The goal of the gospel is not to rescue people out of the created world. It is to gradually purify the created world of sin and restore human furnishing — not just human furnishing, in fact, but furnishing for all of creation. The creation itself, Paul writes, is groaning for redemption (Rom. 8:22). When the curse is removed, creation itself will be restored to its full, incomparable splendor.

Man in full

This means that the gospel restores to man is full humanity. I don’t mean by this that when man fell into sin, he became less than a man, but he did become less and what God intended for humanity. He became shattered, denuded, and miserable.

But he didn’t lose his divine image indelibly inscribed on him. The fall was an act of apostasy, not just an act of rebellion. Man is created with an ineradicable desire to worship. If he doesn’t worship the Triune God, he will worship something else, like creation or himself. This is what produced ancient paganism. The pagans turned away from God, but they couldn’t turn away from their desires for what God intended them to enjoy. They abandoned God’s house and moved into the Devil’s house, but they had to take the furniture with them. They wanted to enjoy this world but enjoy it in a way that God never intended. God won’t permit that. This is why all sinners eventually become miserable. God doesn’t give them the satisfaction of flourishing in ways that he never designed.

Wealth and sex

Wealth, for example, is inherently good. The Bible states plainly that God gives us the power to get wealth (Dt. 8:18). Wealth shouldn’t be used only to plant churches and finance missionaries, though these are essential. It’s also legitimately used to enjoy the Good Life, good life as God intends, of course. Certainly wealth can be abused, and often is abused. When it’s transformed into an in itself, it leads to greed, covetousness, and destruction, including self-destruction. Humans cheat and lie and kill for wealth. Wealth alone doesn’t satisfy, and it was never meant to satisfy. Wealth obtained in God’s way satisfies. Wealth gained legitimately never satisfies. God won’t allow it.

The pagans turned away from God, but they couldn’t turn away from their desires for what God intended them to enjoy. They abandoned God’s house and moved into the Devil’s house, but they had to take the furniture with them.

The same is true of sex. Its function isn’t just pro-creational. It’s also for human delight, human furnishing.[1] God’s sexual plan limits it to marriage: one man for one woman for one lifetime. When we turn away from God, however, and see sex as an end in itself, and seek its delights outside his will, we never achieve permanent satisfaction. There’s immediate satisfaction, and permanent damage (1 Cor. 6:15–18). Why? Because God wants us to enjoy this world in his way, and not some other way. When we covet what’s beyond God’s gracious designs for us, he pays us in dissatisfaction. How does God do this? Note Calvin Seerveld’s riveting words:

[T]he Lord eats away stealthily at that which a person has and wants more of (like the fellow in Luke 12:18). If you covet your neighbour’s wealth, God punishes you with the insatiable discontent of the miser. If you covet sexual satisfaction with your neighbour’s spouse, God will spoil the joy one know[s] in erotic troths (cf. Proverbs 6:23–29). If you covet a career success and becoming well-known, God the moth will eat away the fabric of your respect for others and punish you with the reputation of riding roughshod over your fellow workers….[2]

Confidence in our God-rigged universe

We live in a God-rigged universe. God is the house, and we can never beat the house. The house always wins. God has arranged the universe so that all of those who introduce viruses to destroy the system end up destroying themselves. “Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, [a]nd he who rolls a stone will have it roll back on him” (Pr. 26:27). Divine wisdom declares, “But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul; [a]ll those who hate me love death” (Pr. 8:36). In fighting against God, man combats himself.

Why no anxiety

Incidentally, this is why we need never be concerned that the chaotically sinful world is spinning out of control. When we see rampant political conflict and international terrorism and anarchic sexuality and pervasive chemical addictions, we might get the impression that the world is doomed. But the world isn’t doomed. This is God’s world, and it’s a good world, and he will purge all the sin out of it. He rigged the universe so that only he would win. The apostates can wreak a lot of havoc, but in the end it’s they, not God’s good world, that are doomed.

When we appeal to unbelievers (and even wayward Christians), therefore, we don’t simply say, “You’d better give up your sins and trust Jesus or he’ll judge you.” That, of course, should be declared, and it’s true. But we should also say that if they persist in their path, they’ll only destroy themselves. Jesus said to the unconverted multitude,

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Mt. 11:28–30)

Jesus alone furnishes true rest and delight. To his disciples he offers these inspiring promises:

“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” (Jn. 10:10)
“These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.” (Jn. 15:11)

The appeal of the gospel to unbelievers is the appeal to return to what it means to be fully human. [3]

[1] P. Andrew Sandlin, The Christian Sexual Worldview (Coulterville, California: Center for Cultural Leadership, 2015).

[2] Calvin Seerveld, Take Hold of God and Pull (Carlisle, Cumberland, England: Paternoster, 1999), 49–50.

[3] Gordon J. Spykman, Reformational Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 70.

The Free-Floating Irrelevance of Ecclesiastical Colonization

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on January 31, 2020

The church is indispensable in God’s kingdom. The church alone is his local, gathered community washed in the blood of his Son under the oversight of earthly shepherds.[1] (There is no such thing as the “invisible” church in the Bible.) The church alone preserves structured theological belief (orthodoxy). The church alone is the pillar and buttress of truth (1 Tim. 3:15). The church alone administers the sacraments, or ordinances. The church is God’s chief institution for maturing his people (Eph. 4:1–16).

But the church isn’t God’s central work in the earth, and it certainly isn’t his only work. His chief work is his kingdom (Mt. 6:33), his rule and reign, to which institutions like family, church, and state contribute. The church is a single divinely established institution among several, and to elevate it to a more domineering place leads to the blight of ecclesiastical colonization. [2]

Contracting Christianity

Because the church is obviously vital, many Christians get the idea that where God is at work in the world, he is working everything within the church. This ecclesiastical colonization has historically come in one of two forms: (1) the role of the church is expanded to dominate all of life: family, education, politics, and culture. All culture must be church-ruled culture. The Middle Ages sometimes perpetuated this error,[3] which we can designate as ecclesiocracy — the rule of the church. This isn’t a problem anywhere in the Western world today.

But there’s also (2): The role of Christianity is contracted to conform to the church. It’s this second problem that’s pervasive today. The only important Christian things are happening in the church; everything outside the church is secondary or irrelevant as far as the Faith is concerned. The idea that culture itself should be Christian is a huge mistake.[4] Because economics, politics, science, technology, entertainment and sports aren’t a part of the church, they need and should not be Christian. This error is apparent in the so-called “Two-Kingdom” Theology:[5] the kingdom of the church is governed by the Bible, but the kingdom outside the church is regulated by “natural” theology, on what both Christians and non-Christians can agree are common-sense, non-Christian principles: Jesus is an absentee landlord. This dualism always leads to a radically secularized culture and a radically pietized church. The culture abandons God, and the church abandons any field it can’t control. From Satan’s standpoint, it’s an ideal arrangement.

Privileging Theology, De-privileging Worldview

Ecclesiastical colonization starts early. In seminaries and Bible colleges, future church leaders are taught the nearly exclusive importance of theology, meaning biblical or systematic theology and including exegesis, hermeneutics, Christology, soteriology, eschatology, and ecclesiology. These topics are necessary, and there can be no robust Faith without them, but the Bible includes much more. The Bible is no less concerned with a Christian view of economics, sex, music, science, and education than with traditionally theological categories. The Bible tells us how we are to live in the world, not just in the church. In fact, the faith disposition of our heart generates a worldview, and this worldview and the philosophy we derive from it shape how we interpret reality — including how we read the Bible.[6]

The culture abandons God, and the church abandons any field it can’t control. From Satan’s standpoint, it’s an ideal arrangement.

Our hearts and minds must be turned toward the Triune God before we can encounter the Bible reverently, and this is why the basic elements of a Christian worldview and philosophy come before even God-honoring Bible reading. Theology, the kind of knowledge central in the church, is not the only knowledge, or even the first knowledge, that needs to be Christian. Our view of reality precedes our view of everything else. It must begin with God and move outward to the world and family and culture and church and all else.

Double-Decker Reality

To better grasp Ecclesiastical colonization, think of the double-decker tour buses in London. Ecclesiastical colonizers move all Christianity into the upper deck of the church and theology. On the lower deck they leave the rest of life as permissibly non-Christian. Christians assume the Bible has nothing relevant to teach about tax rates or foreign policy or education standards or architecture or popular music or movies or cloning or surrogate motherhood or medical care: these are issues that shouldn’t pose big arguments and “everybody should work them out for himself.” The only important matters are evangelism and prayer (mostly in the church) and AWANA programs and Beth Moore Bible studies and church leadership conferences. The upper deck alone is Christian.

Meanwhile, the lower deck gains its independence from Christianity. Why? The bus driver is always on the lower deck. The lower deck, already unattached from the Bible and church and Christianity, jettisons the upper deck, and soon starts driving the entire culture, above which the detached upper deck angelically floats, enjoying its helium holiness, while the lower deck drives the vast majority of cultural riders straight to hell. For this reason Joseph Boot writes: “To limit the kingdom of God to the church is to surrender culture to the enemies of God.”[7]

Conclusion

The temptation to surrender to ecclesiastical colonization is fierce. Living in a radically secular and neo-pagan culture, we feel safe retreating into our churches and ignoring the outside world. But Satan will never respect the sanctity of our churches. His objective in de-sacralizing culture is eventually to de-sacralize the church and family. Our counter-objective must be to re-sacralize all of life. The intention of the kingdom of God is to colonize all of life for Jesus Christ.

[1] P. Andrew Sandlin, Un-Inventing the Church (La Grange, California: Center for Cultural Leadership, 2007).

[2] S. U. Zuidema, Communication and Confrontation (Toronto: Wedge Publishing, 1972), 47.

[3] Christopher Dawson, Medieval Essays (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1954, 1968), 75–94.

[4] David VanDrunen, “Calvin, Kuyper, and ‘Christian Culture,” in Always Reformed, R. Scott Clark and Joel E. Kim, eds. (Escondido, California: Westminster Seminary California, 2010), 135–153.

[5] Brian G. Mattson, Cultural Amnesia (Billings, Montana: Swinging Bridge Press, 2018).

[6] Andree Troost, What Is Reformational Philosophy? (no loc.: Paideia Press, 2012), 1–21.

[7] No author listed [Joseph Boot], For Mission (Grimsby, Ontario: EICC Publications, 2018) 20.

Religious Liberty: America’s Christian Heritage

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on January 30, 2020

The U. S. Founders believed in religious liberty and as Christians (or Christian-influenced), they knew that “Christianity Is the Mother of Political Liberty.” In fact, political liberty grew out of religious liberty in Europe. Therefore, we need to know what religious liberty means. It doesn’t mean that the state is neutral toward religion. The “Establishment clause” of the First Amendment had a very precise meaning in the late 18^th century. It meant that the United States wouldn’t create an established national church as England did. Congress, therefore, was prohibited from establishing a national church (there was never any “Church of the United States”). Note this fact: The colonies, and then the states, almost all had either established churches or an establishment of a generic Christianity.

The Establishment clause

It’s hard for us to grasp this fact today, but the delegates to the Constitutional Convention demanded the Establishment clause not because they were secularists, but because they were Christians[1] — they had their own state churches and religion and they didn’t want a national church to interfere with it. They didn’t want the Feds intruding into the state religion. The Establishment clause was never designed to de-sacralize culture or even the state.

The Free Exercise clause

Then there’s the free exercise clause. Congress may not prohibit the free exercise of religion. This clause obviously didn’t reflect a secularizing objective. The European religious settlements often had allowed religious persecution for dissenters. The Framers wanted to avoid this, and they wrote that avoidance into law. They weren’t secularists trying to keep Christianity out of the public square; they were Christians who didn’t want any particular church to suffer persecution for its beliefs and practices. They didn’t want the Presbyterians persecuting the Baptists, for example.

There’s no “separation of church and state” in the Constitution (it came from a private letter by Jefferson). However, properly understood, there is a legitimate “separation of church and state” implied in the Constitution — but not the separation of the state from God, which is another matter altogether. The Founders did not want a “Christian state” as such, but they did want a state that reflected certain Christian truths as they related to politics.

Persuasion, not coercion

Now, undergirding this view of religious liberty (which for the Founders implied liberty for Christians) is a striking rationale. The Founders believed that true religion — the Gospel of Christianity — doesn’t require the coerciveness of national politics to survive and thrive. They believed that if left in the free market of ideas, Christianity had nothing to fear. They were tired of the European idea that the nation had to be commandeered by one church, which then in turn got special privileges and protections. The Founders believed that genuine faith didn’t need coercive protections. All it needed was the freedom to propagate and proselytize.

Now, as you know, this is simply not true of many other religions — Islam, for example, has a very different church-state paradigm. Islam requires state protection and coercion precisely because it has no Gospel, no Good News. It’s a moralizing faith, not a redemptive faith. States shaped by Christianity can offer religious liberty to Islam, but true Islamic states like Iran cannot (consistently) allow full religious liberty to Christians or anybody else, except Muslims. Christians can afford religious liberty, but Islamists cannot.

Amid the present cultural depravity, today’s well-intentioned Christian calls for “post-liberalism” are actually suggestions to walk away from a consistently Christian social order. The expression for the generic Founding political philosophy is classical liberalism. It is the closest thing to a Christian political philosophy you can get. One of its cornerstones is religious liberty.

Religious liberty in the United States reflects a Christian conviction — that religion is a matter of persuasion, not coercion.

[1] On all of these points, see Daniel L. Dreisbach, “In Search of a Christian Commonwealth: An Examination of Selected Nineteenth-Century Commentaries on References to God and the Christian Religion in the United States Constitution,” Baylor Law Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 [Fall 1996], 928–1000.

God’s War Plans, and Satan’s

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on January 19, 2020

God has chosen not to annihilate Satan and his forces, but to get the victory for his people through great conflict over sin. He decides to defeat it, not abolish it. Think about that fact for a moment, because it’ll help you understand many things about Christianity and the Christian life. God allows Satan and his hosts to continue their work. God refuses to give Satan the satisfaction of accomplishing the divine will by simply abolishing evil. God accomplishes this will by defeating evil. This means that there’re great battles that we Christians must fight, and they’re great battles of the heavenly realm, and many of those battles include angels arriving to answer our prayer (read Daniel 10).

Therefore, if you’re praying, and praying for a long time, and your prayers aren’t answered, don’t stop praying. Don’t assume that your prayer isn’t in God’s will. Only rarely in the Bible does God reveal that the prayer of a godly person is not in his will. In the vast majority of cases, he answers the prayer of his righteous people, because righteous people pray righteous prayers (Jas. 5:16). This, by the way, distinguishes biblical prayer from the heretical health and wealth gospel and the prosperity gospel. God isn’t interested in answering the prayers of worldly narcissists. But he delights to answer the prayer of his righteous people who wish only to please him.

Gospel battle

A massive front in the battle is Gospel preaching. In the Parable of the Good Sower (Mt. 13), Jesus says that when people don’t understand the Gospel, the evil one (Satan) comes and snatches away the good seed that was sown in their heart (v. 19). There’s never gospel preaching without spiritual warfare. Satan has a vested interest in preventing and perverting the gospel, and he does it all the time.

Jesus uses the same metaphor of planting seeds in the very next parable, the Parable of the Weeds (v. 24f.). The Lord himself sows good seed in the field of the world. The good seed is the people of God, “the sons of the kingdom.” Simultaneously, Satan sows the weeds, “the sons of the evil one.” In this parable, Satan’s not removing good seed; he is sowing bad seed, and the bad seed is actually people. This isn’t a pleasant thought for modern Christianity, but it is a biblical truth. Satan uses evil people to disrupt the kingdom of God, and places them near the people of God in the world. This is a tactic in his warfare. So we can’t pretend that everybody near us is either a Christian or neutral. Satan intentionally places people in the world to thwart the growth of the kingdom of God. And God will only remove them finally at the end of the world.

False apostles

Then think of the false apostles in 2 Corinthians 11. Paul says that Satan’s ministers, the angels or fallen elohim (gods), have begun impersonating ministers of righteousness. We’re not entirely clear what the specifics are of their teaching, but they were leading the Corinthians away from the simple, pure gospel of devotion to Jesus Christ. They were well educated and loved their rhetoric, and there’s nothing wrong with either, but they used these gifts to detract from the purity of the gospel.

Only rarely in the Bible does God reveal that the prayer of a godly person is not in his will. In the vast majority of cases, he answers the prayer of his righteous people, because righteous people pray righteous prayers

Whatever detracts from simple, single-hearted devotion to Jesus Christ is satanically inspired, and anybody who does this as a teacher is a satanic minister. It could be the idea that the Mosaic law can stand on its own apart from Jesus Christ. That’s false doctrine in both the New Testament and the Old Testament. It could mean that you had to become an ethic Jew in order to become a part of the people of God. That’s also false doctrine. It could be that since you’re saved by grace, you don’t have to quit sinning. That’s false doctrine. A grace strong enough to forgive you but not change you isn’t the grace of the Cross and resurrection. Any teaching that obscures or detracts from salvation in Jesus Christ alone, any Gospel that says there is good news apart from our Lord and his death and resurrection, is devilish. That’s at the heart of our warfare.

Apostasy battle

Consider next Luke 22:31–34. Jesus foretells Peter’s denial at his trial. He then says something truly remarkable. Jesus tells Peter that Satan has desired to have him so he could sift him like wheat: in other words, to wreak havoc on his very soul. But, listen to these powerful words: “I have prayed for you that your faith does not fail.” There’s warfare for the souls even of the people of God. Satan wants to destroy their faith and their trust in God. He wants to unleash torment and tribulation on them so that they turn their back on God, just as he tempted Job for that reason.

As we as a culture turn our back on God and revert to paganism, we can expect more demon possession.

What Jesus prayed for Peter I trust he prays for us. And God answered Jesus’ prayer. Peter failed temporarily, but he won permanently. Why? Because of the prayer of Jesus Christ. But make no mistake: there was a battle, and it was a fierce battle for Peter’s very soul.

Today when we see family members and church members and friends of people we look up to fall from the Faith, never assume this is simply as result of rational, mental calculation and “falling into sin,” or mere backsliding. Satan and his minions are wrecking their lives. They’ve suffered the onslaught, the havoc-wreaking forces of hell. This realization will cause us to be a little more patient with them, while, of course, warning them of the grave danger of turning their back on the Lord.

Healing and exorcism

If you read the synoptic Gospels you know that a big part of Jesus ministry was casting out demons and healing the sick. But what he claimed to be doing was defeating Satan (see Mt. 10:1; 12:22–28; Lk. 13:11–16). With the Advent of our Lord, the incursion of the kingdom of God entered a new and accelerated phase. Satan had bound the nations, particularly God’s chosen people Israel, and Jesus came to unbind. How can you plunder the house of the mighty man, if you don’t first bind the mighty man who has bound others? In that metaphor, Jesus depicts Satan as the mighty man that he is come to bind and plunder (Mt. 12:22f.). By the way, Jesus gave this metaphor after he had healed a blind and mute man. That healing was a mark of defeating Satan. It was hand-to-hand spiritual combat that Jesus seemed almost constantly to be engaging in. As much as we might deplore healing ministries and reprobate cash-four-health schemes, we can’t avoid the Bible’s plain teaching: part of spiritual warfare is battling illnesses. The same is true of battling demon possession. This is the biblical world.

And if you wonder why we don’t see more evidence of demon possession in our world while we hear about it a lot more in places like Africa and the Asian bush, it’s because those places aren’t as Christianized as the West; the power of the gospel has pushed Satan to the margins. As we as a culture turn our back on God and revert to paganism, we can expect more demon possession.

Sovereignty and battle

Incidentally, have you noticed that when Jesus confronted those who are possessed by demons, he never laid the blame on them? Today we talk a lot about people’s sins that invite demon possessions, and they certainly can (Mt. 12:43–45). But Jesus looked at these poor, pitiful creatures as the victims of Satan’s hatred for God and for his kingdom. They were casualties of war. This of itself shows us that there’s a great evil in the world, and it’s not the results only of man’s sin but of Satan and his insurrectionist minions.

People sometimes ask the perennial question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The Bible’s answer is simple. Because there is great evil in the world. We can’t say, “Well, God is sovereign, and he could stop it.” Of course he could. But in stopping evil he would have to stop the entire universe. He chose to create both human and nonhuman beings with the capacity for choices, and those choices are sometimes evil. This doesn’t mean they can overthrow his sovereignty. God can and will still accomplish his purposes, but he will accomplish them partly by means of human and nonhuman choices. And those choices, tragically, are often evil. In this way, God got can use sin for his own purposes without being the author of sin. God’s not the author of little babies being burned and buried alive by ISIS, but he’s still working all things for his own glory.

In short, there is evil in the world, great evil, and it won’t overthrow God’s plan, but he is also not the source of it.

Christus victor

The Cross of Jesus Christ was the greatest act of spiritual warfare in human history, and it was God’s greatest victory. Gordon Rupp writes:

There are forces at work in human history which represent human solidarities, perverted and twisted and full of danger. They’re part of the pattern of evil. They’re part of the conflict in our human existence. If the Christian gospel were only concerned with the moral problems of individual men and women, it would be defective indeed. But the first Christians knew better when they affirmed, ‘Christ has conquered sin and death and principalities and powers’.
E. Gordon Rupp, “Principalities & Powers”

Our war is bigger than we think.

Hope, Not Quarantine

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on January 8, 2020

What our children and grandchildren consider normal will be shaped not only by what they hear and see in family and church but also in the surrounding culture.

Our Post-Constantinian, Pre-Christian World

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on December 18, 2019

An important but overlooked essay on Christianity and culture is Massey H. Shepherd’s “Before and After Constantine.”[1] In reaction to assertions by historians like Arnold Toynbee that Christianity has been becoming gradually obsolete or, at least, losing its influence, he suggests that the real predicament for Christianity is in another area. The actual problem, asserts Shepherd, is not that Christianity is losing influence, only that it is losing influence in society. It’s possible that in certain small pockets of the West, a vibrant, virile Christianity survives — and even flourishes. But it does not survive as a culturally dominant force.

Whatever one may think of the product of Constantine’s Edict of Milan (313), it ushered in an astoundingly extensive era of Christian culture. In fact, in the East, the longest-lived human empire in the history of the world was Christian — I am speaking, of course, of that centered in Byzantium. Constantine’s edict, it is sometimes presumed, explicitly established Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. This is not correct, as Charles Norris Cochrane observes in his great Christianity and Classical Culture.[2] Constantine granted religious liberty. The Edict of Milan truly was an act of political toleration, canceling persecution of the church and restoring its confiscated lands and other possessions. The fact that Christianity soon became the dominant cultural force in the ambiance of such relative political toleration lends credence to the idea that what is necessary for such dominance is not official political establishment, but only the absence of official political hostility. If given genuine religious freedom, all other factors being equal, Christianity tends to rise to the top.

Christian culture requires religious liberty

Today’s Western world, including its preeminent nation, the United States, does not in practice accord Christianity such freedom. Expressions of orthodox, Biblical Christianity are officially or unofficially outlawed or censured in politics, the major media, the educational institutions, the artistic community, and so on. Note carefully that while the profession of Christianity is permitted to exist in many of these spheres, the practice of such Christianity is often outlawed. No Christian teacher in any state school in the United States may teach Biblical Christianity as absolute, divine truth or evangelize his students. No civil magistrate may enforce the law of God as it relates to aborticide (elective abortion). No local, orthodox church may treat its physical property as though it were an extraterritorial Christian outpost and as a legal haven for those wrongfully persecuted for their faith, race, and so on. It is questionable whether Bible-believing churches will be permitted to discriminate against practicing homosexuals who apply for church membership. The George W. Bush administration elicited a media firestorm when it was thought that it had cut a deal with the Salvation Army to protect this organization from local laws that forbid discrimination in hiring homosexuals. The Boy Scouts, hardly an overt Christian organization, wished simply to maintain its traditional policy of forbidding homosexual Scout leaders; and it was subjected to merciless assaults, even publicly at the Democratic National Convention. In July 2015, under immense pressure, the Scouts ended their ban on openly gay Scout leaders.

If the present trend is not reversed, it is possible that soon in the United States orthodox Christian ministers will not be permitted publicly to declare the Biblical teaching regarding homosexuality, regarding the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation, and regarding false religion. These will be considered “unprotected” speech in that they offend “good, hard-working Americans.” The problem is not that Christianity as such is becoming less virulent (though this likely also is true), but that it is becoming less relevant in the society at large.

If given genuine religious freedom, all other factors being equal, Christianity tends to rise to the top.

Some jeremiads speak of a “post-Christian” world. It’s more accurate to speak of a post-Constantinian world. Christianity still survives (even, in small pockets, some orthodox Christianity!); but it decreasingly influences education, politics, media, the arts, and so forth. When the present administration in Washington, D.C., for example, floats policies reflecting even the slightest degree of even the most generic Christian faith, the liberal elite in Congress and the media mercilessly shouts them down. While this is inexcusable, it is perfectly understandable, given the present dominant secular culture rabidly hostile to anything that smacks of Biblical faith.

