Legalism with a Smiling Face

I need to point you all to Jared Wilson's The New Legalism. We Christians have gotten so used to routinely defining ourselves as anything but legalistic, that we have failed miserably to recognize the pervasive "soft legalism" (legalism with a smiling face) that we preach and hear preached from week to week. These are sermons that paint a picture of the kind of life/attitude/heart/marriage we should have, give numerous Biblical examples (one of which can even be Jesus, who was an exemplary fellow, don't you know), and then tell us that God is willing to help us achieve this model life/attitude/heart/marriage if we only ask.

We really need to examine ourselves honestly about this. Jared has analyzed the situation quite well:

What it does, in message format for instance, is spend the majority of its time giving us stuff to do to achieve something, and then tacks on at the end a brief message about choosing Christ's free gift of salvation. In my estimation, this is bass ackwards. A Gospel-driven message focuses on Christ's work, on God's work on our behalf, and then moves to an exhortation or application. In most sermons in evangelical churches, the focus breaks down to 90% Helpful Tips and 10% Jesus Did it For You (if that much). But I think the reverse should be the standard....

Even as the new legalism pays lip service to grace, as it plays up the need to do this, this, and this to achieve success or victory in your work/marriage/life, it sets up success and happiness as the goal of the Christian life. Those are not bad goals, but they are not specifically Christian goals. The problem with focusing on our work with the promise that it will produce results is that we end up working for results, rather than out of joy in Christ. And when results are slow (or nonexistent), it only breeds dissatisfaction, and ultimately, despair.

And why doesn't this kinder/gentler legalism (which, by the way, I hear in my church each and every week) actually fulfill its promises? "Because it doesn't address sin."

It does not take seriously the problem of sin and therefore it does not take seriously God's all-sufficient provision for that problem. Instead it suggests, inevitably, 3 steps, or 5 steps, or 7 steps, to achieving that for which you've always dreamed. Jared again:

[T]he new legalism, for all its talk of grace and love and tolerance and anti-condemnation, is just like the old legalism in that it tells us not to be satisfied with Jesus. Don't be satisfied with Jesus' work on your behalf, it suggests. That's not enough. Do more, be more, become more. Because the real goal is not satisfaction with Christ, but success in life.

As I said before, we really need to examine ourselves carefully about this. I find that people are so used to the self-improvement style and values, and so prone to accord it respect, that they don't recognize that it is categorically at odds with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Joy of all Our Joys

A friend of mine recently sent me a brief article by Francis Frangipane. Frangipane writes:

People give their lives to Jesus Christ for many reasons. Some need physical or emotional healing; others are in search of peace and forgiveness. Whatever our condition, God meets us in the valley of our need. Indeed, the Lord reveals Himself to man as heaven's answer for our needs. He is a "father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows." He even makes "a home for the lonely" and leads "out the prisoners into prosperity" (Ps. 68:5-6).

God uses our need to draw us to Christ. Yet, the consciousness of our need narrows our revelation of God, limiting His activity in our lives to the boundaries of our struggles. Thus, many Christians never awakened spiritually to the deeper call of God, which is to attain the likeness of Christ. We are forgiven, healed and blessed, but we experience a ceiling on our spiritual growth.

I'm not necessarily in accord with where Frangipane goes with all this in his article, but he does draw a fairly accurate portrait of many churches, in my opinion. We limit Christ to the "boundary of our struggles." And it seems to me that churches often encourage this limiting. It is, in essence, the default position of much preaching. I have addressed this issue often myself, under the label of the therapeutic gospel.

Frangipane said that "the consciousness of our need narrows our revelation of God." To that I would add, we don't even know what we really need. We think we need healing, or that we need a loved one to get right with God, or that we need to beat an addiction, or to forget a nightmarish past. But what we really need, above and beyond all that, is to know Christ, the height and depth and length and breadth of his love, and the power of his resurrection, and yes even the fellowship of his suffering.

And here's the thing. I don't truly understand any of this and I'm willing to bet you don't either. I don't understand my own need. I don't understand Christ. I have not been so "renewed in knowledge," as Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, that Christ is truly all in all to me.

If we are really to understand our own need, we will have to learn with a keener and more ruthless insight just what sin is and what sin has done to us. Sin leads to death, but there is an author of life who has conquered sin and death, and he did so at the cross. To even grasp one thin thread of this knowledge, like the woman who grasped the hem of Christ's garment, is not only to be healed, but to be saved.

