All these things may be true, and I've found them helpful. But I've come to think of God's presence much more as a peace and a "still, small voice" than the dramatic experiences I thought I was supposed to have as a boy.

For some of my friends, this will seem to undersell God. I can hear one friend as I write saying, "But Ken, God wants to give so much more!"

I hope so. But if you are having questions because that isn't you, it probably isn't what you need to hear right now. Maybe what you need is a recalibration of your expectations.

What if, for most people, the norm is what I call peaceful prayer -- without getting zapped back? This really isn't the silence of God because I've come to view peace as the presence of God. It wasn't what I was primed to experience growing up, but I wonder if it is more the norm.

You can of course see God's hand everywhere if you have faith that God is always working, always giving, always blessing. "In everything, give thanks," Paul says (1 Thess. 5:18).

To me, this is something different from expecting to be zapped with special messages from God all the time. It is a quiet thankfulness. It is a quiet conversation that doesn't expect an audible voice in return. It is an attitude of mystery and trust. 

It is an attitude of faith that doesn't ask for return. And when the return comes, it is an attitude of gratitude.

[1] John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (SCM, 1963).

[2] I used to have a colleague in the psychology department whose research showed which part of the brain "lights up" when a person is having a religious experience. He was not suggesting that religious experiencces were merely psychological. But he did think it might be possible to "counterfeit" them biochemically. If he was right, then some religious experiences may be genuine, and others may be hallucinations.

[3] The phrase was coined in a poem by St. John of the Cross in the 1500s. He was a Spanish mystic.

[4] David Seamands, The Healing of Memories (David C. Cook, 1986).

For the Honest Seeker 1

If you're reading this, you are probably what I would call a "seeker." Perhaps you were raised as a Christian, but you are having doubts. You have questions. Maybe the answers you are getting ring hollow. Perhaps they seem like the easy responses people give when they aren't really looking for real answers. You may be thinking, "They don't even get the question."

Alternatively, perhaps something is drawing you to look into the Christian faith more. Maybe you come as an outsider. You are intrigued but still skeptical. Perhaps you have never given it much thought or have been dismissive. But you are curious. You are investigating further.

This book is for the honest seeker. It's not looking for pat answers or dodging hard questions. If your faith feels settled or uncomplicated, this book may not be for you. It might introduce questions you've never considered. This is a book for those with hard questions looking for honest dialogue about them. 

I've come to see three basic approaches to this sort of quest for faith. On one end of the spectrum are those who think the answers are pretty obvious. This is the crusader, the apologist, the person who thinks the "evidence demands a verdict" in a fairly straightforward way. Often, this person likes to debate to win -- maybe even more than to have deep understanding.

My guess is that, if you're reading this book, the answers this approach gives have not been entirely satisfying. Maybe it feels like they are mostly speaking to the already convinced. In this book, we'll give some of their answers, but we'll look at them as honestly as possible, recognizing that some of them may make more sense to you than others.

On the other end of the spectrum are those who think these questions are pointless and possibly counterproductive. These are the "blind faith" people. They might think that faith is a gift that makes no sense -- either you have the gift or you don't.

You're probably not one of those people either. If you were, you wouldn't be looking for answers. This approach doesn't look for answers. It speaks of taking a "leap of faith" that doesn't necessarily make sense.

No, this book is for those of you who think faith should generally make sense, but recognize that the questions aren't always easy. On some issues, the answers may seem relatively easy. On others, we may have to resort to a leap of faith. On still other questions, you may want to dig deeper for answers that make sense to you but are troubling to others.

Our motto in this book is "faith seeking understanding." Either "I want to believe; help my unbelief" or "I'm open to faith, but I cannot see it clearly." Perhaps you will resonate with a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson: "There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds."

Some doubt too much. Others don't doubt enough. Let our quest for faith begin.

Confessions #4: Paul made Sabbath-keeping optional.

Number 4 in my new series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
2. Try reading the verse before your favorite verse. 
3. Then I read the verses before the prophecies.
x. Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.
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1. I grew up with a lot of Sabbath rules. I wasn't rebellious, although it did make Sundays pretty boring for me. We went to church at least twice. As an attention-deficit boy, that was a little torturous, if I am honest.

We didn't "buy or sell" on Sundays, which meant we didn't go out to eat or to the store. Part of why we didn't go to restaurants on Sunday is so that someone else didn't have to work. My dad occaionally got the opportunity to work overtime on weekends. He'd do the Saturdays but not the Sundays as a matter of conviction.