Christian culture is the only viable culture

The only legitimate culture the Bible knows anything about is a godly culture under divine authority mediated in the Bible. It was this culture spawned by Constantine’s act which, however, imperfectly, laid the foundation for a medieval and Reformation Europe Christian culture which, by and large, reflected a sincere, widespread attempt to please God in all things, not merely at church on Sunday. This culture was the fruit (from a human standpoint) not only of vigilant prayer and labor in the family and church, but also in the wider society. It repudiated (or rather, did not even consider) the idea that there could be zones of life impervious to Christianity, the Bible, and the church. This culture is fully compatible with (and, I believe today demands) constitutional democracy and republican forms of government, which tend to check the growth of tyranny.

It is only when Christians recover a full-orbed, liberty-loving faith that we can expect manumission from the slavery of secularism under which we presently languish. We will recover this faith. As my friend Dr. Joseph Boot likes to say, we live not in a post-Christian world but a pre-Christian world: the world of the cultural prevalence of true Christianity uncontaminated by elements of ancient Greek philosophy that blighted medieval Christian culture is ahead of us. Future Christian culture will surpass past Constantinian culture.

[1] Massey H. Shepherd, “Before and After Constantine,” in The Impact of the Church Upon Its Culture, Jerald C. Brauer, ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 17–38.

[2] Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 178–179.

MAGA? Well, What Made America Great in the First Place?

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on December 11, 2019

The president’s successful campaign slogan Make America Great Again (MAGA) is entirely legitimate, but I’m not sure that most Americans know what made our country great in the first place. It wasn’t our natural resources or two massive oceans that separated us from Europe and Asia. Nor was it even our military might or system of government or character of our citizens, though all of these contributed to our greatness. Rather, it was the providential hand of the Triune God and our substantial submission to him and his word and gospel that made America great.

The United States wasn’t founded as an explicitly Christian republic, and people who argue that it was only embarrass themselves. It was, however, launched as an implicitly Christian nation, and secularists who deny this truth are equally embarrassing.[1] All of the founders were either Christian or influenced by an establishment sort of Christianity.[2]

Christianity is a holistic Faith. We often hear about holistic medicine, that is, medicine that addresses not only the physical dimension of the person but also his spiritual and emotional and psychological aspects. Holistic means: the whole thing. Christianity is designed to shape and influence and impact all of life, the entire cosmos. God placed the man and woman in the Garden to live eternally as obedient worshippers. Their entire lives were to be lived in the presence of God for his glory, obeying his will in toto.

Anti-Compartmentalization

Christianity became great because it refused to be compartmentalized. You might remember that this word entered the national lexicon during the Clinton presidency. Allegedly one factor contributing to his political success was his ability to compartmentalize. For example, he could compartmentalize his private life of sexual immorality from his public life of politics. On an even darker side, Nazi executioners at Auschwitz could gas Jews during the day and to go home to their loving families at night. They were the consummate compartmentalizers.

The Christian Faith is averse to compartmentalization. Since the Triune Creator God is sovereign in his universe, and since Jesus Christ is Lord over the entire cosmos, we’re not permitted to seal off certain aspects of life from God’s loving, compassionate authority. Christianity is in part an anti-compartmentalization program.

How Christianity Made the West (and America) Great

With this comprehensive view of Christ’s authority, it’s no wonder that Christianity changed the world.[3] What we know as Western civilization would’ve been impossible without Christianity, because it refuses to compartmentalize religion into airtight “spiritual” containers. Therefore, it transforms all of life. For example …

Dignity of human life

Christianity restored the dignity of human life at a time when life was cheap (remember the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome?). Abortion and infanticide were rampant. Christians knew man was created in God’s image, so they opposed abortion and rescued abandoned infants. If you want to know why Western civilization until recent decades treasured human life, why medical doctors worked so hard to preserve it, why automobiles pull off to the shoulder when an ambulance races by, why murder is a capital offense, why humans go to extraordinary lengths to rescue individuals trapped under rubble or in collapsed mines — it’s because of the influence of Christianity.

Had Jesus Christ never been born, had Greco-Roman civilization simply continued to develop, we have no good reason for assuming that our world today would be any different materially from the ancient world and its cheap view of human life. It’s radically different today because of Christianity. Unfortunately, as our culture is apostatizing and turning its back on Jesus Christ, the classically pagan disregard for human life is returning. Departure from Christianity necessitates departure from the dignity of human life.

Exaltation of women

Second, ponder the exaltation of women. Feminists today blame Christianity with oppressing women, but primitive Christianity did just the opposite. Ironically, modern radical feminists often revive the pagan worldview that degraded women in the classical world. By contrast, the Bible depicts women as not inferior to men, but as their partners. This is God’s arrangement set forth in Genesis 1:28–30 in the cultural mandate, humanity’s call to exercise stewardship and dominion over the rest of creation. Both husband and wife are heirs together of the grace of life (1 Pet. 3:7).

Purification of sexuality

Third, think about the purification of sexuality. If you’d visited a home in the Greco-Roman world, you’d likely be stunned by least one factor: the depiction of raw sexual acts, including perversion, on everyday items like wall fixtures, oil lamps, vases, bowls, and cups. Pornography was routine and ubiquitous. There’s a harrowing explanation for this pervasive pornography. Marriage and sexual fidelity were looked on with derision and disgust. Sexual fidelity in marriage was a rarity. Sadism, masochism, and sexual orgies were common. Common bathhouses were magnets for heterosexual fornication, not to mention rampant sexual perversion in society.

The Christian approach to human sexuality was decisively different. The sexual act is a beautiful gift from God to be reserved in marriage between a man and woman. Intercourse is designed for both delight and procreation within the divine ordinance of marriage. Interestingly, it was Christianity that introduced the now widespread notion of sexual privacy. Sexual intercourse is a private, not a public, act.

Rise of modern science

Fourth, think about modern science. No weapon in the arsenal of atheism, agnosticism, and secularism has been wielded as frequently against Christianity in the last century than this: Christianity is at war with science. There’s only one way honestly to answer this charge. It’s flatly false. Modern science could never have materialized apart from Christianity.

Gregor Mendel, Augustinian friar, and father of modern genetics

In the ancient world, what we today call empirical science was unknown. The Greek philosophers and Roman thinkers were deductive, rational thinkers. Their way of arriving at a conclusion was to begin with axioms they were already committed to, and from those axioms arrive at their conclusions. Nobody employed what we today call the scientific method. Almost nobody put theories to the test by conducting experiments in the physical world. This meant that if there was scientific advancement, it came by accident.

Christianity is in part an anti-compartmentalization program.

What Christian thinkers began to understand, in addition to the divinely ordered universe, is that since the Creator is separate from creation, we can and should study creation on its own right. We can and must be inductive thinkers.

The newly translated book from 1904 by Herman Bavinck titled Christian Worldview[4] points out that Christianity recognizes that knowledge arises as our sensations interact with the real, concrete world. We don’t begin by turning away from the external world and into our private thought world. We start thinking as we immerse ourselves in the created world as the theater of God’s glory. This is precisely what modern science did, and how it developed such remarkable, life-enhancing and -prolonging advances.

De-stigmatization of labor and vocation

This brings us to the fifth way Christianity is great. One reason the Greco-Romans were so undeveloped scientifically is because they believed manual labor or working with one’s hands is an inferior, demeaning task. The wealthy and upper classes left manual labor to slaves. If they were intellectuals like Plato, they relished deep thoughts that couldn’t be disturbed by physical labor. This silly idea cut the Greco-Roman world off from important developments that only intellect wedded to manual labor could produce.

The early Christians were different. They knew that their Lord was a carpenter before he was a rabbi and teacher. The apostle Paul labored with his hands and encouraged others to do it. In fact, he taught that if one doesn’t work, he shouldn’t eat (2 Thes. 3:10). They were hard workers, and as a result, they made money. In fact, the Romans sometimes criticized the Christians because they were wealthy. This fact turns on its head the misperception that all the early Christians were poor and from the lower classes. They worked with their hands, and their work produced wealth.

The Reformation, in particular, exalted work and vocation. Ironically, today many evangelicals teach or imply that only those in “full-time Christian ministry” are serving the Lord most faithfully. The Reformers didn’t consider this caste system to be biblical. It introduced artificial distinctions into the Christian church. So-called secular vocation itself could be, and should be, holy. We might call this the sanctification of vocation, and it had a profound effect on culture. It meant that the shoe cobbler or wool merchant could look on his work as distinctively Christian.

If today the plumber and flight attendant and software architect and waitress is honored for working hard and not held in contempt, it’s because of Christianity, notably Protestant Christianity. Had Christianity never disturbed the Greco-Roman world, it’s possible that even today manual labor would be looked down on, and vocation would be considered secondary to higher, “intellectual” callings.

Liberation of economics

Sixth, ponder the liberation of economics. In the Greco-Roman world, there were essentially two economic classes, the rich and the poor, who were usually slaves. Most economic growth was the result of slave labor, or of the conquest of new territory. The idea of what we term a “growing economy” within a society was virtually unknown.

Christianity laid the foundation for the free-market economy that has enriched the world, wherever it has gone. Why? For one thing, God’s law protected property rights; your property couldn’t be merely stripped by the state or by criminals. This meant that people could freely trade. The integrity of personal property grew out of the Hebrew (biblical) law.

Individuals could work hard and produce for themselves and in this way gain wealth. This, in turn, created what we call the middle class. No longer was everybody either rich or poor. There are some people who are moderately wealthy but neither rich nor poor. Later came the Protestant work ethic: Christians were called to work hard and save and not engage in conspicuous consumption. In this way they amassed wealth.

This also means that we are constantly serving each other. I’m helping you, and you are helping me. In fact, I can’t get what I want unless I serve your needs. The free market turns everybody into a servant, though not a slave: the wealthiest CEO must serve his costumers’ needs if he is to remain successful.

The economic success of the West was erected on the generic Christian foundation of property rights and hard work, as well as the Protestant work ethic, which stressed thrift and saving. The Bible forbids the state to redistribute wealth for purposes of so-called “social justice” and “welfare” and, more poisonous still, social engineering programs. Charity is the job of the individual, family and church, the so-called “private” sector. By radically reducing the power of the empires, and what we today call politics, Christianity liberated economics from its ancient stranglehold and fostered massive wealth. This fact leads to the final factor contributing to Christianity’s greatness.

Spawning of political liberty

“Liberty has not subsisted outside of Christianity.”[5] So said the Catholic historian Lord Acton. Christianity shattered the unity of the ancient, pagan world. The source of that unity was the state, usually identified with society itself. At the head of the state was a great political ruler, a king or emperor, thought to be a god or god-like. The unity of the ancient, pagan world consisted of the divinization of the temporal order in the form of the state: Egypt and Babylon and Persia and Greece, and especially the Roman Empire under whose government Jesus Christ was born. Christianity recognized “another king” (Ac. 17:7).

This recognition set early Christianity on a collision course with classical politics. Early Christians were savagely persecuted not because they worshipped Jesus Christ, but because they refused to worship the Roman emperor.

The most vicious, violent, and murderous political regimes in the history of mankind have been non- or anti-Christian

Constitutional limitations on political power, the roots of modern classical liberalism, started in Christian England with the Magna Carta. Out of these limitations arose the practice of 18^th and 19^th century constitutional democracies. England also delivered the first successful assault against the evil doctrine of the divine right of kings during the Puritan Revolution.

The founding of the United States was perhaps the greatest experiment in political liberty to that time. It was classically liberal, and it operated self-consciously on certain distinctly Christian premises. The Founders, for example, recognized the Biblical doctrine of original sin and human depravity, and therefore fashioned a system of civil government that divided decision-making among several branches. They didn’t vest any single branch of civil government with too much power. They argued that the role of civil government is to secure the rights of “life, liberty, and happiness,” with which God as Creator endowed all men. Recognizing the Biblical doctrine that civil government should protect minorities (Ex. 23:9), they drafted a constitution to which they attached a Bill of Rights. This inhibited tyranny arising from quick political change at the whim of democratic opinion.

Political liberty as reflected in the separation of powers, as well as checks and balances; the role of the state in protecting life, liberty, and property; and the constitutional protection of the rights of minorities all these were bequeathed to the modern world by Christianity.

The idea that the West should get rid of Christianity and embrace secularism in order to preserve political liberty is not just mistaken: it’s embarrassingly false. The most vicious, violent, and murderous political regimes in the history of mankind have been non- or anti-Christian: the primitive pagan humanism of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, and the sophisticated secular humanism of revolutionary France, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and other modern secular states like North Korea and the “new” China.

Humanism is and always has been a recipe for political terror and tyranny.

Today the West languishes under the violence of abortion and euthanasia, the scourge of homosexuality, the poverty of materialism, the coercion of socialism, the stranglehold of public education, the chaos of judicial activism, and the injustice of a forced racism and sexism. These tyrannies are all the direct result of the abandonment of biblical Christianity.

The Western world has increasingly accepted the proposal of that first modern political liberal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau:[6] the state will emancipate you from responsibility to all non-coercive human institutions like the family, church, and business, if only you submit yourself to the coercion of the state. Modern man has been willing to trade away responsibility to the family and church and business for subjugation to an increasingly coercive and violent political order. We’re returning to the classical, pagan world in which the coercive state is the unifying principle for all of life.

The only hope for the return of political liberty and the free society it fosters is a return to orthodox, biblical Christianity. Christianity isn’t merely a matrix in which political freedom flourishes; it is the only foundation on which to build a free society.

Conclusion

In review: the dignity of human life, the exaltation of women, purification of sexuality, the rise of modern science, the elevation of labor and vocation, the liberation of economics, and the spawning of political liberty — these are just several of the numerous ways in which Christianity is great, and made our world great.

We may not compartmentalize Christianity or say that Christianity is designed to be great in the family and church but doesn’t much matter in science or sexuality or economics or politics or entertainment or education. If Christianity is great, it should be great everywhere. And everywhere Christianity goes, despite the sinfulness of Christians, it makes the world great. The only way to MAGA is to make Christianity great again.

[1] Daniel L. Dreisbach, “The Constitution’s Forgotten Religion Clause: Reflections on the Article VI Religious Test Ban,” Journal of Church and State, 38 [Spring 1996], 261–295.

[2] M. E. Bradford, “Religion and the Framers: The Biographical Evidence,” Original Intentions (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 87–101.

[3] For this entire section I am greatly indebted to Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001).

[4] Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2019), 36–39.

[5] Lord Acton, Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality, J. Rufus Fears, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 491.

[6] Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 27–49.

Advent: Peace or Conflict?

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on December 4, 2019

Abraham Hondius, *Annunciation to the Shepherds* (1663)

When the angels announced the birth of our Lord to the shepherds, they noted that this incarnation of God would bring “peace on earth, goodwill toward men” (Lk. 2:14). This oft-repeated Christmastime pledge warms the hearts of Christians and even many non-Christians who bemoan the obvious and ubiquitous conflict in our world. There is hope that in Jesus Christ, this conflict will be permanently quieted.

Yet when he commissioned his apostles, Jesus told them that he did not come “to bring peace but a sword” (Mt. 10:34). The contradiction is only apparent, not actual. The resolution is found in this truth: God promises peace in his Son’s Advent, but only on his terms. God isn’t interested in granting peace to a fallen world at war with his purposes. God is only interested in shaking a fallen world, and only when the sin has finally been shaken off, will he bring global peace.

The Peace the Wicked Seek

The wicked often seek peace, but they seek it on their own terms. They want peace to live their rebellious, depraved, apostate lives. God doesn’t grant it. We should be neither deceived nor mocked. Whatever a person sows, that is what he reaps (Gal. 6:7–8). The wicked live a life of greed and debauchery, deception and sexual rapacity; and they bear in their minds and bodies the consequences of their sin. They long for peace, but they cannot find it.

And after awhile, they fume, as it were, to the Almighty, righteous God, “Why don’t you leave us alone and let us live in peace in our world?

And he responds, “Because it’s not your world. It’s my world, and I won’t leave it in peace until it returns to my righteous ways.” C. S. Lewis suggests that this is why God calls his people to be militant, not peaceful, in this sinful world:

… Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world — that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of his head’ as a man makes up story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.
From Mere Christianity

God is loudly insisting on getting his way, and he won’t give the sinful world peace; no, he will unleash conflict on the sinful world until he gets his way.

Our Sinfully Conflicted World

Our world seems constantly in conflict. It’s hard to compare today’s chaos, violence, terror, anger, fatal accidents, suicides, hatred, perversion, and apostasy to that of the past. Maybe it’s just that we know more about these things because of the 24/7 new cycle or our ubiquitous smartphones.

Whatever the case, our world is deeply shaken: Iran preparing to go to war, North Korea building nuclear weapons, England pulling out of the EU, tribal wars in Africa, child sex slavery, opioid epidemics, and I could go on and on. It’s not just that we know about these shaking events; with the advent of computers and smartphones, we can see palpable images of many of them. It seems as though they’re happening right next to us.

Obviously, this conflict can provoke in us fear, worry, and anxiety. Some people live almost their entire lives that way, even Christians. They get up in the morning to check their smartphones to find out what new thing that can worry about, and then they’re distraught that they’re worried all the time.

The wicked often seek peace, but they seek it on their own terms. They want peace to live their rebellious, depraved, apostate lives. God doesn’t grant it.

The most important fact to know about all of these earthshaking, anxiety-producing events is this: God is behind the shaking conflict. God is shaking the heavens and the earth in this new covenant era (Heb. 12:18–29). The shaking will do its final work only at Christ’s second advent, but he is shaking the world even now. This is true even if the wicked are unleashing the shaking. It doesn’t mean that God is the author of sin; he doesn’t force terrorists and abortionists and child sex traffickers to unleash their evil. Perish the thought. But the shaking that their sin causes is part of his plan to do one thing: get rid of the sin. God asks Job rhetorically:

“… Have you commanded the morning since your days began, [a]nd caused the dawn to know its place, That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, [a]nd the wicked be shaken out of it?” (emphasis supplied)
Job 38:12–13

For this reason, we believers need not fear this nearly constant divine shaking. We should be happy about, in fact. We shouldn’t want a peaceful world if that peaceful world is sinful. Sin derails, demolishes, and damns. Sin is the great enemy of God’s good creational purposes. To desire peace for a sinful world is to long for the victory of sin. That is not a desire God will ever honor.

So when we observe wars, and political strife in Washington D.C., and diseases and even death, we can and should grieve over the suffering, but we cannot grieve over God’s earth-quaking purposes. All the shaking in the world means that God is not giving sinful man his way. “The way of transgressors is hard,” we read in Proverbs 13:15. It is hard for Saul the persecutor to kick against God’s goads (Ac. 9:5). God doesn’t make it easy for the wicked, and we should find great comfort in this truth.

We should delight in all of the conflict that surrounds us. It means that God is not allowing the sinful world to go on its merry way.

Conclusion

Jesus tells his disciples (and us), “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16:33). The internal peace that should fill the hearts of believers because of the Gospel of Jesus Christ will one day overwhelm the world by the pervasive power of that same Gospel. The objective of the present conflict unleashed by our Triune God to purge sin is nothing short of global peace — peace on his terms. This is very different from the Marxists who, following Hegel, see conflict as an end in itself, a permanent revolution. God launched the conflict when sin entered the world in Eden, promising hostility between the seed of the serpent and the Seed of the woman until Jesus Christ crushed Satan’s head. He did that definitively at Calvary, but the implications of that momentous, head-crushing victory work their way out in time and history (Heb. 1:8).

This Christmas, peace can reign in our heart because our God will not bring peace to our fallen world until he has purged it of the sin and rebellion that alone make the conflict necessary. If you love righteousness, you’ll love only a righteous peace. That is the peace God promises to his people now and his created world for the future.

Homosexuality: Ordered Sins versus Disordered Sins

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on November 16, 2019

In the current dispute ( = battle) over homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” and “-attraction” ( = temptation) in the church, biblical conservatives are often confronted by this argument: “Yes, homosexuality and its related desires are sinful, but they are no worse than their heterosexual counterparts.” (The terms homosexual and heterosexual are 19^th century secular, humanistic inventions, but they are the only verbal currency available to us in the present climate, and that’s the only reason I use them.)

The “homosexuality is no worse” assertion fails to distinguish between ordered and disordered sins. Ordered sins are violations within creational normativity. Disordered sins attempt to overturn the cosmic order.

In Genesis 1-2 as well as subsequent biblical texts that refer to the creation, the Holy Spirit lays out God’s OS (operating system) that inheres in his creational order. If we attempt to upend that order, we do not destroy creation, but we do end up destroying ourselves and our societies. Sins against this creational order we may designate as disordered sins. These sins delegitimize and strike at the created order itself.

Ordered sins, conversely, are violations of God’s law within his order. Theft, kidnapping, gossip, adultery, and assault are ordered sins. They transgress God’s norms for his creational order.

Disordered sins strike at the order itself, attempting to overturn it. Examples are idolatry, homosexuality, murder, and today’s radical environmentalism. Let’s take these sequentially.

The Creator-creature distinction is the very first and the basic creational norm. God created the universe, and though he broods over it, he is not a part of it. To worship creation as God is to attempt to overturn the basic created order.

Ordered sins are violations within creational normativity. Disordered sins attempt to overturn the cosmic order.

Marriage, likewise, is a creational norm, defined as a covenantally bound sexual union of one man and one woman in which the most intense earthly intimacy is exhibited and on which the propagation of the race depends. Sexual intercourse (or lust) between members of the same sex; or between humans and non-humans (bestiality); or, by extension, by humans with machines (robotic sex, coming soon via Amazon delivery to a neighbor near you) try to deracinate the created order.

It should come as no surprise that in Romans 1, Paul unites and highlights idolatry and homosexuality as ultimate sins: they are contra-creational, high-handed, rebellion. They therefore warrant God’s severest judgment, being among the severest sins.

Then there’s murder. Man was created in the image of God, and thus to destroy that image is to subvert his created order. This is why one of the first positive laws of the Bible to which a penal sanction is attached is the prohibition of murder. To destroy human life without divine cause (this includes aborticide) is to attack the imago dei, a creational norm.

We might balk at seeing radical environmentalism similarly categorized, but the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:28–30) is itself a creational norm. Man and woman are placed on earth principally to exercise stewarding dominion over the rest of God’s non-human creation. Radical environmentalism reverses this command; or prohibits him in this calling; and in some cases, presses for the dominion of nature over man, a radical contra-creational reversal. Radical environmentalism is, therefore, a disordered sin.

One striking inferential proof of the comparative severity of homosexuality is the fact that the Bible does not establish boundaries for it as it does with heterosexuality. The Bible is replete with probations of specific heterosexual acts: rape, pedophilia, premarital sex, adultery, incest, and so forth. There are no such prohibitions with respect to homosexuality, simply because they unnecessary. It is necessary to issue such prohibitions with respect to heterosexuality, because heterosexuality is a creational norm that can be violated.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, admits of no qualification, since every homosexual act is a sin. That palpably is not true as it pertains to heterosexuality. Ordered sins are those whose specific variation can be and often is a virtue; disordered sins are those for which no variation is valid and for which no variant boundaries are necessary.

To mitigate the severe verdict on homosexuality and related sins is to confuse ordered and disordered sins. Homosexuality is cosmic insurrection.

To try to break the creational OS is the worst sin of all.

Postmodernity, Simply Explained

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on October 4, 2019

We’ve all heard about postmodernism.[1] This popularity is probably a result of the fact that it’s the dominant pop worldview in the West. Our culture hosts several worldviews, but it’s postmodernism that’s widely pervasive on the popular level. One of the most memorable, brief descriptions of postmodernism is also the title of Walter Truett Anderson’s Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be.^[2] Postmodernism attempts to reengineer reality.

Many of us know that postmodernism is associated with relativism: there’re no moral absolutes. It’s also akin to multiculturalism, which is actually relativism as it pertains to societies and civilizations. No culture or civilization is superior to another. But to get a deeper understanding, we should know a little more about how postmodernism came about.

After modernism

Postmodernism literally means “after modernism.” What is modernism? It’s a way of thinking rooted in the Enlightenment that developed in artistic fields late in the 19^th century. The mantra of modernism is Ezra Pound’s “Make it new!”[3] Every generation, every era, must privilege its own unique situation and standards. It must break sharply with the past.

Artistic modernism began with the Impressionist paintings of Monet, Renoir, and Manet. Many young artists in 19^th century France found the traditional canons of realistic art to be imperious, restrictive, and boring. They wanted to break out and start something new. Over time this idea spread to music, literature, theater, dance, and even theology. The past was suitable for its own time, but not theirs. Tradition is passé. It has nothing useful to teach us.

