Colonies of Heaven and Our Spiritual Home

Colonies of Heaven and Our Spiritual Home

Oct 9, 2023 | Eschatology

Have you ever heard the phrase, “You’re so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good”? The biblical truth of the matter is the opposite: the only way you can be any earthly good is if you are “so heavenly minded.” The former is the typical understanding of most Christians post 19th century’s Second Great Awakening. We are saved, supposedly, so when we die our souls go to heaven, which is somewhere up there, far, far away. In fact, when I was first presented the gospel at the tender age of 18, the guy asked me, “If you died right now would you go to heaven?” For me it was a powerful question because I sure didn’t want to go to hell, but it set me up for the pietistic, over spiritualized Christianity I was born-again into a few months later at college. Christianity seemed kind of like a British double decker bus, with the upper deck being where the important “spiritual” stuff happened, and the lower deck was where I lived daily life, which wasn’t so important.

This is a very hard habit of mind to break because so many streams of Christian and secular thought have come down to us in Western civilization mitigating against a robust earthly faith. Such a faith calls us to live the heavenly life here as we bring God’s kingdom to this earth, to this fallen world. Unfortunately, we tend to equate earth, the material stuff, with what is fallen, a concept we get from Plato not the Bible. God created everything good, in fact very good, and the fall didn’t make it suddenly bad. That’s why becoming a Christian isn’t an escape from this world, the earth, because our mission is to transform it, as Paul says in Romans 12, to “overcome evil with good.” Or in a metaphor used throughout the Bible, to bring light to a dark fallen world. And remember, light always defeats darkness—when light shows up, darkness flees.

Which brings me to this discussion of colonies, something I learned about from a blog post by Doug Wilson. He discusses this passage from Philippians 3:

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

This is a thrilling passage, but like most Christians I used to typically focus on the first sentence assuming it meant going to heaven is the thing. In other words, the Christian life is a short sojourn on this earth, which is not our home, and when we get to heaven we will finally be home, where we belong. Here we’re aliens, and we belong up there. The problem with this perspective is that it’s exactly wrong, upside down from biblical truth. This is where Wilson’s discussion of Paul’s use of the word “citizenship” is helpful in understanding the biblical picture of salvation in the gospel. 

The Greek word translated citizenship, politeuma-πολίτευμα, is where we get our word polity from, or a form of government. The idea is not referring to a location, but to the rule or laws under which we live. Paul isn’t saying our Christian life is really about some far off spiritual place we call heaven, but rather it’s about living here and now according to the rules and laws of God’s heavenly kingdom, or in Paul’s metaphor, Rome. Paul was writing to Christians in the Roman colony of Phillippi, and he and those who he was writing to understood what he meant. Here’s how Wilson puts it:

In this passage, Paul is using this striking metaphor for a reason. He says that our citizenship is in heaven (v. 20). We look toward heaven because that is where Jesus went, which means that heaven is the place He is going to come from when He returns to earth. When the metaphor is translated, it means that Jesus was going to come from “Rome” back to “Philippi.” He was not going to take “Philippi” up to “Rome.” And so when the Savior, the Lord Jesus, comes, He is going to transform our lowly body so that it becomes like His glorious body (v. 21). What He does in this final transformation is in complete accord with the authority He is exercising now as He brings all things into subjection to Himself (v. 21). In multiple places, the New Testament tells us that He is doing this.

Thus on this earth in this life we live in colonies of heaven, and the end game is down here not up there. The idea of “going to heaven” gets the image all wrong. When we’re saved, heaven is coming to us! And Jesus because he was given authority over all things when he ascended to the right hand of God is bringing everything under his control, every single thing. No matter what it looks like to us at the moment, Jesus is ruling and ordaining all things to his glorious, predetermined end. Daniel 7:14 tells us what this means:

He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

This dominion is happening now, His reign extending and kingdom advancing, and we His church get to be part of making all this happen. I used to think this process had little if anything to do with now, and that it was only going to happen when it was fully realized at his return in glory. Ironically, though, because of the early influence of Francis Schaeffer in my Christian life I always believed that Christianity applied to every area of life, but in the end it was a futile enterprise. I now realize my mistake.

