Category Archives: American Evangelicalism

The Primacy of Christ’s Seed: Contra Christendoms, Nationalisms, Traditionisms

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Barth appeals to the primacy of Jesus Christ in all things. In one instance, in his Church Dogmatics, he is developing what it means to understand that Jesus is God’s ultimate plan for all of creation, all of history; which ultimately entails a disruption from all else, even as all else is taken up into the life of Christ as God’s history for the world. Here Barth is in the process of developing his treatment on such things, with particular reference to a doctrine of time vis-à-vis eternity. We will pick up with him mid-paragraph:

At any rate, as a human ministration it is related to the work of Jesus Christ in the same way as in the Old Testament the human act of blessing is related to the real word of blessing which has its power only from God, and which can therefore be uttered only by God Himself. However that may be, the birth of the Christian life “of water and of the Spirit (Jn. 3.5) signifies a direct relationship of the individual Christian to Jesus. He does not follow father and mother or the line of his ancestors, but, taken out of this succession, or at any rate in independence of it, he follows Jesus. He believes that there is one holy catholic Church, and that he may be a living member of the same. Yet he does not believe in the Church, but in the Holy Spirit, who is consubstantial with the Father and the Son. He does not therefore honour and accept the Church’s tradition and order in becoming a Christian and confessing himself to be such, but he places himself behind and confesses the beginning which all ecclesiastical tradition and order can only serve, and which he can now recognise and receive as his own beginning. He believes, thinks, speaks and acts therefore, not as the member of a so-called “Christian nation,” but in gratitude to the Lord that even in his—in no sense Christian—country He has community, by and to whose ministry among this people he himself is called.[1]

This kicks against some of the Christian zeitgeist online right now; which is an extreme turn into postmillennial theonomy. But these types of immanentist turns are exactly what the true Gospel confronts, contradicts, and brings an end to. In the Gospel there is a mediated immediacy, in Christ, to the living and triune God; one that allows the Christian person to live before God rather than anyone else. To find a ground for Christian identity in anything other than the immediate and direct life of God for the world in Jesus Christ is to collapse and thus conflate God’s ways with the contingencies and particularities of the accidents of history; in the sense that Christian identity, in such a frame, begins to predicate God’s ways and in-breakings upon an a prior set of foundations and structures that He has not laid in Christ, but that we have laid in the power of our wit, albeit in the name of Christ.

Barth isn’t saying that salvation history isn’t important, that the historic Church isn’t important, that the catholic creeds aren’t important; He is simply noting that they aren’t the ends or circumscriptions of the reality they are ostensibly pointing beyond themselves and to, in their respective reality, as is all of creation’s, in Jesus Christ. The point is, there is no authority that supersedes the viva vox Dei (voice of the living God); that there is only one authority for the Christian person, as an individual member in the body of Christ (I Cor. 12.27), and His name is, Jesus Christ. The Christian’s birthright isn’t through a nation, an ethnicity, a Christendom, a political party, a ‘blood and soil,’ or anything else. The Christian’s birthright has been seeded in the seed of God as that was given life by the hovering work of the Holy Spirt within the womb of Israel, within the womb of Mary to be sure, but these only as vessels for the ultimate and prime reality of all of reality who is Jesus Christ.

I have grown very weary of being confronted with supposed ‘Protestant’ ‘Reformed’ ‘Lutheran’ ‘Anglican’ ‘Baptist’ ‘Wesleyan’ et al. ad infinitum theologies that end up being nothing more than appeals to some type of socio-politico construct that has been ostensibly harvested from the past as its best repristination for the 21st century church. There is an oppressiveness about all of this to me that does not evince the Spirit’s presence, which is liberty. Indeed, we are a social and political animal as creatures, but our end is not defined, or should not be defined, by this type of extension into space and time. We have been born directly from above, alongside the Son’s freely elected humanity for us, within the womb of the Father by the Holy Spirit. And it is from whence that we have our whither and warp in this fallen and decrepit world. It is by the blood of Immanuel’s veins, quite literally, that we have life; no matter what state, country, or church tradition we inhabit; if indeed we have such life at all.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [585] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 146.