Postmodernism, interestingly, also started in the field of art early in the 20^th century. It was a new way of painting, or better yet, a new way of representation. Up into the modern era, people accepted the idea that man can truly represent reality. You draw a picture (say, of the Madonna or of a landscape) and it was believed you can represent the reality of the object in that picture with relative accuracy. As the 20^th century and modernism moved on, however, artists became less convinced that they could represent reality objectively. The artist himself was believed to be a part of the world that he depicted. In other words, there was a conscious meshing of the objective and the subjective in art. An artist inescapably puts a part of himself, of his own perspective, into the picture, whether he wants to or not. Subjectivity became meshed in objectivity. The artist merged with the world he was trying to depict.

Refusing to depict the inability to depict

Then we get to something deeper. Whenever we draw things, whenever we depict things, whenever we mold things, we have in mind other things that cannot be depicted as such, things that are beyond our capacity fully to depict — truth, beauty, omniscience, love, hope, evil, even life itself. These are concepts that we can each conceive in our minds, but they cannot fully be depicted. We can show examples of each one — justice in the movie The Magnificent Seven, or love in the play Romeo and Juliet, or mystery in the painting Mona Lisa — but we can only get a visual representation, not the actual concept itself. In other words, we can think of things that we can’t present or depict. We might call these things the sublime. Modern artists knew that they couldn’t depict the sublime, but they still wanted to reveal it in some way, so they tried to show that they cannot show it. For example, the Russian Modernist artist Malevich painted a white square on a white background. He was trying to show that some things can’t be shown. The modernist still wanted to get a grasp of everything, even if he can’t depict it. He wanted to be able to use the medium of art to convey the picture of “real” reality — even if he can’t show it as it “really” is. He wanted to use art to depict what cannot be depicted.

**Kavimir Malevich, *Suprematist Composition: White on White* (1918)**

Now, the postmodern is different. He knows there is the sublime, that which cannot be depicted. But instead of trying to show that he cannot show it, he employs chaotic forms to show that man cannot show it. In other words, the postmodernist attacks the modernist, who thinks he can depict all reality by not depicting it. The big point is that the attempt to show what cannot be shown, to try to capture everything in the sublime, is false and foolish and dangerous and tyrannical. It’s part of the modernist urge to control everything.

But the postmodernist doesn’t just want to show that there’s something you can’t depict. He wants to show the folly of thinking you can depict that lack of depiction! He says that man must leave some things alone. Man cannot have the sublime at his fingertips. Man must know that he lacks knowledge and that he can never depict that lack and shouldn’t try. We must live with no overarching sense of reality. This also implies that there can no worldviews.

Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring

The war on progress

Because modernists still believed in the sublime, still affirmed the reality of worldviews, they were committed to progress. Human reason that was elevated at the Enlightenment was to be the engine to assure that every generation is superior to the previous one. Modernism was like Darwinism at this point, but the mechanism was entirely different. For Darwinists, progress occurs by biological evolution. For modernists, it happens by the relentless use of reason. Reason continually emancipates from the tyrannies of the past, even the recent past. Musical modernists included Claude Debussy, Arthur Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. They were consciously trying to break with the classical tradition. People still called their music “classical,” but it’s very different from what went before. It’s often intentionally incoherent in its atonality. It’s dissonant music. The goal is to be unique, even revolutionary. The same spirit animated the architectural modernists, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the German Bauhaus school in Weimer Germany. This is equally true in poetry, theater, fiction, and even the church. Modernism in Christianity meant breaking with Christian orthodoxy of the last 1700 years and adapting the Faith to both the scientific and romantic age.[4] This is how almost every major denomination in United States went apostate in the 20^th century. Modernistic apostasy in the culture was paralleled by modernistic apostasy in the church.

**Frank Lloyd Wright, *Fallingwater* (1937)**

Modernism was optimistic in crushing the past and marching toward a glorious future. But modernism got its own comeuppance in postmodernism. How? What if modernism itself became the past that needed to be crushed? Modernism was committed to unceasing, improving, progressive change. But what if the change were to be that there is no longer improvement, progress, and change? This is largely what postmodernism proposed. Postmodernism is really hyper-modernism’s attack on its predecessor. Modernism birthed postmodernism, and then postmodernism committed patricide. Or, to alter the metaphor, it’s the case of the snake devouring its own tail.

Emancipatory individualism

Modernism was committed to utopian visions: for instance, international communism or nationalistic Nazism or global democracy. We can create society as heaven on earth. Postmodernism shifted from utopian society to emancipatory individualism. That is, the important thing was not so much a social vision as an individual vision, which society should guarantee. Society should guarantee that I can create my own reality. I am a producer and consumer of reality. An endless supply of options should constantly be available to me. I can be married or unmarried, homosexual or heterosexual, introverted or extroverted, passive or aggressive. I can be anything I want to be, and if for some reason I cannot, someone else is at fault. I am entitled to a multitude of options.

In all of its bizarre, tradition-crushing program, Modernism had maintained a unified theory of the triumph of reason, progress by constant, unremitting improvement. Postmodernism depicts life as fragmentary, chaotic, balkanized. There are no universals, only particulars: particular people, particular institutions, and particular communities.

Anti-conservative anti-collectivists

If you think about it, this last part sounds a lot like original conservatism. The original conservatives like Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution and Enlightenment because they tended to uproot individuals and their family and cultures in favor of a universal, cosmopolitan, global viewpoint. After all, the Enlightenment wanted to level everything before universal human reason. The postmodernist saw what happened with universal reason and the quest for utopia that it spawned. They identified Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia with Enlightenment totalitarianism.[5] The problem with a shared vision of the good life is that people disagree on what the good life is. So the only answer is to retreat completely to the individual. In this, postmodernism is the child of Existentialism. And like the Romantics, the individual is the self-creator.

The postmodernists are anti-conservative anti-collectivists.[6] This might sound contradictory to us. When we think of conservatives, what immediately comes to mind is their strong sense of individualism in the face of the collectivism of, for example, communism or fascism. The American Founding was largely individualistic. This is a tenet of what we call classical liberalism.[7] The true conservatives stand for individual liberty against the collective.

So it might seem odd that postmodernists could be anti-collectivist. They are, in fact, radical, left-wing individualists.[8] This is a way of thinking that some modern conservatives have never encountered. They assume that if we oppose collectivism, or statism, for example, we will have a better society. But that is far from the truth. Postmodernists want radical individual freedom from authority, freedom from morality, freedom from creation, from almost all of constraints. All they need the state for is to guarantee that freedom. (This, by the way, is how postmodernism intersects with Cultural Marxism.)

Incredulity toward metanarratives

Jean-François Lyotard famously summarized postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”[9] A narrative is a story, an account. Postmodernists believe that we all live by stories, create our own stories, exist within our own stories, and revise our own stories.[10] We create our own reality. The problem comes when we allow someone else, or group, to create one, large overarching reality that everybody else is forced to live within. This could be everything from Christianity to the Enlightenment to “patriarchy” to Western Civilization. So postmodernism contends that all such big stories are simply invented, and that they can (and must) be subverted and discarded. It’s simply better to allow each individual to invent his own story, his own reality. This prevents tyranny. Individual narratives squash metanarratives.

What metanarratives need squashing? Well, the inevitability of male dominance, for one thing. Throughout history, men have been the leaders in church, politics, family, business, and much else. Women have vital roles to play, both inside and outside the family, but men have been dominant in the most visible ways. Postmodernists don’t believe this is a result of creation or nature. Rather, it’s simply a long-standing metanarrative that women have submissively accepted. What they should do is subvert that narrative and show that men and women are fungible, that is, interchangeable. In this way, sex is simply a social construction. In the words of Anderson, “The women’s movement — I think more than any political effort in our time — is an attempt to change, not only laws and power structures, but social constructions of reality.” Women’s studies is prominent on many campuses, as well as black studies, gay studies, and so on. The idea that there is a shared reality isn’t popular. Why would you want to share your reality with somebody else when you can create your own?

Hermeneutics of suspicion

Metanarratives imply power and domination, so postmodernism is committed to subverting overarching social power everywhere. In this way it has developed a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” No one can speak objectively. Behind every assertion is a motive to dominate somebody else. If postmodernists were reading these lines, they would say, “The reason you’re writing like you is because you’re a white male educated in Western ways of thinking. If you were a black African female, you could never hold (or have held) these views.” They couldn’t simply argue that I’m objectively wrong. They wouldn’t say, “Let’s look at the facts and discover whether you’re right or wrong.” No, they would say that I can only speak from my own limited perspective, and I have no warrant to impose my perspective on anybody else.[11]

Perspectivalism

All postmodernists are perspectivalists.[12] None of us can speak objective truth. We’re all shaped and work by our historical situation. If you think about it, this means there can’t be any substantive, transcultural communication. Everything, to use the language of Nietzsche, is a will to power. Here’s an irony. Postmodernists see society as a big power game, and they work to subvert the powerful, prominent worldviews. But since they don’t believe in objective truth, they must hold that power alone dominates. You can’t reason somebody into your viewpoint as classical liberalism believed. So in the end, might makes right. This is why postmodernists feel justified in shouting down Christians and conservatives they disagree with. There’s no basis for reason or dialogue. There’s only one perspective versus another perspective, and one must win out. (Theirs, of course.) But that doesn’t mean theirs will last. Somebody else will come along with more power, and squash the latest will to power. There’s no truth. There are no objective standards. There are only options. There’s only a will to power.

Playful laziness

Because postmodernists have no interest in working hard to arrive at the truth (which is unattainable anyway), they become very playful. What other people would call a quest for the truth, they simply would see as entertainment. Their point is to subvert any serious intellectual quest. This is where deconstruction as a literary theory came from.[13] There’s no objective truth in a text. Why should the author have the authority to dominate what he writes? I as a reader have just as much a right to determine meaning as he or she does. So postmodern literary theory deconstructs the text, that is, it shows it could have any one of a number of meanings, very different, in fact, from what the author intended. Presumably the deconstructionists want readers to take their own writings about deconstruction just as the authors intended them, but this blatant inconsistency is apparently a trifle nobody should be concerned with. In any case, postmodernists are unconcerned with the great theological and philosophical questions of humanity: who is God, what is man, what is justice, truth, beauty, and love? There’re no objective standard by which to answer these questions. This leads to the conclusion by Kevin J. Vanhoozer that if the besetting sin of modernism was pride, for postmodernism it is sloth.[14] Postmodernists are intellectually and morally lazy.

Conclusion

Postmodernism is profoundly pessimistic. Modernists believed that the proper use of reason could destroy all oppression, breaking with the past, creating a perfect future. Postmodernism recognized the demonstrable fallacy of this faith and replaced it with individualized self-creation projects. The world itself doesn’t matter. Human society doesn’t matter.[15] All that matters is my own reality.

The postmodernist begins by giving up any objective truth and ends with no standards by which to judge anything. And this means that while postmodernism is opposed to worldviews, its opposition to worldviews has become a worldview. Its suspicion of metanarratives has become a metanarrative. It has come to be a dominant power in society, crushing everything, including biblical faith, in its path.

It’s the new snake eating its own tail. And this is equally true of all the other non-Christian Western worldviews. Sinful man rejects God’s authority, believing it oppressive, but when he throws off God’s authority, he installs man’s authority, which ends up enslaving and demeaning and destroying man. God alone knows what causes humanity to flourish, because he is man’s Creator. This means that the only way to satisfaction, joy, and happiness is the Christian way. Everything else leads to degradation and destruction. The blood and resurrection of Jesus Christ alone, which dictate the Christian worldview, alone will save man.

[1] For a genealogy and description of postmodernism, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995), 3–65.

[2] Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What it Used to Be (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

[3] Peter Gay, Modernism, The Lure of Heresy (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2008), 3–4.

[4] Donald E. Miller, The Case for Liberal Christianity (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).

[5] Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New York and London: Guilford, 1997), 6.

[6] Ibid., 11.

[7] J. G. Merquior, Liberalism Old and New (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 37–67.

[8] R. R. Reno, “The New New Left,” First Things, October 2014, 3–7.

[9] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.

[10] Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What it Used to Be, 102.

[11] Stanley Fish, The Trouble With Principle (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 292.

[12] Modernists also were perspectivalists, but they believed that all of these perspectives contributed to a deeper unified reality. Postmodernist lacked that faith. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 30.

[13] William R. Schroeder, Continental Philosophy (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2005), 280–287.

[14] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Theology and the Condition of Postmodernity: A Report on Knowledge (of God),” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, Vanhoozer, ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 23.

[15] Humanity’s annihilation is the price postmodernist John Gray is prepared to pay in order to avoid a unified vision of life. See his Enlightenment’s Wake (London and New York: Routledge, 1995, 2007), 274.

The Revenge of the Cosmos

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on September 14, 2019

Carl Henry’s 40-year verdict on his small early book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism included the summary: “[T]wo things sometimes surprise me: … how little I said and how boldly I said it” (Theology, News and Notes, December, 1987, p. 3). I had a similar experience reading Christopher Wiley’s The Household and the War for the Cosmos: Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family (Canon Press, 2019). It is a brief, bold book. Wiley argues that the Christian household (not identical to the modern deracinated “nuclear family”) is at the center of God’s original cosmological configuration. The fact that this household is hierarchical (the father, for example, is the “middleman of the cosmos . . . stand[ing] between his household and heaven, representing each to the other” [p. 76]) will incite outrage not only from secular egalitarians but also many churchmen (I apologize: churchpersons) for whom individual autonomy is an ultimate human right. Wiley, a Presbyterian pastor, nonetheless sees the family as the center of God’s plan for humanity and argues bluntly that “the Bible is a kind of handbook for households” (p. 5). Which is to say that the household isn’t just at the center of the cosmos. It’s also at the center of Christianity itself.

Of course, none of this means all is well with the household in our fallen postmodern world. All to the contrary. We are living amid cultural collapse. Wiley contends that this collapse is largely the effect of household collapse, offering five evidences: (1) marriage has been reduced to a lifestyle choice; (2) children are increasingly believed to be useless or even bad to have; (3) post-familialism is on the rise; (4) we’re sliding into socialism; and (5) Christians are losing the ability to think like Christians.

The collapse has been abetted by a highly privatized conservative Christianity that gained ascendancy as early as the 18^th century. Well-intentioned revivalists like John Wesley and George Whitefield had reduced the cosmological faith of Christianity to a private, heart affair. No Christian at that time, least of all the evangelical revivalists themselves, could have dreamed that this individualization could lead to a modern radical individualism that undermines the household. For the household is not a collection of autonomous individuals. It is a divinely constructed reality at the center of the cosmos. By reducing the Faith to heart religion, the well-meaning revivalists unwittingly decontextualized the individual from the cosmic order within which he was intended to live and move and have his being. Central to that order is the household.

But the household’s most pernicious enemy isn’t human. Satan himself is warring on the cosmic order. The strategy of his contra-godly principalities and powers is to undermine and subvert God’s cosmological order. That means, of course, destabilizing and eventually destroying the household. The task of Christians is to restore that household according to God’s law.

This broad, sweeping vision sets Wiley squarely within the Genesis 1-2 camp and not the Genesis 3 camp of modern evangelicalism. The Genesis 1–2 camp sees God’s created cosmic order and its development by godly humans as their chief calling (the “cultural mandate”). The Genesis 3 Christians perceive God’s work on the earth as personal redemption, rescuing sinners from judgment and calling them into the church and to greater sanctification.

You won’t win the gospel war if you abandon the cosmic war.

The Genesis 1-2 Christians, by contrast, don’t disagree with the content of this vision, but they see it as subordinate to the larger Genesis 1–2 vision. Because the cosmological household stands squarely within the Genesis 1–2 camp, Genesis 3 Christians are inclined to see Wiley’s emphasis as at best secondary and at worst a distraction from what he should really be doing: keeping sinners out of hell and getting them sanctified and ready to meet the Lord. Wiley would likely reply that if you’re not a Genesis 1–2 Christian, you won’t be able to maintain Genesis 3 Christianity for long. You won’t win the gospel war if you abandon the cosmic war.

Wiley offers two strategies for winning that war, by practicing what he calls, in a whiplashing metaphor, guerrilla piety. First, the church must act as it was designed: the household of God, and quit chasing the world and “relevance.” The church itself is indispensable to the cosmic hierarchy. Its goal is to “put the benefits of Christ’s rule on display for the principalities and power” (p. 120). This advice will not appeal to the pragmatic churchlings among us for whom a Christianized version of the latest cultural kitsch is agenda item #1.

Second, Christians must recognize that “the household is the fulcrum of the cosmos” (p. 121). Wiley offers as evidence a seemingly benign point that actually delivers a powerful punch: “The reason households have leverage is that they are natural” (Ibid.). What makes this argument potent is its radical antithesis to the present privileging of socially constructed reality. Nature (creation, cosmos) doesn’t matter. It gets in the way of human imagination and therefore reality must change: reality isn’t what it used to be. If you want to redefine the household as two lesbians, three toddlers, and a border collie, more power to you. If you want to transform yourself into a dragon, don’t let the cosmos get in your way. Reality is an optional impediment to be pulverized to make way for the creative, autonomous self. This is the gospel of cultural Gnosticism.

Wiley understands that the Satanic assault on the cosmic family will finally fail, because it is a war on reality. If you try to break God’s physical cosmic laws like gravity and thermodynamics, you’ll end up breaking yourself. If you try to break God’s institutional cosmic laws for the household, you’ll get the same result.

In the current war over the cosmos, Wiley urges Christians to stand with the cosmos. That means: stand with the household.

The cosmos, like Father Time, is still undefeated.

The Danger of Pilgrim Theology

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on August 27, 2019

The video-cast is here.

The Thinning of the Church

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on August 24, 2019

Today’s church is increasingly thin.[1] It has little substance. It blows about with every wind of doctrine (Eph. 4:14). It drifts from fad to fad, from kitsch to kitsch, from celebrity to celebrity. It chases the latest cultural prostitute. It is the laughingstock of the depraved society it so slavishly imitates. The church no longer commands serious attention because it does not take itself seriously as God’s redeemed body in the world. The pastor was once looked to as the moral and intellectual leader of the community. Now he is disparaged (often accurately) as a zealous know-nothing and consummate fundraiser. The church is superficial, consumerist, self-absorbed, mercurial. Thin indeed.

Thin Programs

What are the marks of a thin church? First, a thin church expands its programs and contracts its godliness. It is forever appointing committees and calling meetings to “strategize” about how to enlist more attendees by catering to their niche consumption addictions: MOPS, Super Singles, Celebrate Recovery. Sermons are geared to personal fulfillment (“Seven Steps to a Happier Marriage” and “Spiritual Strategies for Achieving Your Life’s Goals”). The congregation, suckled on self-help culture, develop “itching ears” (2 Tim. 4:3) to be scratched by spiritual lifestyle coaches meeting a market demand. Members do not live as a covenant community, pouring their lives into one another, but are simply atomistic spiritual consumers plugged into the religious satisfaction generator known as the postmodern church.

Thin Leadership

Second, a thin church expects the “senior pastor” to be the company CEO, driving a growing organization and “plant,” preferably incremental building programs. The “executive pastor” is more executive than pastor, perhaps holding an MBA and expected to keep the member-shareholders happy with the bottom line. Feeding the flock is incidental. The thin-church shepherd’s job description is beautifying the sheepfold, motivating the other sheep-leaders to keep that flock incessantly active inside the fold, and preserving his own reputation among neighboring shepherds.

Thin Music

Third, a thin church molds its music around the wider cultural sensibilities. Ours is an age of radically rhythm-driven and lyrically over-simplistic performance music, and the church is no exception. “In this moment you’re right beside me/ You’re everywhere, you’re in the air that I breathe/ Every morning you keep coming/ The waves of your affection keep washing over me.” The Sunday morning laser-light concert showcases the swaying female alto and hipster guitarist, and the congregation haltingly mouths the screen lyrics never intended to be sung by anybody but the gaudy professionals. The music, like our culture, is existential, not majestic.

Thin Ideas

Fourth, a thin church is ignorant of or uninterested in the Christian worldview. The Triune God wishes to transform our lives by transforming our minds (Rom. 12:2), but the thin church is thickly invested in the anti-intellectual temper of the age, preferring emotion, passion, and intuition and bypassing the mind. The unified creation-fall-redemption paradigm of the Bible and its implications for the world are of little interest. While it may stress redemption (narrowly conceived as personal salvation), the church omits biblical creational norms that shape the cosmos. Self-absorbed emotional intensity, sprinkled with churchy Jesus-language, rules the day.

Thin Vision

Fifth, a thin church ecclesiasticizes the Bible and the Faith.[2] All the important things happen in the church. The thin church is incestuous. There is no appetite for the Kingdom of God, for pressing the Lordship of Christ in technology, education, the arts, politics, science, and the wider culture — outside the church. That new gaming-addiction recovery program is much, much more important. The thin church equates the church with the Kingdom. Few theological ideas are more dangerous.

The Sunday morning laser-light concert showcases the swaying female alto and hipster guitarist, and the congregation haltingly mouths the screen lyrics never intended to be sung by anybody but the gaudy professionals.

Thin Message

Sixth, a thin church refuses to confront the surrounding culture at the very points at which that culture is assaulting God and his word. The thin church is the cowardly church. Because the Sexual Revolution is the most visible cultural depravity today, it vanquishes the thin church. Premarital sex and same-sex “attraction” must be afforded “safe spaces,” either never mentioned, or positively encouraged, for “broken” people who wish to persist in their sin. Under the guise of compassion,[3] the thin church sells biblical truth down the river for a mess of modernist pottage.

Thin Sanctification

Finally, a thin church knows nothing of ecclesial sanctification, growing in grace as a body. The leaders’ goal, rather, is to create a product/service that increases breadth, not depth. Long-time members grow uneasy that the sermons are pabulum designed for the merry-go-round of new attendees, but lack any meat to feed the souls of those wishing to move beyond spiritual adolescence (1 Cor. 3:1–2). Covenant, Kingdom, worldview, the cultural mandate, wealth, self-sacrifice, judgment, hospitality, individual and eschatological victory and other vital themes are rarely mentioned. Members trudge ahead as spiritual pygmies, as the church increases its programs and membership.

Conclusion

A thick church, in radical contrast, reflects a robust faith. Its leaders are on their face before God and his Word. The Triune God, not the apostate culture, sets the church’s agenda. They lovingly press the faithful toward greater obedience, greater knowledge, greater faith, and greater expectation. The music is theologically substantial and conveys truth that turns religious backbone into iron. The thick church speaks prophetically for biblical sexual ethics and against the Sexual Revolution. It holds antinomian and spineless politicians accountable to God’s standards. This church might be scorned and persecuted by pagans and secularists (and jellyfish Christians), but it is a bright light shining on a hill in a very dark time. To return to the initial metaphor: it is thick, weighty, substantial, a force to be taken with utmost seriousness — including by her Lord.

[1] I borrowed this language from my friend and colleague Brian Mattson. He employed it at the recent inaugural Even Runner Academy to describe art as thin or thick, chiding much modern Christian art as thin. I later counseled a friend about his vexing church situation, and adapted the thinness metaphor to assist him.

[2] S. U. Zuidema, Communication and Confrontation (Toronto: Wedge Publishing, 1972), 36–51.

[3] The church must exude compassion, but it is never compassionate to excuse sin. This is a lack of compassion.

Three Axioms on Homosexuality in the Church

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on August 6, 2019

We should have great pity, but also a measure of respect, for those who practice or champion homosexuality and who, understanding its incompatibility with the Faith, publicly abandon Christianity and the church. They understand and act on the principles involved. However, we should view with contempt and suspicion those claiming to be Christians who practice and champion homosexuality while remaining within the church. Some such lay members are simply confused, but the agenda leaders are not. Their attempt to deconstruct the Faith within the walls of the church is a form of subversion and betrayal, and they should be expelled with extreme prejudice if they refuse to repent. You can be a bold, practicing homosexual or a champion of homosexuality, or you can be a biblical Christian. You cannot be both.
All forms of extramarital sex are sinful. The heterosexual sin on which the modern church is most mute is premarital sex. Somehow church leaders have gotten the idea that young single adults should be expected to fornicate until they are married, but when married, should remain faithful to their spouse. There isn’t a dime’s difference, however, between the sinfulness of adultery and that of non-marital fornication.
But there is much more than a dime’s difference between heterosexual violations and homosexuality. Extramarital heterosexual sex between consenting adults is flatly sinful, but it is a violation of God’s law within his ordered creation. It is an ordered sin. Homosexuality, however, is a contra-creational and contra-cosmic sin. It attempts to overthrow the sexual order of the cosmos. It is, therefore, a disordered sin. For this reason, it is wrong for Christian leaders to scold us critics of homosexuality with the idea that, “Well, all extramarital sex is bad, and [heterosexual] adultery is just as bad as homosexuality.” No. They are both sinful, but heterosexual fornication and adultery do not attempt to overthrow the cosmos. Homosexuality is high-handed subversion of God’s ordered universe.

