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On April 23, 2016 By In Politics, Theology

Problems in public theology

The task of speaking for Christ in the public square – the kind of thing done here in the UK by our friends at Christian Concern and the Christian Institute – is an urgent and important one. Yet it is fraught with difficulties. Here are some of them.

1. The British evangelical and Reformed church has given only limited attention to the task of constructing a public theology. Many churches appear to view almost any kind of public engagement as a distraction from the gospel, a view that only serves to reveal an unbiblical and minimalist view of the gospel itself. Yet the fact remains that with a few exceptions British evangelical and Reformed churches are largely disengaged from public life, leaving the task to courageous para-church organisations like those mentioned above. One reason for this is that we have failed to articulate a clear theological rationale for such engagement. Consequently, until we recover something approaching a biblical view of eschatology, ecclesiology, and indeed of the gospel itself, this situation is unlikely to change.

My impression is that the situation is a little better in the US. Yet even so, I’m not sure there are many reasons for optimism. Just to take one slightly unnerving example, if a Christian-dominated political constituency is capable of bringing this man to the brink of the nomination for Republican presidential candidate, it clearly has some way to go before it can really be said to have worked out all the details of its public theology.

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On April 15, 2016 By In Culture, Politics, Theology, Worship

The doxological foundations of a Christian social order

Introduction

In recent years, various writers have given some thought to the shape of a distinctively Christian social order: What would the world look like if large numbers of people turned to Christ and sought to live out their faith in every sphere of life?

This is an important question for at least two reasons. The first is of particular concern to me, as a Minister in London England: this issue has been almost entirely neglected in contemporary British evangelicalism. While God has blessed us richly in the last century or so with a rediscovery of the priority of biblical preaching, personal faith, evangelism, church planting and so on, we have not given enough thought to the ways in which the gospel should impact the wider structures of society – the life of nations, our educational systems, the media, the law, politics, medicine, the arts, and so on. It’s about time that we did.

Second, these questions about the nature of a Christian social order are not merely peripheral or academic. In the contrary, the answers we give to them will profoundly shape the kinds of decisions we make in many different areas of our lives. They will help us decide how we should educate our children, what kind of political change we ought to work and pray for, how we should vote (and what to expect from even the best candidates if they win), what strategies we should employ as we engage in public life, what kinds of attitudes we ought to have towards our vocations, and a whole range of other questions.

Indeed, almost every major decision (and a good many minor ones) we make in our lives as individuals, families, and churches presupposes some kind of answer to this question, since at its heart it is about the shape of history (past, present and future), and our interpretation of the past and our expectations for the future will necessarily shape our decisions in the present. Life is eschatology.

A neglected question

There is one important issue, however, which has been rather neglected (so far) as we have sought to reformulate our vision of a distinctively Christian social order. The question concerns the role of the church in bringing about the change we seek for. At a superficial level, it appears that the church’s role is far from neglected. Everyone affirms that the church must pray; everyone affirms that it is through the church’s evangelism and witness that people are draw to faith in Christ and begin to display the transformed lives that lie at the heart of the social change we desire; everyone affirms that the church has a vital role as a place of teaching, fellowship, encouragement, and so on; and most importantly of all everyone affirms that it is in response to the church’s prayers that God acts graciously in the world to bring about the social change that we long for. At their best, these affirmations have been self-consciously corporate in focus – that is to say, “the church” has meant not just “That collection of individual Christians who worship at St Ethelwine’s and then head off to pray and evangelise and so on in the hope that that Spirit of God would draw other men and women to faith,” but rather, “That congregation at St Ethelwine’s in response to whose corporate prayer, evangelism and community life the Spirit of God is at work to change the world.”

But this answer, it seems to me, stops short of explicating the full extent of the church’s place in this aspect of the Spirit’s work. In particular, it fails to address explicitly the vital importance of the church’s worship on the Lord’s Day as the first step in God’s plan to renew and re-create the world.

