Populism, the ethos among evangelicals, works most powerfully with negative emotions like resentment and suspicion. The populist appeal is for The People to rally because The Elites are out to get them. It's an appeal to wounded pride. But, to evoke positive emotions, populism leaves evangelicals with only one tool. Feelings such as gratitude, joy, and love aren't compatible with wounded pride, but can only grow in the soil of humility. Which is why the populist tool for evoking positive emotions is sentimentality.

Novelist John Gardner defined sentimentality as "the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause." Arousing sentiment is essential, he said of fiction. But when an emotion is "achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration" -- sentimentality -- it "rings false." (The Art of Fiction, New York: Vintage Books, 1991, p 115.)

I'll put the point bluntly. Evangelicals can't seem to arouse good feelings among themselves without artistic cheating.

We have, for instance, this:

Your daughter has gone beddy-bye, and she's snuggled head-to-head with Raggedy Ann. Hovering over her, almost patting her silken hair, is Jesus, looking like a kindly woodsman who happens to blow-dry his hair. And what is Jesus saying to your daughter? "I know the plans I have for you, etc., etc."

You, the viewer, are Daddy or Mommy peeking in to check on your precious baby girl, only to realize that Jesus is already there.

This picture is all "message," like any other piece of commercialized art. The emotion it seeks to arouse is good -- relief and joy at God's providential care for your children. But the picture does not provide "due cause" to achieve this emotion. It cheats. It goes for "Oh, how cute!" bypassing the more volatile "Oh, how defenseless!" Because the girl is safely upper-middle-class, nothing truly horrible hangs over her. And Jesus is reassuringly within the Anglo-Saxon gene pool.

There's no desperation in that picture.

As opposed to this:

The Miraculous Draught of Fishesby Jacopo Bassano (1545) arouses many emotions, but they need sorting. (The National Gallery displays the work here.) One fisherman kneels in a posture that mixes helplessness, gratitude, and loyalty. Another, his features contorted in amazement, has just hopped onto Jesus' boat. He has abandoned the three remaining fishermen, who have to struggle with the catch and their boat by themselves.

My feelings about Bassano's Jesus are complicated. He does not appear to my eye first because his robe is a cool blue, and he is not at the center of the action. Even when I notice him, I don't feel that he is open to me. His back is turned, and I only see his face in a severe profile. Emotionally, he is remote from the frenzy of activity among the fishermen, with his posture erect, his face serene, and his hand raised in blessing.

This painting doesn't tell me what to feel. But it provokes many sentiments, and the more I reflect on them, the more force they have. I find myself responding to a King.

This is not a populist painting: Jesus is not "one of The People." But he is in the ordinary. The painting's complexities give it power.

The populist cannot trade in complexity. He controls his audience's emotions with a false simplicity -- us against them. He can arouse the uglier sentiments easily with slogans. But how can he arouse redeeming sentiments like gratitude when he has driven out the humility that gratitude requires?

It's no wonder evangelical church life is so emotionally unsatisfying. With harangues against the godless, we sing our own virtues, and then with sentimentality we invite each other to rest in coffins of self-regard.

Populists are the virtuosi of ugly emotions. They always hit the right notes. So, in examining the evangelical version of the populist aesthetic, I started with resentment, the pedal tone that rumbles underneath us-and-them rhetoric. Now we examine the populist use of a related chord, suspicion.

The formula is well-known: the elite few have not only amassed money and power for themselves (which we resent), they're conspiring (we suspect) to use their unfair advantages to destroy our way of life.

Consider two quite different incidents of evangelical suspicion in response to films.

In 1989, evangelicals got wind of a Martin Scorsese film not yet finished, The Last Temptation of Christ. Lines from the screenplay and descriptions of scenes had leaked, and the way Christ was portrayed was shocking. So the grass-roots operations that had helped elect Ronald Reagan twice, and the elder George Bush once, swung into motion to protest the film.

The line I remember was, "Those people in Hollywood have gone too far this time!" The film confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Hollywood elites were out to discredit the faith. The massive protests marked a new phase of push-back in the culture wars. We were mad as heck, and we weren't going to take it anymore.

But it was the evangelicals who went too far. Their protests ensured blanket free-media publicity for the film's opening -- and accomplished little else.

Moral: Negative emotions get the masses moving, but not always in the right direction. In the case of Last Temptation, using people's suspicions to rally them for battle plugged the film, rather than sink it.

In 2004, Mel Gibson used evangelical church networks in an under-the-radar marketing campaign for his film, The Passion of the Christ. He gained the endorsements of prominent evangelical pastors, and held rough-cut screenings in large churches to invitation-only audiences. The campaign was a huge success.

I recall that the push to get on board with The Passion unleashed many evangelical sentiments. Some of the feelings were understandable -- a sense that the film was a significant evangelistic opportunity, for instance. But others led to profound misjudgments. Just to take one example, there was a sense that this was "our film," when it was really more from Roman Catholic traditions. Such distinctions seemed not to matter.

There was also a sense that Gibson had put himself at risk to produce "our film," both in terms of his finances and his career. I remember people talking about what "Hollywood" could "do to Mel" because he had made this film. "So we'd better get out there and support him, make the film a success." I heard this kind of thing from lay people as well as pastors. The Passion became a way "we" could hit back at "them."

Evangelicals heavily invested their credibility in Gibson. They defended him, in particular, against charges that the film was anti-Semitic. So when Gibson made anti-Semitic remarks during his DUI arrest on July 28, 2006, there was nowhere for evangelicals to run. How were we going to defend "our guy?"

Moral: Suspicion drives groups to choose their friends based on their enemies. Gibson's testimony of life-change sounded a lot better when he was overturning the chessboard in Hollywood than it did when he was railing against the Jews.

I'm not saying that Last Temptation was really a good film, while The Passion was really a bad one. I'm not saying that Scorsese was really sincere and well-motivated, while Gibson was really just a slick manipulator. I've never seen either film, nor have I looked into the hearts of the two men, who have both been held to account for their public words and deeds.

I am saying that evangelicals got very public black eyes in both cases because of their addiction to us-and-them populism. They picked both fights and friends on the basis of point-scoring opportunism.

I am also saying that evangelicals learned populism from politics, not from the Bible. The uses of suspicion for organizing the grass-roots, for fund-raising, and for Sunday morning fulminations, are many. If the goal is to keep people's view of their own team inflated, then populism works.

But if the goal is to soften souls -- which the Bible says our goal ought to be -- then the uses of suspicion are few.