A Note on Faith, Works, and Justification

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on July 29, 2019

A friend recently asked my opinion about a famous Bible teacher charged with heresy because of his view of the relationship between faith and good works. Here is the substance of my response:

I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching this very topic (exegetical theology, systematic theology, and historical theology), and I wrote two dissertations relating to this issue and have finally come to believe that most of our Puritan forefathers understood it (or at least expressed it) better than we often do.

The best answer in this case is the simple answer: faith alone saves, but the faith that saves is never alone. We’re not saved by works, yet we are never saved without works. God does not look at our good works and justify us, but justification without good works is spurious.

We cast all of our faith, all of our hope, all of our expectations on the crucified and risen Jesus Christ who loved us, and gave himself for us. He accomplished our salvation at Calvary and from the empty tomb. When we are united him by faith (alone), we’re also united to resurrection victory, and that victory includes — in fact, necessitates — good works. If works are lacking, this omission only proves that we are not united to the crucified and resurrected Lord.

I’ve known people to go way, way into the weeds on this issue and come back no better than when they started — and often worse. Eternal life is not a reward for good behavior, but neither can there be a salvation minus good works.

As simple as it may sound, this is a good summary of precisely what I believe the Bible teaches.

Covenant versus Autonomy

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on July 23, 2019

Ours is an age of autonomy (“self-law”). Of course, autonomy has been around since the Fall. What’s different today is that the secular West has created sophisticated rationales for it. It’s not just that man is autonomous; it’s that man should be autonomous, and any other way is unnatural and enslaving. Man hasn’t simply broken free from God’s law; he’s now trying to break free from creation itself.

Transgenderism is one such attempt to vanquish God’s created order. Man’s imagination mustn’t be subject to any constraints. Man has a right to be anything he wants to be, and if anybody gets in the way, that impediment must be legally removed. Male athletes that see themselves as transgendered must be given the right to participate in women’s sports contests. It doesn’t matter than this move disadvantages women: contra-creational rights trump women’s rights.

This autonomy has moved into the church. More churches and ministries are capitulating to so-called same-sex “marriage” and “- attraction.” This includes ministers and churches in such allegedly conservative groups as the Sothern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America. The fact that these views and acts are flatly anti-biblical seems not to matter. What’s most important is conforming to what Francis Schaeffer called “forms of the world spirit.” The driving force in Western culture today, postmodernism, unleashed radical autonomy, especially sexual autonomy. It must tower over all else in culture, even in the church.

This is an attack on the very roots of the covenant: that God is the suzerain and we are the vassals. Jesus is Lord, and we are his subjects. This isn’t a decision we make only at conversion. We must make it again every day: will we surrender our will and desires to our King, the one who bought us with his own blood? The great Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger’s successor, was correct, therefore, when he declared that

[T]he entire some of piety consists in these very brief main points of the covenant. Indeed, it is evident that nothing else was handed down to the saints of all ages, throughout the entire Scripture, other than what is included in these main points of the covenant…. Compare, if you will, the law, the prophets, and the very epistles of the apostles with these main points of the covenant, and you will discover that all of them return to this center as if to a target.

But we aren’t only oath-bound to God; he’s oath-bound to us. He promises he’ll never leave us or forsake us. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 8:35f.). And by nothing, I mean nothing. He promises to answer our earnest prayers, meet our greatest needs, give us the strength to defeat the world, the flesh and the Devil. We don’t bow to a weak, ineffectual suzerain. He’s King of kings and Lord of lords. He rules from the heavens and rides on the clouds and accomplishes his will in the earth. No one can thwart his purposes.

If today you feel overwhelmed, weak, impoverished, rudderless, know this: you have a great suzerain, a great King, who is covenantally bound to you. It’s not simply that he might help or might not. He’s willingly tethered himself to you by covenant. He can’t do otherwise. Some things God cannot do, not because he is not all-powerful, but because he has willingly bound himself to his promises. One of those promises is to be perseveringly faithful to you and me as his covenant people. Hold him to his covenant promises. He delights when we remind him of his promises to us, because that shows that we take his word seriously (Is. 45:11; 62:6–7). Take God at his covenant word.

The Romantic Cult of Authenticity

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on July 14, 2019

Today we hear this sentiment all the time: “Be true to yourself.” “Bernie Sanders is not a regular politician; he’s authentic.” When rock stars go wild on stage, ripping off their clothes and breaking guitars, we admire them, because they’re expressing what they really are.

The Recovery of Fearless Christian Intellect

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on July 14, 2019

Francis A. Schaeffer, intellectual evangelist

Sitting here on the eve of the inaugural Runner Academy, I was thinking of the course of Christianity and the cultivation of intellect over the last two and a half centuries.

A common and injurious error at the time of the Enlightenment was for many Christians to assume that the Christian Faith could be defended by autonomous human reason and that Enlightenment presuppositions, properly employed, would lead right back to the doorstep of biblical Faith. This view made more sense in English Enlightenment, which was more conservative than the French Enlightenment, which was radically secular. In both cases, however, it ended with the triumph of autonomous reason, crushing biblical truth and, eventually, everything else in its path. Please read Beiser’s The Sovereignty of Reason for a captivating verification of this historically evident verdict. Christians cannot beat intellectual autonomists at their own game, and they should never try. Rather, they should demonstrate, as Herman Dooyeweerd argued, the radically religious character of all human thought, Christian or non-Christian. Christian thought employs reason in God-honoring ways, and non-Christian thought employs reason in God-defying ways. Reason is not substantive; it is instrumental.

Today, the problem is altogether different. We live in a profoundly anti-intellectual age, in which emotion, intuition, “passion,” and “escape from reason” (Francis Schaeffer) are king. Far from committing themselves to a heightened use of reason and submitting it to the Lord, most Christians are again trying to beat the world at its own game, this time, the game of anti-intellectualism. The notion that the Faith is rigorously reasonable and intellectual frightens many of them, and, in fact, they want nothing to do with such a cognitively rigorous Christianity.

A goal of Runner is not to restore the Enlightenment apostasy of autonomous reason. But neither is it to ape the mindless, passion-laden anti-intellectualism of the postmodern world. Rather, it is to restore the Christian mind, fueled by the Christian heart, the core of man’s being, and of which the mind is an aspect, and inculcate a true Christian world and life view that challenges modern secularism and paganism, both autonomous reason and mindless anti-intellectualism, with the claims of God’s infallible word by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Anything less or different is doomed to failure.

Stand Your Ground In the Evil Day

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on July 1, 2019

Blue-Jeans Religion

Christian leaders who until the last five years stood for biblical truth and historic orthodoxy are caving in record numbers to what Francis Schaeffer called “forms of the world spirit”:[1] Cultural Marxism (“social justice”),[2] “wokeness,” ideological feminism, same-sex “marriage” and “-attraction,” “Christian socialism,” and upgraded Darwinism. These “thought leaders” among evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Gospel Coalition, and numerous churches and other ministries decry “toxic masculinity,” “white privilege,” and the literal historical account of Genesis. Faithful followers, accustomed to trusting their leaders, are unsettled and perplexed. Has the church in the West really been guilty of “systemic racism”? Must Christians accept same-sex desire as normative? Are males simply presumed to be guilty of misusing power with females? Is insisting on the historicity of Adam and Eve a barrier to the Gospel? It’s no wonder so many in the pews are anxious.

While Christian leaders can be sincere but misled, there can be little doubt that the chief impetus behind the current wholesale defection is simply craven compromise, the desire to curry favor and popularity in an apostate age suckled on individual autonomy. When leaders change their views on historically (and biblically) settled issues just a few years after these issues have become unsettled (and re-settled as apostasy) in the wider culture, we can be confident that we’re observing compromise, not sincere rethinking. A shift would be more laudable if it cut against the grain of the cultural fabric: if, for example, a Christian college president concluded that his institution should issue a formal declaration repudiating Obamacare, or that after much prayer a pastor proposes the church amend its statement of faith to expressly oppose both garden-variety KKK racism as well as Left-wing “affirmative action” racism. It takes no courage, Francis Schaeffer taught us in the late 60’s, to wear blue jeans as an anti-establishment statement when almost everybody is wearing blue jeans.[3]

Don’t Follow Errant Leaders

Meanwhile, followers, church members, laypersons, and patrons would be well advised to heed these items of counsel. First, the fact that your leaders change doesn’t mean you must change. The Bible is replete with warnings to errant leaders of godly followers, issued from the old covenant prophets to John the apostle. The calling of leaders is precarious precisely because of their measure of influence (Jas. 3:1). But sheep are not required to follow errant shepherds, and certainly not wolves. Don’t simply assume a pastor or popular speaker is faithful to the Lord. Don’t suppose that the size of his audience (or number of Twitter followers) is the measure of his faithfulness. Examine his (or her!) teaching in light of the Scriptures. If the apostle Paul commended his followers for scrutinizing his own teaching (Ac. 17:10–11), you can be certain that he expected all Christian followers to follow their lead.

[I]t’s not sufficient quietly and covertly to avoid evil. We must overtly expose it. The prime reason that we today find this expectation distasteful is that we have a diminished view of God’s holiness.

Don’t Be Sentimental

Second, don’t be sentimental about institutions. If they leave the Faith, you must leave them. Churches that were once faithful to the Lord have drifted toward heresy (like City Church-San Francisco). Christian ministries that once championed Biblical faith have become little more than social clubs (the Salvation Army is a striking example). Christian colleges and seminaries that began with godly men on their knees wishing to establish a training center for devout young Christians have been gradually infested by unbelief, higher criticism, socialism, Darwinism, and Cultural Marxism. This is true of every Ivy League college, and increasingly true of a number of evangelical colleges and seminaries (like Wheaton and Azusa Pacific). Christians associated with these sorts of churches and institutions sometimes feel a sentimental loyalty: “I’ve been attending here for 40 years, and I feel comfortable.” Or, “My parents are buried in the church cemetery.” Or, “I’m a graduate of this college or seminary and just can’t pull away.” And they allow their sentimentality to blind them to the apostasy before their eyes. Many continue to support this apostasy with their attendance and money. This is wrong. Abandon apostasy and redirect your prayer, time, effort, and money toward orthodox, Bible-believing, uncompromising, culture-reclaiming churches and ministries. The fact that sectarians draw the lines too quickly and narrowly (over denominational distinctives, for example) doesn’t mean there are no lines. There are bold, God-drawn lines, and they must not be crossed.

Don’t Stay Mute in the Face of Evil

In Ephesians 5:11 Paul writes, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” We don’t have the luxury of obeying only the first half of that verse.[4] The second half of that verse puts pressure on today’s craven Christianity, which says, “I know that I must avoid sin, and I’ll obey to please God. But other people have to make up their own minds. They’re responsible for their own actions. That’s their business, not mine. I’ll just go about my own life.” But that is precisely what Paul does not say. He commands, first, that we separate ourselves entirely from the works of darkness. He also commands that we expose those works. In other words, it’s not sufficient quietly and covertly to avoid evil. We must overtly expose it. The prime reason that we today find this expectation distasteful is that we have a diminished view of God’s holiness. God deplores sin. It diminishes; it deranges, it destroys, and it damns. Curbing sin is a God-honoring act. We must, of course, curb it first in our own lives, and only then in the lives of others, always charitably; and we must never limit that exposure to the “private” sphere. We must expose cultural evils no less than individual evils. The Bible places a high premium on unity, and we dare not sunder it for “light and transient causes.” But Cultural Marxism, homosexuality, and socialism are not light and transient causes.

Conclusion

Ours is an age of rampant social depravity but, in addition, and even more tragically, pervasive defection within the church. It is analogous to what happened about 100 years ago when Protestant liberalism captured almost all of the mainline denominations in the U.S. and England. We will win the war, but there will be no victory without battles. We must stand charitably, firmly, without rancor, but also without flinching. Remember at all times that our great enemy is Satan and his minions. Soon in eternity we must stand before the Lord. Until then our charge is: Stand your ground in the evil day (Eph. 6:13).

[1] Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1984), 111–140.

[2] Of course, justice ( = righteousness) should be social, and a culture must be just, according to God’s moral law, but this is not what most “Social Justice Warriors” mean at all. They are simply Leftists with a pious veneer.

[3] Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster, 99.

[4] John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians in Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 21:310–311.

Classical Liberalism Keeps Politics Downstream

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on June 23, 2019

As is often the case, my discussion with Pastor Douglas Wilson on classical liberalism contra post-liberalism, subset of the dispute between Sohrab Ahmari and David French presently rankling conservatism, exhibits greater agreement on substance than might have initially appeared. Simultaneously, the issues on which dispute remains have become clearer.

As far as I can tell, Pastor Wilson and I share an objective: a global Christian culture. We disagree (partly) about how to get there. As a long-time, unembarrassed classical liberal, I believe politics is downstream from culture. Pastor Wilson, along with many post-liberal conservatives,[1] believes that the culture has so eroded that politics needs to get upstream, and fast.

This series of quotes asserts what he believes to be the actual difference between us:

If a concern for individual liberty and for religious liberty was fruit that grew on the tree of an informal Christian consensus, then do we not need to maintain that informal Christian consensus (at a minimum) in order to keep the fruit? And you cannot maintain such a consensus if you insist on diluting it….

[T]here is a difference between officially recognizing the Christian faith as the foundation of everything you are doing, on the one hand, and establishing a specific denomination as the recipient of tax largess on the other. I don’t want an official denomination of Christians. I do want the Constitution to acknowledge that Jesus rose from the dead. This is the heart and soul of my mere Christendom project…

And we finally come to what I guess might be my only real disagreement with Andrew. He distinguishes between a structural pluralism and substantive pluralism. He rejects the latter, rightly, as being confused and relativistic. But he says this: “Consistent Christianity embraces one chief definition of pluralism but not the other. We must distinguish between structural pluralism and substantive pluralism.”

Now in order to go with this, a consistent theonomic Christian would have to say that “because Jesus rose from the dead, we should do what He says. And what He says to do is to adopt a structural pluralism to guide us as we order our civic affairs. Oh, and one other thing. Don’t mention my name to anyone.” It is like Jesus healing the blind men in Matthew 9, when He told them to tell no one who did this.

And so, I would raise a test case for the structural pluralists. If Christianity and Islam are on all fours together, not to mention the secular unbelievers, what should our marriage laws look like? This is really not an irrelevant question, is it? Christian teaching is soundly monogamous. The Koran says that a man can have up to four wives.

What kind of guidance does structural pluralism give on the question of polygamy once the informal protections of a widely shared Christianity are eroding? (emphasis supplied)
Pastor Douglas Wilson

What I take Pastor Wilson to be arguing is this (I paraphrase his points in bold print):

If structural pluralism is correct, it is correct only because it is rooted in Christianity. Pastor Wilson and I agree.

It was unnecessary for the Founders to recognize Christianity officially, on the simple grounds that they could assume a culturally Christian consensus. We agree again.

It is no longer sufficient not to officially recognize Christianity, since that historic Christian consensus has eroded. Here we disagree.

If the true variable in this equation is not the official recognition of Christianity, but the actual national worldview consensus (Christian, which we once had, versus secular/pagan, which we have now), officially recognizing Christianity today would be just as futile as it was unnecessary to recognize it at the Founding.

Ironically, an officially recognized Christianity in the near future would presuppose the presence of a new Christian consensus or, at least, a significant Christian minority. But if we had that, we wouldn’t need the official recognition any more than the Founders did. If everybody knows the culture is basically Christian, you don’t need to shout that it is, any more than Pastor Wilson’s church needs to put on its marquee, “This Is an Officially Christian Church.” And if we lack a Christian consensus or large minority in the nation, as we do today, no amount of official recognition in the world would make any substantive difference. The Christian Democratic Union, prominent center-right political party in Germany, is not more Christian because it claims to be. If they were to drop Christian from the name, but subsequently espouse Christian principles, the CDP would be more truly, though not titularly, Christian.

Potential Objections

This is not an argument that important national norms need not be written down. Of course, classically liberal societies need, and demand, written constitutions and laws. The official federal recognition of Christianity is of another order entirely, however. To borrow and tweak the language of Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, the Christian presuppositions are the conditions under which classical liberalism can happen at all. They are not and never claimed to be the result of classical liberalism.

Nor is this an argument against the formal recognition of Christianity. My own life and the Center for Cultural Leadership are devoted to creating a new Christian culture. If more people, families, and institutions publicly confess Jesus is Lord, you’ll get no complaint from me. One day, every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord; and the sooner, the better.

But let us not delude ourselves into thinking that a national confession of Christianity makes any difference whatsoever as long as the culture is anti-Christian.

Andrew’s advocacy of classical liberalism — notably his suggestion that structural pluralism, that is, procedural neutrality, or a level political playing field — can perhaps be reduced to falsity[2] by considering the issue of legally enforced monogamy. Not quite. Marriage is a creational norm, not a Christian norm. Had man never sinned, had Jesus Christ never died, had there been no church, there would’ve been marriages: in fact, a world-populating multitude of splendorous, sinless, child-producing marriages. Marriages are not the result of Christianity. Marriages are one of the conditions that make Christianity possible at all. Christianity perfects marriage; it didn’t create it. The fact that this reasoning might stun modern evangelicals shows how far they have drifted from biblical creational theology, subordinating creation to redemption, precisely the wrong sequence, which has neutralized churches in their battle against cultural secularization.

What Would Jesus Politicize?

Pastor Wilson tries to deflate structural pluralism by noting that when Jesus rose from the dead, he didn’t command that his disciples declare structural pluralism and forbid that anybody mention his name. I couldn’t help but think when reading this line of William F. Buckley’s quip about the author who was a pyromaniac in a field of straw men. Obviously my case for structural pluralism is biblically inferential. But I did point out specific biblical texts that require blind, evenhanded, “neutral” treatment on the level political playing field, a distinctive plank in classical liberalism. I suggested that the Gospel is so powerful that it doesn’t need the Feds propping it up (nor did the Founders believe this). Christianity — and Christian culture — must be voluntarily embraced; it cannot be politically imposed. The Founders had seen enough politically imposed Christianity to last a few lifetimes, thank you very much!

“[W]hen you lose confidence in the power of Jesus Christ, you vest confidence in the power of the state.”

While using different language now, what I was saying originally is that while classical liberalism does not norm, it is itself normed by divine revelation (creational and biblical). The playing field and rules don’t dictate who will score or win the game, but somebody did make the rules and build the playing field. The Founders were all molded by a generic Protestantism that informed how they made the rules and built the field. They assumed a Christian cultural consensus that made an explicitly Christian political consensus unnecessary. To paraphrase James Carville: It’s the culture, stupid.

Alt-failure

One way to counter our present predicament of the evaporated Christian consensus, which the Founders knew alone could sustain their political system, would be simply to change the political system to restore a godly society: you could, for example, devise a Christian dictatorship. But I’m convinced this is not what Pastor Wilson wants. Nor should anybody else.

This also points to the quandary of the broader post-liberalism of people like Sohrab Ahmari: they don’t like the present depraved culture, and they don’t like the classical liberalism within which it emerged, but they also don’t tell us what they would replace classical liberalism with. The reason for this omission is likely that the replacement would be an assault on liberty which, in turn, would be an assault on Biblical Christianity.

The polygamy question

Pastor Wilson asks, “What kind of guidance does structural pluralism give on the question of polygamy once the informal protections of a widely shared Christianity are eroding?” Let’s turn the interrogative into a declarative: when the Christian consensus is gone, we can no longer protect against polygamy. That’s right: we can’t, and, in fact, we never could have. The possibility of widespread polygamy was there from the beginning, and the only thing protecting against it was the Christian consensus that generated pro-monogamy legislation, a consensus that is now gone, and, therefore, also the religious basis for the legal prohibition of polygamy. Another way of saying this is: there are no political guarantees when they are no longer cultural guarantees. Politics is downstream from culture.

Pastor Wilson is addressing the dilemma of what Christians formerly enjoying a Christian consensus should do to correct deep, profound sins and depravities resulting from the loss of that consensus and the political scourges they inflict. That consensus was not lost because the nation was never officially Christian, and it will not be restored if it becomes officially Christian. You get rid of the problems of a lost Christian consensus by recovering that consensus.

The tyranny of the “Highest Good”

The task of politics in the Christian conception is not to create the virtuous society (in the words of Ahmari “a public [i.e., political] square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”), but to create a peaceful, liberty-girded playing field on which individuals, families, churches, schools, and businesses can grapple for a virtuous society.

We have been, however, observers in recent history of politics designed to create virtuous societies, “re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”: the Soviet Union, Communist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and Islamic Iran. The role of the state in Christianity is not to create the virtuous society but to suppress public, life- and liberty- and property-depriving evils (Romans 13:1–7) so that everybody can go about the business of living (1 Timothy 2:1–8). Christians should have confidence that their Faith will eventually emerge victorious in the culture, as long as they have a level political playing field.

But when you lose confidence in the power of Jesus Christ, you vest confidence in the power of the state.

Roger Scruton, British conservative not known as a champion of classical liberalism, nonetheless notes of its exhibition in the premier political document of the United States:

The US Constitution was not a panacea, a comprehensive doctrine by which all life should be guided. It left the citizen in charge, free to adopt whatever way of life might conform to the purely negative constraints of the central government — and that was its greatest virtue.
Roger Scruton

For classical liberalism, the political arrangement, the playing field with its evenhanded rules, is the virtue. All other virtues are supplied in and by the culture. And if they are not, a panicky, self-designated virtuous politics may not step in to correct the culture’s irresponsibility.

Conclusion

Anxious for statist political protections as the baying hounds of secularism nip at our heals is not a strategy for cultural victory. It is, at best, a strategy for temporary political victory, which will quickly be transformed into political repression when our cultural enemies gain (or regain) the political upper hand.

The alternative to classical liberalism is a dictatorial society of one sort, whether culturally Marxist or Christian statism. But Christian statism is a contradiction of terms. Christians don’t have access to the statist political tools the Cultural Marxists do.

We have better tools.

We must win (again) on the cultural battlefield. And if we can’t win there, no amount of titular political victories, including the official profession “Jesus is Lord,” will suffice.

Let’s keep culture upstream and politics downstream.

[1] I did not say “other post-liberal conservatives,” because I’m not convinced Pastor Wilson is one.

[2] This what a reductio, the word Pastor Wilson employs in his title, means.

Classical Liberalism, Consistently Christian

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on June 17, 2019

Because I’m a long-time friend of David Bahnsen and long-time fan of National Review, I’ll address briefly Pastor Douglas Wilson’s (mild) criticism of both. My chief impetus, however, is to reassert the Christian assumptions behind classical liberalism, the underlying (though not exclusive) political philosophy of the American Founding under withering assault by modern “progressives” (Cultural Marxists) and suffering surprising potshots from the illiberal nationalist conservatives. A striking clearinghouse for the latter is First Things, which under Rusty Reno’s editorship has turned into the opposite of what Richard John Neuhaus launched it to be: an explicitly Christian organ for classical liberalism. It’s now an explicitly (but inconsistently) Christian organ for classical illiberalism, that is, the sort of illiberalism traditionally practiced by both Catholics and Protestants attempting to weigh the state in their favor and deprive their religious competitors (Christian or not) of religious liberty. It was this classical illiberalism that classical liberalism was created to replace in the first place, after Europe’s tragic Thirty Years’ War (of Religions).

For his part, Pastor Wilson wants to distinguish Christian classical liberalism from secular classical liberalism. The latter is oxymoronic. I think what he wants to say is that what passes today in some quarters for classical liberalism is simply secularism living off the capital of classical liberalism. In fact, he does also say this. But this is not secular classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is conceptually Christian.

It developed as a unique convergence of three main ideational streams: (1) generic Protestant Christianity; (2) the British common law tradition; and (3) the conservative (British) wing of the Enlightenment (as opposed to the radical French wing). It was articulated by thinkers like Hume, Locke, and Adam Smith. It consists of eight bedrock principles (on which I don’t have space to expand): (1) individual liberty, (2) religious liberty, (3) separation of powers, (4) protection for minorities, (5) property rights, (6) Protestant openness to cautious experimental change, (7) universal morality, and (8) religio-cultural virtue. It was Christianity, in large part, which furnished the rationale for the unique combination of these exceptional characteristics. In this sense, it’s proper to refer to the Founding as Christian: not explicitly or officially, but conceptually and attitudinally. The Founders relied on ancient Greco-Roman ideas also, of course, but their unique experiment in liberty was framed within a generic Protestantism many of them took for granted, whether they professed an orthodox Christianity or not (most of them did). It was not secular. Not even close.

Pastor Wilson advocates both the original and American revisions of the mid-17^th century Westminster Confession of Faith as they pertain to church-state relations. Both limit religious liberty to Christians and potentially withdraw it from non-Christians. The original confession was hammered out in England by Protestants living within the conflagrations of church-state conflict. This conflict included the presence of a national Protestant church (Anglicanism). It’s not possible simply to decontextualize this document and plant its views on church-state relations into the American political experiment without further ado.

