In the first three installments, I’ve noted liberals’ (and liberal evangelicals’) enthronement of experience, their war on certainty, and their preference for pre-redemptive-era interpretations of Jesus rather than post-redemptive-era interpretations (Paul versus Jesus).

We can’t go forward without touching on the liberal view of science. Liberalism emerged at a time (the 19^th century) when scientific advances seemed breathtaking. The scientific method and early science had been founded mostly by Christians and with a Christian understanding of the world: that God had created an orderly physical world and that man was called (Gen. 1) to steward it for God’s glory. Gradually, the Enlightenment drifted from these moorings, first into deism (God created the universe but isn’t actively involved in it) and finally into agnosticism (we don’t need God at all to explain the universe). There can be no doubt that the discoveries of modern science (operating on Christian premises but gradually denying the Maker of those premises) reshaped the West, and for this reason when the Bible was thought to conflict with science (as it did in the famous case of Galileo’s insistence that the earth orbits the sun, contra church dogma), liberals, wanting above all else to adjust the Faith to modern trends, increasingly dumped the Bible for science.

Or, rather, scientific myth. Why do I say this? As Dillenberger and Welch observe (pp. 200–206), no scientific event brought the conflict into greater focus that the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which championed biological evolution. This work was scientific to the extent that it addressed present empirical facts, but religious (“faith-based”) in that it interpreted those facts to suggest a theory of human origins. In this sense, it was no different from the book of Genesis, which doesn’t claim to be verifiable by the scientific method — it claims “only” to be the Word of God. In short, the Bible and Darwinism contain competing (non-scientific) views of human origins.

The liberals’ answer to this conflict was generally to embrace what we term nowadays “theistic evolution”: God created the mechanism by which man evolved. This set them at odds with Biblical orthodoxy on the one hand and atheistic scientists on the other. It also meant that the straightforward teachings of the early chapters of Genesis on universal origins had to go.

Today’s liberal evangelicals, too, are eager to jettison teachings vital to the most obvious interpretation of the Genesis account — like the historicity of Adam and Eve. Pete Enns, a controversial liberal evangelical, explains it this way in the Huffington Post:

Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, “What does the Bible say about that?” And then informed by “what the Bible says,” they are ready to make a “biblical” judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about “human origins.” It isn’t. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch — an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about “the beginning,” however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question “Where do humans come from?” They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious — and often political — beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

In short, we can’t expect the Bible to be unique. Like all other such narratives of the time, the Bible’s human authors were simply telling a very personal religious story.

On the other hand, almost everybody reading the Bible without any interest in reconciling it with modernity “assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about ‘human origins.’” What less would it be? But once you start with the assumption that the Bible is like any other book, you can come up with all sorts of counterintuitive theories — and avoid what’s on the page right in front of you.

Not to worry, say the liberal evangelicals. After all, we’re all about the evangel, the Gospel, not human origins, which have no essential bearing on the gospel.

Never mind that the Bible itself assumes a nearly absolute continuum of creation-history-redemption. Jesus is the Second (historical) Adam, corresponding to the Edenic (historical) Adam (Rom. 5). If you get rid of the historic sinning Adam, soon you’ll need to get rid of the historic sinless Jesus — and this is just what liberalism does. Liberals don’t deny the Jesus of history (only the Jesus of the Bible). But by lopping off Adam and Biblical origins, they necessarily turn the gospel into something it isn’t. In the end, you can’t get rid of Genesis without getting rid of the Gospel.

It’s strange that early liberals often understood this fact better than today’s liberal evangelicals. In his 1925 work The Religion of Yesterday and To-Morrow, famed Harvard professor Kirsopp Lake, a prominent liberal, wrote:

[T]he Fundamentalists are perfectly right in thinking that Genesis is the keystone of all biblical theology, and they are perfectly right in thinking that it cannot be reconciled with modern [evolutionary] Science…. To say [as the theistic evolutionists were] that evolution is merely the method of creation is a travesty. (pp. 86–87)

Orthodox Biblical Christians, therefore, cherish the scientific method and modern science, but not scientistic mythmaking.