Evangelicals are hard to understand without reference to populism (as we've discussed here). So let's delve into the populist aesthetic and see how it works. Consider the usefulness of ugly emotions. The quintessential populist speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan in 1896, at the Democratic convention that nominated him for president. The issue that year was the gold standard, which Bryan opposed because he said a limited money supply harmed farmers and laborers. His speech bristles with at least two kinds of resentment.

On the surface, Bryan expresses resentment of wealth. He turns to the pro-gold delegates in the convention hall and says, "When you come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course." Populism is often reduced to this formulation, that the rich are too rich. But Bryan is talking about something deeper.

He targets the issue of status, asserting a new definition of a "business man." Notice the socially explosive contrasts:

The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain . . . .

That's powerful stuff, not because it's about money, but because it's about status -- the relative worth of rural and urban people. The paragraph expresses people's resentment when their culture fades under the dominance of something alien. Here's another explosive moment from Bryan's speech:

You come and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

This rhetoric aims at the gut. It pits one way of life against another.

The populist aesthetic of resentment has not changed after 112 years of campaigning. Here is Governor Mike Huckabee, the evangelical former-candidate, in a speech at an Elks Lodge in Cedar Rapids, Iowa before the caucuses last January:

If you go to caucus Thursday night and give me an opportunity to come out of here winning this caucus, I am going to tell you, it will stun the political chattering class — all those folks out there in the Wall Street to Washington axis of power who love to predict what you are going to do, who have it all figured out, because after all, money is what makes politics. It is all about the money.

It's only "about the money" for Huckabee to the extent that money is a symbol of status. Notice his word choices, aimed at the guts of the Elks Lodge members. There is an "axis of power" -- power over you -- that runs from "Wall Street to Washington" -- not the locations but the class markers. The rich people in the axis "love to predict what you are going to do."

More from the same speech: "Well, I know I have been outspent in this state 20 to 1. I understand what that means. Just like some of you understand that your whole life you feel like you have been outspent 20 to 1 in about everything you have ever tried to do." See the heads nod vigorously. "That's right. Everything I have ever tried to do."

On Super Tuesday, after winning several southern states, Huckabee linked his constituency's anger at the party establishment to the obvious biblical images. As reported in the New York Times he said, “Tonight, we are making sure America understands that sometimes one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor.” He took a specific shot at Mitt Romney: “And we’ve also seen that the widow’s mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world.” Gold again.

On some other blog, they can argue about the economics of the middle class. I'm not saying that everything's financially rosy in the average household.

I am saying that evangelicals now use a political rhetoric that flatters "true believers" and creates whole classes of enemies they can blame for their woes. Wall Street wants to buy the Iowa caucuses. Washington bureaucrats are conspiring to destroy the family. Hollywood elites are imposing their values on The People.

I have two questions:

1. Does populism leave the evangelical soul softer or harder?

2. Does an agnostic bond trader on Wall Street know that there's a difference between crucifying Jesus on the cross of Calvary and crucifying farmers on a cross of gold? Will the farmers be able to help him distinguish the two?

By the way, in 1896 William McKinley won the presidency and Bryan lost.

Decades ago, evangelicals and their hard-bitten brethren, the fundamentalists, rode off the cultural cliff, and the flag that snapped in the wind all the way down bore the stripes of populism. We've discussed here and here how believers are afraid of interacting with American culture. Fundamentalists shun the larger culture because they fear the contamination of worldliness. The position of evangelicals is softer. They adopt the forms of the consumer culture, using TV and pop idioms freely, but only in a parallel media universe that mimics the secular originals.

Believers have many historical models for participating in contemporary culture while living out pure doctrine, ethics, and spirituality -- models like the Princeton theologians we sketched last week. But both evangelicals and fundamentalists have rejected these models. We no longer produce leaders with the cultural depth of a J. Gresham Machen. The exceptions, like Francis Schaeffer, are glaring.

I believe we have rejected our historical models because we now see them as elitist. To hold the attitudes that education and the life of the mind should be important values in the local church, that the arts should be a vibrant part of church life, or that genuine scholarship in the pulpit is the least a congregation should expect, is to incur many evangelicals' wrath.

Regular people don't see the point of such fancy talk. And if regular people don't see the point, then there is no point. (I'm not slamming "regular people" here. I'm articulating what I think has become an ethos. I happen to think "regular people" will provide ways forward for evangelicalism.)

This expectation that spiritual leaders will set everything according to the standards of "regular people" is new, and distinctly American. It results from the evangelical embrace of populism.

I use the term populism in a specific sense. I refer to the political and cultural aesthetic that traces at least as far back as Andrew Jackson. This aesthetic transcends parties and factions, and has expressed itself across the ideological spectrum. It has these basic characteristics:

1. Populism is agrarian, southern, and western.

Jackson was from Tennessee, and was far removed from the aristocracy of Virginia and Massachusetts. He cast the aristocratic John Quincy Adams out of the presidency, and the shindig after Jackson's first inauguration left the walls of the White House smeared with cheese. Other populist figures in American history have been William Jennings Bryan (born in Illinois, moved to Nebraska), and Huey Long (governor of, and later U.S. senator from, Louisiana.)

The fact that evangelicalism is strongest in rural, southern, and western regions is not coincidental. Evangelicals have deeply anti-urban attitudes.

2. Populism feeds on suspicion of corporate, academic, financial, and cultural "elites."

Jackson was bent on destroying the Bank of the United States. Bryan made his career opposing the gold standard. Among this year's presidential contenders, the most virulent populists were John Edwards, pitting the "two Americas" against each other, and Mike Huckabee, pitting evangelicals against Republican insiders. Populists hate power "in the hands of a few."

Evangelical fear of "cultural elites" needs no elaboration. Used as a money-raising appeal, its effect is primal.

3. Populism is animated by resentment.

One of the things that makes populists so compelling is that they feel the resentments of a particular class personally. Jackson seemed to draw life from anger. Bryan identified closely with the plight of agrarian people in an increasingly industrial society. George Wallace was not compelling because he was a racist, as people outside the south imagine, but because his hostility to northern liberals was completely sincere. (Gay Talese is enlightening on this point about Wallace in his memoir, A Writer's Life.)

I may be flirting with controversy here, but . . . evangelicals thrive on their own cultural resentments. The Hollywood elite. The scientific establishment. The Ivy League elites. Evangelicals both cherish and resent their status as outsiders.