Contra a Christian Nationalist Christendom and the Crusades

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A few weeks back there was a debate on X with reference to the Crusades. Unsurprisingly there are certain Christian Nationalist groups who are promoting the legitimacy and value of the Crusades (and not Billy Graham’s); attempting to justify them in the name of Christ. This all makes sense in the sense that these folks want a resurgence of a certain type of Christendom, primarily of a Protestant hue. I responded thusly,

The Crusades were a function of a Catholic ecclesiopolitical state. They were ostensibly carried out in the name of Jesus Christ; and for the preservation of the Gospel and all its entailments. The last thing Muslims saw, as the sword came crushing through their skulls, was the cross on the crusader’s shield. This was not done in the name of Christ, ultimately; but in the name of a sectarian Latin church who asserted that its authority was simply a prolongation of the incarnation of God on earth. This assertion is neither Christian, or Holy; and therefore, cannot be justified in the name of Jesus Christ.

The Tale of Two Evils: One Greater the “Other Lesser”

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The lesser of two evils model is a mythology. Evil is simply evil. The mass murder of babies in the womb is the epitome of evil de jure. There is no “scale” or quantification of evil that can ever balance out sheer evil. One problem with committing oneself to a lesser-of-two-evils model is that it becomes a slippery slope; as this presidential election perfectly illustrates. It is a slippery slope because within the winds of the cultural mores we all become conditioned in ways that are increasingly beholden to comparing this level of evil to that level of evil; but when this is done, we can become persuaded that compared to this evil over there this evil right here isn’t so bad. In fact, after a while living in this type of pressure cooker, we easily become entwined and melded into the juices of the cultural wash. The only way out is to look at evil as evil, compared to God’s holiness Self-revealed in Jesus Christ, and make our decisions from this Holy Ground of God’s life. It is His alien righteousness for us that ought to be the frame we see the world, and the “choices” it offers us, through. When we move and breathe in this way, we come to have the capacity to simply say, No! And we live a life of continuous repose upon God’s Word rather than the culture’s word baked into God’s Word.

A pushback to this might be: “well, this is too idealic and pie-in-the-sky.” But the opposite is actually the case. In fact, trusting God’s Word, living as seeing the unseen as the seen, is the only way a Christian can truly move and breathe and have their being in this shifty and shadowy world of dissolution. This is not to say that we don’t have difficult decisions to make living as Christians in a fallen world; indeed, it is to say the inverse. It is much more difficult to live a life that the basic human senses cannot penetrate; to live by the faith of Christ. The fallacy of the lesser-of-two-evils model is that it presumes that a person has the capacity to weight this evil against that evil, this amount of evil against that amount of evil, and discern which side of the scale is the right side. But what if one evil is so being-shaking, what if one evil, in a basket of many evils, so utterly strikes at the being of God, the being of Life itself, that it becomes impossible to weed through to the point that we believe we can come to the conclusion of what weighted side is more acceptable than the other? What if there is an evil that like yeast becomes so intracule to the total loaf of bread that its pervasiveness becomes inescapable; to the point that it finally becomes absolutely necessary to simply trust God? To move beyond the supposed possibility to divine between the evils, and simply recognize the LORD has not given us a viable choice to choose.

The Soylent Green of American and Global Politics

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God’s judgment, I would suggest, entails false choices often times. In this case, America is faced with a POTUS decision wherein Kamala Harris&co. seemingly are the archrivals of humanity all the way down. But then there is Trump. Trump has radically changed his tune in regard to abortion. He supports the accessibility of the abortion pill by mail; he has had the RNC, effectively, change their official platform on abortion and the abortion pill; he is for abortion in cases of rape and incest. Not to mention, he gave us the lockdowns, warp speeded the deadly vaccines, and is for the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana; among other things. We are where we are even with Trump in power for four years. Clearly, the leftists have done everything they can, even in an attempt to take Trump’s life, in order to keep their power intact. The leftists clearly are intent on destroying the United States of America as a country. They are so far wayward that they will literally stop at nothing to “win.”

Either way as I look at it there is no choice this presidential election. Our country, along with the rest of globe, is so underwater in the cesspool of immorality of every kind, that the only hope this old world has is Jesus Christ. It is not possible for me to vote for someone who supports the mass murder of babies in the womb, no matter what the alternative is. As I’ve written on before: the “logic of death” that funds abortion does not stop at the exiting of the womb; it carries into every other aspect of life. Whether Trump or Harris is the president said logic will be informing every decision they make. One is more masked than the other, and less dramatic, as far as immediate results, but just the same, both have the blood of the masses of dead babies on their hands. And to boot, they both, respectively, will offer the land the spilled blood of the masses (outside of the womb too) in regard to the ‘covenant of death’ they both (the DNC and RNC) have signed with the blood of the babies.