We didn't watch TV on Sundays. My dad felt like he would end up watching football all day if that door was open. So we set the day aside for worship. When Star Wars and E.T. premiered on TV on Sunday nights, I missed them. (I had already missed them at the movies because we didn't go to movies either.)

Sunday was serious, solemn. It was a holy day, set aside, sanctified. That means we didn't throw a football or baseball. I was kicked off a playground at a holiness camp ground once because Sunday was too serious for play.

This was all very normal for me. It was one of many practices that set my family apart from other people. We knew we were a "peculiar people," as Deuteronomy 7:6 in the King James Version says.

There's nothing wrong with any of the practices I mentioned above. As I studied the Bible more and more, though, I realized that these things were really a matter of personal conviction. A deep reading of Scripture won't see them as practices that God requires of his people.

2. Two things began to change my mind on these practices. One is an increasing ability to read the Bible in context, and the second was an openness to listen to the Bible over my tradition.

For example, the most glaring insight is that Sunday isn't the Sabbath. Saturday is and was. There's not a verse in the entire Bible that refers to Sunday as a Sabbath. [1] Sunday is the "Lord's Day," not the Sabbath. In the Bible as in Judaism still today, the Sabbath referred to the period from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday.

There are groups like Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists that have recognized this fact and they do keep Saturday as the Sabbath even today.

Of course, many Christians recognize this fact and will immediately respond, "The specific day is not what's important. What's important is that you set aside a day as your Sabbath." For example, many pastors set aside Monday or another day as their day of rest.

Many other Christians have blurred the Sabbath into a day of worship. So what becomes important is going to church to worship on Sunday. If you do that, they believe, then you have kept the Sabbath.

These are all very interesting (and practical) traditions. There's just one thing about them They're not in the Bible. They are like the traditions of the elders of the Pharisees in Mark 7:1. They are oral traditions that Christians have come up with to explain how they keep the law without exactly keeping the law.

And that's ok. It is fantastic to set aside a day of rest. It is very healthy! It is spectacular to set aside a day of worship! The Lord deserves our worship every moment of every day, and setting aside a day to gather together to worship him is VERY biblical (cf. Heb. 10:25; Rev. 1:10).

3. Here's the thing though. The farther I went into my study of the Bible, the more I let each passage say what it wanted to say. I didn't let myself continue to say, "OK, this verse sounds like it says x, but I can't let it say that because of passage y." I tried to stop "cooking the books," so to speak.

So, consider Colossians 2:16: "Do not let anyone judge you because of food or because of drink or in respect to a feast or a new moon or a Sabbath." What is this verse saying?

If I let the verse speak, it seems to say that the non-Jewish Colossians (Gentile Christians, in other words) should not feel pressure from anyone in the city to observe the Jewish food laws, festival days, or Sabbaths. That is to say, Colossians does not consider Sabbath-observance binding on Gentile believers!

If you were in doubt, let's go to Romans 14, a chapter that was very important to me on my spiritual pilgrimage. It says, "There is the one who considers one day above another and another who considers every day [the same]. Let each person be fully convinced in his or her own mind. The one who observes the day observes it for the Lord" (Rom. 14:5-6).

Verses like these are sometimes difficult for us, not because they are hard to understand, but because they wreak havoc with what we think we know. Paul here indicates that keeping the Jewish Sabbath was a matter of personal conviction, not a universal requirement. Some Christians would believe God requires it of them. Others would not.

Why is this so striking? It is striking for several reasons. For example, this is one of the Ten Commandments. "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Exod. 20:8). And Paul says you don't have to keep it. I think he especially had Gentile Christians in mind. I suspect he and other Jewish Christians continued to observe Saturday as a Sabbath.

Let that sink it. Not only does he not consider it an absolute. He does not even consider it a universal requirement. By definition, he puts it in the category of the relative, a "relativist" categorization. That's really the category in which personal convictions go. It's wrong for me, but it might not be wrong for someone else. Paul says that, on this issue, what is important is that you are fully convinced in your own mind (Rom. 14:5).

There's no way around it. That's what he says.

I was talking to a family member about this once and the response was, "But Exodus 20:11 bases the Sabbath law in creation" (cf. Gen. 2:2-3). 

"I know," I responded. "But it doesn't seem to matter to Paul."

4. Let me give it to you straight. Despite our traditions, despite what makes sense to us, despite the fact that it is one of Ten Commandments, rooted in the creation story, despite all these things... the New Testament does not consider the Sabbath to be binding on Christians.

That was a huge admission for me as a Bible know-it-all. When you listen to the biblical text, it often doesn't want to be read the way my tradition wants it to be read. Then I have to decide whether my idea of the Bible is more important to me than the real Bible itself.