4. Populism can evoke positive emotions only through sentimentality.

As rhetoricians, populists gain quick and questionable access to wells of loyalty through cheap symbolism. The flag. "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free." Jimmy Carter (not James E.) in his cardigan sweater, carrying his own luggage. Bill Clinton's suddenly thickening accent.

Evangelical sentimentality is egregious. The juxtaposition of the stars and stripes with the cross. The happy-clappy music. The weepy testimonies. The southern pronunciation of CHEE-zus. Our dependence on these tricks is an embarrassment.

Line up Machen against these characteristics and he fails on every count. He was from the northeast. He was an Ivy League elite. The notes he hit in his rhetoric were not resentment and sentimentality. He made his case with scholarship, and based his appeals on principled reasoning.

This is probably why the Princeton leaders lost influence among fundamentalists, as the voices against modernism became less theologically informed and more populist. Like William Jennings Bryan, who turned the Scopes trial into a media frenzy and lost the cultural contest to Clarence Darrow -- lost it big time.

Over the next several weeks, I'll examine such issues as how the populist aesthetic works, how specific evangelical leaders like Mike Huckabee use it, what populism does to local churches, and why populism will always fail. I will not argue for a return to elitism. Still less will I argue that we need "another Machen," or "another Princeton."

But I will argue that evangelicals are deluded about the flag they carried off the cultural cliff. Their flag did not proclaim, "Jesus Saves!" Their flag said, "Small Towns Forever!"

The fighting fundies have made doctrinal debates feel like torch-and-pitchfork meetings. Ever since the battles over liberal modernism in the early 20th century, we've worried that controversies over the inerrancy of scripture, or creation, or the 70th week of Daniel will end fatally for somebody. When did fundamentalists take on the menace of a mob?

Consider the thinkers whom fundamentalists no longer emulate, men like the theologians at Princeton Seminary.

John Witherspoon was the school's 18th century intellectual father, fusing biblical theology with the Common Sense philosophy of his native Scotland, and delivering this minority report on the Enlightenment to the American colonies. Witherspoon became a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and was known as a warm and genuine preacher.

His combination of intellectual and exegetical discipline, personal piety, and cultural interaction with Europe remained characteristic of the Princeton theologians all the way to the twentieth century.

From 1826-1828, for example, the young Princeton graduate Charles Hodge toured theological institutions in Germany, gaining a firsthand understanding of the trends that would create liberal modernism. He became Princeton's star scholar for a generation. Hodge's student B. B. Warfield also traveled in Europe after graduating from Princeton, before returning to dominate the next generation of biblical thinkers. In 1905, Warfield's student J. Gresham Machen did postgraduate work in universities at Marburg and Gottingen, and then came home to a career as the last of the Princeton conservatives.

The Princeton theologians are remembered for their precise scholarship, sharp polemics, and deep contributions to the Reformed doctrines of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Scripture. When they attacked liberalism, they knew what they were talking about at a cultural level, not just at the level of point and counterpoint. They had learned liberalism from the best liberals on the face of the earth -- taking in their nuances of style, sensing the scope of their knowledge, and being innoculated against their hauteur. Once the Princeton theologians gained these things, they had nothing to fear -- either from liberalism or from the culture that fostered it.

So a man like Machen participated fully in his culture, retaining the privileges of his Western inheritance. He saw science and reason as part of this legacy, and he viewed himself as a steward of it. He did not live a cramped existence on the margins of Western society.

But he saw such narrowness gripping American culture (Education, Christianity, and the State, The Trinity Foundation, 1987, p 9):

The depreciation of the intellect, with the exaltation in the place of it of the feelings or of the will, is, we think, a basic fact in modern life, which is rapidly leading to a condition in which men neither know anything nor care anything about the doctrinal content of the Christian religion, and in which there is in general a lamentable intellectual decline.

I can't help but notice how well this statement from 1925 describes the atmosphere of the megachurch. Even to ask whether most believers heard anything from the pulpit that reflected scholarly discipline last Sunday is laughable. Megachurches either fondle the Precious Moments figurine they've made of Jesus, sentimentalizing the Christian experience, or they praise a rock hero Jesus, whose masculinity seems all about his three-day growth.

Evangelicals today have to live in a cultural wasteland.

As for those who became fundamentalists in Machen's day, they rejected what he was culturally in defense of what he argued doctrinally. Their rejection was conscious and explicit. The fundamentalists came to believe that if a man studied for a year in, say, Marburg and Gottingen, he would become a liberal. In their eyes, the less educated a man was, the more likely he would defend the atonement. But the more he cared about history and fine distinctions and travel to foreign parts, the more he would certainly favor the documentary hypothesis.

The fundamentalists didn't reject Machen himself, of course. They wouldn't have dreamed of it. But they've rejected men just like him ever since.

I'll be blunt.

I don't rate fundamentalists highly. If you stoke fiery convictions in a group that has no culture to tame its passions, no literacy broader than its fixations, and no experience of peaceable disagreement, what you get is a mob.

And I'm not real high on evangelicalism in general. If you take that same group in its poverty of culture, illiteracy, and narrow experience, and you douse its fiery convictions -- turn them into megachurch mush -- what you get is a mob shopping.

But I'm convinced of three things. First, the average believer is smart -- smarter than her megachurch. Second, when leaders call believers to discipline in their understanding and use of the Bible, believers respond. In this regard, sloganeering won't make the grade as leadership; but stimulating teaching will.

Third, believers will be able to assert classic orthodoxy without bigotry. The average person in a megachurch today puts up with the shallowness in order to participate in the energy. But he is more culturally sophisticated than megachurches make him appear. And if he is shown models for cultural interaction from the days before fundamentalism became a cuss word, models like the Princeton theologians among many, many others, he will know what to do with them.

The biggest problem we have is the character of evangelical leaders. We have yet to point to the true criminal in the story of fundamentalists and evangelicals -- the American populist. More about him next week.

At 82, the man who contributed more than anyone else except Ronald Reagan to the defeat of communism is gone. William F. Buckley, Jr. was found at his desk today, in all likelihood doing the same task to which he had devoted his life, crafting prose. You can sample his dialectical style in a compilation of Charlie Rose interviews here. The hour-long show features Buckley's wit, his caprice, his gift for friendship. There are some good features in the New York Times obituary, especially the audio backstory by biographer Sam Tanenhaus.

Buckley was that rare man whose example became deeper over time.

When I first started watching Firing Line in high school, it was his defiance of prevailing standards that captured me. I felt empowered to realize that the grey world of leftism could be dismissed, and that individuality was not dead.

