I am beginning today with a pop quiz, a sort of self-inquiry. Here are six statements. Please ponder whether you agree with them or disagree:
1. A God exists who created and orders
the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice,
and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be
happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly
involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they
die.
6. All of these statements together
summarize Christian faith.
These statements come from work published by Dr. Christian Smith, who holds an endowed seat in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[1]
He says his
research shows that these statements accurately summarize Protestant religious
belief in America today, especially among church-going youth. The problem, he
says, is not that the first five statements are incorrect, even though they are.
The problem is the sixth statement, which is that the first five are a
sufficient summary of Christian faith. Professor Smith calls this belief
Moralistic-Therapeutic Deism. That’s more academic than I want to be this
morning, so I am calling it a term that is widely used today, Cultural Christianity.
Cultural Christianity is not itself a formal
religion, of course. However, when people say they are spiritual but not
religious, this is what they really mean, along with an awful lot of American church
goers. Cultural Christianity is not a belief in a personal God but in certain
principles. Its main tenets are:
·
that
moral living means being someone others like, fulfilling one’s personal goals
and being socially agreeable.
·
Of
main concern is feeling good, happy, secure, and at peace; getting along
amiably with other people and not giving offense.
·
Finally, Cultural Christianity's God is not much involved in our personal affairs—especially
affairs we don’t want God involved in. This God is one who seems quite
comfortable with the idea that we have personal or private affairs that are
none of his business, especially sex. So, God gets involved in our lives only
when we ask him to, which is usually when we have some trouble or problem that we
want resolved.
In his book,
Wild at Heart, Christian author John
Eldredge observes that North American Christianity, as we practice it, is doing
terrible things to our children. Most children reach their graduation day
thinking that God has put them on earth to be good boys and girls. They may
have some growing pains, some difficulties now and then, but if they listen
closely and go to Sunday School they may, just may, have a chance to become . .
. a nice person. We offer them no worthy battle to fight, no cause to sacrifice
for. And we wonder why when they grow into young adults they stay at home on
Sunday mornings.
But there is
good news. Professor Smith is careful to point out that Cultural Christianity is
not the universal religion among
teens or adults in American Protestantism. There are still significant numbers
who “embrace substantive religious beliefs and practices that effectively
repudiate … this revisionist faith. Some teens [and adults] do appear to be
truly very serious about their religious faith in ways that seem faithful to
the authoritative or orthodox claims of the faith traditions they profess.”
What is at
stake in understanding Cultural Christianity and its cousins? Why does it matter?
The first
problem is that it rejects the fullness of the character of God, Christ, and
the Holy Spirit and simply assumes that God is a personal genie who grants our
wishes. The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus are sideline events, if
even that. After all, Cultural Christianity assumes that all we must do is be nice
and after we die we’ll automatically go to heaven. Orthodox-minded folks see that
this is just another version of salvation by works, which is specifically and
energetically denounced in the New Testament. So at least what is at stake is
the eternal destiny of vast numbers of our friends, relations, acquaintances
and neighbors.
The second
problem is that Cultural Christianity has no basis for morality except vague
notions of being nice, not giving offense and finding happiness. Beyond that it
does not matter in some ultimate sense what we believe. After all, aren’t we
all trying to get to heaven in our own way? Hence it doesn’t really matter what
we do because God is not judging us. I recall when Christian singer Vicky Beeching
told an interviewer, “What Jesus taught was a radical message of welcome and
inclusion and love. I feel certain God loves me just the way I am…” [2]
Ultimately, this world view coarsens our common life together because absent both divine mandate and divine consequences, the question of right and wrong becomes simply who wins. A few years ago in Berkeley, California, police arrested a former college professor named Eric Clanton and charged him with assault with a deadly weapon for striking a man over the head with a large bicycle lock, all over political disagreement. Clanton said he was not guilty because, he said, morality is a “social construct.”