I was under the impression that it was merely Christian ideas, the Christian worldview, that spoke to culture and politics, art and architecture, philosophy and law, etc., but completely missed that it was far more profound than that. It was in Paul’s words in Ephesians 1, rather, Christ seated at God’s “right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” Somehow I completely missed, “in the present age.” Why would I do that? Because I thought “going to heaven” was the thing instead of heaven coming to earth. And even more important, I didn’t realize that when the Church is bringing the kingdom of heaven on earth, a la the Lord’s prayer, it isn’t us doing that, but the Lord Jesus himself! The victory isn’t ours but His. We’re simply his body carrying out His orders as subjects in His earthy colonies. This is what it means to make disciples of all nations.

This is a critical distinction the holier-than-though above-it-all Christians I wrote about in my last few posts don’t get at all. They see Christians who engage in and prioritize cultural and political engagement as somehow doing that apart from the rule of Christ, as if the victories we achieve are our victories and not Christ’s. As if we’re building our kingdom and not the kingdom of God. That’s why they throw around words such as “authoritarian” when talking about people like me. Read the Great Commission in Matthew 28 again. The reason we make disciples of all nations (not individuals) is because Jesus has been given all authority “in heaven and on earth.” Because this is true, He tells us to therefore, go. We do the legwork because God uses saved sinners to build his kingdom, and He has the authority and power to turn our feeble efforts into results for our good and His glory. It’s because of this that I said above that the Philippians 3 passage is so thrilling. We’re Jesus’s advance team! And we’re ultimately on the winning team!

So, what does this look like? We can take our cue from Jesus’ command in his Great Commission. After baptizing the converted, it means “teaching them to obey everything” He commanded. That includes not only everything in the gospels, the “red letters” if you will, but the entire Old Testament because it’s all about Him and is His word, as well as the rest of the New Testament because it’s all about Him and is His word. Unfortunately because of our pietistic privatized faith the tendency is to see this as only applying to our personal and not our professional lives or occupations. What does it look like to obey everything if I’m a truck driver? Or an engineer or architect or teacher? I grapple with how I do it every day as a sales guy loving and serving my customers and co-workers. This is for each Christian to figure out how they bring the gospel, their Christian worldview, and God’s law to bear on everything they do.

Now imagine what happens when a city council woman or county commissioner or state legislator becomes a Christian. Do they not bring their Christian faith to bear on how they carry out their public duties? God’s word and law is their ultimate standard, and they will do politics differently than someone who has a different standard. They don’t leave their faith at home and enter some neutral secular square because they are doing politics. This doesn’t mean Christians agree on public policy positions, but that they govern based on God’s word and law as Christians and everyone should know it.

Here is a sermon Wilson gave some years ago where he goes more in depth into this idea. It’s amazing how wrong we as Christians have gotten this for so long. We’re bringing to earth what God will ultimately bring at the consumation of all things revealed to us in Revelation 21 and 22.

Education and the Myth of Neutrality

Education and the Myth of Neutrality

Oct 5, 2023 | Parents and Family, Uncategorized

I use the phrase, “the myth of neutrality” here from time to time when addressing issues related to culture and politics. It also very much has to do with how we educate our children in America. This myth is the fruit of the secularism bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, and which completely smothered the Christian West in the latter half of the 20th century. This mythical idea is as simple as it is deceptive: public life in a pluralistic society where there are many different religions and beliefs must be neutral with regard to ultimate questions, e.g., the meaning of life and death, sin and salvation, God, heaven and hell, the basis of morality, etc. The problem is that we can’t, not a single one of us, be neutral regarding these questions, ever. This applies both to our personal lives and our lives lived in society with other people, including government. Yet this myth has been accepted for a hundred years or more by most Americans, and sadly most Christians as well.

The opportunity to discuss this comes from the approval for a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma in June. Immediately we saw headlines like this: “Oklahoma’s Religious Charter School Aims to Break Church-State Separation.” Oh the horror! It isn’t just liberals, leftists, and libertarians who oppose such a thing, but many conservatives as well. This piece at Current addresses the intrepid David French who thinks the Oklahoma ruling is a threat to religious freedom. It’s shocking that someone who claims to be a conservative (although a Trump-MAGA hating one) and a Christian could be so historically ignorant, but French fits the bill. Everyone knows Thomas Jefferson came up with the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state” in a letter to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, which has come to mean the separation of religion or Christianity from the state.