But the longer I watched Firing Line, the more dependent I became. Buckley brought me not only deep discussions of politics, but of art, music, theology, novels, and foreign cultures. Buckley was more than a combative conservative; he was a partisan for the enjoyment of life.

In particular, Buckley's interview with Malcolm Muggeridge from the late 1970s showed me that Christianity was bigger than sentimentality. My grandpa first introduced me to it, and I watched it repeatedly, wearing out the videotape and practically memorizing the conversation.

Firing Line was a breath of air for a teenager in the intellectually suffocating culture of evangelicalism.

But the fall of the Soviet Union raised Buckley's significance -- and elevated his example for me. At the start of Buckley's career in the early 1950s, anti-communism was intellectually dead. It was tainted with isolationists, conspiracy theorists, and anti-semites. Buckley, then in his twenties, commandeered the talents of older men -- most prominently James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers -- who had been fellow-traveling Stalinists, and who had turned against communism. Buckley led these writers to articulate a new critique of socialism.

That was a feat of leadership that gets very little attention -- a feat of coalition-building.

Even further, Buckley rose above the fierce polemicism that characterizes political debate and formed deep friendships with many of his antagonists, like John Kenneth Galbraith. He knew how to have fun in the midst of a fight.

Buckley's example continues to inform me in my pastoral work.

The demise of evangelicalism, for me, is a disaster. I find evangelical populism  a completely inadequate mode for communicating the truths of God's word. I find the cultural degradation of churches into malls shocking. The disconnection of one generation from another is especially disturbing.

I often ask myself if we can come back from this dilapidated condition. Buckley's rich example tells me we can.

The old pastors like Joe Wiens, who fought modernist liberalism from a rural church in Montana, were either retiring or dying by the time I came into ministry. But I got a sense of who they were and what they experienced. Decades ago, Joe discovered that his denomination was sending missionaries around the world who didn't believe in the inerrancy of scripture, in the deity of Christ, or that Christ's death literally paid for sin. Joe was the mildest man you could meet, full of prayer and charity. But these discoveries were the beginning of the end.

He led his church out of the denomination.

This was not just an isolated misunderstanding. It was an experience repeated across the country, especially from the 1920s through the 1940s. Such conflicts may have been more decisive in casting the fundamentalist mindset than the rise of Darwinism. The average Christian witnessed a betrayal of his core principals not by unbelievers, but by hierarchies of the churches. Many took the lesson that interaction with the larger culture -- with its entertainment, education, and practices -- was a sure way to be unfaithful to the Bible.

The problem of how to influence the world without being poisoned by worldliness is one that evangelicals have not solved.

Fundamentalists have taught that believers must disavow not only outright sins, but also practices that lead to sin. Just this evening, I read a sermon outline from the pastor of a thriving suburban church in which he said that dancing, alcohol consumption, and movies were "slippery slopes," and called for "complete abstinence." Last week, Dale Fincher wrote about an incident at Cedarville that illustrates this mindset here. The university canceled an appearance by Shane Claiborne because Claiborne was seen as Emergent. Let one of their kind in, and what's next?

Fincher wrote that "anyone who is trying to live the good news of Jesus that has a different texture to mission than Christian fundamentalism will be suspect. There's little way around it. If you don't use the typical accepted vocabulary, then expect suspicion. I've been at the brunt of it myself with no good Biblical reason, but that I just don't fit the sub-culture."

In trying to preserve an alternative culture to mainstream America, fundamentalism kept out worldliness of a kind, but only by chaining itself to authoritarianism.

Broader evangelicals take a different view of interacting with the world. They have said that the only things wrong with non-Christian songs, movies, and educational institutions were the messages. We could use pop music and movies if we filled them with godly themes. So evangelicals have created an alternative universe of media, schools, and organizations devoted to copying the styles of secular offerings while delivering safe content.

I believe the effect on evangelical churches has been deadly. In the mimicry of secular pop culture, all the worst characteristics of American consumerism have been injected into the veins of corporate worship -- the passivity of the audience, the relentless me-focus, the suffocating sentimentality. And the mimicry has deprived evangelicals of the best aspects of pop culture: the creativity that takes art from the street and a shows it to a broader audience. Mimicry simply does not inspire.

When I say this result is deadly, I'm choosing my word carefully.

Evangelicalism does not present itself as a counterculture. It offers no contrast to the ways of vanilla suburbia, but insists that the blessings of Christ can be enjoyed without any sacrifices. Emergents are absolutely right in criticizing these aspects of evangelical culture, and in searching for deeper bonds. (See Len at NextReformation on a move toward missional orders here.) We are seeing the beginnings of a flight from the corpse of Christianity at the mall.

Both the fundamentalist and evangelical approaches seem to have had the same result. Believers have been taught only to shun the outside world, not to interact with it wisely.

For fundies, the shunning is literal. Evangelicals, for their part, try to shun with a smile, offering substitutes that taste just like the real thing. But a young believer stepping onto a college campus for the first time still has no idea how to present herself, still does not know how to articulate where she comes from, still cannot take what she has inherited and build a life in hostile territory. She knows that her cultural upbringing is simply not adequate.

We have to interact with the world without being poisoned by worldliness. This problem will not go away. So what can we do?

There are emergents who display biblical Christianity among people hostile to the gospel. They study and pray deeply, and they have found ways to communicate truth openly. These emergents don't need lectures on staying committed to God's word; they're living it.

There are conservative evangelicals -- even fundamentalists -- who also display biblical Christianity among people hostile to the gospel. They know how to interact with homosexuals, environmentalists, new agers of all stripes. They don't need lectures about openness; they're living it.

These two groups don't seem to agree right now. But if the majorities in the two groups can view each other outside the lenses of past antagonisms, they will start to talk. Their disagreements will become more specific, and their fellowship more broad.

Joe Wiens was no fighting fundy. He supported Billy Graham crusades from the early days when Billy would stop on the highway and pray with the local pastors -- pastors from many traditions. Joe knew how to interact with and learn from other Christians. He died a man of peace, not a man of bitterness.

By losing the fear of interacting with each other, even in disagreement, we may learn how to show wisdom to the world.

Here are two blogs that offer help for those trying to understand current evangelical divisions, and another blog that offers . . . well . . . Let's accentuate the positive.

Kingdomgrace takes up the question What is ministry? here, here, and here. Her gift is for spotting the right question, inviting comment, and summarizing the results. In this case, she sees that many evangelicals view the concept of ministry differently -- some as a profession, others as a way of life. She lays the differences on the table and lets people talk about them. When she infuses controversy into the discussion, she restores focus instead of inciting reaction. She is, in other words, a leader who helps a group get smarter.