I’m afraid we have become too conditioned, too ‘frogged in the kettle,’ to see outside of the sheer wall of Soylent Green we have become ensconced within. When abortion becomes just another “issue” the plot has seriously been lost. In my view, it is better to simply recognize that as a global people, and in particular, as Americans, we are reaping what we have collectively sown; we are reaping death rather than eternal life. What convinces me of this is who God has given us for our presidential candidates. In this situation, under God’s judgement as we are, I think it’s best to recognize that, just as king David did after his sin with Bathsheba, and commit ourselves into the merciful hands of the living God. I do not believe the Lord is asking us to vote this time, as if some type of civic, or even kingdom mandate. Instead, He is asking us to wait on Him rather than on the depraved heart of men and women that has led us to where we are currently. I believe we are in the thralls of a Romans 1 judgment at the national and international level. As such, there is no human to “vote” for at this point; at least not at the POTUS level.

Let God be true and every man a liar.

On Chemical Warfare in the Womb and Trump

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I have been posting on my other social media accounts (FB and X) today with reference to Trump’s support of the abortion pill; in other words, on his support of abortion en masse. It is a dilemma, indeed. Kamala and Walz will seemingly be the final death knell for America. If they win it will be akin to jumping out of the window of a high-rise building that is on fire. The country, and world, will simply get to where it has already gone, it will find its bottom quicker than if Trump and company win. In my view Trump will only offer a retarding effect on what has already been set in motion. He will put a skid on the total and immediate economic collapse, and all the upheaval that will cause. He will bring an end to the wars that are currently underway across the world. He will bring energy independence back to America. And he will do more that will seemingly be positive, in regard to national flourishing. And yet with all of the above in the balance, on the other side he is pro-abortion (pill). He believes that accessibility to the abortion pill ought to be in reach for anyone who has access to the post office. Just to be clear, the abortion pill is not the “morning after pill,” or anything like that. A person ingests the abortion pill if they are confirmed to be pregnant; it chemically destroys the baby from there. The abortion pill is something like making a mother’s womb like mini-mobile-gas chambers. Drop the poison, and it engages in a shoah catastrophe that reaches even beyond the gas chambers of Hitler’s satanic scepter (as far as numbers go in regard to loss of human life). Ultimately the logic and activity Trump is committed to, with reference to the abortion pill, is something like going full circle. It is a logic of death that has no graded place in the economy and Kingdom of God in Christ. It is the same logic of death that Kamala and Walz et al. are committed to on the “other side” of the same coin of death.

  1. God’s judgment on the USA entails a false-dilemma. That is to say: we have been presented with two false choices, before God, for the office of the president of the United States.
  2. It is a form of natural theology that says that God spared Trump (from assassination) because God endorses Trump (He clearly doesn’t endorse Kamala either).
  3. The only abyss the human being ultimately hangs over, apocalyptically that is, depends on whether a person is for Christ or against Him. Whether a nation in the now fails or prospers is contingent on the aforementioned. It is not contingent, per se, on who the President is. If the core of the country is rotten, who the President is in the midst of that core will not bring the salvation so many hope that it will.
  4. Has the political situation become so dire that in fact it is better to jump out of the window of the burning World Trade Center than it is to stay and endure the flame and the total collapse of the building? That’s the question I am reflecting on. They both end in the same place, it’s just how you get there.
  5. Leaving abortion up to the states is like leaving slavery and segregation up to the states. It is a federal issue like nothing else is. If it cannot be banned at the Federal level, in my view, we don’t deserve to be a country.
  6. My Dad’s church (where he was senior pastor) in North Long Beach, CA was very involved with the House of Ruth, and Walk for Life. The House of Ruth was/is an organization that helps unwed and abused mothers find refuge and a way out, without being reduced to abort their babies. Walk for Life provides a public witness that there are people who oppose abortion, but also who are there to minister to those who otherwise might abort their babies. And now of course there are many other organizations (Crisis Pregnancy Centers etc.) that are involved just the same.
  7. “Abortion is not, therefore, one issue among other issues. It is the most fundamental postmodern issue. As we saw earlier in this book, the gods of the ancient world demanded that their servants sacrifice their children to their power. This was the “abomination” that the Lord refused to Israel in the Old Testament and to which Israel was continuously tempted. In the Bible, this is not a random picture of evil meant merely to shock us. It is, rather, based on an anthropological insight: the willingness to kill your child and the consequent construction of a system of child murder is the only path to pure power, pure sovereignty. Pure power demands that keeping helpless people alive be a voluntary display of power, a whim of the strong; otherwise, if power is ever revealed to be for the weak, the social hierarchy is inverted, and the whole system is exposed for the lie that it is. This is why, as we saw earlier in this book, nearly all pagan societies condone the killing of babies. This is how human power can speak order into chaos without opening itself to what is beyond it, to the transcendent. Nowhere is the West’s final slide into post-Christian paganism clearer than in the abortion regime, which kills around sixty million children every year, roughly 20 percent of all babies. As the pope wrote: ‘Where God is denied and people live as though he did not exist, or his commandments are not taken into account, the dignity of the human person and the inviolability of human life also end up being rejected or compromised.'” -Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2021), 336-37.