The worst effects of this are seen when Lord’s Day worship is replaced (almost) entirely with evangelistic activities, on the well-intentioned but ultimately misguided assumption that this is the best use of our precious time together if we want to see our communities transformed by the gospel. Of course evangelism is vitally important, but worship is vitally important too, and the two activities are not to be seen as a trade-off, as though doing one would detract from the effectiveness of the other. On the contrary, both are necessary (at different times, in different contexts), and it is in response to both of them (and also, as it happens, in response to the renewal of our relationships within the corporate life of the church) that God works to change the unbelieving world around us.

So what exactly is this missing element? How exactly is the church’s worship related to the Spirit’s work to renew and transform the world? The answer could be put like this: It is as the church gathers in the presence of God, lifted up in the Spirit into the heavenly places in Christ Jesus to worship before the Father, that God is at work both to renew and reorder the relationships between the members of the church and to transform the unbelieving world outside the church by drawing people to faith in Christ and bringing about the broader social change we long for.

To put it most simply, everything begins with worship. A Christian social order has doxological foundations.

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On April 4, 2016 By In Books

How to read smarter: the 90-10 rule

A friend of mine linked to an article by Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review recently about how to read more and faster. At least a book a week, the article says. There a fair amount of useful stuff in there. But I think it’s missing something – partly because of the premise of the article, “How to read more“. It seems to me that this is missing the point.

Over the years, I’ve noticed what I now call The 90-10 Rule. It’s simple. Roughly speaking, around 10% of the books I pick up give me around 90% of the benefit of all the books I read. Most books are simply not very good, or they might be good for someone else but not particularly good for me (too hard, too simple, too technical, not about something I’m interested in, etc).If you stop to think about it, I bet the same is true for you, too.

The key issue with reading, therefore, is not to read more books. It’s to work out what those 10% of books are, and to spend your valuable time on them, and (with a few necessary exceptions) them alone.

This means that when you first get to a new book, one of the first tasks is to work out whether you’re even going to bother spending more than a few minutes with it. That’s where the tips in the HBR article are very useful. But the best thing to do with a book that doesn’t grab you is to stop reading it altogether and spend your time doing something more productive.

So, for example, in the last year, I’ve been blown away by Richard Hays, Reading Backwards; James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom; Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death; and a couple of others. The year before, the list included Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos and Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. A few years ago, it was Tom Weinandy, Does God Suffer; and a couple of years before that it was Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle. Alongside these, there are some old favourites that I go back to frequently, like Calvin’s Institutes and Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics.

I’ve read each of these several times, trying to soak them up, inhabit their world, take them on board, be really changed by them. And with each of them there has been a wonderful moment in the first few minutes of reading it when I’ve suddenly realised, I’ve got one! I’ve found one of the 10%!

I don’t think reading more books should really be the aim of the exercise. Reading more good books is the key – along with having the courage to put the bad ones down.

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On April 1, 2016 By In Culture, Wisdom

Social media and the death of human society

So much has been written about the impact of social media from a Christian perspective that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could contribute anything new. But my friend Arthur Kay, Minister at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Bolton, Lancashire, UK, made some remarkably profound and insightful comments in a recent email exchange with a few friends. Here, with his kind permission (thanks Arthur), are some reflections prompted by what he said, including some large chunks straight from his pen (of course, I’m to blame for anything that’s inaccurate, irritating or confusing):

People today have fewer and fewer reasons for getting together. Many of the things in the ancient world that reinforced tradition and kept people together geographically are gone. Travel is much easier; we no longer need to go to the local market to exchange goods; many cultural and social festivals are disappearing.

But even today the constraints by which cities have arisen in the past are being stripped away. Technology is enabling more and more personal isolation. For example, consider the impact of:

  • Instant remote communication
  • Remote diagnosis and even remote surgery
  • Online shopping and drone deliveries
  • Online multi-player games
  • Working from home
  • Virtual meetings
  • 3D printing
  • Superb all-round sound and vision reproduction over vast distances so that it is no longer worth the hassle of attending concerts and art-galleries

What all this means is that human selfishness is easier than ever to indulge. Human community does not arise “naturally”; it must be formed deliberately, and it takes a considerably effort to do so.

This prompts some interesting thoughts about what the local church community will look like in the future. Assuming that we don’t capitulate to the virtual church movement (Lord preserve us), perhaps God is bringing us to a point where pretty much ther only communities around are those gathered around the Lord’s Table. Though our cities may be larger than ever before, there may come a time when there might simply be very few actual localised, embodied communities left.