I believe Spirit-led people will follow leaders like her.

Jollyblogger also offers help, commenting on the merchandising of Jesus here and here. Jollyblogger is onto the fact that marketing has worn out its welcome with the young. I think the division between generations of evangelicals is partly a result of older generations' love for the extravaganzas and bombast of the TV aesthetic. The young aren't buying.

The divisions are treated in a measured way at Jollyblogger, and he concludes that "the critics of the franchise church are spot on - this is an argument against the commodification of the faith and an argument to engage people as people, not prospects and to engage them as human beings, not as a part of an assembly line process."

Again, I think Jollyblogger is the type of leader Spirit-led people will heed.

The clashes of perspective shown in these posts help us understand why evangelicals are splintering. Many no longer hold common definitions of such basic concepts as kingdom work, compromise with the world, and evangelism. What is considered credible among some evangelicals, like marketing, is considered pathetic among others. The disagreements are often grave.

Which is why following these discussions can put a knot in your gut. Can we rebuild an evangelical consensus on these issues? If we're unclear on such basic matters, how can we form vibrant communities?

And then you read Josh Brown here.

Or rather, you read him if you can stomach his replacement of argumentation with scatology. Brown wants to deal with misconceptions about emergents, and deal with them he does. With flamethrowers. Brown not only blasts critics of emergents, but insults anyone who dares even pose questions in the comments.

The Lord has blessed evangelicals with an emergent conversation that is larger than Brown's rhetoric. If he really did speak for emergents, the prospects for rebuilding an evangelical consensus would be nil. But, while I wonder whether he speaks for Emergent Village, I can't believe emergents will listen too long to his rantings.

I believe evangelicals can become members of one another in Christ again -- in a way that is not merely notional but practical. I believe they not only can, but they will. The leaders are out there.

This joining will not take place, however, as a result of blogs, books, or conferences. It will not be organized by yet another national movement. It will grow as individual Christians commit to each other in local churches -- churches they recognize to be faulty. Their joining will come at the price of their complaints. Eventually, they will tire of nursing their wounds. They'll ignore the abstractions of zealots and seek strength from emotions other than anger. They will establish bonds with those communities that teach the Bible, and strive to live in the power of the risen Christ.

They will do this because they have the Holy Spirit, who sovereignly nourishes the body of Christ (Ephesians 4.1-6). The splintering of evangelicalism may be noisy, but it will prove temporary.

The faces I see each Sunday morning are often rigid from the week's tension, frozen against our society's assaults -- inhuman rudeness, aggression, and indifference. In their tension, these people yearn for a renewed emotional life. Their yearning is broadly shared. Quadrivium offers excellent comments (here) on the self-destructive behavior of celebrities. All the pampering money can buy does nothing to renew them. At the other end of the spectrum, Quadrivium notes that in one region of south Wales, thirteen young people have committed suicide over the past year.

When we see this kind of despair, we're tempted to extol the joys of life in Christ, the pure pleasures of the Spirit. But such generalizations won't help me minister to Sunday's faces.

Christian joy is not otherworldly. It is practical, a matter of investing time and focus.

Tim Challies gives a glimpse of one kind of investment here. He interviews Makoto Fujimura, a New York-based artist, about how his artwork is an extension of his faith in Christ. At one point, Fujimura refers to an international group he has formed and says, "We believe that God desires to re-humanize the world via the arts and creative expression, and we want to create a home for folks wrestling with deep issues of art, faith and humanity."

That got some comments.

One participant questioned the idea "that God desires to re-humanize the world via the arts." Is it biblical? We evangelicals are suspicious of creativity. So when we hear the phrase "re-humanize the world via the arts" we tend to smell liberalism. I wonder why. No one cares more about re-humanizing the world than the God of the Bible. He provided creativity as a tool for our emotional refreshment.

If evangelicals pushed the drab and stale things out of this world through the arts, they would be more potent evangelists. Fujimura's paintings took my breath away.

God has given us another tool for refreshment -- the Bible itself. His word was not inspired only to instruct our minds, or to command our wills. It was also inspired to change the way we feel. I say this because God chose to reveal his truth through high literary art. Take the Psalms.

Dale Fincher brings us a quote from Kathleen Norris here. She writes,

The value of this great songbook of the Bible lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them, praise is meaningless.

Norris is right. We cannot express the greatness of God without reflecting on the depth of our sins, needs, and losses. That is why the most troubling moments in the Psalms can be the most edifying.

The emotional impact of the Psalms comes from several artistic devices.

The Psalms use structure to satisfy our emotions with balance and completion. On a broad scale, for instance, Psalm 103 both begins and ends with the words, "Bless the Lord, O my soul!" The words are bookends for the poem. On a small scale, Psalm 103 exhibits the classic parallel lines of Hebrew poetry: "He will not always strive with us, nor will he keep his anger forever." The second line is a reflective pool under the first.

The Psalms also use imagery to lift truth into liveliness. Psalm 103 says that in the Lord "your youth is renewed like the eagle." It pictures the greatness of God's love: "as high as the heavens are above the earth." It gives the power of God's forgiveness a spatial measurement: "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us."

And much of the Psalms' imagery expresses pain. Psalm 103 says that God "is mindful that we are but dust."

Still another way the Psalms affect our emotions is through allusions -- references to other parts of scripture. For example, Psalm 103.8 is a partial quotation of Exodus 34.6. "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness." The psalm summons the scene of God forgiving Israel for its idolatry with the golden calf.

We can gain this emotional power if we invest time and focus in God's word. The Bible is not only a source of truth, but a source of beauty. If we really believe the doctrine of inspiration, then we realize that God inspired the Bible's genres, forms, and images to impress his character on our feelings.

What people need on Sundays is to have their rigid emotional lives softened by the beauty -- the sometimes dark beauty -- of God's word.

I am dismayed to meet so many people who have felt abused by their church leaders. I regularly hear stories of pastors who lie, steal, manipulate, and commit sexual immorality, and the stream is too steady for me to dismiss the stories as slanders from a disgruntled few. Why is this kind of abuse so common?

The emergent conversation is tackling this question, but not, I think, from the right point of view. A leitmotif among emergents is the pompous preacher, the angry know-it-all who uses the Bible to control people. By heavy implication, those who practice biblical exposition are guilty of being Pharisaical and power-hungry.

This man, many seem to be saying, is the problem. The preacher has too strong a tendency to abuse people. He needs to be cut down to size.

To a large extent, I agree. But how do we shrink him?