More importantly, if the liberal evangelicals continue on the same trajectory as the liberal predecessors, they’ll soon find out that you can’t dump Genesis 1–3 without in the end also dumping John 3:16.

I’ve already addressed liberals’ and (liberal evangelicals’) enthronement of experience and war on certainty.

They claim to be Christians, so what do they say about Jesus Christ?

In liberal theology, “[t]he core of Christianity is to be found in the personality of Jesus and in his teaching,” write Dillenberger and Welch (p. 209).  In this sense, they want above all else to be “Christ-centered” (or “Christocentric”).

Then again, what Christian doesn’t? To be a Christian is to believe and follow Jesus. The problem with liberal Christocentricity is that its view of Jesus is selective, and, in harmony with its religious epistemology (view of knowledge), it interprets Jesus in light of one’s individual experience.

Which is to say, it’s not especially interested in the Jesus as portrayed in the Bible.

For liberals, it’s the “teaching” and “personality” of Jesus, not his death and resurrection, that get the emphases. Specific teachings of Jesus that reinforce specific liberal tenets — turn the other cheek, do good to your enemies, forgive others, don’t judge people first by externals — captivate liberal Christology.  Liberals are less interested in other teachings of Jesus — I did not come to abolish the Old Testament law, no one can gain salvation except through me, and unrepentant sinners will end up in an eternal hellfire. These latter teachings of Jesus don’t conform to the reigning liberal paradigm of antinomianism, pluralism, and tolerance, respectively, so they must be conveniently omitted.

More importantly, perhaps, liberals want to concentrate on Jesus’ teachings recorded in the gospels and not other New Testament teachings, because Paul (and John and Peter) interpret Jesus’ death and resurrection in ways liberals find abhorrent, while Jesus generally does not offer an extensive pre-interpretation of his redemptive work.  He does speak about his work as a ransom on the Cross, and he does predict his resurrection; but he couldn’t go into great detail, because it was all his disciples could do to believe he was the Son of God — much less grasp the substitutionary atonement and implications of his bodily resurrection.  It was left for Paul (and, to a lesser extent, John and Peter) to provide that.  You can get around (but not very easily) penal substitution (that Jesus suffered the penalty of God’s wrath for our law-breaking sin) by looking only at Jesus’ words — you can’t get around it when reading Paul.

And the fact is, penal substitutionary atonement is a scandal to the liberal mind.  It presents three utterly embarrassing points: (1) Man is full of sin and he can’t save himself from God’s judgment on sin; (2) God is angry against sin and will pour out his wrath on it; (3) God punishes His own Son on the Cross.  These Biblical tenets had nothing in common with the temper of the educated elite of the 19^th century — that is, the people early liberals were trying to please.  They believed (1) that man is basically good, (2) that God isn’t an angry God, and (3) that God would never punish His Son in our place.

Because you can — and will — get all these teachings from Paul (and, to some degree, John and Peter) but less from the recorded words of Jesus in the gospels, the “teaching” and “personality” of Jesus became “[t]he core of Christianity” for liberals.

It shouldn’t surprise us, either, that as evangelicalism slides toward liberalism, it slides away from Paul’s teaching and slides toward Jesus’ teaching.  Scot McNight, prominent liberal evangelical New Testament scholar, declares:

Formerly I had loved Paul and thought with Paul. Then, when I encountered Jesus, as if for the first time, I began learning to think with Jesus. One of my colleagues occasionally suggested I was getting too Jesus-centered and ignoring Paul. I’m not so sure I was ignoring Paul; after all, I was teaching a few of his letters on a regular basis. But I had unlearned how to think in Pauline terms and was thinking only in the terms of Jesus. Everything was kingdom-centered for me.

And, truth be told, I was so taken with Jesus’ kingdom vision that reading Paul created a dilemma every time I opened his letters….

My experience is not unusual. Many of us have made a move from Paul to Jesus, and an increasing tension remains among evangelicals about who gets to set the terms: Jesus or Paul? In other words, will we center our gospel teaching and living on “the kingdom” or “justification by faith”? (emphases supplied)

Don’t be misled. The root issue here isn’t kingdom versus justification (the Bible — and both Jesus and Paul — teaches both). The issue is allowing Paul to tells us what the Cross and empty tomb mean.  When we do that, we can’t come to liberal conclusions.