Regardless of what the secular Jefferson thought it meant, life in America never reflected an impenetrable wall of separation until the mid-20th century. As examples, for most of American history there were sabbath laws, and sodomy was a felony in all 50 states as recently as 1962. The foundation of law in America had always been the Bible and the Christian worldview, but after World War II cultural elites were intent on replacing Christianity with secularism. A significant part of that mission was the Supreme Court  Emerson v. Board of Education decision in 1947 which effectively made secularism the established religion of the United State of America. Christianity and the Bible would no longer be allowed in American “public” schools. In 1962 it was made “official” when the Supreme Court struck down the right for children to pray in schools. Now all would be made to worship at the altar of secularism, and religion’s influence would be confined to the home and church.

In spite of Jefferson’s predilections, America’s founders believed deeply in the importance of religion and education, and to that end the Continental Congress in July 1787 passed The Northwest Ordinance in which they stated:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Religion to the Founders meant Christianity, and its morality and knowledge was necessary to good government and a happy populace. In other words, civilization and the success of American government depended on education and the influence of Christianity. It didn’t follow, however, that encouragement meant government control of education given the Founders’ deep suspicion of human nature and government power. Yet, over time “public” education came to mean government education subsidized by taxpayers controlled by the government. From a Christian perspective there should be no such thing as “public” education let alone government education. J. Gresham Machen put this presciently in his 1934 Education, Christianity and the State:

Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great.

Who can argue with this after 89 years of hindsight. And it looks like Machen might be encouraged by a political and cultural movement to Make America Great Again.

R.J. Rushdoony in his 1961 book, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education further makes the point:

The public school is now unmistakably a state school, and its concept of education is inevitably statist. This is apparent in various ways. First of all, education has ceased to be a responsibility of the home and has become a responsibility of the state. . . . the state still claims sole right to determine the nature, extent, and time of education. Thus, a basic family right has been destroyed and the state’s control over the child asserted.

It cannot be both state and family, only either/or. And this is not just an argument for liberty over against government tyranny, but a fundamentally religious question. American public schools are the establishment of a secular religion in the guise of religious neutrality. Joe Boot in The Mission of God explains:

We can clearly see . . . that neither the structure within which we educate, nor the purpose for which we educate, nor the content by which we educate, can be neutral.

Doug Wilson states why this an indisputable fact in The Case for Classical Christian Education:

Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed. Christians and assorted traditionalists who want a secular school system to instill anything other than secular ethics are wanting something that has never happened and can never happen.

He further asserts that public or “common schools were going to be the means by which the entire progressive agenda was ushered in.” Progressive in the twenty-first century is nothing like the early progressives imagined, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how secular progressive education paved the way for the current takeover of education by cultural Marxists.

Does this mean that what we know as “public education” needs to be “abolished,” to borrow from Marx? Yes! School choice may be a good stopgap measure to take away some of the monopoly power of the government, but it is only temporary. It follows from the biblical imperative of the familial responsibility of educating our children, that it must be completely private and divorced from government at any level. Government money always brings with it government influence. Education is a worldview enterprise, and in America parents should be free to decide in what worldview they want their children educated. Parents should pay for their own children’s education and not forced via taxes to pay for others.                                                                 

What that looks like and how we get there I don’t know. I only know this should be the objective of any Christian who understands the incompatibility of Christianity with any other worldview in the educating of children. In the meantime as we work toward this, I believe that charter classical schools are a critical means to challenging the secular progressive monopoly on education. The ideal is classical and Christian, but even charter “public” classical schools are a powerful weapon against secularism. They reject the postmodern relativism of secularism, and teach that there is objective goodness, beauty, and truth rooted in history and the classical and biblical texts of the Western tradition. The ultimate responsibility for the children’s faith and worldview is the parents, but a classical education will at least not indoctrinate them into the dogmatic secularism of the current cultural and government American elite.

 

 

 

Russell Moore’s American Evangelical Church Crisis and the Myth of Neutrality

Russell Moore’s American Evangelical Church Crisis and the Myth of Neutrality

Oct 2, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

If you don’t know who Russell Moore is, you’re not missing much. He used to be a big shot in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and last year became the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. He left the SBC amid some controversy in 2020 and eventually took over at Christianity Today. He’s a Christian, along with people like David French, leftist elite society loves. He writes for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, among other establishment organs of the approved secular cultural and political narratives. To say the least, he is not a fan of the MAGA movement thinking it’s infected the Evangelical church and as he argues has created a crisis for the church. He writes of this “crisis” in a July article in The Atlantic, and since my last two pieces were about “gospel losers,” I figured it would be important to continue the theme of the biblical contrast to such anti-cultural engagement Christianity.