I believe that the only way a pastor can avoid abusing his people is to submit himself to the authority of scripture. The reason abuse is so common in churches is not that biblical exposition is too prominent, but that the Bible has been systematically ignored in churches -- honored on leaders' lips but not in their hearts.

I try to implement several principles to constrain my heart as a leader.

• Let the text pick the topics. I often assume that I know "what my people need," but I really don't know. It's all too easy for my favorite practical issue, or my favorite doctrinal focus, to become "what my people need." To undermine my assumptions, I try to work in a strict exegetical fashion -- deriving topics from passages, not seeking passages for topics. For instance, if I pick the topic, "Jesus Provides For Our Needs," I might use the feeding of the 5,000 from Mark 6.33-44. But what would the topic be if I let Mark choose?
• Preach texts, not points. Too much of what passes for application today is actually generalization. For instance, the preacher goes from the feeding of the 5,000 to the sweeping principle, "Jesus provides." He then has to "illustrate" the principle, using "real life examples," because he's stated it too broadly. But the miracle is already a real life example. Mark was specific: the disciples were hardening in unbelief, and Jesus repeatedly confronted them (Mark 6.51-52). Preach Mark's text, and listeners will appreciate how Jesus teaches us to depend on him.
• Reason together. If I'm going to declare that Jesus teaches us to depend on him, I have to show not just that my declaration is consistent with Mark 6, but that the teaching is Mark's burden -- that it is Mark's point. Showing that crucial fact requires reasoning. It requires some analysis. It requires time. The tricks of salesmanship are simply not up to the task.

Sticking to these principles helps drain my preaching of willfulness. The principles bend me back into submission to the scriptures.

It is not a surprise that abusive leadership has followed the decline of biblical exposition. If leaders set the agenda for their churches, if leaders allow themselves the privilege of sloganeering rather than reasoning, if leaders feel they can lard their sermons with stories and call it being practical, then the leaders have freed themselves from accountability to God's word. Tyranny will follow.

The core of abusive authority is lawlessness in the leader's soul.

The emergent conversation often returns to the theme of churches' abuse of souls. In a post earlier this week, Len at NextReformation gave me another angle on soul-abuse, namely that the damage can come not only from aggression but also from neglect. Soul-abuse is repeatedly injuring a person's heart-and-mind -- doing so without seeking forgiveness or showing repentance, and while substituting slogans for integrity. Betrayal, guilt manipulation, and over-reach of spiritual authority are common types of soul-abuse.

The phrase is my expression for what many people feel they've experienced in churches. I think the phrase is problematic. Soul-abuse seems to want membership in the victimization lexicon, and that's a major turn-off for me. Individuals are responsible for their souls, including their reactions to injury. But, unfortunate connotations aside, I think the phrase is accurate. Many churches are injuring people's souls, injuring them repeatedly, and are not doing anything to repent.

Anger at the aggressive forms of this abuse abounds. A substantial proportion of American believers have had enough of churches run as businesses, of scandalous pastoral behavior, and of manipulative fundraising. Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna seems to tap into this anger, and has been much debated around the web over the last fortnight. (A hilariously negative review here; a judiciously positive review here.) My novel Fallen was written to dramatize crimes that have become all too common.

But soul-abuse by negligence is harder to pin down. Which brings us back to Len at NextReformation.

He comments that "we don't 'do fathering' very well." Len quotes Paul Fromont about churches' lack of parenting skills. "They’re not all that good at nourishing, accompanying, encouraging, and resourcing growth and increasing levels of Christian maturity." Len suggests that "the system [of churches] became rational more than relational and involved authority in offices rather than connecting it to wisdom."

I think Len is right. Many churches have become malls rather than gatherings, and the work of discipleship has tended to be done in classrooms. The results I have seen are dismal: busy people yearning to know who they are, unable to find a sense of kinship.

Churches used to operate in strong organic systems -- families, schools, volunteer associations, neighborhoods, charities, government. Local cultures in America used to be vibrant -- if far from perfect -- which meant that the impact of fathering was felt everywhere. A child not only had parents, but vigilant neighbors and teachers who reinforced shared values. The role of churches was to focus the spiritual priorities of people who already knew their own identities.

But in most of the nation now, localities are cultural wastelands of anonymity.

Churches, in my view, have done worse than ignore relationships. They have ignored fathering relationships -- the authoritative bonds that pass on ways of life and provide continuity from one generation to the next. Every church needs a core of strong, loving men -- every church. But few have such a core. We can't teach the Christian life in a class. Information is only helpful in the context of strong fathers who model application.

If this is true, then the most serious soul-abuse has been that of neglect. Churches have not built godly men, and as a result most new believers have not had models. Churches have injured people's hearts-and-minds by a failure to nurture.

This is certainly a criticism of the "religious activity" model of discipleship favored by traditional churches. But I don't see emergents making any progress on this issue either. Listening to the hurting is good and right. So is a missional approach to church structure and organization. Spiritual formation is a needed emphasis.

But, ultimately, loving fathers confront and do not yield. Is there an emergent model for this?

Eight women in Florida have given sworn depositions charging that a megachurch pastor coerced them into sex. The pastor, Earl Paulk, is being charged with perjury because he told investigators that he'd only had sex with one. (Local coverage here.) So here we are again, back in the zone of abusive spiritual authority. When a pastor's personal agenda is blatantly sinful, as Paulk's allegedly was, believers are devastated. But they also feel manipulated when the agenda is mixed -- when in the midst of pursuing godly goals a pastor doesn't seem to notice his own vanity.

There is almost a sense now that any exercise of authority is abusive, and many believers question the legitimacy of pastoral leadership. The issue was featured in a couple of blogs this past week (unrelated to the Paulk story).

Robbymac offered a rich portrayal of servant leadership and its implications in a tale of two men in dialog about spiritual authority in a pub. The gruff barkeep becomes their model. Says one, "I’d like to suggest that real 'apostles' don't need to trumpet their status or try to get people to agree to be 'under' their authority. They just serve and people recognize their authority based on character and not on their need to have people 'submit' to them." Robbymac's post gave me good ideas to feast on, and it was so evocative that I could almost smell the hops.

Kingdomgrace sparked some lively exchanges about pastoral authority with her usual clarity of expression. Reviewing a chapter in Pagan Christianity (Viola and Barna) about the history of the clerical tradition, Grace surveys the dubious mixture of contemporary ideas of pastoring with the ancient priesthood. She writes,

I don’t believe that one person should be responsible for the equipping of the body, but rather that you will find those equipping gifts among the body. The same is true with discipling, teaching, and mentoring. None of these things should be taken on solely by the leader.