On Amillennialism: Against the “Replacement Theology” Caricature

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The following is something I wrote in and around 2007; I was still a dyed-in-the-wool dispensationalist when I wrote this. But I was attempting to be as a critical as I possibly could be towards a hermeneutical system, and biblical eschatological position, that I had always been told was heretical and even antisemitic. I was told, by dispensationalism’s best teachers, that amillennialists engaged in a purely allegorical and idealistic interpretation of Holy Scripture; especially when it came to the theology and book of Revelation. And yet as I continued to study and press in further this simply was not the case whatsoever. Maybe some within the amil camp operated or operate that way, but that is not the majority report among amillennial exegetes; nor is it the historic position amongst amillennialists. I might qualify a little bit of what I wrote so many years ago (but not in substance). I turned amil publicly probably fourteen years ago now, and for many exegetical reasons (especially with the help of Richard Bauckham’s work on the book and theology of Revelation).

Some in my old church circles label anything that is not their hard classical dispensationalism—pretrib-premil—as ‘replacement theology,’ or more technically it has been called supersessionism. This is the idea that all the promises made to ethnic Israel, once Christ came and the church was established, were taken over by the church spiritually; and of course this would be antisemitic, and thus antiChrist and heretical (since Jesus is the forever son of David, the forever Man from Nazareth). But this is not what historic amillennialism has entailed; at least not in the Protestant appropriation of it.

Let me add one qualification before I reshare what I wrote years ago: I take the Bible, in principle, to be intensively and radically about Jesus Christ (the One for the many); so did Jesus in His teachings found in John 5 and Luke 24, respectively. As such, the whole point of ethnic Israel’s existence (just as the whole point of creation’s reality in general) is in fact to mediate Christ to and for the world. To elevate human history to a level that makes Jesus an abstraction vis-a-vis ethnic Israel completely inverts the whole inner reality of everything; that makes the nation of Israel the point of salvation and creational history, and not the triune God in the scandal and particularity of Jesus Christ is to end up in another form of replacement theology, another type of supersessionism wherein the nation of Israel replaces the person of Jesus Christ as the reason and being for all of history. It is a false dilemma dispensationalists offer when they assert that it is either all about the nation of Israel or the person of the Christ. It is a false dilemma because Jesus is continuously the Jew, and thus the fulfillment and reality of what it means to be Jewish before God in an ultimate way. The Christ is the second and greater Adam, which entails the notion that to be in the eternal and heavenly Adam, come to earth, is to be participants in an elevated and life of primacy which is Christ’s for the world. In other words, was Adam an ethnic Jew; was Abraham even an ethnic Jew (see Rom 4)? God’s purposes are ultimately creational/re-creational; they are cosmic, not sectarian; they are concrete, not abstract and dualistic; they are to see this time and God’s time (“eternity”) as coterminous through the analogy and reality of the hypostatic union of God and humanity in the Logos ensarkos (the Word [of God] enfleshed).

Here is how I described amillennialism so many years ago now:

Monergism.com, some years back, picked up a little summary description I wrote somewhere (on-line) on what Amillennialism entails as an interpretive system. Here’s what I wrote:

The Amillennialist affirms that the people of Israel have not been cast off or replaced, but rather, that the Gentiles have now been included among the Jews in God’s Covenantal promises. In other words, not replacement but expansion. God’s redemptive plan, as first promised to Abraham, was that “all nations” would be blessed through him. Israel is, and always has been, saved the same as any other nation: by the promises to the seed, Christ. Amillennialists, do not believe in a literal 1000 year reign of Christ on earth after His second coming. Rather, they affirm that when Christ returns, the resurrection of both the righteous and wicked will take place simultaneously (see John 5), followed by judgment and and the eternal state where heaven and earth merge and Christ reigns forever.

