Here from Where, and to What?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that our church is growing.  While there are certainly many reasons for this, one, in particular, is noteworthy.  In one of our sister denominations, there is a battle going on over the so-called “Side B Gay Christianity” movement.  There is growing support for the idea that a man or woman can self-identify as a “same-sex attracted, but celibate” Christian.  They even revel in the perceived “glories” of queer culture. Even ministers of the Gospel make this claim, and it currently threatens to tear the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) right down the middle! What this is doing is forcing many to look to the ARP as an historically moored, doctrinally conservative, and confessionally faithful denomination in which to worship, raise their children, and fellowship with God.

So how does a confessionally Reformed denomination end up in a place where a debate this can rage?  And should we be worried?  

George Crum once said, “The future will be the child of the past and present, even if a rebellious child.” To see this principle writ large over the face of a civilization, you need to look no further than the modern American evangelical church.  

To a great extent, this movement is creedless, independent, individualistic, and overconfident.  Too often, her leaders are little more than eloquent demagogues with scant formal seminary education, who nevertheless remain convinced that the Bible is their only authority for faith and practice, and whose chief skill seems to lie in their ability to gather a crowd and rile them up with spiritual enthusiasm.

How did we get here and from where?

The historical roots of this movement reach back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries (1776 -1830). These were heady days indeed in which many witnessed what the British historian, Paul Johnson calls the birth of the Modern Era. During this time the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions, the great age of “cheap land,” the development of steam power, well-built roads, the mass production of the piano, the works of composers like Beethoven, Wagner, and the child prodigies, Mendleson and Liszt, not to mention the literary works of Hugo, Tennyson, Brontë, and Dickens all came to be. In America, this was a time to move West, expand frontiers, and challenge the boundaries of traditional, aristocratic authority. 

On this side of the pond in the years following the American Revolution, the common man resented the rise of a new elite. “We fought for liberty, but despots took it, whose little finger is thicker than George’s loins; the cry of violence and wrong; O that George held the claim still! For, before the war, it was better with us than now!” Much like the truckers blocking the roads in Canada today, this spirit led to Shays’ Rebellion, a spontaneous uprising of poor farmers against the perceived tyranny of an elite eastern legislature. Similar, non-violent uprisings challenged the rule of educated experts in disciplines of law, medicine, and the clergy. Times were certainly a changin’.

The old guard in the Church, men like Timothy Dwight (Jonathan Edwards’ grandson) and Lyman Beecher underestimated the power of this sentiment and spoke condescendingly of a new breed of uneducated and unlettered preachers and circuit riders. Speaking to the Yale graduates of 1814, Beecher declared, “Illiterate men have never been the chosen instruments of God to build up His cause!” Really? Had he never heard of the twelve disciples?

Such circuit riders, however, made up for in sheer numbers what they lacked in learning and spread the gospel far and wide. These were rugged men indeed; one-third died within five years of starting out, and more than half of them failed to reach their thirtieth birthday! One of the more famous of this new breed of preacher was “Crazy” Lorenzo Dow. In 1804, for example, he preached somewhere between 500- 800 times and traveled ten thousand miles on horseback the following year. Dow was certainly a captivating performer and a remarkable storyteller. Cultivating the image of a modern-day John the Baptist, he was replete with very long hair, a weather-beaten face, flashing eyes, and a harsh voice with which he could reduce an audience to tears one moment and laughter the next.

These men railed against “Priest-craft” and the tyranny of lettered men. “What I insist upon, my brethren and sisters,” Dow asserted, “is this: larnin isn’t religion, and eddication (sic) don’t give a man the power of the Spirit. It is grace and gifts that furnish the real live coals from off the altar.” With such rhetoric, Dow and his ilk thundered a “No Creed but the Bible '' message and inspired the common man to think for himself.

Such preaching was certainly effective,  deceptively attractive and it felt authentic and fresh. Many souls confessed Christ, learned to follow the dictates of their own consciences, and new churches sprouted up all along the frontier. Nathan O’Hatch writes:

“Starting from scratch just prior to the Revolution, Methodism in America grew at a rate that terrified (the establishment). By 1820 Methodist membership numbered a quarter of a million; by 1830 it was twice that number. Baptist membership multiplied tenfold in the three decades after the Revolution.”

