by Matthew Raley Evangelical teaching about being “filled with the Spirit” has tended to be individualistic. You have your own personal faith in Jesus Christ, and God responds by giving your own personal immersion in the Spirit.

I don’t deny this teaching. It became an evangelical emphasis because of cultural inertia in churches, in which individuals coasted toward heaven on the strength of group membership. The individual new birth, and the resulting personal transformation, is an antidote to self-righteousness.

But the Bible’s teaching about the Spirit goes into more detail about how personal transformation works. Each of us is transformed by interacting with a Spirit-bonded community.

In Ephesians 4.1-6, Paul teaches that there is “one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” For Paul, all these things are the substance of “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Individuals in a church have each had a bonding experience. They have come to see their own sins (unique to them, not shared), have heard the gospel of Christ (teaching held in common with others), and have each gained new life directly from the “one God and Father of all” (an experience that mixes the common and the unique).

That is to say, an individual is bonded with Christ and with other believers at the same time. The depth of the individual’s baptism in the Spirit also deepens the individual’s human relationships.

In this context, the personal transformation begun by the new birth accelerates as an individual participates in the body of Christ “in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” That worthy manner requires “all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” Individuals who are jarringly different become more like Christ as they suffer through their disagreements with grace.

(Yes, I have expounded these verses “backwards,” starting with the reasons in vv 4-6 that motivate the commands in vv 1-3.)

As I said in the previous post, this teaching gives life and health to individuality. There is no implication that individuals conform to each other, ceasing to be unique. On the contrary, Paul teaches their continued diversity explicitly (Ephesians 4.11-16).

But in that diversity there is not independence or autonomy, as if the parts of the body function separately. The individuals interact, being transformed by the process of giving and receiving. And their interactions are governed by the one thing we postmodern iPod worshipers instinctively reject: a bond, a tie to others that cannot be cut or ignored. In Christ, the Jew is bound with the Greek, regardless of whether either would choose to be.

Paul applies this theology directly to worship in music (Ephesians 5.18-21). Singing together is one of the interactions that are governed by the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace, and as such is one of the tools Christ uses to express his own self in us. This is Paul's conception of being "filled with the Spirit."

Therefore, corporate singing is not about my passions at all, but Christ's. Music is a way of submitting my passions to His.

Contrast that application with most worship in music today.

1. What holds musical worship together in most churches is sameness of style.

The style of a church’s music is carefully crafted to target a specific demographic. The invitation most churches extend is, “Join us because we are exactly like you!” The other (unspoken) part of this invitation is, “If you aren’t like us, you won’t really fit here.”

This conformity kills the interaction individuals need with believers who are different from them. It replaces a genuine filling of the Spirit with mere human affinity.

2. The demographic bond is cheap.

People in the same demographic share the same media reference points, many of the same likes and dislikes, the same stage of life, the same job. They relate to each other, as T. S. Eliot put it, only with the most conscious part of themselves.

The “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” is a bond at once deeply personal and deeply relational. It supernaturally overcomes ethnic, linguistic, and cultural divisions, and blows away superficial, market-based identities. It makes individuals larger and larger.

The ugly truth is that many churches are actively manufacturing small, superficial people whose ability to interact is retarded.

3. The demographic bond is false.

Many people now link their personal identities to their choices as consumers. The cars, clothes, music, food, and attitude with which they upholster their lives all make up their identities. Thus, people labor to join certain demographics, and flaunt their status once their satisfy their ambition.

What churches create in their pursuit of demographic affinity is a lie. People seem to be bound together. But they are only attached by their choices, which they are free to reverse at any time.

The stark reality is that style-driven worship music resists the Spirit's work of bonding, his work of love.

by Matthew Raley In modern philosophy (as I sketched here), the dignity and freedom of the individual have been troubled. Here is how Reinhold Niebuhr summarized one aspect of the problem in The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949, p 21):

Modern man ... cannot determine whether he shall understand himself primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his reason or from the standpoint of his affinity with nature; and if the latter whether it is the harmless order and peace of nature or her vitality which is the real clue to his essence.

In postmodern culture, exhausted with these questions, the individual has become an autonomous consumer of mass culture: self-invented, alienated, rootless, and unaccountable to permanent relationships. She mines her passions in search of vitality, a search for which boundaries, reasoning, and even relationships are impediments.

The postmodern individual understands herself from the standpoint of natural vitality, but in her the outward-reaching wonder of modern romanticism is dead, replaced by an inward-reaching nihilism.

The iPod worshiper I described last week is little different. He or she comes to public worship wanting the freedom to sing alone to God with others who are also singing alone to God. The iPod worshiper knows no other mode for passionate freedom but the personal, subjective, solo mode. Christ and his community are understood from the standpoint of self, which is antithetical to Paul's description of body life in Ephesians 4-5.

(I think the younger you are, the more likely you are to identify with iPod worship. The older you are, the less you identify with it, because to some degree you have experienced a culture held in common.)

To revive evangelical worship, most believers jump to the issue of music style. "Naturally, the style I like is what will revive worship." But I will address music style last in this series, because style needs to serve many, many other considerations. The reason we now have churches full of iPod worshipers is that all other considerations of worship were made to serve style.

What we need to work on exegetically is this problem of individuality-in-community. What is individuality, and what is it for? What is personal freedom, and what is it for? What is the nature of the bond between individual Christians, and what is that bond for? What do individual Christians owe in light of their bond with each other?

If we have some answers to these questions, the matter of what and how to sing may become clearer.

Let's take some direction about individuality from Ephesians.

1. In Ephesians, we understand ourselves not from the standpoint of our past, present, or preferences, nor from our rationality, nor from our natural drives. In fact, we don't view ourselves from the standpoint of self at all, but from that of Christ.