Strong points of Amillennialism

1) It is highly Christocentric: it makes Christ the center of all the biblical covenants (even the “Land” covenant or Sinaitic)
2) It notes the universal scope of the Abrahamic Covenant (as key) to interpreting the rest of the biblical covenants
3) It sees salvation history oriented to a person (Christ), instead of a people (the nation of Israel)
4) It emphasizes continuity between the “people of God” (Israel and the Church are one in Christ Eph. 2:11ff)
5) It provides an ethic that is rooted in creation, and “re-creation” (continuity between God’s redemptive work now, carried over into the eternal state then)
6) It emphasizes a trinitarian view of God as it elevates the “person”, Christ Jesus, the second person of the trinity as the point and mediator of all history
7) It flows from a hermeneutic that takes seriously the literary character of the Scriptures (esp. the book of Revelation) [see the quote at Monergism.com here]

One more point of clarification: I am not, of course, your normal Covenantal theology amillennialist. Mongerism [dot] com is. I am “Barthian covenantal,” which is a completely different creature; particularly as that is funded by Barth’s reformulated doctrine of predestination (election-reprobation).

The Secular Background Behind the, Shepherds For Sale

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If you hadn’t noticed, I deleted my last post in support of Megan Basham’s new book: Shepherds For Sale. Here is something else I have written in its place.

While exposing the darkness is what we ought be about I’m having second thoughts on putting too much stock into Megan Basham’s book, Shepherds For Sale. What she is confronting is clearly a problem in the evangelical churches, and one that has been present long before the expose. But I’m afraid her book is relying too much on making some type of forensic case in regard to following money-trails and backers. Ultimately, what matters is what is being introduced into the Christian world by the folks Megan is highlighting, and many others who she is not. It seems people on the side she is exposing are attempting to claim that if all the details of MB’s work aren’t inerrant, then her recognition of the broader problem is in fact errant. But of course this isn’t the case.

In other words, it isn’t that I think MB’s book is reporting things that aren’t true, per se. But ultimately the problem remains an ideational one, as communicated by these mainstream evangelicals. The case, at an ideational level could be made that the real problem that stands behind evangelicalism is the fact that it is built on a turn to the subject anthropology and thus, epistemology. Evangelicalism’s foundations, as those took shape under American Fundamentalist pressures, are rationalist, romanticist, and positivist just as much as are the leftists’ and progressives’. Until the pastors and churches who are against the progressive agenda realize this no amount of pietism and moralism will be able to finally stave off the very foundations that ground the whole evangelical experiment.

Conversely, I think an unintended consequence of Basham’s book might be to allow her opponents (in her book) to deflect away from the real ideological and theological issues by arguing against the details of her reporting (i.e., following the “money-trail”). But I don’t think that is where the argument is at, even to start with. Whether or not Soros, and others like him, are behind the funding of the mainstream evangelicals, particularly as we find that at Christianity Today, and other like outlets, (and I think they are, in many demonstrable ways) is not where this argument should terminate. It only counts further against these types of operatives within the churches. But the better way to counter them, as in any spiritual war, is to undercut the very rootage of their beliefs and agendas at the ground level. At best, Basham’s work can expose some of the financial compromise that is happening behind the scenes, which then ties into identifiably secular (and satanic) agendas. But the “argument” need not rise or fall on that point in itself.

Addendum:

I am continuing to read through Megan Basham’s book. She is writing as a reporter should write, and simply following the leads as they present themselves. This type of work needs to be done so people in the churches can, at the very least, understand better where their tithes are going; and with what “other monies” it is being mixed. This is no small matter since tithe money is collected as unto the LORD, and ostensibly being used to execute the work of His ministry through the Church. The problem though remains; as Os Guinness titled one of his books, evangelicals in the main, “have fit bodies but fat minds.” Until the pastors stop fleecing the sheep—by not teaching them deep and stretching biblical theology etc.—I’m afraid Basham’s work will fall on mostly deaf ears. Even so, the work itself needed to be done.

The problem remains though, there isn’t a “stable” place to return to for “evangelicals.” Evangelicalism in the main hasn’t ended up where it has in a vacuum. I’m not exactly sure what the antidote is, but staying within the “intellectual” milieu that funds evangelicalism will only result in a full circle cycle of movement. Once again, these matters are not purely binaries of us/them-them/us. That is too shortsighted, and too pietistic to think this way.

What is Love? Against the Cultural and Psychological Conceptions in the Church

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Helmut Thielicke makes an excellent observation as he engages with the “conscience” as that is distilled in the epistle to the Romans. He notes that there really is no such thing as an autonomous conscience. For Thielicke the conscience, as understood biblically, is either going to be “ridden” by a fallen broken human nature, or it is going to be ridden and shaped by God’s triune life; there is no via media or Swiss neutral ground. And it is within this understanding, which we might say is the Pauline understanding, wherein Thielicke will argue that the point of contact between God and humanity is not resident within a native (to an abstract person’s) conscience, but instead it is only as God in Christ circumscribes our humanity with His; it is only as Christ condemns sin in His body for us that we come to have the capaciousness to know and be for Him.