Even if this is clear in your heart as the leader, as long as there is a full-time pastor, it will be an uphill battle to prevent passivity among the congregation regarding who is responsible for ministry.

An uphill battle indeed. In fighting the consumer mentality, a pastor will always face the question, "Why are you trying to get me to do your work?"

The intensity of the comments in response to Grace's post shows how dire the collapse of spiritual authority has become. Participants were not so much questioning the character of pastors, as the legitimacy of having a paid pastor at all. Commenting on the aging evangelical base, one participant named Jerry expressed a sense of crisis many share:

I don’t think people realize how desperate a state the American church is really in. We’re less than 10 years from being exactly in the same state as Europe (barring a medical miracle).

We need Frank Viola’s and George Barna’s (and many others) to really shake this thing up. There’s a disaster pending the likes of which the church world has never seen. All we have to do to get there is hang on to the status quo.

No question, we've got trouble.

Believers have lost a sense of how authority is supposed to work biblically. Those who remember when pastors had a recognized civic role fantasize about the recovery of Christendom, while emergents at times seem frantic in their search for an egalitarian church structure. There are those who want to trust their pastors, many of whom end up getting burned like the eight women in Florida. But there are others who long ago resolved never to trust another pastor again.

We witness a bitter scattering. The question is how to return to the Shepherd.

For me, a purely egalitarian church structure -- no leaders, no followers -- is fast-acting conformism. The herd never tolerates dissent from its stampedes. Furthermore, I believe egalitarian promises are fraudulent: all groups have leaders. The informal ones who lead from charisma tend to be the least accountable.

But the old institutional hierarchies assume a cultural consensus that no longer exists. Christendom, as a cultural force, is on life-support in the U.S. In Europe, it's dead. Pastors are not authority figures anymore. But they're still acting like it.

I am trying to implement several principles as a pastor:

• Model submission for other believers: submission to the Lord, to the scriptures, and to the other leaders of the church.
• Lead only from the trust gained by modeling submission. This practice is empowered by the Holy Spirit (e.g. Ephesians 5.15-21).
• Lead not by casting visions, but by applying narrowly defined biblical principles to the next decision on the congregation's horizon. Put another way, there's no grand plan, just point-to-point navigation.

These principles help me eschew the power game and nurture unity. They do not bring hyper-growth. They do not empower a great career path. They don't even eliminate conflict. But they do harness the forces of relationship, truth, and love to the work of change.

And in the bargain I will see my own soul saved -- an end I pray for the eight women in Florida and for Earl Paulk.

The storm that slammed California last Friday swept some shingles off our church's roof, leaving the women's restroom drenched. The carpet bubbled and the plaster ceiling wept. This, in addition to the usual leakage. Our building has a tower-like structure on the southeast corner, with a neon cross perched uneasily on top. The neon no longer lights. The tower can be relied upon to leak every year -- a tradition spanning eight decades. At some point, church leaders stopped trying to fix it. Someone just put buckets in the attic that catch most of the water, and no one remembers who.

Confession: The foregoing is bait to tempt readers into tired metaphors of churches' pomposity and ineffectiveness -- especially my emergent readers. (Cue crickets.)

Emergents and evangelicals generally have been disgusted with their churches -- the congregations, not necessarily the buildings. They've been disgusted for years, and have been hunting for the cause of all the dysfunction. From several emergent blogs I've seen, many blame the buildings for the sad condition of the people. Apparently the buildings' very existence is heinous.

This issue came up on a great blog I've been following, kingdomgrace. For a week or so, Grace has been writing intelligently about a book by Frank Viola and George Barna called Pagan Christianity, one of many books analyzing the evangelical mess. Their thesis is “that the church in its contemporary, institutional form has neither a biblical nor a historical right to exist.”

The chapter she treated yesterday (here) dealt with "the history of the church building from the first century through modern times."

Viola and Barna are not positive in their overview. Grace quotes them as saying,

"Somehow we have been taught to feel holier when we are in 'the house of God' and have inherited a pathological dependency upon an edifice to carry out our worship of God. The church building has taught us badly about what church is and what it does."

I can't relate to what Viola and Barna have written there. I was never taught "somehow" to feel holier when in a church building. Feeling holier has been impossible because most of the buildings where I've worshiped have been aggressively ugly.

Nor can I relate to their assertion that "we" have "inherited a pathological dependency upon an edifice." I feel sure that they liked how the phrase sounded, but didn't think about it too carefully. "Must . . . have . . . my . . . edifice!"

And I can't get into the ersatz liberal arts thing of saying, "The church building has taught us badly."

Grace gives more nuanced comments. Church buildings do contribute to such problems as "congregants as spectators," "lack of participation," "consumerist mentality," and "isolation." She writes, "The problem isn't necessarily the building, but rather our imagination and understanding of who we are and what we are called to be apart from the building."

I think she's right on. The design of large churches today deadens the acoustics, coerces the sight, blocks the world outside, and isolates the worshipper. It's a barrier to the restoration of community.

But how do we overcome such barriers?

I see two kinds of dialogue among emergents. One kind is epitomized by Grace. She is probing and measured. Her passion seems expressed by depth rather than bombast. Though I sense that she's seen the troubles of church life, she does not allow her experiences to embitter her writing. Many barriers can be overcome with this kind of dialogue.

The other kind is epitomized by Pagan Christianity. The rhetorical neon doesn't glow and the argumentation has continual leaks.

The Iowa caucuses today will officially begin the end of social conservatism as a force in American politics. But this gives an opportunity for local churches to refocus their energies. There may be surprises in Republican results by the end of the evening. Consensus this week has been that Mike Huckabee has been hurt by Mitt Romney's assaults, and that Romney has retaken the lead. But John McCain once again has a field operation in the state, and he was there for a last burst of campaigning, feeling energized by positive news from New Hampshire. There was buzz about a "late-breaking surge" for Fred Thompson at National Review Online yesterday (here).

For the evangelical project of recovering traditional values through political activism, though, none of this matters. I see three basic reasons why the grass roots social conservatism of the last two decades is done.

First, a generational split has undermined evangelical political unity. Emergents are far more likely to take liberal/progressive stands on the war, the environment, and economic issues. They treat their elders' project of restoring America's Judeo-Christian heritage contemptuously. I've written on this here.