As an example of the attempt to do this, Pastor Wilson writes: “America must have an official faith. At our Founding, it was the Christian faith.” Well, no. The Founders emphatically avoided an official religious faith. All of the states had a Christian establishment of some sort, and some preserved established churches well into the 19^th century. What they wished to avoid was an established national church whose political privileges many of them had to come to oppose and fear. Even had they attempted a national religious establishment, the states would never have ratified the Constitution. They didn’t want the Feds messing with their state religious establishments. Almost all of the Founders took for granted that Christianity was the dominant faith in the colonies at the time and would be in the foreseeable future. They shaped the Founding institutions on that assumption: transcendent, divine law; the dignity of the individual created in God’s image; human sinfulness; and so forth. They knew that it wasn’t necessary to create an officially recognized faith for a culture to be Christian; they soon lived within one. In fact, well into the 19^th century the nation was largely Christian, apart from any national official religious establishment, though far from a perfect Christian culture (as slavery so painfully proves). So when Pastor Wilson writes …

David Bahnsen is exactly right that there is no neutrality. But this truth extends beyond private agents, beyond individuals. There is also no neutrality for corporate actors either—whether we are talking about corporations like Google, or nations like the United States. Each individual must give an account of himself, and each corporate entity that acts in the world must also give that same kind of account. By what standard? So of course David French fights for religious liberty in the way he does because there is no neutrality in his life. But we need to do more than that. We need to point out that there can be no neutrality in America’s life either. We make decisions with moral implications, just like individuals do, and we have to give an account for them, just like individuals do. It is therefore our responsibility as Christians to call America, in her corporate capacity, to repentance and faith…

… he need not (and should not) have in mind an officially recognized Christianity in the U.S. or, for that matter, the states. Pastor Wilson implicitly chides David Bahnsen for failing to suggest that religious non-neutrality extends beyond individuals. But David’s point was that the fact that there’s no cultural neutrality does not mean there should be a lack of procedural neutrality, a structural, as opposed to substantive, pluralism. This simply means that, as classical liberalism holds, a society can and should be grounded in religious truth while providing a framework within which all people of all religious viewpoints can equally live in peace.

A Tale of Two Pluralisms

Consistent Christianity embraces one chief definition of pluralism but not the other. We must distinguish between structural pluralism and substantive pluralism. Christianity supports structural pluralism, a cornerstone of classical liberalism. This is the view that the structure of a society, and especially the state, should not be tilted to advantage Christians or adherents or any other religion or worldview. For example, the state should not issue quotas for religious adherents in the labor force, should not require that only one religion be explicated in government or education, should not dictate that anyone become a Christian or any other religion or life-system, or punish anyone for apostasy from that religion or life-system (as, for instance, Islam does). Structural pluralism creates a level legal playing field of society.

Christianity supports structural pluralism because it relies on the power of the Holy Spirit and (subordinately) human persuasion for its success. Individuals come to Christianity by faith, a voluntary act of trust in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord (Romans 10:9–11). Christianity is willing to have a society comprised also of Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, New Agers, and atheists because it does not need the coercive power of the state to win converts. This is why Christianity has been at the forefront of constitutional democracy and the liberties it affords. Christianity is a religion of peace (Acts 10:36), and it can afford for the structure of a society to be pluralistic; Christianity is not a statist or coercive religion.

However, Christianity does not countenance substantive pluralism. This is the idea that multiple, mutually exclusive worldviews, religions, and ethical standards can peacefully coexist only the grounds that none is entirely correct, all containing truth and contributing to the beautiful “mosaic” of a “diverse” society. No religion or other worldview should hold its views too strongly, knowing that each is only relatively valid. Belief itself, not merely the political structure within which a belief is practiced, is pluralistic. The social pests, therefore, are those who insist that their own view is right. They are troublemakers, because they lead people to believe that one specific way (their way) is right and all others are wrong. Substantive pluralism, by its very nature, is relativist.

Neutrality: No and Yes

In Christianity, because nothing substantive can be neutral, some things must be structurally neutral. God’s moral law requires just (equal) weights and balances (Leviticus 19:35–36). Neither rich nor poor may be privileged or de-privileged in court (Exodus 23:3; Leviticus 19:15). The law applies equally to citizens and foreigners (Leviticus 19:34). In short, justice must be blind. The legal playing field must be level. Christianity, therefore, espouses procedural equality, not consequential equality. It was just this version of structural pluralism that classical liberalism adapted from Protestantism’s insistence or individual liberty and the Bible’s demand for procedural neutrality (if we want to use the term in this context).

Must National Review “Come To Jesus”?

Grasping this basic distinction will help defang Pastor Wilson’s patronizing verdict:

National Review needs to come to Jesus. Whether or not it is possible for the United States to become a Christian nation again (it is), we should all agree that it possible for NR to become a Christian magazine.

If nothing else, the verdict is strangely ill timed. Since he has been a decades-long reader (as I have), he certainly must have noticed that the magazine is more Christian in content now that at any time in its history. David Bahnsen himself as a board member of NR Institute illustrates that fact. Pastor Wilson doesn’t tell us how NR should become a Christian, or an even more Christian, magazine. By putting Christian in its name? Surely not, for a magazine the pastor himself once published (Credenda Agenda) did not have Christian in its name, yet it was certainly Christian. Must all writers be professing Christians? That would likely describe Sojourners, leading magazine of the evangelical Left, but somehow I get the impression that’s not the sort of Christian magazine the pastor is envisioning. It seems to me that what he really wants is a magazine that conforms to Christian presuppositions, but if so, in large measure that is what NR has done for decades and is increasingly doing, even if it includes a handful of non-Christian contributors. Non-Christian contributors do not necessarily produce a secular magazine any more than alleged Christian contributors necessarily create a Christian magazine. The fundamental factor in a Christian institution is its worldview. And, by and large, NR reflects such a worldview: a moral society, ordered liberty, economic freedom, negotiated politics, etc. It’s the reality, not the profession, that’s vital. Christian friends of mine own businesses (employing non-Christians) that exhibit Christian business ethics. They’re not professedly or officially Christian businesses, but they are no less Christian businesses. If, similarly, to “come to Jesus” means significant conformity to Christian truth in the realm of socio-cultural and political discourse, that’s just what NR does.

As the (non-Christian) editor Charles Cooke’s devastating comments make clear in the recent NR “The Editors” podcast “Define Your Terms,” the actual target of Christian illiberals like Sohrab Ahmari at First Things is the illiberalism of the “progressives”: “You must bake a cake for my wedding even if you believe marriage is between one man and one woman”; “You must fund my abortion with your tax dollars even if you believe life begins at conception”; “You must grant me the freedom of expression to deprive your freedom of expression if I don’t agree with your Christian (or conservative) viewpoint.” The Christian illiberals like Sohrab Ahmari (and Pastor Wilson? Is he politically illiberal? I’m honestly not sure) are right to oppose this Leftist illiberalism. But the solution isn’t a revived Christian illiberalism, which is — or should be — a contradiction of terms.

David Bahnsen and a number of other folks at NR and I hold our position not because our Christianity is weak, but because it is strong enough to invite all competitors onto a level playing field. We don’t need a coercive politics to protect us.

This is precisely what classical liberalism has always taught.

The Gospel Coalition’s Bamboozling Act

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on May 1, 2019

The Gospel Coalition (TGC) has been increasingly tolerant of and sympathetic toward the “social justice warriors.” Thabiti Anyabwile (aka Ron Burns), for example, champions leading tenets of Cultural Marxism (CM) under TGC rubric. He declared that whites should collectively repent for assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr. (Yes, he did write that.) So we shouldn’t be surprised, I imagine, that TGC’s Joe Carter exploits the recent synagogue murders by Orthodox Presbyterian teenager John T. Earnest to identify the latter’s racist, murderous ideology with those of us who consistently and vigorously — but thoughtfully and peacefully — oppose CM.

Real Racism

Carter situates Earnest within “kinism,” the racist ideology parading under the Christian banner which holds, in Carter’s cited definition, “that God specially ordained ‘races’ and that he intends for us to preserve that division to one degree or another.” Carter correctly identifies kinism as contra-biblical. The multinational, multiethnic gospel of Jesus Christ rests in the work of the Cross, which was specifically designed (among other things) to erase racial barriers (Eph. 2:11–22). Note carefully that the gospel doesn’t help people achieve “racial reconciliation.” The gospel is (among other blessings) racial reconciliation. Like justification by faith alone, it’s a reality, not an agenda.

Real Smear-by-Association

From there, however, Carter makes an odd and ominous shift. He argues that those of us Christians who expose CM are guilty of using racist “jargon” that “make[s] us sound like we subscribe to an alt-right ethno-nationalist worldview.” Carter summarizes CM this way:

The term originally referred to the idea that since the Marxist concept of “class consciousness” was not merely an economic phenomenon but was also expressed in cultural forms (books, traditions, institutions, and so on), the production of culture as it relates to power must also be analyzed.

This at best is paltry, even as a summary. Even a simple blog explanation can do better. But what is especially (and embarrassingly) evident is how much Carter hinges his argument on the genealogy of the expression itself: “Many [Christians] are merely repeating a term they heard used by fellow Christians and are unaware of the anti-Semitic and racialist origin.” Unfortunately, Carter doesn’t document that the term has anti-Semitic and racialist origins, so it appears he expects the reader simply to take his word for it.

Even if the moniker itself has anti-Semitic and racialist origins, that fact wouldn’t disprove the accuracy of its content. In fact, this argumentative tactic is intellectually dishonest. You don’t refute an argument by disqualifying the moniker that describes it. I don’t refute Anglicanism by pointing out that its original moniker (The Reformed Church of England) originated within a strategy to validate King Henry VIII’s divorce. I’d actually need to disprove the tenets of Anglicanism. But Carter doesn’t refute the phenomenon CM describes. He claims the moniker originated as a racist conspiracy theory and leaves it at that: the moniker had racist origins, so CM is a conspiracy theory best forgotten.

Real Cultural Marxism

In fact, however, Carter exhibits no acquaintance with the original writings of, or important secondary literature about, leading CM thinkers like Adorno, Gramsci, Horkheimer, Lukács, Marcuse, and his sweeping identification of us critics of these Cultural Marxists with racists is frankly embarrassing — to him and TGC.

Perhaps he’s unaware that a number of the early German CM’s were themselves anti-Semitic Jews, deeply resentful of their own privileged upbringing. They saw the Weimar Republic as the social laboratory for their experiments in moral decadence. In the mid- and late-20s they were not radically anti-Nazi because they believed that if Hitler seized control, the National Socialist order would collapse quickly and would be replaced by Marxism: they believed that Nazism was a final stage of capitalism. American Leftist John Dewey got the Frankfurt School to Columbia in the 1930s, when Hitler essentially kicked them out of Germany. From there their influence and writings proliferated at Columbia University and other prominent universities and, their influence was significant, especially on the New Left and the 60’s student radicals. And many of those same folks sculpted the ideology of major cultural institutions beyond the universities: the family, the press, the arts, corporations, foundations — even the church.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s a demonstrable fact. (Please consult the appended recommended reading list for proof.)

But Carter is undeterred. He writes:

When those on the political right use terms like “Frankfurt School” or equate cultural Marxism with multiculturalism, they are—whether the recognize it or not—using the redefinition and racialized meaning given by [William S.] Lind.

Perhaps Carter is unaware that “Frankfurt School” or “Critical Theory” is a widely accepted description of the tenets originating at the Institute for Social Research in Germany in 1923. There’s nothing conspiratorial or racist about employing this language that anybody in the academic guild would use.

Further, is the Jewish magazine Tablet anti-Semitic for defending the use of the expression “Cultural Marxism” and acknowledging the ideology itself? What about Allen Mendenhall of the classically liberal James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal? And what about Galen Watts at the free-thinking Quillette, who uses the term — and even agrees with some of its iterations?

Apparently one can employ the moniker “Cultural Marxism” without being anti-Semitic and racist. Professor Ardel Caneday was correct, therefore, to write on his Facebook page in response to Carter’s post:

Long ago, without any input from William Lind, I have been critiquing “Multiculturalism and Diversity” and its various and numerous iterations as Cultural Marxism. Furthermore, I have been doing so quite intelligently so without the slightest hint of kinism or racism. Additionally, I have never been guilty of “merely repeating” the term “heard used by fellow Christians.” Joe Carter is wrong to claim that the origin of the term “Cultural Marxism” is “anti-Semitic and racialist.” Whether someone uses the term in an anti-Semitic or racialist manner does not render the term itself anti-Semitic or racialist or racist.

Still, I’m not inextricably wedded to the moniker. It’s dispensable, like almost any other moniker. This school of thought has also been termed neo-Marxism, revisionist Marxism, Western Marxism, and existential Marxism. The name is not sacrosanct, but altering the name doesn’t alter the reality it describes.

Real Arguments

Carter proceeds to slander the motives of those who use the expression CM:

Like many others that have used the term over the years, Lind is just as obsessed with identity politics as the people he’s criticizing. The only difference is he’s worried it’s his own ethnicity that might lose power.

I’m not sure when God granted Carter the gift of mind- and motive-reading, but in any case it perhaps hasn’t occurred to him that it’s not loss of “white power” animating us Christian critics of CM, but loss of Christian power. CM is designed to erode Western civilization and the broad, generic Christianity that helped foster it (Gramsci, in fact, explicitly said so). We’re committed to the creation of Christian culture, not white culture. But it’s so much easier to dismiss arguments by questioning the motives of one’s opponent than actually engaging his argument.

It’s also lazy and contemptible.

Joe Carter might wish to mute the criticism of CM, but smear-by-association tactics leveled at the moniker itself won’t effectively do that. He’ll actually need to engage the argument.

Smart people know when they’re being bamboozled.

For Further Reading

Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, California. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Berlin, Isaiah. Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002.

––––– . “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, 118–172.

Codevilla, Angelo M. The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About. New York: Beaufort, 2010.

———- . “The Rise of Political Correctness,” Claremont Review of Books, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Fall 2016), 37–43.

Chambre, Henri. “Marxism.” The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Goetz, Philip W., ed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988, 23:577–585.

Fonte, John. “Antonio Gramsci and the Transformation of Institutions,” in Building a Healthy Culture, Don Eberly, ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001, 204.

French, David. “Malign Marcuse,” National Review, April 17, 2017, 32–34.

Germino, Dante. Antonio Gramsci: Architect of a New Politics. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

Heller, Mikhail. Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Hook, Sidney. “Marxism,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Wiener, Philip P., ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1973, 3:146–161.

Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingstone, trans. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1968, 1971.

––––– . Marxism and Human Liberation, E. San Juan Jr., ed. New York: Dell Publishing, 1973.

Marcuse, Herbert. “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Wolff, Robert Paul; Moore Jr., Barrington; and Marcuse Herbert, eds. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965, 81–117.

Minogue, Kenneth. The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life. New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010, 296.

Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967.

Rubin, Barry. Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance. New York: HarperCollins, 2014.

Sartwell, Crispin. “The ‘Postmodern’ Intellectual Roots of Today’s Campus Mobs,” The Wall Street Journal, March 25–26, 2017, A13.

Schroeder, William R. Continental Philosophy: A Critical Approach. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2005, 76–80.

Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015, 2016.

Steele, Shelby. “The Exhaustion of American Liberalism,” The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2017, A-17.

Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1952, 1987).

Walsh, Michael, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. New York and London: Encounter Books, 2015.

Wolin, Richard. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.

———-. The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010.

A Note on the Current Protestant Revival of Classicism, Scholasticism, and Natural Theology

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on April 4, 2019

Dr. Sandlin,

Do you know what’s driving the resurgence of Classical Apologetics, Neo-platonism, and the subsequent reaction against worldview within Reformed circles?

I’m seeing more and more of this on FB posts, footnotes, books, etc. Otherwise trustworthy and respectable pastors/theologians are pushing this. What’s worse, it seems they’re promoting it as if the early presup[positional] guys were completely unaware of the Christianizing of Greek categories (as opposed to the Hellenization of Christianity, i.e. Robert Wilken).

As a Kuyperian (generally speaking), it’s not that I mind some pushback from these guys–there seems to be some good work being done (i.e Steven Wedgeworth, The Davenant Institute, etc.) but it seems that they’re either (1) lacking self-awareness and hide the fact of their own presuppositions, or (2) prevaricating and purposely misinterpreting the worldview programme. Your thoughts?

Dear ____

These are relevant issues, and I can only speculate about what’s driving the revival of classicism, scholasticism, and natural theology. Like you, I appreciate the work of Davenant and others in stressing a reasonable faith and excavating the “unused past.” I suspect at least two dubious factors, however, are at work in this program: one historical, and the other epistemological.

First, the chaos of hypermodernity drives theological and dispositional conservatives into the apparent (but only apparent) safe spaces of the past and to attempts to repristinate it. The historic reality of Christian culture summons Christians amid hypermodernity. The scholastic era was a time when the unity of faith and reason was widely respected, and Christians could conduct scholarship in a generally hospitable climate. The problem is that this faith-reason paradigm (“double-decker” epistemology) compromised the Faith. It did not recognize the inescapably religious character of all thinking, in the lower deck of reason no less than the upper deck of faith. Reason is always captive to the heart, and the heart is inescapably religious. This is what the presuppostionalists from Kuyper onward were wanting to say and it was, after all, just the epistemological implication of good, old-fashioned Reformation theology. Positing reason as a neutral, presupposition-less quality erased or diminished the Bible’s depiction of the depravity of the “natural” mind. Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson observed that when Enlightenment needed a paradigm for the super-exaltation of reason, it had one ready at hand: the scholastic nature-grace (faith) distinction. It simply lopped off the upper deck of faith-grace. For this reason, I agree with Brian Mattson’s hint that if the current advocates of natural theology were to succeed, they would return us to a way of thinking that helped give us the very secularism that afflicts us.

Second, I think these folks are under the impression that the epistemology of worldview thinkers and presuppositionalists too closely resembles philosophical idealism and Kantian epistemology (this is not a new charge, by the way). In our postmodern times that privilege constructivist epistemologies and are attempting to reinvent reality via moves like transgenderism, those suspicions might seem well founded. By “constructivist epistemologies,” I mean views of knowledge that see nature as a mass of chaotic stuff that the mind must order and reorder in order to supply meaning. In today’s climate, it means also that man creates his own reality: nature (if there even is such a thing) is the clay, and we are the creators. To be sure, we worldview thinkers deny the possibility of unaided reason and the neutrality of the knower. Yet we’re emphatically opposed to constructivist epistemologies. We hold to a meaning-laden creation with the greatest force. Creation is foundational, and the gospel is a tributary — a vital one, to be sure — in the massive Christian worldview river. Anybody who has read Herman Dooyeweerd knows that his theory of law spheres (“creational norms”) rejects any epistemology that denies the world brims over with divinely inscribed meaning. He and we only want to point out that man never encounters creation in a neutral way: the heart (the spiritual organ) is never inert. It worships either the Creator or the creation. No one ever accused Herman Bavinck of a diminished view of creation. John M. Frame, the leading presuppositionalist of our time, just write a book on creation. It is possible (no, essential) to embrace the highest view of a meaning-laded creation and simultaneously the clearest understanding of reason as non-neutral, and captive to the heart.

The early presuppositionalists were certainly as aware as liberals like Harnack of the Hellenization of subapostolic Christianity. Indeed, Dooyeweerd made this a cornerstone of his epistemology and social theory, and Van Til made it a cornerstone of his apologetics. The liberal answer was to read this Hellenization back in the NT. The presuppositionalist answer was to adopt the Hebraic-biblical paradigm as a corrective to the Hellenization.

I hope this helps. I’m eager to see you and your son at the Runner Academy this July. We’ll be highlighting all these distinctions and more, and laying out an extensive Reformational worldview.

Our Romantic Moment

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on March 29, 2019

Henry Fuseli’s Romantic horror masterpiece *The Nightmare* (1781)

Ours is a culture lush in Romanticism, but to grasp it we need to know what it was a reaction against: the European Enlightenment. [1] The Enlightenment began in full force in the 18^th century. It was best defined by Immanuel Kant as man’s liberation from his self-imposed slavery to external religious authorities like God and the Bible and the church.[2] Man in his reason and experience was now positioned as the measure of all things. But it was collective man as the measure. In other words, Enlightenment held up shared human reason and experience as the final authorities. Enlightenment thinkers would talk a great deal about human reason. They meant reason that all people shared. If everybody could just put aside their prejudices and private opinions, we could all arrive at the rational truth. Reason was the same for everybody, if we could just access it and rely on it. We would then agree on religion (a rational but anti-supernatural religion, like Deism), as well as science, education, politics, and the nature of man himself. Man’s reason is (or can be) neutral and arrive at the truth without divine revelation.

This rationalism produced a cold, sterile world, and in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Romanticism emerged as a reaction.[3] Romanticism didn’t like the idea of universal or shared reason and experience. It wanted to champion what was unique about every individual, not what humanity had in common. Romanticism is the first wholesale movement of individualism in world history. The really important thing was individual thinking, feelings, emotions, desires, and interpretations, not what all humans shared. Historians call this “the inward turn”; it’s a turning point in Western history. Objective truth outside us is no longer important, whether that truth is God or the Bible or the church or creeds or shared human reason or experience. The most significant thing in life is my inner, subjective life. This is the source of the “cult of authenticity.” [4] Before the 19^th century, the right kind of life was determined by how you conformed to the Bible or to nature or to reason or experience. But after Romanticism, the best life was the life in which you live out what you’re privately believing and feeling. This is the “authentic” life. The “inauthentic” people try to please God or their parents or friends or the wider society’s expectations. The authentic people are “true to themselves.” They “follow their heart.”

Romanticism is the first wholesale movement of individualism in world history

This is the temptation the serpent offered to Eve in the Garden. “If you eat the forbidden fruit, you’ll know good and evil. You will become one of the gods, one of heaven’s great court.[5] You’ll see the world as only a god can see the world.[6] You’ll have a god’s-eye view of the universe. You’ll have a depth of knowledge that allows you to rise above mere humanity. You are the final arbiter.” Today that temptation would include among the churched: If you want to engage in premarital sex, that’s the new rule. If you decide to date an unbeliever, who’s to tell you differently? When you turn 18 years old, you can leave the church if you want: who has a right to dictate to you? If you’re a young lady and want dress in sexually provocative ways, that’s your choice and nobody else’s. If you’re young man and you lust for pornography, it won’t hurt anybody, and nobody else can decide for you. If this church and God stuff seems so unreal, why do you have to bow to it? “I’ll live my own life.” This is Romanticism in the church. Its roots are in the Garden of Eden.

We’ve gotten where we are today by gradually shedding all external authorities. When Kant said that Enlightenment is man’s coming of age by shedding external authority, he could never have envisioned today’s self-autonomy: sexting, juvenile profanity, teenage abortion, “sex-reassignment surgery” (correction: “gender-affirmation surgery”), and other reprehensible practices. But when we throw off authority — particularly God’s authority — there’s no barrier to anything being permitted.

When we throw off authority — particularly God’s authority — there’s no barrier to anything being permitted.

The Enlightenment idolized humanity in its collective sense: universal human reason and experience. Romanticism and its child postmodernism idolize every individual human in his own uniqueness. The fact that this leads to fatal inner self-contradictions hasn’t yet impeded the Romantics. For example, free speech is under attack on our university campuses. Why? Because students believe that have a right not to be offended. Other people must be restrained from saying things that offend me. But what about my speech? Shouldn’t I be allowed to express my opinion? If that opinion isn’t an acceptable, politically correct opinion, the answer is no, you may not. The same is true of gay pride parades. These gays think they have a right to be homosexual exhibitionists. But what about the right of parents and children who happen to be downtown at the time. Don’t they have a right not to be exposed to such depravity? And similarly artistic speech. An apostate artist claims the right to depict and display great acts of sexual debauchery or blaspheme, like a crucifix immersed in a jar of urine. Does he have that right of artistic autonomy? If so, do I have the right not to be exposed to it? This is how radical human autonomy leads to inner contradictions. Today’s autonomous Romanticism can’t account for the inevitable conflict between the expressions of autonomy, or the autonomy or rights of others.

For this reason and others, some have predicted that today’s culture war will become a civil war.[7] The conflict is basically between the Christian, or-Christian-influenced, vision of culture on the one hand, and the Romantic view of culture on the other. The battle is whether we as a culture will return to God’s ways revealed in his word, or charge along the path of worshipping man and his radical individualistic autonomy.

One thing is certain: there can be no compromise between the two.

[1] Peter Gay, The Age of Enlightenment (New York: Time-Life, 1966).

[2] Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html, accessed July 6, 2018.

[3] Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).

[4] Charles Guignon, Being Authentic (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 49–77.

[5] Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis, A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 91.

[6] Robert S. Candlish, Commentary on Genesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1866 reprint), 1:64–65.