Without the creeds and established authorities to hold them in check, however, this new, creedless gospel produced an atomizing effect denominationally and theologically. O’Hatch goes on to say, “By the middle of the nineteenth century, Methodist and Baptist churches had splintered into a score of separate denominations, white and black” (The Democratization of American Christianity).

Armed with the Bible alone, many of these preachers abandoned orthodoxy altogether for the error of Universalism, that is, the belief that everyone is saved in the end, whatever they believe. For example, Elhanan Winchester in 1780, who determined to rid himself of the tyranny of denominational authority and think for himself. In doing so, however, he completely lost the gospel along the way. Listen to his testimony:

 “I shut myself up chiefly in my chamber, read the Scriptures, and prayed to God to lead me into truth, and not suffer me to embrace any error; and I think with an upright mind, I laid myself open to believe whatsoever the Lord had revealed. It would be too long to tell all the Teaching I had on this head; let it suffice, in short to say, that I became so well persuaded of the truth of Universal Restoration (Salvation), that I determined never to deny it.”

During this time, following precisely this kind of thinking, others like Joseph Smith completely abandoned any semblance of Christianity to form new religions altogether. 

Such start-afresh, creedless, think-for-yourself doctrinal originalism sounds bold, fresh, and enticing in the ears of neophytes, but it fundamentally denies the communal nature of the Christian faith which is passed down through the ages by men gone before; it underestimates the noetic effects of sin, that is, that our minds have been corrupted by Adam’s fall and not just our habits; and it overestimates an individual’s ability to invent by himself on his knees with an open mind and an open Bible what has taken two thousand years and countless men to discover and hammer out in the course of Church history. 

Ask yourself what doctor or engineer would start his career by throwing out all the scientific discoveries of those gone before? Who would countenance such chronological snobbery not to mention such personal arrogance? These well-meaning but wrongheaded men did and the effects are writ large across our culture today. While it is one thing to discover Christ and the simple gospel on your knees before God, it is quite another to discover the whole Christ and the whole gospel in all its constituent parts by the same method. Church history is replete with tales of fools who tried and churches that died by attempting such folly.

So here we are in our postmodern, selfie age full of people who trust their opinions more than their pastors, who trust their felt convictions more than the written creeds, who trust new experience before time-honored dogma, and who value liberty more than they do authority.  

Cast adrift amidst the flotsam and jetsam of such a spirit, where deeply held convictions and sincerely enjoyed experiences represent a viable source of truth, it is not hard to see where people start to think, “Well, I feel strong attraction to members of my same biological sex, or I feel I am a man trapped in a woman’s body, therefore these experiences must be from God, they must be valid, and I must honor them in o rder to be true to the person God made me.” 

To  hear this kind of thinking from neophytes drunk with the spirit of the age is not surprising, I suppose, but I have heard even heard Presbyterian Pastors, unsure as to precisely how to engage with this kind of thinking, saying things like, “I want to hear these men (and women’s) stories with the kind of humility that refuses to rush to judgment.” At first glance, this might sound very humble and Christ-like, but it is neither. 

By contrast, listen to the timeless wisdom of G.K. Chesterton engage with this kind of banality,

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions . . . What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that man does assert is exactly the part he ought not assert--himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”

 What the Church today needs, therefore, is a  prophetic voice that speaks with certainty based on true authority. You won’t find this in the empty, shallow echo-chamber of a rootless, selfie age. 

It takes more than a few minds and a few years to develop this kind of certainty; it takes a millennia of spirit-given wisdom. You won’t find it with an open bible, an open mind, an empty heart, and the memyselfandI.com website of postmodernity. 

No, this kind of wisdom only comes when you read the Scriptures with a humble heart, willing to listen to those gone before. Herein lies the value of true tradition–the kind of tradition that tells us not simply what our fathers did, but how our fathers read and understood the Scriptures. It was precisely this kind of wisdom Chesterton referenced when he said,

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead… Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

Brothers and sisters, it is to the old, well-worn paths that our Fathers in the faith trod that we must return, to the law and the testimony, and to the received interpretations through the ageless community of faith. If anyone does not speak according to these, it is because he has no light.

 Pray for me, Kyle, Chris, and your elders. May God keep us faithful, steadfast and true to the ancient paths of the old gospel. Here alone will we find the light and love of God. Here alone will we find the wisdom of God for salvation. Without it, the best we can be is lost--lost in the age-old darkness, without hope, without God, and without Christ.