How Did We Get Here?

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a world without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." In this famous and more than slightly scolding description of Protestant liberalism in the 1950s, Yale's H. Richard Niebuhr actually put his finger on the perennial heresy of the human heart since humanity's fall in Adam. In this article, I will lay out in very broad terms the rationale for the theme we have chosen for 2007: "A Time for Truth."  

The Glory Story: Why Pelagianism Always Makes Sense

 

A British monk named Pelagius arrived in Rome and set about to initiate a widespread moral clean-up operation. Augustine, a North African bishop of great standing in the church, stood in his path. Hardly uninterested in holiness, Augustine himself had been set free from a licentious life. Nevertheless, he knew that the power of that liberation was the gospel of God's free grace. By the time the fracas was over, Pelagianism, with its denial of original sin and rigorous demand that people save themselves by following Christ's moral example, was condemned by more church councils than any heresy in church history. Nevertheless, it has remained the most constant threat to the gospel. Why does it keep growing back so quickly right after it has been cut down? Because Pelagianism just makes sense to us. It's the "glory story."

Following Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, which was following Romans 10 and 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, the Reformation contrasted the theology of glory with theology of the cross. As Gerhard Forde nicely summarized,

The most common overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story. We came from glory and are bound for glory. Of course, in between we seem somehow to have gotten derailed-whether by design or accident we don't quite know-but that is only a temporary inconvenience to be fixed by proper religious effort. What we need is to get back on "the glory road." The story is told in countless variations. Usually the subject of the story is "the soul." ... The basic scheme is what Paul Ricoeur has called "the myth of the exiled soul."     Continue at Michael Horton

The Bleeding Of The Evangelical Church

What has changed most dramatically, I believe, in this last quarter of a century is that when I first arrived here we were at the end of the post war period when evangelical faith was being doctrinally framed and today, for the most part, it is not. Or at least, not obviously so. What shaped the Church then, far more than it does now, was theological conviction about its character and purpose. What shapes it now, far more than it did then, is a marketing ethos. In one sense, this should not be surprising at all. Americans are nothing if not consumers, consumers of images, of relationships, and of things, You perhaps will have seen some of these figures that have been assembled in recent years. We have 7% of the world’s population but we consume 33% of the goods and services. Every year in America, 12 billion catalogs are sent out to see if some unwary consumers can be attracted. The average child watches 20 thousand advertisements on television every year and on an average day you should see 1,600 advertisements. Our whole society has been transformed into a consumer’s heaven and we are nothing if not a nation of buyers, thoroughly at home in, and thoroughly a part of, the life of commerce. We move in and out of it much like fish do through water. It is in this commerce that we live and move and have our being. So the Church’s willingness to adapt to the marketing model for thinking about itself really is not remarkable.

But in adapting itself to this culture, the Church, far more than was the case twenty-five years ago, is having its character, and its purposes, and the way it functions, defined for it. There’s nothing wrong with commerce per se, but I am going to argue that there is something profoundly wrong in trading Christ, or in thinking that religion is the commerce of the soul. Now this adaptation to this kind of culture I see taking place in three very important ways in the evangelical world.  Read it all HERE

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