[7] Angelo M. Codevilla, “The Cold Civil War,” Claremont Review of Books, Vol. XVII, No. 2 [Spring 2017], 24–27

Make Christianity Great Again

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on February 27, 2019

Christians are quick to blame secularists and neo-pagans for the cultural marginalization of our Faith, but much of it is due to our own timidity, compromise, and cowardice. Before he ascended, our Lord charged the first Christians to disciple the nations (Mt. 28:18–20). It was a bold charge that demands a bold life and message. At the first post-resurrection Pentecost, a radically reenergized Peter, transformed from a craven Christ-denyer to a fierce Christ-proclaimer (Ac. 2), declared to thousands of Jews: “[K]now assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (v. 36). This is the basic message of the NT and the primitive church, and it is the first Christian creed: Jesus is Lord.[1]

This message has impelled Christians whenever the Faith has advanced in the world. Despite relentless persecution, the primitive church marched boldly in that message. Finally, even the Roman emperor Constantine had to bow before him. Gradually Christian culture pervaded the West. In fact, Western civilization became roughly synonymous with Christian civilization.[2] The Reformation sought to correct severe theological abuses in the medieval church, but it did not oppose Christian culture. Far from it. Its English-speaking heirs, the Puritans, believed that all society should be governed by God’s law in the Bible. England’s American colonies each had established churches or Christian establishment of some kind, as did every one of the first United States. [3]

Faded Glory

This Greatness Christianity of former days is now in retreat everywhere. The 18^th century European Enlightenment ripped away the miraculous. Romanticism eroded all objective Christian standards, like the Bible. Darwinism reduced man to an amoral higher animal. More recently, postmodernism depicts man as an inventor of himself and of his own conceptual and moral universe. Christianity is now largely confined to isolated family life and to Sunday church. Christian schools and colleges dot the landscape, but many are caving in to the spirit of the age, particularly same-sex-“marriage.” Everywhere the Lord’s Day is dishonored. A robust, full-bodied Faith is in full-scale power-down mode.

The Appeasement

Unfortunately the erosion has been championed by Christians themselves. David VanDrunen of Westminster Seminary-California argues against any Christian culture outside the church, thereby denying the Lordship of Jesus Christ in most of life.[4] For Willie James Jennings of Fuller Seminary, the problem is the Christian culture of the West itself.[5] Samir Selmanovic, an Emergent church leader, writes that for too long Christianity has been influential in the West. He writes:

Christianity gave us the dignity of the human person, the university, political liberty, modern science and medicine, a purified sexuality, the exaltation of women, transcendent music, and the abolition of slavery.

Looking back nostalgically to the times when Christianity was an empire, we tirelessly monitor our power, our growth, our numbers, our financial success, our political strength. Maybe the time has come for Christianity to lose.[6]

This is the pious goop of spineless religion. This appeasement reinforces the cultural irrelevance of Christianity and has become the unintentional ally of secularists and pagans.

Restoration of Greatness

Christians are required to be humble about themselves, but never about their God. If we boast, we must boast in the Lord (2 Cor. 10:17). Our Lord is a great God. He is the cosmic sovereign (Eph. 1:20–23). He rules the universe. His gospel brings sinners to repentance and saves them by his matchless grace. If there is to be a restoration of Christianity’s greatness, there must be a retrieval of these convictions that made Christianity great in the first place. The first apostles spoke the word of God with boldness. They were witnesses of our Lord’s resurrection. They heard with their own ears the Great Commission. They knew the Lord promised that hell’s very gates would not prevail when the church came attacking (Mt. 16:18).

The claims of King Jesus are not options. He commands all men everywhere to repent (Ac. 17:30) and this means to trust him for salvation, and bow to his authority. The entire world is subject to God’s law (Rom. 3:20. The Great Commission is to disciple the nations with the glorious, love-drenched, obligatory gospel.[7] This gospel transforms lives and cultures. To say the gospel transforms lives but not cultures flies in the face not only of abundant historical testimony[8] but also, and more importantly, the Bible itself. In whatever Christians do, they are to do for God’s glory (1 Cor. 10:31). Jesus came to subordinate all enemies, not just non-cultural enemies (1 Cor. 15:20–27). This command extends far beyond church and private devotions.

Conclusion

Whenever the church has marched with this message, she has gained ground. She has routed the forces of Satan, death, and hell, and gradually produced a Christian culture. Christianity gave us the dignity of the human person, the university, political liberty, modern science and medicine, a purified sexuality, the exaltation of women, transcendent music, and the abolition of slavery.[9] These were not bequeathed to Western civilization by the Greco-Roman world, ancient paganism, Islam, or secularism. They’re the fruits of Christianity. The West has come to take these fruits for granted, and assumed it can uproot the tree and still get the fruit. This is a dangerous illusion. As our civilization turns from God, it will gradually lose the great blessings that have made it what it is.

Meanwhile, Christians must recover their triumphant boldness, proclaiming the slain Lamb who is the Lion, ruling from the heavens. We must not gently suggest that Jesus is the best way. We must trumpet that he is the only way, and all other ways lead to individual, cultural, and eternal destruction. True greatness is found only in our great king of Kings and Lord of lords. To lose him is eventually to lose everything, everywhere. To have him is eventually to have everything, everywhere.

[1] Oscar Cullmann, The Earliest Christian Confessions (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949), 23.

[2] Christopher Dawson, The Formation of Christendom (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 287.

[3] M. Stanton Evans, The Theme is Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1994), 275–279.

[5] Willie James Jennings , “The Fuller Difference: To Be a Christian Intellectual,” Fuller, issue 4, 50–53.

[6] Samir Selmanovic, “The Sweet Problem of Inclusiveness: Finding Our God in the Other,” in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt, eds. (Baker Books, 2007), 198.

[7] Stephen C. Perks, The Great Decommission (Taunton, England: Kuyper Foundation, 2011), 20.

[8] Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).

[9] Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence, How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001).

Learn more about how to make Christianity great again:

Is Marginalizing the Family the Latest Evangelical Idol?

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on February 11, 2019

**The family is a Christ-created cosmic norm**

Just in time to catch the cresting wave of our secular culture’s anti-family crusade, Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, chides Christians for championing the family. He’s not the only one. In the 80’s and 90’s, evangelicals perceived the family as under cultural and legal assault: abortion, homosexuality, divorce, pornography, and the Equal Rights Movement. This perception was a major impetus behind the Moral Majority. In an abrupt about-face, today’s evangelicals increasingly warn about idolizing the family, despite the fact that the family is under more intense attack today than 20–30 years ago. Moore writes:

The dark powers would have us idolize ourselves and by extension our families, by which usually we mean the image we’ve cultivated of ourselves and our families.

Before we evaluate whether today’s evangelicals are actually family idolaters, perhaps we can consider a time when the family was incontestably idolized — during the ancient Roman republic:

The head of the family was not merely father, judge and protector; he was also priest. The traditional religion of Rome was scarcely more than an extended spiritualization of the high points of family life: birth, marriage, and death. Nothing violated the religious, any more than the legal, autonomy of the family. The father was the supreme priest of the private gods of the family and its hearth, the Lares and the Penates. No child was ever born into a family; he had to be accepted, following birth, through the religious authority of the house father.[1]

Until the recent century and the incursion of Western (Christian) ideas, this divinization of the family almost equally shaped Asian cultures like China and Japan; ancestor worship is a logical practice when the family is divinized. This ancient Roman pater culture and traditional Asian ancestor worship, however, are far removed from the alleged idolatry Moore is criticizing:

[O]ur suffocating grasp on our family — whether that’s our idyllic view of our family in the now, our nostalgia for the family of long ago, our scars from family wounds, or our worries for our family’s future.

Even were this an accurate description of modern Christian devotion to the family, it’s far from the idolatry of the family, to put it mildly. Moore argues that this idolizing the family is partly the result of the church’s trying to be relevant — answering pressing questions the world is asking:

The outside world is interested in order and stability. In that sense, the world can see the value, in most cases, of “The Family” [note the scare quotes and derisive caps] in a way that it would not see the value of, say, the doctrine of justification by faith. Churches can talk about the family, then, in ways that seem immediately relevant even to their most metaphysically disinterested neighbors.

I’m not sure what world Moore is living in. Certainly not the West of the 21^st century. This “outside world” is interested in autonomy and rebellion, not order and stability. Indeed, at the heart of our postmodern moment is a reaction against order and stability, not craving for it.[2] Since God’s central institution of order and stability is the family, postmodernity is at war with it: porn, ideological feminism, sexual egalitarianism, children’s “rights,” same-sex “marriage,” androgyny, gender neutrality, “toxic masculinity,” cheap no-fault divorce, and on and on. If uniquely serious members of the “outside world” are anxious over the loss of “order and stability,” why shouldn’t the church counter with the family? In fact, if any other institution should champion and protect and nourish the family in our poisonously autonomous age, it’s the church.

Jesus, Enemy of the Family?

But for Moore, to exalt the family in our incontestably anti-family society is to diminish the message of Jesus Christ, who came to divide the family. He cites these statements by our Lord to prove that Jesus’ message necessarily assaults family loyalty:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters — yes, even their own life — such a person cannot be my disciple,” he said (Luke 14:26).

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. . . . I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household” (Matt. 10:34–36).

To the man who said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father,” Jesus responded without any apparent empathy: “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:59–60).

When another prospective disciple of Jesus asked to “say goodbye to my family,” [Moore writes] Jesus would have nothing of it. “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God,” he said (Luke 9:61–62). Again, if anyone but Jesus were to say this, it would sound at best harsh and at worst evil.

When Jesus said, “Follow me,” the fishermen-apostles immediately dropped their nets and came with him. James and John, Mark recounted, stopped mending their nets and “left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him” (Mark 1:20). Jesus’ hearers would have understood this as a repudiation of the family.

This catalog would seem to close the argument once and for all: Jesus came to lead people away from the family. But Moore’s is a strategy of swift de-contextualization. Just what families was Jesus dividing? Moore seems to be under the impression that Jesus’ audience were just good old-fashioned, Jehovah-honoring, Torah-observing, Messiah-searching Jews, and their Old Testament commitment to the family was what Jesus was overturning. But anybody who reads the Gospel accounts (particularly John’s) knows how erroneous this assumption is. Again and again he chides the Jews (and not just their leaders) of not believing or understanding the Old Testament (Jn. 5:46), of not adhering to the Genesis creational norms (Mt. 19:8), of not being Abraham’s children (Jn. 8:39). Moore conveniently fails to mention identification of Jesus’ own blood brothers with darkness (Jn. 7:1–7). Jesus’ was not quite a “happy Christian family.”

Jesus, then, did not come to divide the family, the institution that he himself created. He did, of course, come to divide the rebellious, apostate family of Israel at the time. Russell Moore seems not to make this distinction.

Here’s how the angel described the future ministry John the Baptist to Zacharias his the father: “And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord [Jesus Christ]” (Lk. 1:16–17, emphasis supplied). John was to turn the hearts of parents to the Lord Jesus so that he (John) could turn those same hearts to their children in preparation for the Messiah. A parental heart turned to the Lord is a heart that can be turned to one’s children. Jesus indeed came to divide families — apostate and unconverted families. He did not come to divide the family as an institution.

Moore’s assault intensifies: “But Jesus was no hypocrite. He not only taught these things [attacks on the family] but also lived them. He was never married and never had children. He seemed to disrespect at almost every turn his immediate and extended family.” But Jesus’ singlehood, as I noted in my article “The Evangelical Singleness-Celibacy Paradigm Is Wrong,” was wholly unique. Jesus does have a metaphorical bride, the church, and he does have metaphorical children, Christian believers. Had he taken a literal bride (a nearly unthinkable scenario), he would have been obliged to abandon her to untold grief at his agonizing death and subsequent departure to heaven. He knew he could not (and should not) fulfill earthly husbandly obligations to a physical bride. The fact that Jesus did not marry and sire children in no way whatever suggests he assaulted the family as an institution.

Junking Creation

But Moore’s most pernicious assertion, the core of his argument, is here:

In fact, Jesus seemed out of step with the entire thrust of the Bible. The biblical story starts with a family — a man and a woman charged with being fruitful and multiplying across the face of the earth (Gen. 1:28). God’s promise was that he would make Abraham the “father of many nations” (Gen. 17:5), that his descendants would be as numerous as the sands of the shore and the stars of the sky (Gen. 15:5). God’s promise to David is that God would establish a royal dynasty for David, that one of his sons would sit on his throne forever (2 Sam. 7:4–17).

Moore sets Jesus against the family by setting Jesus against creational norms. The fact that Jesus himself is the mediator of creation (Heb. 1:1–2) — that Jesus himself established the family — seems not to have entered Moore’s calculation. His marginalization of the family is rooted in his hermeneutic of discontinuity.[3] He can more easily marginalize and deprivilege the family by lopping off the creation account. But Jesus didn’t come to undo creation. “God does not make junk.” [4] He came to redeem and enhance creation, not junk it. Moore sets redemption against creation, the Jesus of Nazareth against the eternal Son of God, and the New Testament against the Old Testament. He sunders what God has joined, and in so doing truncates the biblical worldview.

Fighting Today’s Battles Today

Contrary to Moore, the church’s great present need is not a revival of preaching on justification by faith alone. This is not the most important doctrine in the Bible, even in soteriology (salvation doctrine). Still, the Reformation was forced to highlight it because the mediaeval church had obscured salvation by grace under a blanket of sacramental works-righteousness. But while that error is not less pernicious today, it is less pervasive, and giving that doctrine the emphasis it had from 1517–1660 is a mistake. The impetus behind that mistake can be either hidebound traditionalism or cultural cowardice — sometimes both.

The great threat today is the attack on creational norms like male and female created in God’s image as distinct kinds of human beings, and the related issue of marriage. That attack comes in the form of same-sex “marriage,” sexual fungibility (interchangeability of the sexes), and the exaltation of singlehood as autonomy. Recovering biblical creational norms is more important than preaching justification by faith alone, not because it’s optional (it isn’t), but because creational norms provide the context in which justification can have any meaning at all.

It’s no idolatry to champion the family and creational norms at the very time they’re under assault both in the culture and the church.

But it might be a tiptoe toward idolatry to slink away from the heat of battle over a misguided traditionalism, a faulty Old Testament-New Testament hermeneutic, or plain old garden-variety timidity. The longing for comfort without controversy and battle might just be the idolatry we have most to fear.

For further reading on this topic …

The Christian Sexual Worldview

[1] Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), 37. Christopher Wiley pointed out in his gracious prepublication review of this post: “I think the negative aspects of Roman household life can be oversold. See Xenophon’s On Household Management and you will find many supposedly modern attitudes about working with servants and your wife.”

[2] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995), 3–65.

[3] Paul D. Feinberg, “Hermeneutics of Discontinuity,” in Continuity and Discontinuity, Perspectives on the Relationship Between the Old and New Testaments, John S. Feinberg, ed. (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1988), 109–128.

[4] Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985, 2005, second edition), 48.

Christians Must Be Conservative, and Conservatives Must Be Christian

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on December 7, 2018

Political conservatives are interested in government. One of conservatism’s chief distinctives is commitment to small government: restoring states’ rights, reducing taxes, and deregulating business, for example. Conservatives deplore ever-expanding government intrusion into citizens’ lives. They stand for the Constitution, largely because our Founders believed in limited government.

Jesus Christ, too, is interested in government. We read in Isaiah 9: 6–7:

For unto us a Child is born, Unto us a Son is given; And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace [t]here will be no end, [u]pon the throne of David and over His kingdom, [t]o order it and establish it with judgment and justice [f]rom that time forward, even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

This Jewish child was the Messiah, our Lord. He’d grow up to be the Savior of the world. The “government will be upon His shoulder.” That is, he will carry the government. Government is the Hebrew word misrah. It means “rule” or “dominion.” A crucial (but not only) aspect of government is political government. Jesus Christ is the rightful Governor of the world. In fact, if we don’t get his role in government right, we’ll get all other roles wrong. This means that politics, like all else, must be Christian. But what makes a political view Christian? It’s first necessary to shed the silly idea that Christianity is equally compatible with dramatically conflicting political philosophies.

Christians Must Be Conservative

To start bluntly: All biblical Christians (that is, true Christians) must be politically conservative (as we use that term today), and all true conservatives must be Christian. The evangelical Leftists might suffer cardiac arrest at that assertion, but it’s true. This does not mean that liberals or Leftists cannot be regenerate. It’s possible for regenerate people to be untaught, immature, confused or rebellious. It is not possible, however, to be Christian as the Bible assumes Christians will be while embracing political liberalism.

To reiterate: Christians may not legitimately be either conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. The Bible is not fundamentally about politics, but it does imply what we term a political philosophy. That philosophy is simply not compatible with today’s liberalism. This also means that Christianity isn’t reconcilable with the Democratic Party.

**The Christian Left is Leftist, but it is not Christian**

The Bible cannot be construed as hospitable to political liberalism. (Not the way we use liberalism today.) You can’t be a true Christian and be a liberal. You can’t support abortion rights and same-sex “marriage” and Obamacare and judicial activism and socialism and still be a biblical Christian. There are churches throughout the world today that support political liberalism. They claim to be Christian. They’re not. Christians must be politically conservative.

Conservatives Must Be Christian

My present concern, however, isn’t with liberalism but with conservatism. I don’t want to suggest merely that Christians must be conservative. I want to argue a more controversial viewpoint. Conservatives must be Christian. You can’t be a true conservative (not for long, anyway) unless you’re Christian, at least in your basic worldview. If your political conservatism isn’t grounded in Christianity, it won’t long survive. If you lack a Christian foundation, your political house will collapse with the first big ideational and existential storm. It’s suicidal to decouple conservatism from Christianity. In other words, our political conservatism should be Christian conservatism, and there shouldn’t be any other kind. There are other kinds, of course.

Varieties of (Non-Christian) Conservatism

Libertarianism

Let’s take libertarianism (some call it anarcho-conservatism). Hard-core libertarians don’t like to be known as conservatives, but most libertarians would be considered big-tent conservatives. Libertarians believe in a dramatically reduced role for the state, or perhaps even no state at all. They believe in laissez-faire (“let do”): they believe the market should be free in an almost absolute sense. They believe in the legalization of all drugs. They believe in the liberty for sexual acts of all kinds between consenting adults. If consistent, they believe in liberty for bestiality. They oppose environmentalism, zoning regulations, and other political interference in the economy. The guiding principle of libertarianism is individual autonomy. The individual and his choice rules.

Conservative Christians find aspects of libertarianism attractive. We agree that the state is way too large. We agree that individual choices should mostly decide in the economy. We agree that government interference leads to tyranny. But we can’t be libertarians. They guiding principle of libertarianism is individual autonomy — the self rules. We Christians have a name for that principle: sin. That was Satan’s appeal in Eden: “Come on, Eve, be your own boss; be your own God. Be a good libertarian.”

It’s strange that some Christians want to be libertarians when the very guiding principle for libertarians is what we know to be sin. Our guiding principle is “Jesus is Lord,” not “Man is God.”

Constitutionalism

Then there’s Constitutionalism. This is a much better option. These conservatives want to base all politics on the U. S. Constitution. That’s not a bad idea. The Constitution is a towering document in world history. It brings together the best of British conservatism and the experience of the American colonists. It was shaped by Christianity.[1] It’s no wonder that liberals dislike the Constitution as interpreted in its original context. It won’t stand for their views. Liberal judges believe in a “living Constitution.” They must interpret it to say what its framers would never have intended. Why? The dead Constitution, that is, the actual Constitution, would kill their dreams of the elite society. The Constitution is a bulwark against today’s political liberalism.

But the Constitution isn’t a stand-alone solution. The Constitution was designed for a Christian people. On October 11, 1798, John Adams, our second President, declared to the military: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious [he meant Christian] people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[2] We can’t sever the Constitution from a Christian populace and expect the Constitution to save us. This explains a great dilemma we face as a nation. The Constitution and our historic institutions were intended for a Christian population. But now we have a post-Christendom, secular, pagan population. Yet that population is still living under a Christian-shaped form of government. We’re now at a breaking point. Our ungodly citizenry is chafing under our Christian institutions. We’ve gradually put the new wine of secularism and paganism into the old bottle of the Constitution. The bottle is about to burst. This is why our answer isn’t simply a return to the Constitution, impressive though it is. The Constitution requires a Christian people.

Paleo-conservatism

Finally, consider paleo-conservatism. “Paleo” means old or ancient. This is the view of old-time conservatives like Pat Buchanan and the American Conservative magazine. In some ways, it’s correct. In other ways, it’s incorrect. It stands for moral absolutes. It stands for America First. It stands for strong families. Its foreign policy is non-interventionist. It supports a protectionist economic policy. It opposes the sociopolitical elites. It’s largely shaped by Roman Catholicism. Its guiding principle is tradition: the old ways are the best ways. Many of the old ways are better ways than modern ways. But the old ways can never be our standard. After all, sin is very, very old. In our nation, Southern slavery is an old way, but it’s not a biblical way. Reviving the past isn’t a silver bullet, for the simple reason that we’d be reviving the sins of the past, not just the glories. For this reason, paleo-conservatism won’t save our nation.

There are other strains of conservatism: neo-cons, crunchy cons, populist conservatives, urban conservatives, and others. All of them have one thing in common: they aren’t Christian. And because they aren’t Christian, we can’t buy into them wholeheartedly, even if we agree with parts of them.

A foundational point is this: we say that Jesus is the answer, but he’s the answer to everything, not just the family and church. He’s the answer to politics. And if this is true, and if our politics isn’t Christian, it denies our Lord, and it will fail.

This doesn’t mean that political parties must have Christian in their name. Some European political parties have Christian in their name, but they’re about as Christian as the American Democratic Party. In other words, they’re anti-Christian. It doesn’t mean that politicians must always be quoting the Bible. It doesn’t mean all party members must be Christian. It doesn’t mean that the church must control politics (it must not). To say that all conservatives must be Christians is simply to say that Christian truth is our guiding principle. Our guiding principle is not human autonomy (libertarianism), or the Constitution (Constitutional conservatism), or the past (paleo-conservatism). Our guiding principle is the bedrock truth of Jesus Christ, the cornerstone, revealed in the Bible.

Why Conservatism Must Be Christian

What are the facets of that guiding principle? I’ll mention five.

Jesus’ Cosmic Lordship

First, Jesus is Lord of all the universe, including politics. “Jesus is Lord” was the first great creed of Christians.[3] They meant he’s Lord of all. He’s Lord of the individual, the family, the church, business, schools, and, yes, politics. We can’t draw the line at politics. We can’t say, “Jesus, we recognize you as Lord everywhere — except politics. That’s just asking too much.” No, if Jesus is Lord anywhere, he must be Lord everywhere.

The fact that sinners don’t recognize him as Lord doesn’t mean he’s not Lord. One day all people will recognize him as Lord (Phil. 2: 5–11), but he’s still Lord today.

In the early church, this meant that Caesar is not Lord. This is why Christians were persecuted.[4] They weren’t persecuted by the Roman Caesars for worshipping Jesus. The Romans worshipped all sorts of deities, the more, the merrier. The Romans didn’t care what god you worshipped, just as long as you recognized Caesar as lord. Christians could never do that. They would obey Caesar, but they would never bow to him as lord. This is why they were torched and thrown to lions, not because they trusted Jesus as their Savior. The issue is always, “Who is Lord?”

Caesar isn’t lord. The Roman senate wasn’t lord. Medieval kings weren’t lord. The Pope isn’t lord. Your pastor isn’t lord. Marxist dictators aren’t lord. Military leaders aren’t lord. Donald Trump isn’t lord. The democratic majority isn’t lord. Jesus alone is Lord. Therefore, a non-Christian politics is a denial of the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

God’s Universal Law

Second, if Jesus is Lord, then God’s moral law, including his moral law in politics, is designed for all people. God’s moral law is revealed in both creation and in his word, the Bible (never separately[5]). Remember: Jesus isn’t Lord over just the family and church. He’s Lord of everything. That means he exercises his jurisdiction over everything. How does he do that? By his word, his law. Paul writes that the entire world is subject to God’s law (Rom. 3:19–20).

In Psalm 2 we read that the kings of earth try to break the bands of Jehovah’s Son. His bands are his law. They rebel against the Son (our Lord), but Jehovah will punish them in his anger if they refuse to repent and submit to the Son. All kings, not just Jewish kings, are bound to obey and enforce God’s law.

This doesn’t mean that all of God’s law is political. Most of it isn’t. Most sins aren’t crimes in the Bible. Most sins aren’t punishable by the state. In fact, God’s laws are many fewer than man’s modern laws. Man multiplies laws to to increase his political control. God’s laws are few and simple. God’s law requires politicians to protect innocent human life, including preborn children. They’re required to protect the family from social destroyers like same-sex “marriage.” They’re required to protect legal property. They’re required to impose capital punishment on those who deprive innocent people of their lives. God’s laws are simple and few.