When there
is no sense that morality or justice are of divine origin and are hence only
human inventions – which is what “social construct” means – then getting and
keeping power takes on paramount importance. This fractures society into
classes or groups, each trying to take what the others have; it is the return
of tribalism in a fierce form. I submit to you that this process is well under
way in America now as even a cursory examination of our national politics will
confirm. We should not be surprised that this trend occurs when Gallup,
Rasmussen and other respected research organizations show that religious
devotion is declining.
Cultural Christianity is, then, bereft of hope or any basis for hope other than narcissistic
self-assurance, which is no hope at all. It is the foundation of nothing desirable
in either this life or the next. It is not Christian even though it uses
Christian terminology.
What verse or passage in
the New Testament do you think is the best summary of the heart of Christian
faith? I finally settled on Romans 5:8-11:
8 But God demonstrates his own love
for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since we
have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from
God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were
reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been
reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we
also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now
received reconciliation.
What is the
heart of the Christian proclamation? Paul begins with the divine character: “But
God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.” At the core of God's interaction with the world is love. I
do not mean, of course, the mushy emotion that we mortals weakly imagine love
to be, but God’s indomitable will and ability to preserve, protect, lead,
redeem, recover, and restore creation to its divine destiny and fulfillment.
What lengths
will God go to preserve us for eternity with him? Paul says, “Since we have now been justified
by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!”
Jesus put it
this way:
For God so loved the world that he
gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but
have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the
world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not
condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they
have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
Here are two
major points of departure between scriptural Christianity and pop-culture, Cultural Christianity:
·
First,
God isn’t just spending eternity thinking kindly, approving thoughts about us.
Indeed, God became human to take our sins upon himself, to shed his blood and
die so that we shall not perish but have eternal life with God.
·
Second:
being nice does not save us. Jesus didn’t go to the cross to encourage us to be
nice. In fact, there are times when being nice can be an offense against God. Jesus
died to save us from what he called condemnation.
Paul talks
of being “saved from God’s wrath through” Christ. That’s something else that
comfortable Christians and spiritual people have dismissed: the wrath of God. But
Jesus explained what God’s wrath is too, in John 3.19: “This is the judgment:
Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light…” There
are consequences for rejecting God and the Bible describes them in fearful
terms. The apostle James summarized the problem this way: “But one is tempted
by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has
conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives
birth to death.”
In doing so,
we may well perceive of God as our enemy, but God is never our enemy. One’s
enemy does not lay down his life for you! Yet God did, so that, as Paul says, “we
were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been
reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”
Christian
faith is not simply the affirmation of certain, easy-going principles. Christian
faith is not simply believing beliefs, nor is faith merely affirming the truth
of certain propositions. It is a conviction of the heart that in the life,
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we are justified before God and brought
into right relationship with God.
We are
called to lives of discipleship. Discipleship is not simply believing beliefs, or
simply doing no harm, nor in merely doing good, nor just in attending services
of worship. People “may labor many years” at such things, “and at the end have
no [Christian] religion at all.”[3]
Merely abstaining from evil does not make one good.
Discipleship
is loving God with all one’s heart, and with all one’s soul, and with all one’s
mind, and with all one’s strength, and loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Discipleship
is faith in action, not inactive faith.
Salvation is
not just what happens when we die, or what Christ institutes after he returns.
Salvation is also found in this age, in this life, in this world. For it is
here, with God’s help, that we can build the Kingdom of God in the way we live
together, in the way we multiply God’s love doing God’s work.
My friend and
former co-worker, Ken Miller, a wonderful devout Methodist in Virginia, put it
this way: “Work for a cause, not for applause. Live to express, not to impress.
Don’t try to make your presence noted, but to make your absence felt.”
"But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” And so we should live for God!
[1]
http://www.ptsem.edu/uploadedFiles/School_of_Christian_Vocation_and_Mission/Institute_for_Youth_Ministry/Princeton_Lectures/Smith-Moralistic.pdf
[2]
http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/august/worship-songwriter-vicky-beeching-comes-out-as-gay.html
[3]
John Wesley