Category: Evangelicalism

With doctrine and church attendance.

Sunday Thoughts 8/18/13

I don’t know that I’ve ever repeated a blog before, but I stumbled across this Saturday evening, and it still expresses what I think.

I’m writing for Evangelicals, so don’t be shocked if you “don’t get it” coming from somewhere other than Evangelicalism.

  1. I am a former Evangelical. I was on the conservative end of 1950s and 1960s Evangelicalism, which by today’s standards would be “Fundamentalist.”
  2. What I was taught at home and in the Evangelical Covenant Church of my childhood didn’t match what I was taught in a Wheaton-affiliated Evangelical boarding school in my adolescence; which didn’t match what I was taught at Wheaton College for 40 semester hours; which didn’t match what I was taught at John Brown University; which didn’t match what I was taught in IVCF and through InterVarsity Press when I went to Bradley University; which didn’t match what Campus Crusade was teaching when I dabbled over there; etc.
  3. Everyone claimed that their version was simply Biblical.
  4. Have you noticed, by the way, that all the Hal Lindsey/Late Great Planet Earth crap, very mainstream Evangelical, has proven to be false prophecy? The same fate awaits “Left Behind.”
  5. Seeing Evangelical disagreements (and extra-Biblical taboos and shibboleths) lowered my enthusiasm, but I knew nothing better than Evangelicalism and toughed it out.
  6. Through diligent reading, I stumbled onto Calvinism, which was better and brought back much of my enthusiasm. I then considered myself maybe sorta kinda a fringe Evangelical.
  7. Through dumb luck, I later stumbled onto Eastern Orthodoxy, where I’ve been for 14 years [now 16+] and [where] I expect to die.
  8. Orthodoxy is the continuation of 1st millenium Christianity; it never adopted indulgences or the other stuff that led to the Protestant Reformation. Darn shame (and long story how) y’all didn’t come back to Orthodoxy then instead of starting new “churches.”
  9. I’m not alone in journeying to Orthodoxy.
  10. You’re a little old to become Orthodox because all the cool kids are doing it, aren’t you?
  11. You’re not too old to be uneasy with the contradictions and inherent foibles of Evangelicalism, and to go to a better, saner place, are you?
  12. You really don’t need the Sisiphean task of fighting Evangelical entropy, do you?
  13. If Evangelicalism isn’t based solely on the Bible, its boast and claim to fame (and disagreements among Evangelicals pretty well proves that it’s not), what is left of Evangelicalism?
    • What good is it?
    • How, if you know that returning to historic Christianity is an option, dare you not investigate in depth?
  14. If you are a disenthralled Evangelical, who is still is drawn to Jesus, you really need to look into Orthodoxy.
    • You may say “Wow! This is it!”
    • Likelier, you’ll say “Wow! This is kinda beautiful, but really strange.”
    • If you say the latter, it’s only because you’ve been in historically strange worship for too long. (I believe that if some Christian were teleported from the first millenium to your Evangelical Church at 11 am Sunday, he would not know it was a Church. Nothing he expected from Church would be there.)
  15. If you’re still enthralled with Evangelicalism, God bless and have mercy on us both.

Suggestion: Put on your Sunday best, get out the Yellow Pages, and look for “Churches – Orthodox.” Do it today.

Forgive me for any offense I’ve given by my many snarky comments about Evangelicalism. I’m trying to find the magic words that will disenthrall a reader or two, so they can discover what I’ve discovered.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

An Evangelical feature, not a bug

[W]e find ourselves on utterly familiar ground with our LGBTQIA neighbors, and they with us, when we turn from matters of the body to matters of the heart. All of us know, in the depths of our heart, that we are queer. Our yearnings, especially those bound up with our sexuality, are hardly ever fully satisfied by the biblical model of one man and one woman yoked together for life. Every one of us is a member of the coalition of human beings who feel out of place in our bodies east of Eden. And every one of us has fallen far short of honoring God and other human beings with our bodies.

(Andy Crouch in Christianity Today)

I cannot endorse Christianity Today as a reliable source for anything – well, almost anything. I once read it assiduously and considered it serious stuff. I watched it become considerably dumbed-down, a process which notably included publishing a tragically naïve side-bar by me 40 or so years ago, which I have regretted whenever I’ve thought of it for several decades now.

But CT probably is a reliable barometer of “respectable” Evangelical opinion, and even a blind pig finds an acorn occasionally. Andy Crouch (H/T Robin Phillips on Facebook) perceives the gnosticism implied by LGBTetc Groin Pieties:

Christians will have to choose between two consistent positions. One, which we believe Christians who affirm gay and lesbian unions will ultimately have to embrace, is to say that embodied sexual differentiation is irrelevant—completely, thoroughly, totally irrelevant—to covenant faithfulness.

…

There is one other consistent position that Christians can hold, though we will hold it at great social cost, at least for the foreseeable future: that bodies matter. Indeed, that both male and female bodies are of ultimate value and dignity—not a small thing given the continuing denigration of women around the world.

Indeed, that matter matters. For behind the dismissal of bodies is ultimately a gnostic distaste for embodiment in general. To uphold a biblical ethic on marriage is to affirm the sweeping scriptural witness—hardly a matter of a few isolated “thou shalt not” verses—that male and female together image God, that the creation of humanity as male and female is “very good,” and that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18, NRSV).

Sexual differentiation (along with its crucial outcome of children, who have a biological connection to two parents but are not mirror images of either one) is not an accident of evolution or a barrier to fulfillment. It is in fact the way God is imaged, and the way fruitfulness, diversity, and abundance are sustained in the world.

Apart from some hand-wringing about “difficult pastoral challenge[s]” and “complex hermeneutical questions,” the article is an acorn, and I think I’ve heard other occasional good things about Andy Crouch. May he some day awaken, as have some of his bretheren, to the insight that gnosticism is an Evangelical feature, not a bug, and that he needs to get him up into a land that his Lord shall show him.

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.