Thielicke writes:

We see here at the same time the consequences of Roman Catholic anthropology, which we have already discussed in some detail in connection with the doctrine of the imago Dei. If the human person is not understood in relationship, but instead is given ontic autonomy as the bearer of demonstrable components of nature and of ontic substances of grace, then loving with one’s whole heart can no longer be understood personally in terms of existence in fellowship with God. It has to be understood instead as the ontically demonstrable content of the heart, as a psychodynamic state of being filled with loving impulses. The ontology of man leads at once to psychology, and indeed to a theological-speculative kind of psychology. Once we enter upon this path, we cannot avoid the conclusion that in terms of psychical structure man’s “infirmity”—i.e., the fact that soul is necessarily filled with shifting contents, with varied impressions and desires as well as with tasks and duties which claim our attention and devotion—man’s “infirmity” is completely incompatible with his being totally filled with love for God. Love for God as a psychical “content” then enters at once into competition with other potential contents of the soul. In any case love’s claim to be total is wholly illusory—until these competing contents of the psyche are eliminated in the uninterrupted and undeflected vision of God in the life to come. Thus the command to love loses its unconditional character the moment we enter the ontological-psychological plane of thought. For on that level it is no longer possible to grasp the personal category of love.

It is precisely at this point that we can find help in the formulation of Luther whereby the subject of faith—in this context we may with equal propriety say: the subject of love—is a “mathematical point” [punctum mathematicum]. Luther uses this extreme formulation to combat the fatal psychologizing of faith and love. He refuses to regard the subject of faith and love as merely an extended psychical tract filled with diverse forces and aspirations. There is thus no place for such questions as whether we are supposed to believe or to love at every single moment of our lives, or how such permanence is to be understood psychologically. Faith and love are characterized by their object, not by the psychical accomplishment of believing and loving. I confess him who loved me, and I believe in him who has given me his promises.

Thus the life of piety has as its goal not that all our time should be filled up with “conscious” faith and love, i.e., with conscious acts of believing and loving, so that everything else is dismissed from our minds as we move to at least approximate that total filling of the psyche. On the contrary, Luther recommends periods of prayer and devotion merely as “signs” that my time is under God, not as devices for filling up my time—at least partially—with thoughts of love and faith. The object of my faith , God’s love and righteousness, is still effectively present even when I “feel” nothing, even when I am “empty” or terrorized by doubt.[1]

As Thielicke presciently identifies (along with Luther): as the root goes, so goes the tree. If the root is rotten, the tree will be rotten. If the root is healthy and vibrant, the tree will be healthy and vibrant. You will notice that Thielicke is really critiquing the Roman Aristotelian (and insofar as that is picked up in Post Reformed and Lutheran orthodox theology) categories of thinking of grace in terms of habitus (disposition and its habituizing), and as substance and qualities. In other words, he is critiquing the Thomist synthesis wherein grace becomes its own independent substance resident in an abstract self-possessing humanity. He is rightfully arguing that when such categories are deployed, in regard to thinking about an ostensible notion of God’s grace, that the person under such notion-izing is flittering about in an inward curved movement of the soul upon the soul in a striving attempt to make their innards, their ‘feelings’ somehow correspond with what they speculate, what they perceive to be God’s love, God’s affection, God’s feeling. But according to Thielicke, to use a Torrancean (TFT) phrase, “this is only to throw the person back upon themselves.”

What Thielicke is offering as the alternative to the aforementioned is the biblical reality wherein humanity, and its conscience therein, is understood to be grounded in an alien conscience; but one that has been brought into union with us, insofar that God in Christ has brought us into union with Him, and His vicarious humanity for us. The problem that Thielicke vis-à-vis Luther is identifying is that the human propensity is to constantly think itself as the prius to all else; so the ‘turn to the subject’ that modernity has sophisticated for human consumption.

There are multiples of implications to all of the aforementioned, particularly as we think about the state of the Christian church in the West (and elsewhere). We can immediately see the effects of what happens when the church ingests a psychologized self wherein people, Christians in their spirituality, are reduced to performing for themselves and others. When genuinely triune love is not what constrains us, as that is truly actualized for us in Christ, then all that we ultimately have is a love within the ‘accidents’ of our being that we can strive to produce and express in “sacrosanct” efforts to demonstrate that while we were yet sinners we died for Christ’s sake. That is to say, as Thielicke has: that when love is thought of in philosophical rather than personalist terms what we necessarily end up with is a self-driven and cultivated notion of love that is not necessarily at the core of our beings coram Deo (before God).