Perhaps God is handing us over to the consequences of our individualism, giving the world in an extreme form what we’ve been foolishly been seeking for many years, and daring the church to stand against the cultural tide. Churches that have the courage to do this may find that they suddenly become havens for large numbers of fragile, splintered people who have been stripped bare by the folly of (post-)modern, post-romantic individualism and are desperate for a community that will hold them together.

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On March 31, 2016 By In Politics

Peter Leithart on the Trinity

A couple of weeks ago at Emmanuel in London, we had the privilege of welcoming Revd. Dr. Peter Leithart to speak at both our annual Church Conference and our annual Ministerial Conference on the subject of the Trinity. The videos and audio recordings for both these conferences (Church Conference; Ministerial Conference) are now available, and I recommend them to you heartily.

The first of the Ministerial Conference lectures can be found below. For the other recordings please visit Emmanuel Evangelical Church.

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On March 8, 2016 By In Wisdom

No, you DON’T need to read those books

In a recent article, Matt Smethurst of the Gospel Coalition asked 20 church planters for their list of 3 books every church planter should read. It provides a very instructive insight into the character of the modern western evangelical church.

Looking at the combined list, I have to say I’m dismayed, though not as surprised as I might have been a few years ago.

There are over 60 books on the list (some of the contributors took the phrase “3 books” slightly loosely). A quick glance reveals that almost all of them were written in the last 15 years. Yes, seriously. Unbelievable, right? But true.

There are a few exceptions – a shout-out to Lloyd-Jones; a couple of texts from the 20th (Leon Morris, Ronald Allen) and 19th (Spurgeon, Charles Bridges) centuries. And you need to look carefully at the lists, because in one or two cases the dates given are the dates of reprints, not the dates of first publication. But once you’ve worked through this, you discover that just four of the works hail from earlier eras: Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, and Thomas Brooks.

While it’s encouraging to see this nod to the Puritans, there’s little cause for excitement about their overall contribution of around 7% to the total. What’s astonishing is that none of the books come even from the early Reformers, never mind the Medieval or Patristic eras. (more…)

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On February 11, 2016 By In Politics

The President said what?

As a Brit, I don’t understand a great deal about the subtleties of Political-Religious discourse in North America. However, one man with a clearer grasp of the issue than I is my friend Joe Boot of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and Christian Concern. He’s written an interesting response to President Barack Obama’s recent visit to a Mosque in Baltimore, which you can read online here.

I’m particularly struck by the following words, quoted by Joe from Sidney H. Griffith, which resonates strongly with my own experience of interacting with Muslims here in the UK:

“All of the Christian communities who lived within the world of Islam in the early Islamic period strove to cultivate good relations with Muslims at the same time that both in Arabic and in their own languages they clearly marked the difference between the two creeds.”

In other words, the best way to relate to people of other faiths is to welcome them warmly, while at the same time having a robust and clear-headed debate about the differences between us. This, it seems to me, is far more respectful and productive than to adopt the increasingly popular secular liberal pretence of blurring the very real differences between (for example) Christianity and Islam, since such fuzzy thinking simply serves to marginalise the substantive claims of both religions, subsuming them under a suffocating blanket of political correctness with which neither Muslims nor Christians agree, and thus subjecting both religions equally to the same high-handed contempt.

Naturally, I don’t think Islam is right, but neither do I think secular liberalism has much going for it. But while I have great respect for my Muslim friends (including a number of people who have been visiting Emmanuel both in recent weeks and also in the more distant past) who are willing to talk frankly about what they believe, I have very little time for the folly, ignorance or downright dishonesty of those who typically profess neither faith with any seriousness but try to pretend that Islam and Christianity are really just the same.

Different religions are, well, just different. And we need to learn peaceably, lovingly, and clear-headedly, to deal with it.

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On February 8, 2016 By In Politics

Cowards won’t debate

In recent years, the true character of the secular creed of Tolerance, Diversity and Free Speech has at last become clear.