When we retreat to the “teaching” and “personality” of Jesus, we can champion liberal dogma (if we’re selective, of course).

Paul? No way.

For this reason, when the evangelicals slide to interpret Paul’s post-redemptive-era teachings in light of Jesus’ pre-redemptive-era teachings, they are sliding into liberalism.

I already observed in part 1 of this series that liberalism reengineers the Faith, and creates theology, in terms of man’s experience and feelings. The objective dimensions of Christianity (Bible, doctrine, church) become nothing other than a projection of man’s subjectivity.  This means that when man’s experience changes, his religion changes.  This is also why liberalism (not liberal Christianity, for there is no such thing) spawns such a dizzying hydra of theologies: gay theology, feminist theology, liberation theology, black theology, and so on.  The call for radical diversity in theology and the church is almost always a call for liberalism.  There’s plenty of valid diversity within the pages of the Bible (different gifting, different emphases, as in Jew and Gentile churches), but the Bible presupposes that all Christianity will be anchored in the Word itself, because God alone can tell us what to believe and how to live.  This Biblical diversity isn’t the diversity that liberalism has in mind, to put it mildly.  By radical diversity, therefore, I mean a diversity untethered to objective divine standards, I.e., the Bible.  This is the diversity of liberal theology and life.

Radical diversity presupposes a lackadaisical attitude toward truth.  If you believe in religious truth, radical diversity is impossible. We might assume that this lax attitude toward truth and the certainty it furnishes is very recent, very postmodern, but in fact it’s one of the cornerstones of good, old-fashioned 19th century liberalism.  “Tentativeness or skepticism as to the possibility of achieving certain knowledge of ultimate reality,” is, in the words of Dillenberger and Welch (p. 213) one of the chief marks of liberalism.  This skepticism grows out of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the epistemological fountainhead of liberal theology (epistemology is the study of the source and acquisition of knowledge).

For liberals, the way to get rid of competing truth claims is to hold that we can’t really know the truth, not to prove that one claim is right and its competitors are wrong.  Besides, such truth claims put a crimp on human autonomy, and man must at all costs call the shots in his life — and especially in his sexual practices in today’s world.

This war on certainty, therefore, was around a long time before postmodernism got here, and it’s at the root of liberalism.

It’s also and equally a war on fixed theology and, in fact, a war on certainty precisely so it can be a war on theology. If we need to be tentative about belief, we need to be tentative about all belief, including the truth of the Bible, miracles, answered prayer, the deity of Jesus Christ, his bodily resurrection, Biblical sexual ethics, and so forth.  The problem is that the Bible isn’t at all tentative about these things, and whoever isn’t tentative about the authority of the Bible won’t be tentative about what the Bible clearly teaches.

One of the most gifted liberal evangelicals, John Franke, by contrast, puts his views this way:

A nonfoundationalist [epistemically tentative] conception envisions theology as an ongoing conversation between Scripture, tradition, and culture in which all three are vehicles of the one Spirit through which the Spirit speaks in order to create a distinctively Christian “world” centered on Jesus Christ in a variety of local settings. In this way theology is both one, in that all truly Christian theology seeks to hear and respond to the speaking of the one Spirit, and many, in that all theology emerges from particular social and historical situations. Such a theology is the product of the reflection of the Christian community in its local expressions. Despite its local character, such a theology is still in a certain sense global in that it seeks to explicate the Christian faith in accordance with the ecumenical tradition of the church throughout its history and on behalf of the church throughout the world.

There simply is no final word in human history because Christians cannot escape their local, time-bound humanity.  Moreover, there is no way of judging between competing local visions of the Christian Faith, since each faithfully expresses local reflections on God’s truth, which cannot directly be known.  It is precisely this reasoning that got liberals to gay theology, feminist theology, liberation theology, black theology in the first place: local theologies lacking direct access to the Word of God and, therefore, free to reflect on their own local experiences and fashion a theology from them.

The early church would have found this modesty strange indeed, believing as they did that they had access in the Scriptures to the very living Word of God, the very voice of God as it were.