Like the young pastor Poythress in my previous posts, Moore believes in a personal pietistic kind of Christianity, and thinks cultural and political engagement is poison to the true mission of the church. As with other people who think like him, he is good at setting up straw men (a logical fallacy) so he can mow them down. The Christians he criticizes are caricatures in his imagination. He condemns people like me, but what he says I believe is inaccurate and untrue. The straw man strategy is an effective way to get people who already agree with you to agree with you, which is why he writes for leftist publications, and Christianity Today has lamentably become one of those. He doesn’t know any populist-nationalist (MAGA) conservative Christians like me because if he did he couldn’t write pieces like this in good faith. I’m not going to go through the paragraphs like I did in my previous posts, but give a couple examples of his straw men and false choice assertions, and argue for the biblical position. Which, by the way, can be proved without doubt by the history of the church. Here is the very first paragraph:

The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves “evangelical” anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories.

I will assume he’s being honest here and not using this to simply make a rhetorical point. If it is true, he needs to talk to more young Evangelicals. And beware of anyone who uses the phrase “internet conspiracy theories” to discredit others. We’ve seen the last several years how the globalist deep state elites used this to try to stifle dissent and anything against the accepted “narratives.” You can see in the last sentence he embraces a personalized pietistic faith that shouldn’t get too involved in politics. He asserts a false choice typical of such thinking: it’s either “culture-war politics” or prayer and the Bible. It is not. Here is the most egregious straw many setup:

Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age.

Really? Can you give me some proof of this, Russell? He can’t because they don’t exist except in his imagination. He uses the word nostalgia four times in the piece to make his point, which only makes it weaker. As he says, “The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous.” I wonder how dangerous it really is when nobody actually believes it! I’ll quote two more sentences that show how committed his is to a personalized pietistic Christianity.

Nostalgia—especially of the sort wielded by demagogues and authoritarians—cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.

It doesn’t surprise me that Moore accuses those Christians he disagrees with as being “authoritarians.” Since the New Left arose in the 1960s they’ve used the “authoritarian” card to discredit and try to silence Christians who dare bring their faith into the public square. Unlike the leftists, Christians are supposed to leave their faith at home, and apparently Moore agrees with them. This is especially targeted at Christians who want their Christian faith and worldview reflected in how our nation is governed. That he is using leftwing rhetoric to discredit fellow Christians is reprehensible.

Lastly, he says the answer is “a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.” He won’t get any argument from me there, but we mean something completely different by “personal faith.” The distinction of what “personal faith” is gets to the nature of the Christian faith and the heart of the issue. Pietism has been a disaster for the church and its influence in Western culture. This movement of 17th century German Lutheranism in due course influenced Evangelical Christianity in a way that divorced faith from life beyond the Christian’s personal piety. In other words, personal holiness and devotion, prayer, Bible study, church, etc. are such a priority that everything else pales in comparison. As you can see from Moore, even being concerned, or engaged in things like politics or “culture wars” distorts Christianity from what he thinks is its true purpose, personal transformation. The problem with this view is that it is not only not biblical, but an extreme distortion of the gospel. Cultural influence at every level, including politics, is baked into the gospel cake.

Christians in the first centuries of the church declaring “Jesus is Lord” was a loaded political statement. Unlike modern pietistic Christians, the ancient church knew there was no such thing as a “neutral” society. Someone had to be Lord, and it would be either Caesar or Christ. Many of these early Christians gave their lives because they understood the Christian faith was not at all just personal, but had ramifications for all of life. It wouldn’t be until the rise of the Enlightenment in the 17th century that secularism began its attack on Christian Western civilization which by the 20th century introduced the concept of neutrality, or as it is rightly called, the myth of neutrality. That Christians bought into, and still do, this myth has been a disaster for Christian cultural influence in the West over that last sixty plus years. Secularism reigns in our day, and because it does Christians who venture into the public square declaring God’s law and word as applicable to everything are attacked as “authoritarians,” among other epithets. As long as we accept our place at the pluralistic table and keep our faith respectfully private, we can occasionally scrape up some cultural crumbs to keep us happy. Russell Moore obviously agrees with the secularists.    