Second, those who live by biblical sexual morality are in the minority in the nation at large -- and there is some question in my mind whether they even command of a majority of evangelicals. The presupposition behind social conservative positions on family policy, gay marriage, abortion, and the role of public education is that monogamous married sex should be normative. The proportion of Americans who accept that presupposition has been shrinking for the better part of three decades.

Few voters are open to social conservative policy positions anymore.

Consider Britain in the 1990s. Prime Minister John Major made family values a significant part of the Conservative Party's message in the years before he faced Tony Blair in a general election. But Major's government was hit with one sex scandal after another. His successor as party leader, William Hague, tried to rehabilitate the party's image in a number of ways. He made his position on morality clear by touring the country with his live-in girlfriend.

There is no political expression of traditional sexual morality in British politics today. Nor will there be. The populace will not tolerate it.

I believe we face a similar dark moment in America now. The sex scandals afflicting Republicans for the past year or more need no repetition. I believe the demise of biblical sexuality in American culture is an unmitigated catastrophe. But its demise is a fact. The outcome in Iowa will do nothing to help restore it. Biblical sexuality is now countercultural.

Thirdly, evangelical conservatives do not have a top tier candidate for the Republican nomination. Rudy Giuliani is not a social conservative in any sense, nor has he made any effort to appease the pro-life part of the Republican base. With Sen. McCain, evangelicals might be able to make peace, but they would remain a small part of his coalition. They would not figure in a McCain administration the way they have in Bush's.

Gov. Huckabee is certainly an evangelical. But even a win in Iowa will not make him a top-tier candidate. He does not have the money, the organization, or, frankly, the depth.

Which leaves Gov. Romney. Too many evangelicals know too much about Mormonism to have any illusions about a spiritual, or even a moral, alliance. They may vote for him. They know well enough that they're not selecting the nation's Sunday school teacher. But he's not their guy.

Without a top-tier candidate, evangelicals are reduced to bargaining for specific policy priorities at a nominating convention they will not control. And they are ill-positioned to do this sort of bargaining because of their own divisions and because of the larger culture's hostility.

Which brings me to what I think is the evangelical opportunity.

Evangelicals have an opportunity to see their role in America clearly. They are no longer mainstream. Their role is to build local churches that are countercultural in every way -- in their devotion to the Bible, in their demonstration of love, and in their vitality from the resurrected Jesus. Building more malls with good clean fun for the whole family is not going to be part of this role. Evangelicals are going to have to build a new, non-conformist way of life.

In order to take this opportunity to be countercultural, evangelicals will have to focus all their energies on the gospel -- the message that people's sin can be forgiven and their souls reborn. In the coming darkness, we will not have political strength. We will only have the Lord Jesus Christ.

  A church chairman discovers that his pastor has been lying to him. It's all very dark.

You can pre-order it here.

Justin Buzzard heard Rob Bell on his "the gods aren't angry tour," and wrote a detailed review (here). He got a reaction. While Justin loved much of what he heard from Bell, Justin came away with a concern. "I began to see that Rob wasn't going to talk about a foundational biblical truth that runs from Genesis 3 straight through to the end of the Bible, the biblical truth which makes the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross both necessary and amazing, the biblical truth that makes the good news of the gospel so good: Sin."

Justin would ask Bell three questions. What does Bell believe the Bible teaches about sin? What exactly does Bell believe about Christ's atonement? What does he believe about salvation, heaven, and hell?

Justin's priorities tell me that he cares about the integrity of preaching, that he is committed to studying and expounding the Bible, and that he does not believe biblical doctrine is expendable. The questions he asks are reasonable - questions that all who teach about Christ are accountable to answer.

But a response to Justin's review came from Mauryn Kkira.

Mauryn's post is lengthy, but I think it's worth reading in full because of the emotional impact of the truth she communicates. She has also heard Bell, and what she took from his presentation was "the message of grace being spoken to a severely fallen world that has been bathed in condemnation from the church for as long as I can remember."

Two things in her sentence caught my attention.

First, Mauryn says the world is "severely fallen." Mauryn believes that God "should be angry" with us: "look at us, we are a mess, and don't seem to be getting better anytime soon." She felt that Bell presupposed sin in his message: Bell "would have to have a clear picture of the sin nature in order to even begin to understand the grace that God offers us." I think Mauryn is operating from a doctrine of depravity in her post; she makes no pretence that human beings are basically good. She may not articulate the sinfulness of sin with theological precision, but she gets it.

The second thing I noticed in Mauryn's quote was that the "severely fallen world" has been "bathed in condemnation from the church for as long as I can remember." A world so fallen needs to hear about grace. "I think Rob's point is that our sinfulness has never been greater than the goodness of God." Mauryn clings to God's goodness for dear life: "I have to say that the thought of a Holy and sinless God who loves me exactly the way I am in spite of my sin ... the thing he hates the most, that catches my attention and keeps it."

Mauryn's priorities tell me that she has experienced the grace of Jesus Christ, and wants other people to know his goodness. She presses the point that preachers need to bring out truth that edifies.

What I hear articulated by these two voices is a pastoral problem of the highest importance. It's one of the problems that frustrate me most. Both Justin and Mauryn believe in sin. Both yearn for the grace of God to be understood and received. But what Justin calls for, a direct confrontation of sin, is the very thing that drives Mauryn to despair. What Mauryn calls for, a proclamation of God's goodness, is the very thing that fills Justin with questions about the proclamation's integrity.

A pastor has to confront sin. He also has to comfort sinners with the promise of forgiveness. Different audiences will need different doses of confrontation and comfort. That's my problem: how do I determine dosage?

A preacher is required to make some determination of his audience's spiritual needs and aptitudes (e.g. John 16.4, 12). If his assessment is that the audience needs to hear more about sin, then he must give them more about sin. But if he believes his audience is already convicted of sin, he would be wiser to talk about grace.

For me, the Rob Bell case boils down to this. If Bell has made the assessment that today's unbelievers are convinced of the sinfulness of sin, and that they need a vision of God's goodness from the scriptures, then he has delivered his message in good conscience. I believe the Lord will bless it, and that the Lord's kindness will lead many to repentance (Romans 2.4). Some will say that Bell is mistaken, and that unbelievers need more teaching about sin. They may be right. But if they are wrong, then they would have us heap more sorrow on the grieving (2 Corinthians 7.10).

By contrast, if Bell thinks that unbelievers will never be convinced of the sinfulness of sin, and merely follows the path of least resistance, then we have another case entirely.

This side of the last trumpet, and lacking any definitive evidence, I choose to believe the former, which means I'm praising God for Bell's impact on Mauryn, sitting beside Justin and waiting to hear more.