When liberal evangelicals enshrine tentativeness as a cherished virtue in theology and/or Christian ethics, they are talking like — and becoming — liberal.  In calling for a radical diversity (many local theologies) not itself subject to a final, accessible revelatory Word, they tiptoe — or dash — to liberalism.

An increasing number of evangelicals are becoming liberal evangelicals, which is to say, they are becoming liberal. Liberalism narrowly considered is identified with a movement in Europe and American in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but its theological impulse — to conform the Faith to the spirit of the age — has been around since the Garden of Eden. (In this sense, the ancient Jews, when they syncretized their faith with the surrounding pagan nations, were notorious liberals.)

In the first half of the 19^th century in Europe, this accommodating spirit was Romanticism, the enthronement of emotion and feelings to counter the acidic effects of Enlightenment, which judged all things by universal human reason or objective human experience. The liberalism of that time did not want to give up the gains of the Enlightenment, but it also did not want to give up Christianity, as the Enlightenment seemed to be forcing people to do if they were to judge everything by universal human (as opposed to God’s) standards. In this way, liberalism could protect Christianity from Enlightenment — the problem is that the Christianity it protected had nothing to do with the Christianity of the Bible.

So liberalism hatched a cosmic salvage operation: keep Christianity around but anchor it in feelings and emotions and not reason and truth. Friedrich Schleiermacher, first major Romantic liberal, in his tellingly titled On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, writes:

Whence do those [orthodox] dogmas and doctrines come that many consider the essence of religion? Where do they properly belong? And how do they stand related to what is essential in religion? They are all the result of that contemplation of feeling, of that reflection and comparison, of which we have already spoken. The conceptions that underlie these propositions are, like your conceptions from experience, nothing but general expressions for definite feelings. They are not necessary for religion itself, scarcely even for communicating religion, but reflection requires and creates them. Miracle, inspiration, revelation, supernatural intimations, much piety can be had without the need of any one of these conceptions. But when feeling is made the subject of reflection and comparison they are absolutely unavoidable…. (p. 87, emphases supplied)

Christian beliefs — atonement, resurrection, Second Coming, Biblical inspiration — are simply a reflection on the internal Christian experience, which is the essence of religion. They are not true in any objective sense. Real religion is a particular kind of feeling.

Liberal evangelicals today increasingly echo this definition of religion. Roger E. Olson, himself at the vanguard of the movement, writes of the post-conservative (i.e., liberal) evangelicals:

Postconservatives seek to broaden the sources used in theology. Stanley J. Grenz refers to this as “revisioning evangelical theology” (the title of his recent programmatic statement of evangelical theological method). According to Grenz and others, the essence of evangelicalism is an experience and a distinctive spirituality centered around it. The experience is an act of God the Spirit known as conversion, and the spirituality is a community-shaped piety of the converted people of God. Theology is second-order reflection on the faith of the converted people of God whose life together is created and shaped by the paradigmatic narrative embodied in scripture. The essence of both Christianity and theology, then, is not propositional truths enshrined in doctrines but a narrative-shaped experience. This is not to demean or demote doctrine. Postconservative evangelicals believe that doctrine matters — but not as an end in itself. Doctrines are the necessary rules that reflect and guide the converted community of God’s people. (emphases supplied)

That is, we get our theology from our communal experience. With a few minor corrections here and there, Schleiermacher would have said much the same thing.

Of course, Christian experience is a critical aspect of being a Christian, and there can be no Christianity without it. But the Faith is not created by our experience. The Faith creates our experience.

Whenever you hear an evangelical assaulting propositional truths or propositional revelation in favor of individual or communal experience, which then forms theology or doctrine, you’re listening to a liberal evangelical — whether he or she knows it or not.

And you’re listening to somebody soon likely to give up the Christian Faith.