As Stanley Fish saw years ago, and many others realized long before him, the aim of the movement is not to remove particular moral, political and religious values from the public square, leaving a Free Space devoid of substantive commitments where everyone can say live and let live. (Indeed, since substantive commitments of some kind are unavoidable, the very idea of this kind of Free Space is incoherent, and even those who thought that this is what they were seeking were in fact pursuing something else.)

Rather, the aim is to promote (and indeed where possible to impose) a very particular set of commitments, while at the same time treating those commitments as axiomatic – Things Upon Which All Decent People Agree. Anyone who for whatever reason takes exception to the paradigm must not be debated with; they must be silenced or excluded.

The most obvious example is the increasing prevalence of “No-Platforming” – the attempts by (for example) University student societies to exclude speakers from campus on the grounds that their views are (regarded by some people as) offensive.

As someone once said, the new religion of Tolerance, Diversity and Free Speech has two articles of faith: (1) All views are welcome; (2) If you don’t agree with me, shut up.

There’s a great deal that could be (and has been) said about this cultural shift. I want to make just one simple point:

This stance is cowardly. It reflects the conviction that these views are too weak to hold their own, and must therefore be protected from challenge in order to remain intact.

Thus, for example, a generation ago, university students had the courage to attend debates featuring speakers whose views they abhorred, in order to engaged them in argument. They did this because they were confident that their own convictions were strong enough to win the day. Marxists debated with capitalists, pro-abortionists debated with pro-lifers, atheists debated with Christians, and so on,  because they all had the moral courage and intellectual backbone to put their views in the ring with the opposition and (verbally, of course) slug it out.

There are still some today willing to engage in this sort of public debate. But those who believe that the only way to preserve their own values is to silence debate and shut down opposing views are not among them.

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On February 4, 2016 By In Wisdom

Should we always follow our conscience?

Yes, obviously.

“Conscience” is simply a way of referring to “What you think is the right thing to do.” So it’s certainly wrong to disobey your conscience. Equally, it’s wrong to ignore or silence or suppress your conscience. You ought to do what you think is right.

But if this is all we ever say about our conscience, we’re only telling half the story. To illustrate the problem, consider what happens to the Christian whose conscience tells him that it’s always wrong to drink alcohol, or that abortion is OK because every woman has the right to choose, or that (as someone once famously said) evangelism is unnecessary because when God is pleased to convert the heathen he’ll do so without your help or mine?

Clearly there is something wrong with the Christian’s conscience in these instances. And this highlights that we have a two-fold duty in relation to our conscience: not merely to follow it, but to educate it. It’s not good enough to say simply, “I’m following my conscience, so that’s fine,” because your conscience may be wrong.

If you’re not open the the possibility that you may have read the route incorrectly, you’ll walk off the edge of a cliff convinced that you’re heading in the right direction.

Psalm 25 says the same thing using the imagery of the “ways” and “paths” of the LORD. Clearly, we must walk in (what we think are) the ways of the LORD. But the Psalm doesn’t stop there. David prays that God would “Make me to know your ways, teach me your paths, lead me in your truth and teach me” (vv. 4-5; cf. vv. 8-9). David wants help not just in following God’s ways, but in knowing what those ways are. If your conscience is pointing in the wrong direction, following it will simply lead you into trouble.

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On February 2, 2016 By In Pro-Life

After-birth abortion and infanticide

Last Sunday’s sermon at Emmanuel Evangelical Church in London was on the subject of abortion. Since the release of the Planned Parenthood videos has made this something of a hot topic over in the US in recent months, I thought it might be helpful to mention a couple of things that arose during the sermon itself and in the subsequent discussion.

A couple of people expressed surprise (no, actually astonishment) at the article whose abstract I quoted during the sermon. The article from the 2012 Journal of Medical Ethics is available online, and is entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” In it, the authors Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva expressed the view that what they call “‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” Since the article is frankly almost unbelievable, perhaps it might be helpful to quote the abstract in full:

“Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

Perhaps predictably, Giubilini and Minerva faced a barrage of criticism for their views. Indeed, they even reportedly received death threats from pro-life activists, which are of course no more morally justifiable than the threat to human life posed by abortion itself. (more…)

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