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 342–43.

Are the Western churches even the Church Anymore?

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Confusing the various subcultures of Christianity, with the Gospel itself is fleeting. Each Christian tradition has its own idiosyncratic ways of liturgizing, and various parochialisms, and its just straight up weird stuff that they do. For my respective “tribe,” broadly speaking, as an American evangelical, what has become weird is driven by its slavish commitment to consumerism at all costs. Whether it be professional worship bands leading worship (like the folks who didn’t quite make the American Idol cut), the pastor wearing skinny jeans, sporting a mustache, with a man bun, or just the self-help sermons and programs that run amok in such environs, there is a cultural Pelagianism present behind such productions. That is to say, the belief that people, in the main, are simply neutral beings, and that given the proper external stimuli they can be persuaded, one way or the other, to affirm Christ or not; they can be “led” into a situation, through various conditionings (and programs), where, as the theory goes, they will come to feel included in the community. You know the whole “felt needs” and “real needs” combine. One big problem with this is that such seeker sensitive churches get so hyper fixated on meeting peoples’ felt needs—with the rationalization that it’s all being done in the name and claim of the Gospel—that that becomes the end. They are unable, under such inertia, to ever get to the real need; which has been the supposed justification for using the felt needs to begin with.

As an American evangelical who has grown up in this, from its more fundy iteration to where it is now, what I have come to realize, along with many, that such Pelagianistically funded churches really aren’t representative of the church writ large at all. That is not to say that there aren’t “saved” people in the pews all throughout such churches. But it is to say that these people have become used to, and thus expectant of having their ears and eyes tickled with feel good messages; for the most part. After awhile though, the discerning Christian has to start asking at what point such a group ceases to be operating as a real life, Spirit led church, and instead finds its function more in line with some sort of social club (e.g., think of Christian Smith’s adage: moralistic therapeutic deism). None of this is to suggest that the church, this side of the Eschaton, will ever be perfect. But it is to say that at a certain point the Ghost has been given up indeed, and the so-called pastors are nothing more than “hirelings” for cultural dereliction.

For those of us seeking a healthy local church to attend, in such environments, this scenario makes it exceedingly difficult. For me, the pastors involved in this type of tripe are heading for a serious and heavy judgment. In the end, the Gospel cannot be reduced to these church subcultures; and yet often, people do engage in such reductions—and so they become so-called Exvangelicals, Nones, or straight up atheists (of a certain pop type). The Gospel is Christ as attested to and encountered in Holy Scripture. The Gospel is God’s triune Life for the world, and a genuine church is to faithfully bear witness to this deep reality; through deep and stretching teachings, activities, so on and so forth. Outwith this I have a hard time seeing how the apostasies of the Western churches (and elsewhere) can be curbed.

Church Culture isn’t the Gospel, isn’t God: On Deconstructing Deconstruction

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Church culture isn’t the Gospel. Even so, it is what we most tangibly experience as Christians in the world. That kind of experience, as with any experience, can be either good, bad, or indifferent. Unfortunately, many these days (and in days past) are deconstructing. They are claiming to have this ‘come of age’ moment wherein they’ve finally come to realize that their respective evangelicalism[s], the cultures therein, have misrepresented God to them. The early mistake most of these folks make is to conflate their experience in various church cultures with God Himself. This represents some form of functional pantheism for them, wherein God’s existence is coextensive with the church’s “body” existence. Insofar, that such folk are unable to disentangle their experience of church culture with the reality of the living God Himself, they will mistakenly chuck the whole thing; at least, the whole thing in the way they have come to understand it.