The most significant theological contribution by the late John Murray was his configuration of what he termed “definitive sanctification” (Collected Writings, 2:277-293).    Murray doesn’t deny the validity of the traditional definition of sanctification (the Christian’s progressive conformity to the image of Jesus Christ [pp. 294-304]); but he holds that “definitive sanctification” is anterior, and “is the foundation upon which rests [Paul’s] whole conception of the believer’s life …” (p. 279).   According to Murray’s exegesis of Rom. 6:1-7:6; 1 Pet. 2:24; 4:1, 2; 1 Jn. 3:6-9 and other Biblical texts, this “definitive sanctification” is the “momentous” and “radical” “transformation” of the believer grounded in his union with Jesus’ death and resurrection, which breaks in him the power of sin and death and resituates him in the sphere of abundant life and radical obedience.   This effect of the union ground in past redemptive events is actuated in history when one repents and believes — at that point in history he is definitively sanctified, living as a consequence a life of progressive obedience (sanctification!) with no possibility of apostasy.

I have chosen the word punctiliar to describe the phenomenon.  “Punctiliar sanctification” highlights this one-for-all, decisive break with the old man and the world and the flesh and the Devil in those regenerated by the Spirit at a particular point in history.   The Bible does not imply that one always knows the precise point at which this personally epochal break occurs in his life, only that it has in fact occurred — the evidence for it is overwhelming (note especially the absolute marks of sonship in 1 John).

This divine act in God’s elect delivers the coup de grace to all merely processional soteriologies — to every notion that one’s security of salvation is held in abeyance until the Final Day. To be sure, God justifies His own at the heavenly tribunal only on the Final Day (Rom. 2:13), and if one has not persevered in good works, he will not be justified — since good works always accompany saving faith (Jas. 2:14-26).

But the finality of the Christian life is proleptically experienced in history in one’s blessed punctiliar sanctification.   At that point, despite all the subsequent machinations of Satan and Hell, the believer’s final victory in Jesus is assured (Rom. 8:28-39).

And present, incremental victory over sin — again, despite all the machinations of Satan and Hell — is also assured.

Now as he [Paul] thus made his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, “Paul, you are beside yourself! Much learning is driving you mad!”

Acts 26:24

To my fellow Christians: would any unbeliever ever have warrant to accuse our vast learning of driving us mad?  If not, why not?

Our times are marked by increasing irrationalism and anti-intellectualism, even — perhaps especially — in the church.  The Enlightenment (c. 1680 – 1780) enthroned man’s reason and dethroned God’s revelation.  During the Romantic reaction (c. 1790 – 1840) and into postmodernity (1970 – ), Christians banished reason from the court altogether.  Today, illogical arguments are paraded as “deep spirituality,” and “community” is a substitute for theology.  This is a central theme of Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, which reconfigures Christianity into a Great Conversation.  Reason, by contrast, demands clear arguments and sharp distinctions; “community” erases those distinctions.  The emerging generation (= Emergent church) longs for the cuddly warmth of religious community unencumbered by intellect and creed and doctrine.  An immediate problem is that of all the major religions, Christianity is the most theological, and at critical points it makes strenuous demands of the mind (Rom. 12:1–2).

Kevin Vanhoozer once wrote that if the besetting sin of modernity was arrogance, the Achilles’ heel of postmodernity is laziness.  Hard thinking requires hard work, and Christians increasingly deplore hard work, preferring entertainment, notably on Sunday mornings — dazzling rock shows, lukewarm lattes, and self-help sermonettes.  This lazy self-indulgence is simply a reflection of the surrounding culture.  Personal consumption is life’s new objective: “The world exists to please me.”  The Christianized version is “Jesus and the church exist to please me.”  In Love God With All Your Mind, J. P. Moreland argues that this interiorized anti-intellectualism banishes the church to the social margins and thereby assures the victory of anti-Christian forces in the culture.  Cultural engagement requires the exercise of intellect, and if Christians refuse this exercise, they will lose cultural battles.  We have refused, and we are losing.

A huge solution to this problem would be a revival of intellect-cultivation in the church.  Ministers must re-commit to rigorous Biblical exposition in the pulpit.  Members must again read gutsy books on doctrine and theology — and philosophy and culture.  The church must claim — with justification — that it has the answers to modern man’s problems: from unbelief to broken marriages to addictions to sexual deviance to economic apostasy to virtual realities.  We won’t have these answers if we refuse to cultivate an intellectual Faith, which is a huge part of our Christian heritage, despite the fact that it has been squandered in the last 200 years by a lazy, worldly, and sometimes cowardly church.

