Posts by P. Andrew Sandlin

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.

Creationism, or Creational Worldview?

P. Andrew Sandlin, Center for Cultural Leadership

Posts by P. Andrew Sandlin

Homosexuality: Ordered Sins versus Disordered Sins

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on November 16, 2019

Postmodernity, Simply Explained

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on October 4, 2019

The Revenge of the Cosmos

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on September 14, 2019

The Danger of Pilgrim Theology

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on August 27, 2019

The Thinning of the Church

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on August 24, 2019

Three Axioms on Homosexuality in the Church

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on August 6, 2019

Creationism, or Creational Worldview?

P. Andrew Sandlin

Posted on August 6, 2019