Killing Churches
When a church jettisons biblical authority, she guts her foundation. It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down. The lie swallowed by the Mainlines was: “doctrine divides”. In place of biblical doctrine, the mainlines embraced a number of substitutes: “Community”, ecstatic experience, social justice, ritual, technology. But nothing fills the gaping truthless hole at the center of American mainline Protestantism. It’s all sticky sentimental plastic drivel without the Word of God.
This, by the way, is the problem with the Emergent movement and it is what I find so troubling about the present popularity of writers like Rachel Held Evans - they’re repackaging the same lie for those reacting against evangelicalism. In fact, the opposite has proven to be the case. Doctrine grounded firmly in the supreme conviction that scripture is the measure of the Church, the norm that norms all other norms, is vital. Ignoring doctrine not only divides churches, it kills them.
Here’s Timothy George on the topic:
There is an intrinsic connection between spiritual vitality and theological integrity. The debate over homosexual practices within the mainline denominations is not the root cause but only the presenting issue in the devolution Douthat has described so well. At the heart of this issue is a broken doctrine of biblical authority, a loss of confidence in the primary documents of the Christian faith. The patina of pietism and the lushness of a well-rehearsed liturgy are no substitute for what the Thirty-nine Articles calls “the sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures.” Apart from such commitment, it will not be long before other cardinal tenets of the Christian faith become negotiable, including the Trinity, the full deity and true humanity of Jesus Christ, and redemption wrought through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Two of Chuck Colson’s most important books were The Body, a study of ecclesiology, and The Faith, a call for renewed orthodoxy. The church and the Bible are coinherent realities in the economy of grace. One will not long survive intact without the other…read more
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Matt:
I’ve been reviewing my walk with Christ lately, my history, and I’ve always assumed that I walked away from Christianity (during my college years) because of what I was learning in the classroom seemed (at least at that time anyway) more rich and full than the faith I had gotten from my ‘fundamentalist’ background. However, while I think this is still largely true for me, I think my drifting away began much sooner:
When I was maybe 14 years old, I remember a family in my childhood church where the husband and wife were always having marital difficulties. Finally, they split (though they were later remarried some years later…twice), but they wanted to continue to raise their boys in the same church together. It was a small church of about 70, and the wife was the daughter of the family that had helped to found the church, so it really shook that small community of faith.
I remember that one Sunday my tiny Sunday school class started talking about this couple, and my Sunday school teacher (who was otherwise a solid follower of scripture) said, “Well, what needs to happen is that Michael needs to find himself a girlfriend, and Jane needs to find herself a boyfriend.” I remember asking my teacher, “But I thought Jesus said that unless they cheated, people weren’t supposed to remarry if they got divorced.” I remember my poor teacher looked awkward…he realized that he had said what he had in a moment of emotion, not in the cold light of reason or moral clarity. Finally, instead of saying he had made a mistake, all he could think to say was, “Well, the bible doesn’t say you can’t date.”
This sudden introduction of backdoor theological inconsistency—well-meaning though it was intended to be—was the beginning of my withdraw from the faith that became complete in my early 20s. I guess for the first time, I became aware of tractable moral demarcation that existed between what was taught in the sanctuary (and the Sunday school room) and the sort of pragmatism (or situational morality) that people often used in their day-to-day living. Obviously, this simple mistake (or moment of weakness on the part of my teacher) was hardly the sole factor in why I withdrew, but for the first time in my life I began to have such thoughts as “is this really a sin?” or “God won’t mind if I indulge myself occasionally” or “I’ll do what I want, and I can make a bargain with God later.”
When we fail to live up to God’s law for human nature, fail to keep His commandments, or whenever we manage to slip into theological inconsistency, the most natural thing for us to do is to immediately begin to bargain and to rationalize…that’s how we’ve come to have heresy and liberal theology. My Sunday school teacher should have just said “You’re right, Reinhardt. I was wrong. I don’t know how Michael and Jane will work this out, but we should just pray for God’s guidance in their lives.” But he didn’t, and this began a long disenchantment for me with the church. I expect that many young people (at the risk of lumping them all together as too many writers do) today feel the same way.
[1] Posted by All-Is-True on 7-18-2012 at 09:30 AM · [top]
Seems like everyone is talking about Ross Douhat’s article. But that’s the way the world works - the liberals can think they have the press on their side, but it only needs events or perceptions to shift a little and then the 4th estate will turn on them.
[2] Posted by MichaelA on 7-19-2012 at 03:00 AM · [top]
Here is another article on the dying liberal “mainstream” denominations, this time about the United Church of Canada:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/the-collapse-of-the-liberal-church/article4443228/
I really liked this comment in a perverted way:
“Ignore all those that are leaving. They’re morons!” Wow.
[3] Posted by robroy on 7-29-2012 at 01:38 AM · [top]
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