**The Lordship of Jesus Christ, not individual salvation, is always the central issue**

Positive law, what we call legislation, must be an application of God’s moral law. Laws penalizing software theft are applications of the 8^th commandment. Speed limit laws are applications of the 6^th commandment.

None of this means that conservatives are trying to set up a theocracy, as they’re often accused of by an ignorant or slanderous press. Theocracy means God’s rule. The fact is, Jesus Christ already set up a theocracy, whether we like or not. Liberals complain that conservatives want to “take over” politics to force people to become Christian. That’s false. People become Christian by trusting in Jesus Christ alone for salvation. Salvation is by grace, not politics. Christianity doesn’t force anybody to become a Christian. It does require a basic law order, however. That’s just what the Founders believed.

Knowledgeable liberals understandably fear Christians in politics for one chief reason: we will slash the size of politics. We believe in getting the federal government out of most all of life. We believe in states’ rights. Even more so, we believe in county rights. And even more, in family and church rights. God’s moral law laws are few and simple. God’s law cuts man’s law — and his politics — down to size. A non-Christian politics refuses to be governed by the only law that God intended for politics — his.

The Creational Commission

This leads to the third aspect of Christian conservatism: the creational commission of the godly is to take responsible dominion over the rest of creation, including political dominion. This commission was given to man and woman at their creation (Gen. 1:28–30). It was never rescinded. God repeated it to Noah after the Flood (Gen. 9:1–3). God gave man the responsibility of capital punishment (vv. 5–7). Obviously this commission includes (what we call) politics. In Daniel 7:27 we read that when Jesus ascends, this happens:

‘ … [T]he kingdom and dominion, [a]nd the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven, [s]hall be given to the people, the saints of the Most High. His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, [a]nd all dominions shall serve and obey Him.’ [emphasis supplied]

It’s God’s desire that godly people lead politics. The great commission is this creational commission adapted to our fallen world. We preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, sinners trust him, and he brings the nations under his authority (Mt.28:18–20). This includes his political authority, his civil law.[6]

For too long Christians have abandoned their commission. They’ve seen the gospel as a one-way ticket out of this world into heaven. They’ve believed that the world rightly belongs to the Devil. They’ve been derelict in their obligation to steward the earth for God’s glory. But the facts are these: the Gospel is the Good News that God in Jesus Christ is turning back sin everywhere, “far as the curse is found.” Jesus Christ isn’t saving just us; he’s saving everything.

Our future home isn’t heaven, but a new earth on which a new heaven descends. We don’t travel up to heaven to live eternally with God. He descends to earth to live with us (Rev. 21:1–4).[7] And Satan doesn’t own the world: “[T]he earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness” (1 Cor. 10:26, 28). Jesus stated that at his first coming, he bound the strong man, Satan, and plundered his house (Mk. 3:27).

Jesus Christ is Lord of the cosmos, and we are God’s deputies in his world. He’s given the world into our hand to steward for his glory. Politics isn’t the principal place to do this, but it is one place to do this.

Tragically, the church has been overrun by cultural retreatism. Christians think they’ve fulfilled their obligation by attending church on Sunday and avoiding gross sins and evangelizing a few sinners and waiting for heaven or the Second Coming. But man and woman live on earth as God’s deputies. Jesus carries the government on his shoulder, but he calls us to lead that government under his authority. Secular progressives and neo-pagans have commandeered politics precisely because Christians have shirked their calling. If we expect to turn back evil in the world, we will do it when more Christians recover their dominion calling. This includes their political calling: more biblical Christians in political office, more Christians voting for Christians and Christian-influenced candidates, more biblically shaped legislation. Politics is a Christian responsibility, not a luxury. A non-Christian politics exempts Christians from their God-imposed requirement of cultural stewardship in politics.

A Plurality of Governments

Fourth, God has established several governments, and politics is simply one among several.[8] When we use the term “government” today, we usually mean the federal government in Washington D.C., or our state government. That’s not the biblical idea. The most important government is self-government under God’s authority. Then there’s family government, church government, school government, business government, and so on. And then, one government among many, is civil (political) government.

Today’s conservatives call these other governments “civil society.”[9] These institutions are buffers between the individual and the state. One of the telltale signs of the Leftists is to demolish all barriers between the individual and Washington D. C. That’s why they want to nationalize everything: education, health care, elderly care, retirement income, and all else. Leftists are elites. They believe they alone are entitled to dictate to everybody else. They alone know what the Good Society is. The family and church represent rival authorities. The family and church compete for citizens’ allegiance. So they must marginalize or eliminate the family and the church. For Leftists, there must be only one government: civil government. Politics is their god.

But Christian conservatives know that God divides up the exercise of his governing authority. There are several governments, not just one. And because God’s government is big (over everything), man’s government must be small. This is why conservatives must support small government. Because God’s government is big. His Son carries the world’s government (over all things) on his shoulders. When Christianity is excluded from politics, political government begins to dwarf all other governments.

The Earthly Kingdom Victory

Finally, God has promised victory in history for his kingdom, including political victory. Jesus deeply resisted the Jews who wanted to make him king. All they wanted was a leader to overthrow the Romans. They were political revolutionaries. They were crushed for their recalcitrant insurrection in the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 68–72. Jesus wasn’t a political revolutionary. He came to earth to be a king, but by dying for our sins and rising from the dead. When he ascended, he assumed his heavenly throne. He now rules the world by his Spirit and his word and people. Paul writes that he will reign until he crushes all enemies under his feet (1 Cor. 15:21–28). Paul sets the historical sequence: Jesus rises from the dead; then he reigns over earth; then he returns, and he raises all the dead; then he delivers the kingdom to his Father. He’s reigning right now. He will continue to reign until all his enemies are crushed.

The Bible’s eschatology (view of the future) is an eschatology of victory.[10] This doesn’t mean that there won’t be battles. It doesn’t mean that we’ll win every battle. It means that we’re on the winning side. It means that we’ll progressively win.

Here’s a helpful metaphor.^{^[11]} After D-Day in WWII, the Allied victory was never in doubt. But there are still many battles to be fought. The war was working toward Allied victory. But many bloody battles lay ahead. The Cross and resurrection were our D-Day. The victory is never in doubt. But there are still plenty of battles, and that includes political battles. But the Devil’s fate is sealed. The victory is the Lord’s.

The Western church in the last 150 years has developed a desiccating pessimism. It’s given up hope. It’s holing up for rescue. But God won’t rescue us from our dominion responsibility. He hasn’t called us to escape from evil; he’s called us — like he called his Son on earth — to victory over evil.

The late George H. W. Bush once spoke of a New World Order. Conservatives were suspicious. This sounded just like a dreaded “globalism.” But I can assure you: there is a new world order, and it belongs to Jesus Christ, and no other world order can compete with it. In Daniel 2 we read the prophecy of the four ancient world empires in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream: Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Daniel sees a small stone supernaturally hurled and striking the feet of the fourth empire (Rome). That empire collapses and the stone slowly grows to a mountain that fills the earth. Daniel explains this part of the dream (v. 44):

[I]n the days of these kings [that is, the days of the ancient empires, not in our own days] the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever.

That is Messiah’s kingdom. By the Gospel of Jesus Christ and obedience to his law, the kingdom gradually grows and eventually overwhelms the earth. This kingdom is the final kingdom. It will never be supplanted. It will crush all other kingdoms. “It shall stand forever.”

Never surrender to discouragement. We’ll win because the Lord Jesus Christ will win. But we will not win as long as we suppose that politics is acceptably non-Christian.

Conclusion

If you’re not politically conservative, you can’t be a biblical Christian. Today this also means that can’t support the Democratic Party. Further, if you’re a conservative, you must, if consistent, be a Christian. Every other guiding principle for conservatism will eventually collapse.

To libertarians we say: Free markets without the Triune God lead to lawlessness and a tyrannical state that steps in to squash the anarchy.

To constitutionalists we say: the Constitution is exceptional, but the Constitution cut off from its Christian source won’t survive. Our anti-Christian culture will alter or abandon the Constitution (a good reason, by the way, not to support a new constitutional convention). We must be Christian constitutionalists, not just constitutionalists.

To paleo-conservatives we say: the old ways were often better than the new ways, but neither way is absolute. Reviving old errors is no better than inventing new ones. Our standard is God’s word, not the old ways.

Donald Trump’s theme is MAGA: “Make America Great Again.” It’s a fine motto, just as long as we know what made America great in the first place. It wasn’t our mighty army or natural resources or political philosophy or virtuous citizens. America was great because it was founded on Christian truth. It was not founded as an explicitly Christian commonwealth (since Christianity already suffused the culture), but it was founded on Christian truth. John Quincy Adams, our 6^thpresident, and son of John Adams, wrote in a letter on April 27, 1827:

The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this — it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity. [italics in original][12]

“Righteousness exalts a nation, [b]ut sin is a reproach to any people” (Pr. 14:34).

What is needed today is a bold, thoughtful, effective voice for political conservatism — in other words, for biblical Christianity.

[1] John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997).

[2] William J. Federer, America’s God and Country, Encyclopedia of Quotations (Coppell, Texas: Fame Publishing, 1994), 10.

[3] Oscar Cullmann, The Earliest Christian Confessions (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949), 18–34.

[4] Carl E. Purinton, Christianity and Its Judaic Heritage (New York: The Roland Press, 1961), 246.

[5] There is no “natural law,” as that is expression is commonly understood, a secularized law code specifically excluding Jesus Christ and the Bible. The Son of God is the mediator of creation, and God holds all creation together (Col. 1:15–17; Heb.1:1–3).

[6] Scott J. Hafemann, “The Kingdom of God as the Mission of God,” in For the Fame of God’s Name, Sam Storms and Justin Taylor, eds. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2010), 235–252. “Because of the atoning consequence of the Cross, God is finally fulfilling his mission of revealing his glory through (re-) creating a people who will exercise dominion in his name by keeping his commandments” (248).

[7] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 104–106.

[8] Rousas J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, 1978), 331–343.

[9] Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nations, Two Cultures (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 30–44.

[10] J. Marcellus Kik, An Eschatology of Victory (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971).

[11] Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950), 84.

[12] “John Quincy Adams to an Autograph Collector, 27 April 1837.”

Christmas versus Excarnation

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on December 4, 2018

This Advent and Christmas season we celebrate the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Incarnation literally denotes enfleshment. The eternal Son of God assumed humanity as a babe in Bethlehem in order to grow to adulthood and die for the sins of the world. This death and subsequent resurrection, the source of our salvation, presuppose incarnation. Without incarnation, there can be no salvation.

Excarnation

The opposite of incarnation is excarnation, a word coined by Charles Taylor[1] to describe the modern inclination to limit all the significant issues of reality to the mind. The body and material world are simply vehicles for reason and imagination. Excarnation is indebted to ancient Gnosticism, the first and most dangerous Christian heresy that afflicts the church and culture down to this very day.[2]

While the Bible located the world’s ills in human sin, Gnosticism blamed them on creation itself. An ignorant, malign deity (the Demiurge) broke from the true God and created matter, including the human body, contrary to God’s desire. The true God tried to foil the Demiurge by covertly inserting sparks of divinity into the human bodies. To the Gnostics, the Fall is not from righteousness into sin, but from spirit into matter; and salvation is escape from the body and reversion to pure spirit. This means the human body and the material world are a prison from which the enlightened must escape. Jesus came not to save from sin, but to deliver from ignorance and impart knowledge (gnosis), by which the illuminated learn of their true, excarnated destiny. For Christians, man is rescued by God’s Son becoming man in assuming (and dying and rising in) a human body. For Gnostics, man is rescued by escaping from his body, after which the divine spark is released to return to the heavenlies. Man becomes God.

Excarnation is the process of man’s salvation. This heresy the antithesis of biblical orthodoxy.

Excarnation in Culture

Excarnation is increasingly a guiding tenet of Western elites. There’s nothing Christian about it. The Bible teaches that God’s norms are interwoven in the cosmos. These include gravity and thermodynamics. They include economic laws of scarce resources. Moreover, they include his norms for human sexuality. Today’s elites don’t simply wish the rebel against these laws. They want to circumvent and then abolish them. They have figured out the only way to do this is to bypass reality itself. Their vision of the Good Society is one in which all people are equal in condition, and the “marginalized” are resituated as the apex of culture. If this means redefining reality, so be it. If the human body as biologically male or female is an impediment to human imagination, sex-“reassignment” surgery is an option. If some humans are smarter, better looking, stronger, or cleverer than others, laws must be imposed that penalize their giftedness and reduce them to the level of their inferiors. Eventually, this means that their gifts must be eliminated to create true equality. If women are naturally superior nurturers and men naturally superior soldiers, men must nurture babies and women must serve in combat. TV and movies must depict lithe 120-pound women as martial arts devotees vanquishing muscular 200-pound male warriors. The ridiculousness of the idea is irrelevant; it’s the reality-bending social vision that matters. The body forbids the exercise of the rebellious imagination, so the body must be circumvented and, if necessary, abandoned. Reality doesn’t conform to the elite vision of society, so reality is irrelevant. The excarnation paradigm sees the body simply as a vehicle for the person, the “authentic self.” The person, the real you and I, is inside the body, the “ghost in the machine.” The body is like an automobile that carts us around. There’s a radical disjunction between the authentic, self-aware person, and his body. The body is simply a tool, like a screwdriver or a fork, though a highly complex one.

This anthropology (view of man) has momentous implications. For one thing, it means that if the self is not fully developed, the body is unimportant. This means that there should be no barrier to abortion and euthanasia and mercy killing. After all, it’s the self that’s important, not the body. If there is no authentic self (or person on the inside), the body is disposable. Remember: the body is only there as a vehicle for the person. [3] This is the grim price we pay as a society for implementing the excarnation vision.

Excarnation in the Church

The Bible does not exalt spirit over matter; Jesus is Lord of the invisible and visible world (Col. 1:15–17). Yet ever since pagan Greek ideas of the inferiority of the material world infected Christianity, the church has battled with excarnation. Even as the church prays, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt. 6:10), many Christians view the world outside the church — economics, politics, entertainment, education, and architecture — as inescapably “carnal” (fleshly) and unfit for Christian influence. So the church retreats to an excarnated spirituality. Prayer, interior dialogue, and contemplation of heaven are considered spiritual, while working to re-criminalize abortion, de-legitimize same-sex “marriage,” combat pornography, and reduce government theft programs in the form of confiscatory taxation are relatively unimportant and, in fact, a diversion from the church’s real, excarnated tasks. Escape from evil within the created order rather than confrontation with and victory over it is the excarnational agenda. Christianity is reduced to a “personal devotional hobby.”[4]

But Advent stares us unflinchingly in the face with the truth that the present world, immaterial and material, is cursed by sin and is to be redeemed by the death and resurrection of our Lord. The most evil being in the universe is pure spirit, but Jesus was born and lived and died and rose from the dead and lives forever in a body. He is profoundly interested in the world, including the material world. He came healing the sick and exorcising demons from tortured bodies. To trust in the Messiah for salvation is to surrender oneself mind, soul, body — our entire self — to him (Rom. 12:1–2).

TV and movies depict lithe 120-pound women as martial arts devotees vanquishing muscular 200-pound male warriors. The ridiculousness of the idea is irrelevant; it’s the reality-bending social vision that matters.

He is as interested in purging sin from gansta rap and abortion clinics and fraudulent bond-rating agencies and Bauhaus architecture as he is from Christian hearts and families and churches. The cleansing power of the Gospel does not simply take souls to heaven; it transforms everything it touches.

Conclusion

This Advent season, relish the incarnational life and dismiss the excarnational vision. The body and the material world are not designed for our escape but for joy and victory. Jesus is Lord of all, and a God unashamed to be born into a barn amid farm animals is unashamed to care for and redeem every area of creation and culture presently under the dominion of sin. Christmas is a celebration of incarnation that made possible atoning bodily death and victorious bodily resurrection. Our future hope is not excarnation in a false medieval vision of angel babes and halos and harps in heaven but of the new heaven descended to a new earth purged from sin, where God will dwell eternally with us his people — on a profoundly material, but sinless, earth (Rev. 21:1–4).

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Belknap, 2007), 288.

[2] Benjamin Walker, Gnosticism, Its History and influence (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: Aquarian Press, 1983, 1989).

[3] Robert P. George, “Gnostic Liberalism,” First Things, December 2016, 33–38.

[4] Stephen C. Perks, The Great Decommission (Taunton, England: Kuyper Foundation, 2011), 20.

The Evangelical Singleness-Celibacy Paradigm Is Wrong

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on November 20, 2018

Evangelicals tend to be mimics. The surrounding apostate culture invents a trend, and evangelicals eventually adopt it, usually decorating it with a pious veneer. This is the case with the current widespread marginalization of and assault on marriage. Some moderns argue that ours is the best of times (or at least an improving time) for marriage. The recent click-bait headline “Are Millennials Saving Marriage? Divorce Rates Plummet” captures this optimism, but it misleads. Yes, there is good news: millennials are staying married longer than their parents’ generation. Staying married rather than divorcing is obviously favorable for institutional marriage. The bad news is that fewer millennials are getting married. Many fewer. This, in fact, is the prime explanation for fewer divorces — many fewer people are getting married. If there’s a single worst way to reduce the divorce rate, short of international genocide or nuclear holocaust, this is probably it. A study from the Pew Research Center discovered:

[M]illennials are three times as likely to never have married as their grandparents were…. Compared to previous generations, millennials are marrying — if they do choose marriage at all — at a much older age. In 1965, the average marrying age for women was 21, and for men, it was 23. Today, the average age for marriage is 29.2 for women and 30.9 for men ….

The study offers these as chief reasons for the dramatic shift in marriage: “Millennials place personal needs and values first,” “Millennials question the institution of marriage,” and “Millennials have a strong sense of identity.” Deep-seated secularization and the related lust for individual autonomy are obviously at work in this trend:

For some millennial couples, they’d rather avoid the term “spouse” as well as “marriage” altogether. Instead, they are perfectly happy to be lifelong partners without the marriage license. Because marriage historically has been a legal, economic, religious, and social institution — marry to combine assets and taxes, to benefit from the support of each other’s families, to fit the mold of societal attitudes, or even to fulfill a type of religious or cultural “requirement” to hold a lifelong relationship and have kids — younger couples may not want to give in to those kinds of pressures. Instead, they claim their relationship as entirely their own, based on love and commitment, and not in need of external validation.

The bonds of covenant-keeping are the furthest thing from these young minds suckled on radical autonomy (“their relationship [is] entirely their own”), especially sexual autonomy. A no less enticing and more accurate headline is “How Millennials Are Killing Off the Concept of Marriage.” If you are under the impression that millennials are “saving” marriage, this chilling article will rudely disabuse you.

Many evangelicals have accommodated this momentous cultural shift, as they do most cultural shifts, by offering alleged biblical reasons for delaying marriage or simply remaining single, committed to a life of devout celibacy. This rationale provides cover and comfort for delayed marriage or lifelong celibacy among evangelicals. (There’s also the emergence of celibacy for “same-sex attracted” evangelicals, but that topic awaits another post. It’s unfortunately necessary to state here that the Bible does not condone same-sex “marriage” and, in fact, the practice would simply be unthinkable in biblical times, or any other times before our own.)

This emerging evangelical rationale creates roadblocks to Christian singles who creditably want to get married but can find no suitable spouse, since so many are content to remain single, having been granted warrant by their pastors and other leaders. A striking (and particularly flagrant) example is Preston Sprinkle’s article in Relevant magazine, “What the Church Gets Wrong About Singleness and Marriage.” One of many such arguments from what we might term the Evangelical Singleness-Celibacy Paradigm (ESCP), Sprinkle ticks off most of the usual evangelical reasons for staying single, and in fact argues, as many in the ESCP do, that singleness is spiritually superior to marriage. Single people simply make more devout Christians. Several of these reasons seem impressive on first sight, but wilt under more extensive scrutiny. This post offers brief, but more intense, scrutiny.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 7

We should start with 1 Corinthians 7. This is the seeming silver-bullet text of the ESCP. The apostle Paul is answering the Corinthians’ questions about marriage. The statements to which the ESCP draws special attention are located in vv. 7–9, 32–33:

I wish that all men were even as I myself. But each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that. But I say to the unmarried and to the widows: It is good for them if they remain even as I am; but if they cannot exercise self-control, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion…. But I want you to be without care. He who is unmarried cares for the things of the Lord — how he may please the Lord. But he who is married cares about the things of the world — how he may please his wife.

This excerpt without context would seem to settle the matter once and for all: Paul wishes every Christian were celibate because celibates are more devoted to the Lord, but since some people can’t live without sex, they’re permitted to marry, living within a non-sinful but spiritually inferior state.

But this reading misses some key points that mitigate the sweeping verdict of the ESCP. First, this passage is the only one in the Bible in which the writer expressly declares that God did not command the writer’s words but merely permitted him to write them:

But I say this as a concession, not as a commandment …. But to the rest [Christians with unbelieving spouses who are content to remain with them] I, not the Lord, say …. Now concerning virgins: I have no commandment from the Lord … But she [an unmarried widow] is happier if she remains as she is, according to my judgment (vv. 6, 12, 25, 40).

In short, Paul makes clear that in much of this chapter he is offering sound counsel, not communicating God’s norms. This fact does not imply that Paul’s advice is less inspired or infallible than his other writings or than the rest of the Bible. It simply means that his revelation in this chapter is not as widely applicable. Nor does it justify our playing “buffet application”: picking and choosing which biblical revelation to obey and bypassing the rest. The text itself must indicate the parameters of applicability. This text, however, discloses that the much of the chapter is (like the Jews’ wars of extermination in Canaan) not universally applicable. It is ad hoc advice, calculated for a specific situation. The reason for this limited applicability is likely found in vv. 26–27:

I suppose therefore that this is good because of the present distress — that it is good for a man to remain as he is: Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be loosed. Are you loosed from a wife? Do not seek a wife.

No one knows precisely what this “present distress” was. Some NT theologians like Richard B. Hays believe it was the impending Second Advent (pp. 126–129): Paul believed it would occur in the Corinthians’ lifetimes, perhaps even very soon (“the time is short,” v. 29). Yet to the Thessalonians Paul had written that the “day of Christ” was not impending (2 Thes. 2:1f.). 1 Corinthians was likely written just 2–5 years after 2 Thessalonians, so it’s unlikely that Paul would have reversed himself in such a short time. The Corinthian church was influenced by classical philosophy and its pagan Greek assumptions (ch. 1–2), including, as Gordon Fee notes, a spiritualized asceticism and dualism, which degraded the body and sex (p. 269) and lent credence to the singleness-celibacy viewpoint. Perhaps this contra-Christian influence was disrupting the church. Whatever the “present distress” was, it contributed to Paul’s counsel, which he pointedly distinguished from God’s command. In fact, as Fee writes, “[A]part from the command in v. 10, the whole [chapter] is filled with what is acknowledged by the apostle as his personal opinion” (p. 270). It is sound counsel for the “present distress,” but it is not normative. Celibacy is a special gift (v. 7), but it is an exception. Leon Morris summarizes:

Though he [Paul] himself prefers celibacy, his advocacy of that state is very moderate. He does not command a celibate life for all who can sustain it. He never says that celibacy is morally superior to marriage. He regards marriage as the norm, but recognizes that there are some, to whom God has given a special gift, who should remain unmarried. (p. 105)

Paul believed that celibacy was a valid, but non-normative and exceptional, calling. It is not “morally superior to marriage.” This is likely why in all his canonical writings, he didn’t communicate its requirements. After all, he was clear about marital requirements (Rom. 7:1–3; 1 Cor. 11:9–12; Eph. 5:22–33; Col. 3:18–19; 1 Tim. 4:1–4; 5:14; see also 1 Pet. 3:–7). If celibacy were spiritually superior to marriage, it’s hard to imagine why Paul (or another biblical writer) wouldn’t have outlined its specific stipulations as he did for marriage. But if gifted celibacy is rare and exceptional, this paucity of evidence makes sense.

In addition, the fact that Paul requires church elders to be the “husband of one wife” (1 Tim. 3:2; Tit. 1:6) indicates he could not have believed that celibacy necessarily creates superior piety. Who of all people should be more devout than church leaders? Yet Paul did not require that they be celibate. In fact, it’s possible his words might plausibly be construed that celibates are not qualified for church eldership, though this is not an irrefutable conclusion.

In any case, the prime biblical text for the ESCP that, in Sprinkle’s words, “almost downplays marriage in light of the beautiful prospect of singleness” (1 Cor. 7) does nothing of the kind. It offers apostolic advice, not divine command, during a “present distress” that should not be universalized to apply in all possible situations.