Here's my point: the solution to the problem identified by Frangipane is the cross of Christ. Look upon that scene. Perhaps we cannot fully grasp the full worth of that which took place at Calvary that day, but we can see at least that it is awesome and majestic and world-shaking and paradigm-shifting and presumption-shattering beyond all human kin, and that it is, as John Piper says, the sweetest thing we've ever seen, "the light which is the joy of all our joys."

[Check out this brief clip of John Piper for a sense of what I'm talking about. HT: Jared Wilson.]

Beyond the need/fulfillment-of-need trajectory

People with many needs came to Jesus to have the needs taken care of, but that does not summarize the life of discipleship. The relationship of the disciples to Jesus seems not to have been primarily characterized by this need/fulfillment-of-need trajectory. If we ask the question, what lays beyond that trajectory, then we stand with Jesus and the disciples as disciples. That is, as students of Jesus, learning and following.

It's my opinion that church leaders are far more likely to build their congregations by molding the church experience in terms of the need/fulfillment-of-need trajectory. And, furthermore, that it is the inclination of people (perhaps I should say "of the flesh") to remain, if they can, in that relational trajectory. In church life that will look like this: I get a need fulfilled, praise God, testify to the congregation that God is the great need-fulfiller, and then join the rest in pressing in all the more to have still more needs fulfilled. When this happens, it is considered "doing church" successfully.

This model is reflected in our prayer-life as well. It is, I believe, entrenched. And I am not here to say that the church instead ought to completely ignore people's needs, or to suggest that God is not in the business of healing and providing for his children in all sorts of ways. But I am saying that this is not the extent of his call upon those whom He has chosen.

And we all know that. It's one of the tenets of our mental "statement of faith." And yet, on the ground, we have built a church that has trouble bringing people beyond the need-trajectory to the walk of discipleship.

I consider it a pressing problem in the church, and I have been reading the New Testament this year with a particular eye toward understanding what Jesus meant when he said, "Follow me." Embodied in that command, "Follow me," is a vast array of implications for the church, but these implications are played out in the hearts and lives of individual believers.

What I mean by that is, at some level this is a very personal matter. If, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, the call of Jesus Christ is always a call to come and die, well, that dying is not something the church can build a program around. At the literal end of the day, just before bed, can I say with complete honesty before my God, "It was not I who lived today, but it was Christ who lived in me, and the life that I lived today in the flesh I lived through him who loved me and gave himself for me."

The answer to that question, my answer anyway, is no. It was no yesterday, and I suppose it will be no today. When we come to this point, the call of Jesus begins not so much to comfort us with a promise of healing and health (or whatever), as to haunt us with a sense that we have not truly been his "followers" in the New Testament sense of that word. To put it another way: we have not loved Him with our whole heart, nor our neighbors as ourselves.

That feeling is not the end of the story, but perhaps not a bad place to begin. It's the place where Jesus began, after all, when he first sat down with his disciples to teach them how to be his followers. That's when he said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

On the Connection between the Therapeutic Gospel and Christless Christianity

David Powlinson wrote a brilliant article called The Therapeutic Gospel, in which he says this:

It’s structured to give people what they want, not to change what they want. It centers exclusively around the welfare of man and temporal happiness. It discards the glory of God in Christ. It forfeits the narrow, difficult road that brings deep human flourishing and eternal joy. This therapeutic gospel accepts and covers for human weaknesses, seeking to ameliorate the most obvious symptoms of distress. It makes people feel better. It takes human nature as a given, because human nature is too hard to change. It does not want the King of Heaven to come down. It does not attempt to change people into lovers of God, given the truth of who Jesus is, what he is like, what he does.

As I mentioned in yesterday's cranky post, this sort of preaching has a temporary impact. It does have an impact, and many people will be moved, relieved, even delighted by such preaching, but by next week the same people seem to bear the same burdens as before. This sort of preaching is at once attractive and ineffectual.

Therapeutic preaching forgoes all talk of sin, and addresses issues like worry, stress, depression, etc. But the real problem is not addressed, and so the real problem is not truly dealt with. The problem, that is, that is at the root of all worry, stress, depression, etc. It may seem to be suppressed momentarily, but it always comes back with a vengeance.