[1] I did hear an ingenious argument that the Greek of verses like Matthew 28:1 changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. A wooden reading of the Greek is "Now after the sabbaths, at the dawning of the first of sabbaths." Some have argued that this verse changed the old Sabbath to Sunday as the first of the new Sabbaths. Brilliant!

But of course it is this sort of game-playing with truth that caused me to have a bit of a faith crisis. The expression "first of sabbaths" was an idiom for "first day of the week." It existed before Easter, and it existed after Easter. This interpretation is just a very sophisticated version of ripping a phrase out of its historical context. The meaning of these phrases was "Now after the Sabbath, at the dawning of the first day of the week," which is how pretty much every version translates it.

What is evangelicalism? Part I

1. The thing about words is -- they change their meaning over time. 

Take the word woke. For most of my life, it simply meant that someone was awake. Not sleeping, in other words. Then, about fifteen years ago, it began to be used in certain circles to refer to someone who had become aware of their own privilege in society and the challenges of others who are largely unseen to them.

Now, it has become a strongly negative term without much content, largely a nickname to mock liberal or progressive individuals. If it has any content at all, it mocks those with social concerns in relation to people of color or women.

Same word. Changing meanings and connotations.

This is how words work. The same word can mean significantly different things over time. A word can flip from being positive to negative or negative to positive. In the 1980s, Michael Jackson came out with a song called "Bad" in which the word bad came to mean really, really cool. In the early 2000s, a "googol" (1 with 100 zeros) became Google, and "to google" something became a verb.

2. The same is true of the word evangelical. It has not always meant exactly the same thing. 

In German, evangelisch simply means Protestant. Preachers of the 1700s like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards used the word to describe an approach to salvation that, like Martin Luther, emphasized salvation by grace through faith. That was "evangelical" faith and "evangelical" religion.

So we largely call these individuals "evangelical" in hindsight. In their own time, the word described a kind of Christianity more than it named a distinct group.

As the 1800s progress, two streams of "evangelical" Christians begin to emerge. On the one hand, you have those like Charles Finney who continue to emphasize the "conversion" sense of the word that Wesley and Whitefield did. These are the revivalists of the 1800s. [1]

The other stream is foreshadowed by William Wilberforce, who begins to use the word evangelical to contrast the "alive" part of Anglicanism from the "nominal" part that, from his perspective, is Christian in name only. The evangelical part of Anglicanism is still orthodox. It still believes in sin and salvation. It sees faith as personal. The other is respectable and formal, perhaps a little too influenced by the Enlightenment. [2]

By the end of the 1800s, you have two distinct centers of gravity in what we would call evangelical Christianity in America. The one is the revivalist wing that, like D. L. Moody, emphasized conversion and the experience of salvation. They are evangelically "orthodox," but that is not their focus. 

The other includes academics like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, whose center of gravity is the more doctrinal aspects of faith. They are Calvinists who focus evangelical faith on a particular understanding of sin and salvation. For them, an evangelical especially has the right beliefs about the Bible and salvation.

3. In the mid-1900s, the word evangelical would emerge now as a clear sociological movement after World War II. Now, it is very intentionally defined by a group calling themselves "neo-evangelicals." And both streams loosely rejoin in this new coalition.

On the one hand, you have Billy Graham...

[1] For an excellent survey of this stream, see Donald W. Dayton, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage: A Tradition and Trajectory of Integrating Piety and Justice (Baker Academic, 2014).  

[2] David W. Bebbington, as we will see, commits the root fallacy by mixing these two distinct streams together.

Notes Along the Way TF5 -- Teaching at Asbury College

continued from last week
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1. Back in the day, Mike Harstad was a legend at Asbury College. (I don't know the details of his departure so I'll leave it at that.) He was known for teaching Greek the old school way -- by which I mean the way my mother learned it at Frankfort Bible College in the early 1940s. You learned Attic Greek first. Then you downshifted into Koine Greek, the "merchant Greek" of the New Testament.

Brian Small learned Greek from him that way and, as I recall, first introduced me to Smyth's classical Greek grammar. In my seminary years, Greek resources featured high on my list of birthday and Christmas requests. My parents obliged and I filled in some details. I believe Joseph Beth was helpful.

Dr. Harstad thought that Philo was the author of Hebrews, or at least could have been.

Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker, Liddle Scott, Moulton and Geden, Blass-Debrunner. My parents gave me Kittle's 10 volume Theological Dictionary one Christmas. Of course, it turned out to be riddled with language fallacies, not to mention the fact that it was put together by Nazi Bible scholars. Oh well.