It’s hard to blame people for wanting to abandon North American evangelicalism (among other evangelicalisms across the world). In my own experience, and I’ve been “in it” since birth, the evangelical churches have gone to the seed of the anthropology they generally have appropriated from the very beginning. That is to note, evangelicalism, ironically, finds it genesis as a reactionary movement; at least as most of evangelicalism has taken shape into the present. It started with the so-called Fundamentalists. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries post-enlightenment rationalism, so on and so forth, began to penetrate the seminaries in North America; Princeton being the prime example. Once the higher biblical criticism, and its supporting rationalistic positivism began to seep into these seminaries, there were men who were intent on standing against it (think of someone like Machen). But the way they stood against the new theology, or ‘liberal theology,’ was largely to assume the burden put to them by the higher critics of Scripture. As a result, through this type of methodological appropriation, what came with it, was the type of supporting anthropology that funded the critics’ criticism; i.e., rationalism, romanticism, methodological skepticism etc. All this to say, in brief, through this reactionism the fundamentalist theologians allowed the critics to define the theological, and thus ecclesiological types of questions they were going to attempt to answer from the get-go. This type of theological mood was passed down to the fundamentalist and evangelical churches into the current moment. It is a ‘turn to the subject’ wherein the mode of the Christian is to first think of themselves, and then to God. It’s to think that we are singular islands in a voluntary treaty with other islands, and this cooperation we end up calling Church. But you see, if my sketch is correct, what is set up, when applied to a God-world relation, is a methodological starting point in an abstract individual self. It is through this starting point that such Christians approach God. The result ends up looking like the culture at large; i.e., we see a mass consumerism and self-enthrallment at the center of the biblical teaching (i.e., self-help, positive thinking, pragmatism etc.), as well as “worship” (music).

But the above type of enthrallment only superficially meets the basest of our human and fallen desires. It doesn’t offer a deep point of contact between the living and triune God, and what the truly human soul has been created for; indeed, to find its depth reality in the very ousia (being) of Godself. In other words, individualistic consumerist iterations of church culture only have a short burn available to them. For some that might entail decades, for others, a shorter period of time. Once people realize that they are only getting a watered-down version of what the world itself has on offer at full tap, the person seeking real depth turns to the fountainhead of the superficiality that the churches are only able to offer modified versions of. Of course, this “new” sense of liberty, that is from the shackles of “God” as “church culture, is experienced as a new burn is started, and the person is able to “live” off of this type of “early love” feeling for another season of life. Even so, they are left feeling vacuous and empty. They might be able to stoke their new exvangelical sensibilities, as noted, for seasons of time, but they still understand that underneath it all they haven’t found the depth dimension their souls have been longing for all along. Except, for many, they believe they’ve already “been there done that” with God; i.e., hearkening back to their experience with evangelical church culture as God. They are then thrown into a pit of despondency and despair fortified with the belief that they already tried the “God thing,” only to realize that “He” was really only a projection of the collective of people self-identified as the church.

My aforementioned sketch is bleak, but I don’t think is off point. The Church’s reality esse is not found in itself. The Church’s reality res is found in its inner-being in the inner-being of God’s triune life as it has come to participate in that life through the mediation of Christ’s life pro nobis for us through His union with our humanity, and through our union with His humanity as that is grounded in the bosom of the Father. The Church will always have a variety of iterations and cultural expressions, insofar that God’s life in Christ constantly afresh in-breaks into all types of human cultures all across the catholic globe. So, as that is the case, cultural expression, just as Jesus expressed His own human culture as the Jew from Nazareth, is not the problem. The problem is when human culture is thought in abstraction from its ultimate ground and reality in God’s life ‘for us.’ The problem for the churches is when the church’s culture becomes the starting and ending point in itself; as a harbinger to only reinforce the human incurved and sinful bent to begin with.

All of the above noted: it is understandable why many are walking away from God; insofar that they have conflated God with their purported experience of Him as given in their experiences actualized in the church cultures. I think it may well be the Holy Spirit attempting to wake people up to the spiritual failure of these many churches and their attending church cultures. But it is a fatal mistake to take your church culture, and your damaging experiences with it, and throw the whole thing away. God remains God, no matter the failures of the churches. The churches, as we all know, all too well, are of course populated by sinful people; chucking the whole thing doesn’t change that, nor does it change the fact that those who are abandoning God are themselves still, very much so, sinners. What we need to recognize is that the Church does not find its reality ‘within itself,’ but ‘outwith-outside itself’ in the risen Christ and the triune God. Once the Christian realizes this, i.e., that their relationship with God is not contingent upon their experiences within this or that church culture, they will have a better way to move forward. Maybe it will be to move onto another tradition, or just a specific church they find that is more genuinely grounded on the Word of God; or maybe it will be to stay in said church cultures and attempt to be a witness to the reality of the Church in the midst of all the superficialities they and others have been experiencing within the churches.

After saying all of the above, what also is true is that many people are simply using their dissatisfaction with the churches as an excuse to simply walk deeper into their own self-possessed desires and lusts, while hiding behind the real superficiality that is indeed present in the many church cultures today. That is to say, many aren’t finding the ‘level’ of superficiality they are experiencing in the churches as a sufficient means of self-centeredness to live the wanton lives they are really seeking; that is, as ordered by a disordered self-drivenness that their base selves long for.

There is a gambit here.