Sin. A nearly forgotten word in many churches, my own included. But in ignoring the problem of sin we ignore the very thing that God focused his unrelenting attention on from the time Adam and Eve fell. The sin-problem. And by ignoring sin, we ignore God's ultimate provision for sin, the real reason there is a church, a body of Christ, a people destined, despite their sin, to enter into the presence of God forever. In other words, we ignore Jesus.

Do you see how these things are related? Christless Christianity, to borrow a phrase used by Michael Horton, is the result. Perhaps it is not a problem in your church. Praise God! And yet I notice that it is a problem in many prominent Christian ministries, and it is a problem, to tell you the truth, in my own church (I say this in sorrow, not crankiness).

In fact, some of us think it is the great problem facing the church today. There is much at stake here, and a kind of movement is gathering steam among believers to identify this problem. There is a call for a return to the preaching of Christ--who he was, what he accomplished, and why it should matter to us today.

Yes, I'm repeating myself. I think I'll go on repeating myself. This is the crisis of our times, not simply a crisis for churches, but a crisis for the world. If Christ is not preached, sin is not addressed, and the calling to which is one of us as believers has been called ("go into all the world and make disciples...teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you") will have been trampled into the dust.

I'm going to finish this post with a quote from a blog I've just recently discovered, called RealityDisease.org. In a post called Salt, Not Sugar, blogger Ryan offers these words:

Call it what you want, but “sugary Christianity” is destroying the atonement right before our eyes. It certainly seems harmless; after all, we want to include people and make them feel good about themselves. But all we’re really doing is giving them a nice, comforting pat on the back before we watch them plummet into eternal damnation, doing nothing to prevent their fall. We neglect to tell people about God’s wrath and their utter hopelessness without Christ, yet we call this “seeker-sensitive” Christianity.

Now that's something to think about!

What if . . . ?

Over at Internet Monk:

If our great need is to be delivered from the wrath of God, then Jesus is our mediator. But what if our big problem is losing ten pounds? Finding a bigger house? Paying for college? Getting out of debt? What if the guilt that concerns us is the guilt of not having a pool like our neighbor? What if the center of our prayers is the moral life of our kids or our physical health? Do we actually need a crucified Jesus for any of these things?

Charismatic Moralism

It's Sunday morning, and so I'm thinking about church. And I've been thinking this morning that the appropriate phrase for much of the preaching I hear at my church would be "charismatic moralism."

[Aside: Hey, everybody likes to coin a phrase. Let's google this one and see what we get:

Your search - "charismatic moralism" - did not match any documents.

Oh, cool. I may be the first to use this phrase on the Web!]

So anyway, what am I referring to here? Well, the fundamental imperative of traditional moralism is this:

Be good.

Needless to say, there are endless elaborations on this riff, inside and outside the church. Moralism, I feel constrained to add, never solved a single problem, never freed a single prisoner, never quenched the thirst of a single thirsty man or woman. Moralism is a culture-wide curse.

But the fundamental imperative of "charismatic moralism" is this:

Be good . . . with the help of the Holy Spirit.

One might also call this moralism plus or perhaps moralism 2.0. The Holy Spirit is here treated as our key assistant in fulfilling the "be good" imperative. Instead of "you-can-do-it" we get "you-can-do-it-with-the-help-of-the-Holy-Spirit."

Well, I need to mention something: This is not the Gospel. The New Testament Gospel is never called "the Gospel of the Holy Spirit." No, it's the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And the purpose of the Holy Spirit is to direct our attention Christward.

How I long for a worldwide Gospel-focused Christ-glorifying church.

BTW: Michael Horton has written an essay called "Christless Christianity" for the latest edition of Modern Reformation. He puts his finger on the fundamental nature of the crisis of Christianity today.

Something's Missing

Much of what I do around here lately is try to justify my own gnawing dissatisfaction with things-as-they-are Christianity. Nevertheless, the last thing I want to be is yet another blogging Christian curmudgeon, nor am I posturing as a paragon of Christ-like virtue. But it does concern me that American Christianity has positioned itself in the American marketplace as nothing more than a very effective avenue to self-esteem. It seems to me--and many others--that something is missing from our preaching, from our singing, and most fundamentally from our thinking. Jared Wilson has a long post on this very subject, and it deserves attention. He quotes a well-known Christian leader (who shall remain nameless) at length, and adds some insights of his own, like this one:

As long as our churches -- religious, irreligious, and anti-religious -- keep preaching Jesus as one who makes your life better rather than Jesus who makes dead people live, as long as we keep teaching Christianity as the gospel of personal fulfillment rather than the call to self-crucifixion -- we are proclaiming Christianity as an unneeded cure for a mythical ailment.