In the 1992-1993 academic year, Harstad was on a sabbatical. The whole year. And, since I was now finishing up my MA in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Kentucky (UK), I seemed like a good pick to do some of the fill in while he was gone. 

So I taught second year Latin at Asbury College that year, one class each semester. He used Robert Ball's Reading Classical Latin text, which used simple texts from Julius Caesar, Ovid, Cicero, and the like. It was nice. If only I could have started out with those beginning texts instead of being thrown into poetry again at UK.

I can't say that I remember any students except for Jerald Walz, who has occasionally stayed in touch.

2. We used to joke that a great gulf separated Asbury College from the Seminary, as in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Seminary men were known to go over to hang out at the Grill in hopes of finding girls who might date them. It was a little embarrassing, and I joined the ranks of the embarrassing for a short time.

Some of my college friends were RD's at Kresge. We would go over to visit them. That's when I first met Cindy Gunsalus and then Vicki Gibson, who was a close friend in those years. My roomate at the time was Brian Matherlee, now well known Wesleyan pastor in North Carolina. He introduced me to the Braves and the Tarheels. 

He was much more of an extrovert than me and quite cool for a seminary guy. A brief story will capture our respective personalities. Two of the most popular female seminary students came to our apartment to visit him. I was there -- or at least I thought I was. As he showed them around the apartment, he pointed to my room and mentioned that it was Ken's room. Mind you, I was standing right there behind them.

"Who?" they asked.

"Ken," he said. And then as the look of perplexity continued on their faces, he added, "He's standing right behind you."

Ah, such is life.

3. I was a Greek and Hebrew Teaching Fellow at Asbury Seminary from the fall of 1990 to the spring of 1992, going to UK part time. Then from 1992-1993, I went full time to UK and finished my degree.

This involved of course going headlong into Latin. I've mentioned that I took 2.5 years of it in high school. Then I spent the summer of 1991 going through Wheelock.

The first class I finally took was, by some freak act, another poetry class: Juvenal, Martial, and Statius. It wasn't too bad. Juvenal was a satirist. So we read the famous quote that all the people want are bread and circuses. Martial, as I recall, was ronchy. So for a brief moment I knew some Latin bad words and sex terms. I had Dr. Jane Phillips for that class. She was quite reasonable. I had her for Cicero as well.

She was Roman Catholic, and I think may have been a nun at one time. Not entirely sure. I remember her being perplexed that I didn't know the term "fracture" for when the priest breaks the wafer when consecrating the elements. She was trying to prompt my memory for the fourth principal part of frango -- "fractus."

I had two semesters of Latin Composition with her my final year. I can't say that I learned as much as I would have liked, but that has always been my story.

4. I took Virgil's Aeneid with Lewis Swift. He was Dean of Undergraduate Studies and for some reason I was surprised that he actually would teach a class. He passed away a few years ago. I remember a brief exchange we had at a social for the master's students in classics. It was at Robert Rabel's house, as I remember. I dutifully abstained from the wine that was on offer. He had a very nice wine stock, as I recall.

Somehow, we had a brief chat about the imprecatory psalms. Dr. Swift said something like, "I was never quite able to figure out what to do with the imprecatory psalms. You know, praying down God's wrath on your enemies." He had actually studied for ministry as a Roman Catholic at one point, I believe.

I responded that I had always taken them somewhat metaphorically. Praying for God to end evil and various vices rather than people. He seemed intrigued.

He was a great teacher of the Aeneid and, although I continued my multi-hour pre-class Arby's ritual, I regularly found myself trying to guess when I would be asked to read to make sure I had something to say once we got there. A trick I tried with varying success was to volunteer early and then have pockets of text translated so I could volunteer throughout the class and just maybe give the appearance of having it all done. 

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I missed the Battleship.

5. There were classes I wanted to take but it just didn't work out. I missed Plato. That hurt. I went the first day but conceded I just didn't have the time. I did catch Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with Robert Rabel (Books I and X, I believe). I missed Homer, which sucked. I mentioned that I had a year of Sanskrit with Greg Stump.

I had to pass a reading French competency. This was while I was still a teaching fellow. The problem is that the class I signed up for was at 8am. And at that time I certainly was not a morning person. That didn't happen until I was married. I couldn't get myself up. And it's not like there was an attendance requirement. Everything stood or fell on whether you passed the competency exam at the end.

I went the first day. I went a random day in the middle. I went to the class before the exam, I believe. And I studied reading French on my own.

I got an A in the class.