Jesus clearly said (Matt. 28:16-20) because he was given all authority that we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to obey everything he commanded. This is also the same Jesus who said we are to live on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matt. 4), and who declared that the entire Old Testament was about him (Luke 24). From the moment God called Abram out of Ur to make for himself a people (Gen. 12), the faith of His people had radical implications for all of life, both personal and societal. How could it not! Human beings live in communities, live as peoples, as nations, and some worldview, some ultimate source will be authoritative. In the West, which includes most of the world today, that source is either God in Christ revealed in His Word, or man. There is no in between, as badly as Russell Moore wants to think there is.

 

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose, Part 2

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose, Part 2

Sep 28, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

In my last post I vented about the badness of this piece by a young pastor, Justin N. Poythress: “How Evangelicals Lose Will Make All the Difference.” There was too much badness for just one post, so I continue here. His last section is titled, “Better Way,” so let’s see exactly what this way entails. He starts with a doozy:

Jesus tells his followers to take up their crosses, not their crowns (Matt. 16:24–26).

Indeed he does, but what has that to do with crowns, you ask? The young Pastor Poythress creates a false choice. If Jesus calls his followers to suffer in some way, then crowns, or winning, is somehow at odds with the suffering we are called to in Christ. But as I said in the previous post, suffering can take many different forms for the Christian. In fact, we suffer in a myriad of ways every day, psychologically, emotionally, at times physically. This is what I call the pain of sanctification. Sadly there are some Christians called to physical suffering for proclaiming their faith, as is the case in many places around the world today. That doesn’t mean, however, that such suffering is inevitable or the only calling of the Christian. Far from it. Here is the perspective of our Lord and Savior who sits at the right hand of the Father when he gave his followers what we call the Great Commission:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

Notice what comes before “Therefore.” We only go and make disciples of “all nations” because Jesus has been given “all authority in heaven and on earth.” What’s the point of Jesus saying he’s been given this authority if he’s sending out his disciples to lose? Did he intend when he said this that his disciples, those trained and instructed as his followers, could not win?  And as I often proclaim, Jesus didn’t say to make disciples of all people, of all individuals, but all nations, in the Greek ethnos-ἔθνος. Does the Christian influence coming from “teaching them to obey everything” he commanded them not apply to politics and issues of culture? To issues of the so called “culture war”? This was a war, by the way, we did not start. Do these questions not answer themselves? Is it not obvious? (Read Psalm 2 and Eph. 1:15-23 in case you’re not sure.)

Then following his crosses, not crowns declaration he states:

Though our faith may be increasingly marginalized and devalued in the West, losing cultural battles with grace, dignity, and love can persuasively display Christ’s cruciform beauty. Conversely, there’s nothing persuasive about chasing the perks of power.

What exactly is “cruciform beauty”? The word simply means in the shape of a cross. The problem with this statement is that it’s absurd. I know what he means, the Isaiah 53 sacrifice of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, for our sin and reconciliation to our Creator. That is indeed beautiful. However, there is nothing beautiful about a cross. It was the most ugly, horrific, means of torture and death ever devised by sinful man. The cross is only part of the story. The other parts are Jesus’ life lived in perfect obedience to God making him able to grant us his very own righteousness (Rom. 3), his resurrection, victory over death itself, and most importantly, his ascension to be seated at the right hand of the Lord God Almighty. He earned the right to sit there and reign over all of creation, visible and invisible, to advance his kingdom on earth, to reverse the fall if you will, and build his church, conquering all his enemies until the final one is defeated, death (I Cor. 15:25).

Notice also there is supposedly something dirty about “power,” and the “perks” it conveys. It reminds me of certain legalistic Christians who think sex is “dirty.” Power like sex is a natural part of life, and everything depends on what we do with it. He seems to think if we’re seeking “power” we’re doing something inherently wrong, as he says:

Suffering because you’re harmful or obnoxious isn’t Christian faithfulness. Worse, desperately clutching for the instruments of power or elbowing to get a seat at the table sacrifices Christ’s cause to chaos.

Who exactly are these “harmful or obnoxious” people? Jerks on the Internet? And clearly this power he’s obsessed with is a dirty business and in no way has anything to do with Christ’s cause. I would say this is naïve, but it’s worse than that. He completely lacks wisdom about the nature of reality and sinful man, and life lived in societies full of fallen people.