Intellect is not our problem.  Rebellious intellect is our problem.

And ignorance — especially pious ignorance — is assuredly not the solution.

May God grant us an island of intellectuals in a sea of irrationalists.

Tullian Tchividjian writes:

“When it comes to drawing near to God and pleasing him, legalism insists that obedience precedes acceptance — that it’s all up to us. But the fresh breeze of gospel freedom announces that acceptance precedes obedience — that once we’re already approved and already accepted by God in Christ, we can freely follow God’s lead and doing his will ….”

Well, yes and no.  God chooses to salvation solely on the basis of his sovereign grace without any regard for man’s choice or actions (Eph. 1), but as salvation is executed in history, obedience does precede acceptance — if we refuse to obey God by believing in Jesus and in repenting of our sins, we cannot be accepted by God.  I am confident that Tullian does believe this, but his rhetoric doesn’t always (or, in Jesus + Nothing = Everything, even usually) do justice to the obligatory dimension of the Gospel.  He is (understandably) intent to highlight God’s grace in Jesus, but he allows his rhetoric to outstrip Biblical teaching at points.  The universalists are so intent to exalt God’s grace that they end in stating that God eventually saves everyone.  This is not Tullian’s position by any means, but he should guard his rhetoric lest his readers assume that God demands nothing of sinners before he accepts them.

Earlier I noted that a blurb for Dane Ortlan’s book Defiant Grace tended to diminish God’s call to obedience under worries that obedience undermines grace.  But the Bible is only at war with self-righteousness, not with righteousness.  God saves totally by his grace apart from our works, but obedience in the form of faith and repentance in response to God’s grace does not constitute works excluded from salvation.

Election is unconditional, but it is not correct to say that salvation in toto is unconditional.  Without faith and repentance and submission to King Jesus, none will be saved.

“All anyone need know about the long-term prospects of gay marriage — and of the likely fate of a political party that opposes it — is that evangelical Christians under the age of 25 are more tolerant of gay marriage than New Deal Democrats over the age of 65.”

Carl M. Cannon, Politics Daily, “Gay Marriage: Only a Matter of Time,” May 28, 2009

The chief problem with American culture is the American church.  The church in the early United States, while imperfect, was generally orthodox Protestant and stood for the Faith once all delivered (Jude 3).  Although there was no officially established church or denomination (and there should never be), Christianity was established in an even more effective way — in the hearts and minds of populace, in “public” life no less than private.  It was no Shangri-La — not even close — but it was essentially Christian. Gradually after the Civil War, however, the new ideas of heretical “liberalism” gained a foothold among the elites; and by the first third of the 20^th century, nearly every major denomination had fallen victim to its poison.  One effect of this collapse was to drive orthodox Christians to the margins of the culture, from which, as denominational and cultural separatists, they launched theological grenades at the increasingly secular society, not to mention at the deviant mainline churches, all the while waiting for the imminent eschaton and dismissing any constructive program of Christian social ethics.

With the erasure of nearly the last vestiges of the older Christian order during the turbulent 60s, a boisterous reaction emerged in the form of groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.  Almost all such reaction focused — like political liberalism of the previous 50 years — on cultural change via politics: elect the right candidates and pass the right legislation to get the nation back on track.  From the vantage point of 30 years, we now know that this program, even when superficially successful, has not managed any serious reversal in cultural decline.  What we did not know then but know now is that the cultural battle had been nearly lost before the political battle even heated up.

Indeed, when today “evangelical Christians under the age of 25 are more tolerant of gay marriage than New Deal Democrats over the age of 65,” we observe not chiefly that Christians have been ineffectual in the culture but that secularists have been effectual in the church.  The church, which had given up on principled Christian social ethics long ago, has eagerly adopted secular ethics to replace them.  This is simply the latest example of the secularists’ cultural domination, which now extends to the church.  Ethically, the secularists are in the church’s driver’s seat.