Celibacy in the Resurrection

Another biblical argument from the ESCP stems from Jesus’ response to the Sadducees’ question about levirate marriage and the resurrection (Mt. 22:23–30; Mk. 12:18–25; Lk. 20:27–36). They referred to the Mosaic law found in Deuteronomy 25:5–6 that if a man dies childless, his brother is required to marry his wife and to father for his deceased sibling an heir. The Sadducees inquired whose wife the woman would be in the resurrection (a reality they denied) if she married a series of men, all of whom died leaving her childless. Jesus subverted their question and pinpointed their ignorance by asserting that that there is no marriage in the resurrected state. Christina Hitchcock, who has written a book extolling the virtues of singleness, argues that

[S]ingleness signifies …the reality of the Resurrection and the priority of the church. Singleness is a sign of God’s future breaking into our present, a future characterized by radical, total dependence on God. Within this reality, we’re not related to anyone or anything in and of themselves, but all our relationships go through Jesus and outward. That is the vision of the future we see in the Resurrection, and I think that’s the reason Jesus promised a future in which people will neither marry nor be given in marriage (Matt. 22:30).

Hitchcock is not on shaky ground in suggesting that what Hebrews terms “the powers of the age to come” (6:5) retroactively invade the present. This is what theologians call the Already/Not Yet. While we cannot enjoy all the benefits of the glorified eternal state now, we can enjoy some of them (see Rom. 8:10–11; 2Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:11–15). In fact, there is a tendency among some evangelicals to underestimate the eternal powers that have invaded our preconsummate world. They’re plagued by an under-realized soteriology. But the eternal state is not our present state, and some aspects of it are so unlike our present state that they are simply not pertinent in this age. Celibacy is one of them. The reason for this is that Christians will be a different order of being in the eternal state than we are now. We will be enfleshed humans (the only kind there are), but ours will be resurrected, glorified flesh.

One feature of the eternal order is that there will be no need for procreation, and this is Jesus’ underlying point. The reason there is no marriage in the resurrection is that there’s no procreation, just as there isn’t among the angels. The issue is not the abolition of marriage per se, as though it were inferior, but that since one of the chief reasons for marriage is procreation, and since it will be unnecessary in the eternal state, marriage itself is unnecessary. “In this new deathless life,” declares R.T. France in his commentary on the passage, “there will be no place for procreation…. It is this aspect of marriage which Jesus’ argument excludes from the resurrection life, rather than any suggestion that loving relationships have no place there” (p. 317). It is entirely possible that spouses will be even more closely linked and intimate in the eternal state, simply not married and therefore not procreating. The issue is that, in France’s words, there will be “a wholly new kind of life.”

This life cannot be experienced in the preconsummate age. One way to understand the situation is to borrow the theological language of God’s communicable and incommunicable attributes. The former he can communicate to man in a relative sense (love, kindness, holiness) but the latter he cannot communicate to man (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence). Similarly, some features of eternity are communicable to the present age (the kingdom of God, resurrection righteousness in the Spirit, consistent victory over present evil powers), but others are incommunicable (immortality, sinlessness, inherent celibacy). Celibacy and childlessness are not examples of the retroactive in-breaking of the eternal kingdom, simply because that order of existence is not designed for the present world. It is suitable only to the eternal state.

C. R. Wiley pointed out to me after kindly being willing to read a pre-posting version of this essay that Paul in Ephesians 5:27 links the one-flesh union of marriage to the eternal state in detailing Christ’s preparation of his bride, the church, for her formal, spotless, presentation to him. Though this picture is, of course, metaphorical, it is hard to square with the ESCP thesis that marriage has no place in the consummation and that celibacy is an inherently higher spiritual state. If it were, it is perplexing that God would use marriage as precisely the metaphor for his eternal, and not merely temporal, union with his bride, the church.

It is therefore incorrect to suggest that celibacy is an eschatological sign of the eternal kingdom. There is nothing inherently superior about celibacy in the present world.

Jesus Reconfigured the Old Testament Family

Moreover, Preston Sprinkle writes that “Jesus reconfigured the Old Testament’s emphasis on family when he recognized all Christians as brothers and sisters.” In this telling, the OT was family-centered while the NT is Christian-centered. This distinction is wrong on two counts. First, Jehovah in the OT demanded loyalty of individuals even if it meant breaking with their family (remember God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to him?), and the NT recognizes the holy solidarity of the family. The Gospel promises apply to children no less than to their parents (Ac. 2:38–39). Families as families were baptized (Ac. 16:15; 18:8). Both parents and children are an integral part of the church (Eph. 5:22–6:4). The centrality of the family in God’s creational (and not merely redemptive) purposes is a theme of the both testaments.

It bears mentioning that in Matthew 19 we read Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ retort that if, as Jesus taught, divorce is permitted only in carefully circumscribed cases, it is preferable not to marry:

But He said to them, “All cannot accept this saying, but only those to whom it has been given: For there are eunuchs who were born thus from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who is able to accept it, let him accept it.” (vv.11–12)

Here Jesus is saying much the same thing Paul did later in 1 Corinthians 7. Celibacy is a gift, but there is no hint it is preferable to marriage. Jesus did not shift his Father’s emphasis from the family to the individual, and he never suggested that celibacy or singleness is spiritually superior to marriage.

The Examples of Jesus and Paul

In a related argument, Sprinkle draws attention to the fact that both Jesus and Paul were unmarried. But this fact has little relevance to his overarching thesis. Jesus does have a metaphorical bride, the church, and had he taken a literal bride (a nearly unthinkable scenario), he would have been obliged to abandon her to untold grief at his agonizing death and subsequent departure to heaven. He knew he could not (and should not) fulfill earthly husbandly obligations.

Paul was possibly a widower, but as a unique itinerant (“apostle of the Gentiles,” Rom. 11:13), he no less than his Lord could fulfill biblical marital obligations. He was happy in his celibate state and wished that all the Corinthians could benefit from it; but this was his own opinion, and he never once implied that celibacy should be normative.

The biblical texts that the ESCP routinely enlist to support their viewpoint fail, in fact, to support it.

Marriage as a Creational Norm

However, one biblical text conspicuously absent from almost all arguments for the superiority of singleness or celibacy is the Genesis creation account, and this omission is the Achilles’ heel of their entire case. It’s therefore understandable why the ESCP might wish to bypass Genesis 1-2. What gives it particular weight is our Lord’s statement that the creation account is universally normative (Mt. 19:8; Mk. 10:6). His answer was in response to the Pharisees’ question whether divorce was permissible under any circumstances. Jesus flatly told them it is not, and grounded his answer in the creation order. The Mosaic law permitted divorce because of the Jews’ hard hearts, but the creation order, which establishes marriage as a universal norm, trumps Mosaic law. This is a remarkable assertion, because the Bible holds the Mosaic law in the highest regard. Jesus’ statement indicates that what we may call creational norms take precedence over divine law established in the post-Fall world. Such a law is a concession, in some cases, to human sinfulness. Creational norms are, by contrast, the original design for the “operating system.” For this reason, Genesis 1–2 conveys the most universally normative expression of God’s will for his creatures anywhere in the Bible.

One of those norms is marriage. God created man for woman and woman for man. He created them so that they themselves would procreate and exercise dominion in the earth (Gen. 1:26–28). This is sometimes called the cultural mandate. A direct inference is that apart from marriage and children, it is not possible (with the exception of gifted celibacy) for humanity to fulfill its God-given role the world. Because evangelicals have tended to maximize redemption and minimize creation, they don’t allow creational norms to govern their views of marriage and celibacy, despite the fact that Jesus believed these norms reflect his Father’s universal will. Marriage is God’s norm. Anything else, even when legitimate, is an exception.

Marriage is the Holy Default

A man alone or a woman alone can’t fully display the image of God. In marriage, humanity most spectacularly images God. Adam must have Eve; Eve must have Adam. Together they embody and exhibit the divine image as fully as a creature can. The Trinity — God the Father, Son and Spirit, God as one nature in three persons — enjoyed infinite, eternal, blissful communion. Their communion was so indescribably joyous, that they decided to share it (read John 17). God is not stingy. That’s why he created man and woman. The eternal communion of the triune God expands outward to man in time and history. Man and woman now share in the communal life of the triune God (though, of course, in no sense becoming God).

A single individual wouldn’t have fully reflected that triune image. Man and woman both, in complement, comprehensively reflect God’s image. But a man alone or a woman alone can’t fully display the image of God. In marriage, humanity most spectacularly images God. In the words of James B. DeYoung:

… God could have made a thousand males for Adam, yet He would not have fully achieved His own image and its internal diversity. Without that full-orbed picture, His own being would have gone unknown and unknowable. Only a woman, not another man, could complete the divine design for humankind (31).

Adam must have Eve; Eve must have Adam. Together — and only together — they embody and exhibit the divine image as fully as a creature can. This is why John Calvin can write in his commentary at 1 Corinthians 7:1, “[T]he man without the woman was, as it were, but half a man.” Yet Preston Sprinkle exudes:

Much of this anti-singleness message saturates the air of our churches, sometimes with words, other times with actions. The message is usually … subtle and unintended. But single people hear it loud and clear: You’re incomplete until you get married and have at least two kids. (But if you have more than four, then people think you’re weird again.)

But to be pro-marriage is not to be anti-single. It is a creational truth that you are incomplete until you get married, and the Bible requires the fruitful blessedness of children (Ps. 127:3–5) and does not exalt childlessness. “The Childfree Life,” if a conscious choice, is sin, violating the creational norm of a fruitfulness-designed marriage (Gen. 1:27–28).

If the ESCP were correct, we can imagine God’s saying at creation, “Adam, I’m going to create from your own body a woman, one like you, yet different. Whatever you do, however, don’t marry her. The unmarried state is spiritually superior. The woman will draw you away from me.” Such a sentiment is outrageous. On the contrary, and as hard as it might be to accept the verdict, God alone was not sufficient for the man. The man needed someone like him, and though he was created in God’s image, he needed someone more like him than God is. God intentionally created man good, but relationally incomplete, and every male without a wife, and female without a husband, is relationally incomplete, even though at times it is God’s will for them to be that way (as widowers, for example, or as gifted celibates). To be married is alone to be complete.

Conclusion

This profound meaning of marriage rooted in the creation order demolishes the ESCP thesis that marriage is optional and that it and celibacy are not much more different from one another than right-and left-handedness are. The ESCP suffers from deep anticreational roots whose accelerated growth in the last few years threatens to choke the gospel. This is an irony, because evangelicalism is putatively all about the evangel, the good news, the gospel. But by its anticreational direction it strikes out at humanity as the image of God, and at marriage, procreation, and the cultural mandate as creational norms in terms of which the gospel is even possible at all. No creation, no gospel. Misunderstood creation, misunderstood gospel.

God privileges marriage because it is an underlying rationale for creating humanity in the first place. Man and woman in marital union most fully reflect the image of God and, with rare exception, produce children as God’s plan to oversee and cultivate the rest of his creation.

This is what man and woman are on earth to do, and this is the exalted condition that the gospel of Jesus Christ restores man and woman to.

UPDATE: Though I implied it in my essay on singleness, I wish to state now explicitly and emphatically (to avoid misunderstanding) that my criticisms are not directed at godly single Christians who desire to get married but who are waiting on a faithful spouse. Rather, my criticisms are directed at those singles who have marginalized or devalued marriage or even cast it aside, and for parents and, in particular, church leaders who encourage them in their disobedience.

Is God a Republican or Democrat?

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on October 4, 2018

The short answer is “no,” or “neither,” but this answer demands elaboration if it’s not to mislead. Pastor Tim Keller argues that Christians don’t fit into the present U. S. political party system and marshals reason why. I disagree. Keller and I both embrace Protestantism, one of whose distinctives is the final authority of the Bible, so the test is whether his (or my) views conform to the Bible’s teaching.

To Be Apolitical Is to Be Political

Keller’s first point, that to be apolitical is to be political, is quite right. To be apolitical is to tacitly affirm the status quo. A minister who refuses publicly to address ( = oppose) abortion, same-sex “marriage,” socialism, judicial activism, and “affirmative action” is not merely avoiding the entire counsel (Ac. 20:27) of the Bible (since the Bible explicitly or implicitly addresses these and similar issues), but he also creates an atmosphere in which his listeners will passively drift toward the most popular cultural views of the day. The fact that Keller doesn’t invoke the issues I did in making this point, opting rather to mention slavery, public education, and racial segregation, hot-button Leftist issues, doesn’t negate his underlying point: Christians must consider and obey the entire Bible, even the so-called political parts, and not crawl into an apolitical cave.

Godliness Requires Godly Political Power

He continues:

Nevertheless, while believers can register under a party affiliation and be active in politics, they should not identify the Christian church or faith with a political party as the only Christian one. There are a number of reasons to insist on this.

This is a solution in search of a problem. I know of no one (I doubt you do either) who “identif[ies] the Christian church or faith with a political party as the only Christian one.” There have been explicitly Christian third parties, but they have been minuscule. Both major parties include unbelievers and neither identifies as Christian, or, under the present circumstances, honestly could.

One [reason] is that it gives those considering the Christian faith the strong impression that to be converted, they need not only to believe in Jesus but also to become members of the (fill in the blank) Party. It confirms what many skeptics want to believe about religion — that it is merely one more voting bloc aiming for power.

the-two-political-parties-are-not-the-same-L-NehOM_.jpg

But aiming for power is by no means contra-biblical, and the criticism of skeptics is not a valid criterion for determining Christian action. Romans 13 makes clear that the state exercises God-given power. Not to exercise that power or not to support those who do exercise it would be to defy God and expose the weakest in a society to plunder and molestation. To vote for a political candidate or policy that will implement the moral law of God is to foster justice ( = righteousness), the godly exercise of power. To refuse to exercise the power to vote is to empower injustice. The Bible doesn’t depict pacifism as a virtue. In the face of evil, it is a vice (Prov. 24:11–12). Christian responsibility includes conflict with lawbreakers: “Those who forsake the law praise the wicked, [b]ut such as keep the law contend [strive or war] with them” (Prov. 8:24). Keller writes later that

The Gospel gives us the resources to love people who reject both our beliefs and us personally. Christians should think of how God rescued them. He did it not by taking power but by coming to earth, losing glory and power, serving and dying on a cross. How did Jesus save? Not with a sword but with nails in his hands.

This is correct as far as it goes, but to invoke the Cross without the resurrection is to offer half a Christ (Rom. 6:3–14). His earthly body was sown in weakness, but raised in power (1 Cor. 15:43). The crucifixion itself was an act of power, vanquishing Satan and the satanic principalities (Col. 2:12–15). The glorified, post-resurrection Christ presently reigns in blazing glory and power (Rev. 1:9–18). We know him not only in the fellowship of his sufferings but also in the power of his resurrection (Phil. 3:10). The Great Commission is possible because the power of the risen Christ is behind it (Mt. 28:18–20). To argue against power, including appropriate political power, is really to argue against the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all of life. The question is not whether Christians should exercise power, but how they should do it.

Biblical Command versus Practical Wisdom

Keller then notes:

Another reason not to align the Christian faith with one party is that most political positions are not matters of biblical command but of practical wisdom. This does not mean that the church can never speak on social, economic and political realities, because the Bible often does. Racism is a sin, violating the second of the two great commandments of Jesus, to “love your neighbor.” The biblical commands to lift up the poor and to defend the rights of the oppressed are moral imperatives for believers. For individual Christians to speak out against egregious violations of these moral requirements is not optional.

Keller offers racism and refusal to help the poor and defend the oppressed as two political acts that fall into the category of “biblical command” rather than “practical wisdom.” There can be no disagreement, no political flexibility on these issues. There can, however, be room for great disagreement on economics:

However, there are many possible ways to help the poor. Should we shrink government and let private capital markets allocate resources, or should we expand the government and give the state more of the power to redistribute wealth? Or is the right path one of the many possibilities in between? The Bible does not give exact answers to these questions for every time, place and culture.

I know of a man from Mississippi who was a conservative Republican and a traditional Presbyterian. He visited the Scottish Highlands and found the churches there as strict and as orthodox as he had hoped. No one so much as turned on a television on a Sunday. Everyone memorized catechisms and Scripture. But one day he discovered that the Scottish Christian friends he admired were (in his view) socialists. Their understanding of government economic policy and the state’s responsibilities was by his lights very left-wing, yet also grounded in their Christian convictions. He returned to the United States not more politically liberal but, in his words, “humbled and chastened.” He realized that thoughtful Christians, all trying to obey God’s call, could reasonably appear at different places on the political spectrum, with loyalties to different political strategies.

This is an odd juxtaposition of political issues. Racism, defined as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” is a grievous sin because it springs from pride, which God hates (Prov. 8:13). For this principal reason racism is abhorrent. But Keller suggests that racism is sinful on the grounds that it violates the second great commandment. I wonder how he’d respond to an antebellum Christian slaveholder who countered that it is precisely his love for his slaves that requires him to own them and provide for them. This scenario shows how vital it is not simply to know which acts are sins but why they are. Racism is a grievous sin because it is pride.

In arguing that God’s revelation on economics is not transcultural but may change with differing circumstances he faces a quandary. The Bible forbids theft. It declares that a government whose tax rate is as high as 10% is tyrannical (1 Sam. 8:10–18). It portrays Jesus as championing in the most graphic parables possible what we today term market economics (Mt. 20:1–16; 25:14–30). While the Bible doesn’t include anything approaching an advanced free-market system, obviously unknown at the time, neither does it support anything approaching state socialism. In fact, its commitment to the integrity of private (mostly family) property is compatible with free markets and not with socialism. Presumably, however, on the issue of racism, Keller believes “the Bible does . . . give exact answers to these questions for every time, place and culture.” But if this is the case with racism, it is not clear why it isn’t the case with socialism, whose guiding principle (theft) is every bit as abhorrent and perhaps even more abhorrent to God than racism.

Package-Deal Ethics

Keller then states:

Another reason Christians these days cannot allow the church to be fully identified with any particular party is the problem of what the British ethicist James Mumford calls “package-deal ethics.” Increasingly, political parties insist that you cannot work on one issue with them if you don’t embrace all of their approved positions.

If anything, this criticism is more suited to multi-party societies than the two-party system in the U.S. The very fact that there are only two parties means that parties must include people with whom they can work on some issues and not others. The recent internal battle among Republicans between conservatives (Paul Ryan) and populists (Donald Trump) and among the Democrats between progressives (Joe Biden) and socialists (Bernie Sanders), all four factions arguing for differing ethics in some cases, suggests that there are no “package-deal ethics” in modern American politics.

Social Justice Is Social Injustice

Keller elaborates:

This emphasis on package deals puts pressure on Christians in politics. For example, following both the Bible and the early church, Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.

Unfortunately, Keller doesn’t define “racial justice.” If he means that all races should be treated equally under the law, this is just what the Bible requires (Ex. 12:49). If he means that “underrepresented” races may validly be awarded enrollment or employment quotas on the basis of race alone (“affirmative action”), he is arguing for racism, a form of racial injustice. Indeed, social justice today equates to social in justice. Nor does he define marriage, which 20 years ago would have been unnecessary, but is not today. The Bible defines marriage in the way it has been defined in all societies everywhere until decades ago.

No Party Parity

More importantly: the fact is that a number of “historical Christian positions on social issues” do “fit into contemporary political alignments.” The GOP and the historical Christian position define marriage as between one man and one woman. The Democrats do not. The GOP and the historical Christian position see unborn children as persons entitled to legal protection from murder. The Democrats do not. The GOP and the historical Christian position recognize that economic liberty (free markets) is a moral imperative that, not coincidentally, erases poverty. The Democrats do not. The GOP and the historical Christian position embrace the rule of law as a cornerstone of the Founding philosophy of classical liberalism, itself shaped by Protestant Christianity. The Democrats do not. There is no moral equivalence between the parties. The GOP is far from perfect, but it is also usually not far from the “historical Christian positions on social issues.” The Democrats, on the other hand, aren’t even close. And don’t want to be.

So Christians are pushed toward two main options. One is to withdraw and try to be apolitical. The second is to assimilate and fully adopt one party’s whole package in order to have your place at the table. Neither of these options is valid. In the Good Samaritan parable told in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus points us to a man risking his life to give material help to someone of a different race and religion. Jesus forbids us to withhold help from our neighbors, and this will inevitably require that we participate in political processes.

There is another, more comprehensive option: when possible, work within the party that most conforms to the Bible and the historical Christian position. And, above all, do not adopt political Leftism while cautioning about partisan affiliation, when one party is vocally and conspicuously on the side of Leftism. To do that would be erroneously apolitical.

The fact that God is not a Republican or Democrat doesn’t mean that the major moral views of both parties are equally unacceptable (or acceptable). One party more closely reflects, if not always consistently practices, God’s moral law. This means one party is comparatively more God-honoring than the other. I’ll let you figure out which is which.

For a biblical Christian in 2018 in the United States, there is no party parity. Not to choose is to be morally irresponsible.

Counsel to Younger Bibliophiles

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on January 2, 2020

This new year, I’ve noticed (and benefited from) a number of 2018 books-read lists, but here I want to address younger bibliophiles, and from a different angle.

Recently I estimated the number of books that I’ll read over the rest of my life, if God grants a full life, and given my pattern of reading, underscoring, annotating, and indexing. The estimate I came up with was 800 to 1000. That’s not many books. This number sobered me into thinking how I’ve often in the past read widely but not wisely. I’ve read thousands of books (I don’t know how many), and, of course, I wish I knew then what I know today about reading choices.

I began reading omnivorously when I was 10 or 11 years old. Aside from the Bible, the first book that I read, at least the first long book, was The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I was hooked. I was reading theology at 14 years old and socio-cultural works at 17 and 18.

I’ve never let up.

I’ve been so intellectually curious and such an excited and excitable reader that I’ve read widely on a number of topics, perhaps too many topics. While I’m not unhappy with my wide reading, I’m aware that had I read more wisely, I could’ve benefited more greatly from my reading.

My advice to younger readers: Try to discover the very best two or three books on any topic in which you’re interested. My practice was to read anywhere from 15 to 30 books on a single topic, when that wasn’t necessary. Unless you’re a scholar specializing in a particular topic, you don’t need to know everything that everybody has said about it. In fact, if you’ve read more than two or three books on the topic, you’ll probably find yourself consuming a lot of repetition. This happened to me. Because of opportunity costs, this meant that there were other topics that I simply left unread.

Don’t simply read a book because it is (or looks) interesting. Select your reading strategically. Compile a list of the books that you intend to read in 2020, and do your best to finish that list. Don’t be sidetracked by other interesting books. There will always be interesting books to read, but the most interesting books are not always the right ones for you to read.

There’s no substitute for disciplined reading choices.

I wish I’d known this in 1975–1990.

Posted on February 10, 2020

Man in full

Wealth and sex

The pagans turned away from God, but they couldn’t turn away from their desires for what God intended them to enjoy. They abandoned God’s house and moved into the Devil’s house, but they had to take the furniture with them.

Confidence in our God-rigged universe

Why no anxiety

Posted on January 31, 2020

Contracting Christianity

Privileging Theology, De-privileging Worldview

Double-Decker Reality

Conclusion

Posted on January 30, 2020

The Establishment clause

The Free Exercise clause

Persuasion, not coercion

Posted on January 19, 2020

Gospel battle

False apostles

Apostasy battle

Healing and exorcism

Sovereignty and battle

Christus victor

Posted on January 8, 2020

Posted on December 18, 2019

Christian culture requires religious liberty

Christian culture is the only viable culture

Posted on December 11, 2019

Anti-Compartmentalization

How Christianity Made the West (and America) Great

Dignity of human life

Exaltation of women

Purification of sexuality

Rise of modern science

De-stigmatization of labor and vocation

Liberation of economics

Spawning of political liberty

Conclusion

Posted on December 4, 2019

The Peace the Wicked Seek

Our Sinfully Conflicted World

Conclusion

Posted on November 16, 2019

Posted on October 4, 2019

Posted on September 14, 2019

Posted on August 27, 2019

Posted on August 24, 2019

Posted on August 6, 2019

Posted on July 29, 2019

Posted on July 23, 2019

Posted on July 14, 2019

Posted on July 14, 2019

Posted on July 1, 2019

Posted on June 23, 2019

Potential Objections

What Would Jesus Politicize?

Alt-failure

The polygamy question

The tyranny of the “Highest Good”

Conclusion

Posted on June 17, 2019

A Tale of Two Pluralisms

Neutrality: No and Yes

Must National Review “Come To Jesus”?

Posted on May 1, 2019

Real Racism

Real Smear-by-Association

Real Cultural Marxism

Real Arguments

For Further Reading

Posted on April 4, 2019

Posted on March 29, 2019

Posted on February 27, 2019

Faded Glory

The Appeasement

Christianity gave us the dignity of the human person, the university, political liberty, modern science and medicine, a purified sexuality, the exaltation of women, transcendent music, and the abolition of slavery.

Restoration of Greatness

Conclusion

Posted on February 11, 2019

Jesus, Enemy of the Family?

Junking Creation