Aristotle in his Politics said that man is a political animal because we live in communities and seek certain ends of our own good, and this can’t happen without power; the process of deciding what is allowed or not, and the means to enforce it. Simply, politics is the distribution of power, and Christians throughout all of history were intimately involved in it and didn’t think of it as beneath them.

Poythress gets to the heart of what makes his understanding so problematic.

This doesn’t mean Christian political savvy is thrown aside while we lie down and float away with the cultural tide. It does mean American evangelicals have a golden opportunity, even in years when it seems the sun is setting on our influence, to prove our hope is vested beyond the material and visible. We can chart for the next generation a trail of faithfulness that avoids bitter and reclusive cultural withdrawal on the one hand and vengeful scorched-earth behavior on the other.

This is typical of third wayism as if our choices are extreme withdrawal or behavior, or some middle way. To Poythress here is the “Better Way”:

As faithful evangelicals, we advocate for God’s ways and encourage our neighbors to follow them while leaving the results to God.

He assumes fighting for Christianity and truth in the public square means we’re not leaving the results to God. This is the typically condescending perspective of Christians who think they’re above it all. He seems to forget God uses people to accomplish things in this world even though ultimate results are always up to Him.

This mentality is an example of a typical artificial duality in overly spiritualized Christians. Joe Boot explains the problem in his little pamphlet For Mission:

[This] is an implicit and destructive duality that slices up reality into matter and spirit, nature and grace, secular and sacred, naturel and supernatural, time and eternity, higher and lower, with one area perceived as lesser or evil and the other as higher or good. This tendency has resulted in a radical separation of creation and redemption (where redemption is essentially for the higher story of existence), spiritual life and historical-cultural development and mutually reinforcing pattern of subservience to non-Christian culture/nature/secular on the one hand, and the abandonment of Christian culture-building (grace/sacred) on the other.

Boot calls this Churchianity, or those Christians who are “at best disinterested in Christ’s manifest Lordship over any other sphere of life or institution, and at worse are hostile to it.” Francis Schaeffer was warning Christians about this faulty understanding of Christianity back in the 1960s and 70s before the West had become completely secularized. He spoke out against such a dangerous duality that would completely impoverish Christianity’s influence in culture. Too many Christians ignored his warnings  and secularism, along with all its horrors, has won the day. It doesn’t have to be this way.

 

 

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose

Sep 25, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

When I read the title of this peace I knew reading it would not be good for my blood pressure: “How Evangelicals Lose Will Make All the Difference.” And it was worse than I thought. That it was on the Gospel Coalition website surprised me not at all. There are so many logical fallacies and theological misunderstandings in it that it’s almost impressive. Let me take them one by one and see how far I get. The sheer badness of it may require more than one post.

Before I get there, that something like this can be written and believed by a large contingent of Evangelical Christians is depressing. I’m convinced part of the reason people think this way, and think it’s the biblical way to think, is because of faulty eschatology, but that’s not all of it. There are many dispensational premillennialist Pentecostal Christians I have more in common with in this regard than my Reformed brethren, and to say the least I do not agree with their eschatology. Most Christians believe losing “down here” is baked into the gospel cake. They are convinced suffering and loss of cultural influence are the only and inevitable hallmarks of the Christian life. They are not! Taking up our cross and following Jesus doesn’t mean Christians are called to being thrown to the lions or burned at the stake. We know that suffering and dying to ourselves takes many forms, and none of it is pleasant. Let’s see what our young pastor, Justin N. Poythress, thinks.

He is addressing something called “The Seven Mountain Mandate.” Some Christians believe a passage in Revelation is a call “to retake seven spheres (or mountains) of cultural influence: religion, family, government, education, media, arts/entertainment, and business.” Well, yeah, the Christian worldview addresses everything in life, including these broad areas, and more. Jesus in the Great Commission said his followers were to disciple nations. That has implications for all these things, and more. I’ll start with this: 

The perspective is ultimately built on a dual misunderstanding of Scripture and of Christ’s purposes in the world. 

Those are some pretty big things to misunderstand! Here is what he believes the Seven Mountain Mandate misses in the passage in Revelation:

The passage was intended as a picture of the spiritual battle waged through all history until Christ returns. It was intended to give Christians hope amid their suffering and cultural loss.