It is not clear that this downward spiral can be reversed without a full-scale and severe Christian revival and a rethinking of the categories of social ethics.  For instance, it is evident that pluralism is a voracious predator that refuses to be chained to procedural politics.  On his June 3, 2009 self-titled HBO program, Bill Maher trumpeted the latest act of the pluralistic rape of Christianity — why are we arguing about “civil unions” for gays when in fact all public unions should be “civil unions”?  In this construction, marriage is a purely religious matter, performed in the church, in which the state has no interest.  “Civil unions” consisting of one man and one woman, one man and two women, two men and/or two women, and one man and one consenting nine-year-old child — each is a potentially legitimate form of state-sanctioned union.  Marriage, being exclusively religious, is simply no longer relevant in the “public” (meaning non-religious) sphere.

This program, however bizarre, is the logical outcome of the relentless pluralism of our age.

Amid this pluralism, the task of orthodox Protestants is to take their Faith seriously, to pray and work for revival and reformation, and to confront the claims of pluralism with the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ, beginning in the church (where those claims barely survive), but moving outward to all of culture.  We now know that if Jesus Christ is not recognized as Lord everywhere He soon will not be recognized as Lord anywhere.

A message of limited Lordship is no match for a program of unlimited pluralism.

This is a blunt message to Christian (and other) young adults.

You are entitled to your own life choices, but you are not entitled to widespread endorsement of those choices.  You have a claim on your life, but you do not have a claim on everyone else’s imprimatur.

Twin traits of young adults are (a) the lust for autonomy and (b) the lust for acceptance.  These sincere young adults often cannot understand why these traits may — and must —frequently collide.  Most young adults wish to escape the shadow of their parents and older relatives and friends — they want to strike out on their own, make their own way, and heighten their own identity.  This desire, properly executed, is not wrong and, in fact, can be wholesome, a desire in which parents and other older adults should eagerly participate, given appropriate conditions.

But this quest for independence carries with it responsibility and maturity, including the understanding that others from whom we secretly (or not-so-secretly) crave acceptance are not obliged to endorse the products of their responsibility and maturity, that is, our choices.

Part of being “grown up” is taking responsibility for your decisions.  An aspect of that responsibility is resisting the temptation to insist on acceptance from those whose acceptance you covet and to complain when they withhold that acceptance.

The cost of independence is disapproval from people whose approval you crave.

No one has the “right” to approval.

Get used to it.

Can We Expect Only to “Muddle Along”?

I’ve already noted how that Mark Galli, Managing Editor of Christianity Today, has flirted with antinomianism in suggesting that the “gospel . . .  takes ethics away as duty and gives it back as joy — precisely because we don’t have to do it anymore but get to do it in freedom.” But he offers another perspective that warrants attention.  He writes:

As readers of this column know, I’m pretty pessimistic when it comes to claims that we can be “radically transformed” by the gospel in this life. I believe most of the transformation language in the New Testament is spoken in hope; that is, it refers to our life with Christ at the end of history, when everything will be transformed, root and branch (see Philippians 3:21, for example). In the meantime, we muddle along mired in sin, but not without hope. We know that it is not our sin that defines us, but our forgiveness in Christ. That we sin over and over is not news, and it’s no even longer even particularly bad news; it’s just old news. The truly amazing thing—the good news—is that this old news does not define who we are, which is beloved of God despite our sin, forgiven in grace!

But does the Bible really teach that transformation by sanctification and victory over sin must wait until the eschaton — the end of all things? Does it teach that until then all we can expect is to “muddle along mired in sin”? Hardly.

Paul writes in Romans 6:1–4 —

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

His point is that in union by faith with our Lord’s Cross and resurrection, we are raised to a life of obedience. We are “no longer . . .  slaves of sin,” since “he who has died [that is, we, who are united to Jesus] has been freed from sin” (vv. 6–7). Paul proceeds to teach that Jesus’ redemption has liberated us from the power of sin. This can only mean that we are not destined to “muddle along mired in sin.” Of course, sin still plagues us (7:21f.) because we have not yet been fully sanctified, but we gain consistent (if not unremitting) victory in this life by the power of the Holy Spirit:

There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom. 8:1–4)

The NT writers would find strange indeed that we cannot, in the words of Mark, be “‘radically transformed’ by the gospel in this life.” We read that “if anyone [is] in Christ, [he is] a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). From the context (vv. 15–16) it is clear that Paul isn’t referring primarily to the imputed (judicially credited) newness that accompanies the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ (vital though it is), but the actual newness of a newly obedient life.