The truth is not that we don't like ourselves enough, have enough success, get happy enough, etc. The truth is that we are sinners in need of resurrection. If no less a giant than Martin Luther could acknowledge this, what makes us stumble over admitting it for ourselves? I think it is because we are prone to believe the problem is everyone and everything else -- but not us. It is not safe or "nice" to talk about this stuff. Sin is a forbidden word in the American church. We don't want people to be uncomfortable or feel judged.

You should read the whole thing. You won't regret it.

Therapeutic vs. Theocentric Preaching

In my last post I suggested that therapeutic preaching was inadequate, and that advancing the knowledge of God--rather than simply comfort and encouragement--should be the fundamental purpose of preaching. Well, Darryl Dash has been investigating such matters with thoroughness and persistence lately. His blog is called "Theocentric Preaching," a phrase that really does capture well the kind of preaching I am advocating as an alternative to the therapeutic approach. Such preaching has as its primary purpose the growth in the knowledge of God. In this post Darryl quotes Tozer and Willard, who both say it as well as anyone can. Thanks to Milton Stanley for alerting me to Darryl's thoughtful blogging.

Therapeutic Preaching (2)

I've said before that I'm not exactly delighted with therapeutic preaching. But like-it-or-not it has come to be the standard template for evangelical preaching, or so it seems from my perspective.

You know the model, and the presuppositions that go along with it. The purpose of this sort of preaching is to comfort, encourage, and strengthen. It usually begins with a description of the "situation" of the typical listener (the members of the congregation). They are worried, emotionally scarred, beset by financial difficulties, fear of the future, relationship issues, etc. It is assumed that this description fits everyone, and therefore that everyone needs comfort and strengthening. At this point a suitably "therapeutic" Bible passage is read and exposited.

It can be a very powerful form of preaching, but by its very nature it tends to exclude much of the Bible, save only those passages that are obviously comforting. In the end, the message is that God is on your side, cares for you, and will protect you. And who can argue with that?

Well, I'm certainly not going to. But I might just argue that there's more--or there should be more--to preaching than comfort. For example, there's teaching. I would suggest that this might be a seen as one (though not the only) counter-model to the therapeutic approach.

Now, I haven't thought this through by any means, but I think the knowledge of God should be the primary purpose of preaching. Not that therapeutic preaching is absolutely void of this sort of thing, only that the impartation of knowledge is not its primary purpose. But note this: in the same way that we might grow in the knowledge and understanding of God while listening to a therapeutic sermon, we might well be comforted by a teaching sermon. I am not talking about strictly separate categories here. Potentially, there's a lot of overlap.

But in the wrong hands therapeutic preaching can seem like no more than "positive thinking" with a Christian veneer, throwing in a few justifying Bible verses for good measure. More importantly, it leads inevitably to a cherry-picking approach to Scripture, as the preacher selects the famously motivating-encouraging-comforting verses. Much of the Bible is simple set aside by this sort of preacher.

On the other hand, if the preacher sees his assignment as the impartation of a the knowledge of God--of who He is and what He has done--then no passage of the Bible can be excluded. He will tend to be more expository in his approach. He will tend to preach through Scripture, rather than dipping into it selectively.

Well, these are my thoughts on the matter just now. I welcome yours.

Therapeutism as Theology

We Christians always want to be helpful. Or, to be more precise, we want to show people how helpful God can be. I've been wondering lately about our needs-based approach to Scripture, to theology, and to God. I've been wondering about it, mind you. Not thinking it through. And now I find that novelist Lisa Samson has been thinking about it too. She's talking about the craft of writing Christian fiction, but in the course of doing so she says this:

For years we have been fed the notion that our spiritual life is about our own peace and fulfillment, our own "personal relationship" with God. Perhaps the most broken aspect of our theology, however, what may seize up our creativity and hinder us from deep spiritual insight, is the therapeutism touted as theology these days: that God only wants us to be wealthy, healthy and happy, that Christ died so we could be free from any pain and discomfort and if we're not, we're not being blessed or we don't have enough faith.

"Therapeutism touted as theology." I like that. I think she's onto something there!

[HT: Mark Bertrand]