Well yes, it was. The Christians to whom the Apostle John was writing were often being perThe passage was intended as a picture of the spiritual battle waged through all history until Christ returns. It was intended to give Christians hope amid their suffering and cultural loss. secuted violently, some giving their lives for the gospel. But are all Christians in all geopolitical and cultural situations throughout history facing the same kind of persecutions? Is Poythress saying that’s just the inevitable lot for Christians and there is nothing we can do about it but learn to “lose gracefully”? And notice he does something typical of such thinking, he spiritualizes it. Christianity supposedly applies primarily to “spiritual” things, not the mundane issues of life lived in culture.

He then commits a colossal non sequitur (the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise), among many in this short piece. However one interprets the passage in Revelation he asserts:

the conquering warrior is always the crucified Christ, not a sword-swinging church. 

It does not follow that just because the crucified Christ is indeed the conquering warrior, that the church can’t be swinging swords. We’re just supposed to sit back and take it? I guess, be nice and loving and not fight for truth or justice or righteousness or the honor of God? What does this even mean? He says after this:

Even if you’ve never heard of the 7M mandate (and its strange reading of Revelation), it can still be tempting to think Christ’s kingdom grows by “winning” cultural power and influence. If this is where we place our hope, it’ll be hard to stomach the losses.

This is a perfect example of his sloppy thinking. To his mind “winning” cultural power and influence is antithetical to Christ’s kingdom. Somehow Christians living out Kingdom values found throughout the gospels are not supposed to have “cultural power and influence.” Really? How was it that the Roman Empire eventually fell to the “cultural power and influence” of Christianity? Was that a mistake? Unbiblical? Something God never intended when he came to earth in the person of Christ? Why then did Jesus teach us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Maybe because God wanted us to bring the influence of heaven into the cultures in which we live? Just maybe? In fact, the very nature of God’s kingdom, the kingdom of heaven is to bring it “down” to earth, and when it grows it will always gain “cultural power and influence.” How can it not! You wonder how he and those who think like him interpret the parables of the mustard seed and leaven in Matthew 13. It sure seems that Jesus is saying that the influence of the kingdom of heaven grows inevitably and inexorably, and it cannot help but have influence in cultures.

The next sentence is even worse. Because we desire the gospel to influence the culture and have “cultural power” therefore we’re placing our hope in that and not Christ? Really? We can’t want Christ to be glorified and obeyed in the societies in which we live? That’s not Christian? Frankly, that’s insulting. Then he asserts we need to be concerned with how we are seen by the culture:

Evangelicals increasingly run the risk of being seen as sore losers in the culture war. Our inability to let go, to relinquish positions of public prominence and power, reveals a misplaced faith. Too often, we’ve entangled Jesus’s name with a political agenda, as mainline Christians did when they made the church into little more than a social club for liberal activism.

Oh my. I could do an entire post just about this! So it follows that if we want “cultural power and influence” and we have a tough time of it we’ll be sore losers? We’re supposed to glory in our losing? Really? He must think we aren’t aware that we live in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body. Losing and overcoming, and losing again, and overcoming, and losing again, and overcoming is called life! Personally or culturally. 

I wonder if the Apostles and the first generation of disciples cared about how they were “seen” by the Jews and Pagans of Rome. And the gospel calls us to “relinquish positions of public prominence and power”? Really? What kind of doormat theology is this! And he has the gall to compare those Christians, like me, who think our Christianity compels us to a certain political agenda to the liberal Christians of the early 20th century? Really? As you can tell, the old Italian blood gets boiling when I read such calumnies. For you youngsters, that word means insults. And everything about that paragraphs reeks of self-righteousness. He and his ilk think they are above such mundane matters as “the culture war.” I guess as I said above, fighting for truth or justice or righteousness or the honor of God is “misplaced faith.”

I’ve written here about Tim Keller’s unfortunate creating of a moral equivalence between left and right. I’ve heard this called “third wayism,” as if there is some middle way, a more gospel way, between the radical left and the radical right, as Keller said. In our day, there is no “radical right.” And everyone on the left, including most Democrat politicians, and the entire legacy media, are Marxists, thus by definition “radical.” The “culture wars” were started by the left against the right (conservatives) in the 1960s, and we decided to fight back. Now Christians like the young pastor Poythress want us to roll over and play dead because fighting back is “misplaced faith”? Apparently. 

There is much more fodder in the rest of the piece, so I’ll have to do that in another post.