Who can read the book of 1 John and deny that Christians are “‘radically transformed’ by the gospel in this life”? Because we are God’s children, we now consistently keep his commandments (2:3–4). This is no sinless perfectionism, because we all still sin, but if we confess our sins, the Lord will forgive us (1:8–9) by the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ (2:1–2). We have “overcome the wicked one” (2:13, 14); we can purify ourselves just as God is pure (3:2–3); we overcome false spirits because the one residing in us is greater than the enemy residing in the world (4:3–4); and we overcome the world in great victory because of our faith (5:4–5).

If this isn’t “radical transformation,” I don’t know what is.

A Comprehensive Salvation

For this reason, Mark, despite his best intentions, diminishes the power of the Cross and resurrection.  We read in 1 John 3:4–5:

Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin. Whoever abides in Him does not sin. Whoever sins has neither seen Him nor known Him.

Jesus came to “take away our sins” so that we will abide in him and not live a life dominated by sin. It won’t suffice to say that Jesus died to cancel the penalty of our sins. Thank God, he did that (Rom. 3:21–26). This is the judicial cancellation of our sins known as justification: our being declared righteous in that Jesus’ law-keeping righteousness is imputed (credited) to believing sinners. In this way we stand righteous before God.

But Jesus came not just to forgive our sins; he came also to get rid of our sinning. He doesn’t wait until the eschaton to start doing that. From the very start, when we trust in Jesus, he begins to change us, gradually fostering a “radical transformation.” This is why Paul writes in Romans 8:3–4 that in sending Jesus, God condemned sin so that we could walk in a new life. Jesus died on the Cross to bring sin itself, not just us via his death, under judgment: Jesus’ death and resurrection were calculated to abolish sin. Jesus delivered a bone-crushing death to sin.

Late Bible teacher A. W. Pink, in his classic essay “A Fourfold Salvation,” furnished nomenclature for grasping the range of individual salvation’s effects. Christ’s redemptive work saves us from the penalty of sin; we no longer stand under God’s judgment (Rom. 3:19–25). It saves us from the power of sin; sin no longer has dominion over us (Rom. 6:14).  Jesus’ redemption saves us from the pleasure of sin; though we sin, we no longer delight in it (Rom. 7:21–24). And in eternity it will finally save us from the very presence of sin (Rev. 21:27).

We are presently being saved from the pleasure and power of sin. We needn’t “muddle along mired in sin.”

That’s why Peter writes (1 Pet. 1:13–19):

Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear; knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.

Because of these facts, Mark, good intentions notwithstanding, diminishes the bloody Cross and empty tomb.  To Christians who strive for holiness but weary in failure, Mark wants to comfort them with lower expectations. The Bible wants to comfort them, too, not by lowering expectations, but by heightening them: “Keep persevering; by the Spirit’s power, you can be holy!”

“Fight the good fight for holiness,” Peter is saying, because Jesus’ precious blood was shed so that you can in this life, amid great trial and hardship, be holy.

When we say that Christians can expect only to “muddle along mired in sin,” we are diluting the overarching efficacy of our Lord’s death and resurrection.  We are saying that he died to save us from the penalty of sin one day, but that he did not die to save us from the power of sin right now.

In other words, we are saying that Jesus Christ did not die to save us from sin.

Let me encourage you Christians battling depression, anxiety, lust, discontent, avarice, envy, rebellion, and an undisciplined tongue (and any other sin) and who assume that you are destined to languish under sin’s slavery.  You are not the slaves of sin! Jesus’ bloody Cross and victorious resurrection have liberated you.  If you act in faith and obedience on this transformational fact — count yourself dead to sin and alive to God, a slave of righteousness (Rom. 6:11, 18) — you will soon experience an unprecedented victory over sin of that you can presently only imagine.

We need not — and must not — “muddle along mired in sin.” Jesus died and rose to secure victory over sin for you and for me.

Live in the victory.