Paul describes a variety of individuals at work in the community of believers, each part "working properly" in the body -- that is, contributing a unique strengths and actions to shared life. But the individual parts all "grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ." (4.15-16)

So the Jewish Christian descended from Levites has a unique role in the Ephesian church. He contributes a practical knowledge of how Israel worshiped, an instinctive appreciation of sacrifice for sin, and also an instinctive knowledge of the deceitful power of self-righteousness. The Greek Christian, a former worshiper of Diana, let's say, contributes very different strengths to the other Christians in Ephesus: he knows the deceit of sexual immorality as a prop for idolatry, as well as the power of Christ to save a man from it.

Niebuhr said, "The Christian faith in God's self-disclosure, culminating in the revelation of Christ, is thus the basis of the Christian concept of personality and individuality." (p 15) The Jewish man and the Greek man have no need to compromise their uniqueness in the community of believers. They are each connected directly to their Savior, Jesus Christ. Niebuhr added, "To understand himself truly means to begin with a faith that he is understood from beyond himself, that he is known and loved of God and must find himself in terms of obedience to the divine will." (p 15)

These two individuals are outward-reaching in their self-understanding. They are understood. Therefore they will come to understand themselves. The inward-reaching iPod believer needs to take out his earphones and leave the tiny world in which he thrives.

2. In Ephesians, we do not efface what we are, or where we came from, but we submit to Christ as he redeems what we are.

The Jewish man and the Greek man remain Jewish and Greek. The Jewish man's emotional life still revolves around the Psalms, while the Greek man's emotional life remains tied to the sound and form of hymns. Nothing will change that. One man is not required to conform to the other. Rather, Christ takes what each man is and Christ expresses his own self in each man.

And public worship reflects their individuality (5.19). Each individual contributes his or her unique strength in Christ to the love of the community, and he also receives strength in Christ from the community. The Greek man rejoices in the Jewish man's testimony, and vice-versa.

In these two points, I find freedom without autonomy. As followers of Christ, the Jewish and Greek men are not self-invented, alienated, and rootless. They are defined in relationship. In that relationship with Christ, they are unique and they are also accountable.

In particular, as I'll sketch next week, they are accountable for how they relate to each other.

by Matthew Raley Recall the distinction between encouragement and edification.

To encourage is to hearten or animate—to give an emotional uplift when someone is down. Edification, like encouragement, has an emotional impact, but is not primarily focused on a person’s subjective world.

To edify is to build people morally and spiritually. This usually means that the work of edification goes beyond individual instruction to address the relationship of that individual to the community. We ask questions like, “Is this person alone? How can she be better connected?”

The edified person is a connected person, which is how Paul uses the Greek term in Ephesians 4.11-16.

Believers in many roles work together “for building up the body of Christ.” The “unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” is the state into which “we all” must grow. That unity prevents our being “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.” The phenomenon of people growing up “in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,” is explicitly relational. Christ, "from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working together properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

Giving encouragement to individuals is good work, but it is not the same as what Paul describes. Edification summons an energy that comes directly from Jesus Christ, and that reaches into the community of believers to create loving vitality. Edification in Christ connects people.

The dominant ethos of worship today, even in theologically conservative churches, is closer to that of the iPod than the Bible.People want freedom to express their own passion for God. They want to be in a place where everyone else is doing the same thing. If they don't feel that freedom, then their worship is inhibited by the people around them. Authentic iPod worship is dancing Godward like no one's looking.

To be sure, people want a sense of togetherness in this expression of individual passion. But the togetherness only comes when everyone is into the tunes. If even 10% of the people are standing still, the energy is gone. And that means, in order to preserve the energy, only the people who like what you like can worship with you.

I cannot say this in strong enough words: the iPod mode for worship is not the Bible's mode.

The iPod mode is just you. It does not match Paul's description of Christ's body in Ephesians 4. It cannot. Because it's just you. Even if your passion involves speaking directly to Jesus, it's still just you. You and your passion are not enough to reach the edification that Paul describes because you are just you. Even if other people like you express their individual passions in the same room with you, you and the other versions of you have merely attained corporate selfishness.

Maybe you think I'm applying Paul's words about the life of the body inappropriately. After all, you say, Paul wasn't talking about music in Ephesians.

Really?

Paul applies his principles of edification in the rest of the letter.

After covering a host of sins that destroy edifying love, he commands the Ephesians to make “the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” The will of the Lord is not drunkenness, the debauched pursuit of individual pleasure and fake fellowship through boozing, but the filling of the Spirit. The first of many subordinate clauses that specify how the body becomes Spirit-filled says, “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart . . . .”

A preeminent way in which the body of Christ is edified is in singing, both to one another and with one corporate voice.

In the larger context of Ephesians, this direction is specific. Christ “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” between Jews and Gentiles, “that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two” (2:14-15). Therefore, two formerly alienated cultures must now sing together. The newly reconciled body must sing "psalms" from the Old Testament, the ancient chants of Israel. The body must also sing "hymns," Greek forms of idolatrous praise that are now turned to praise the living God.

Further, the body must sing music that originated with neither Jews nor Greeks. The phrase spiritual songs is, of course, much debated. But at the very least, it indicates that the new culture of Christ's body in Ephesus must produce new music that is formed in "the unity of the Spirit" (Ephesians 4.3, a use that sets the context for all subsequent references in this letter to things that are "spiritual").

Paul was talking about music. And we will unpack the musical implications of what he taught in the coming weeks.

For now it's enough to repeat that we live in a time of consumeristic selfishness, a narcissism that divides young from old, individual from community, race from race, and rich from poor. Evangelical worship music has not challenged this narcissism at any level.

I fear the evangelical culture of encouragement is a mask for self-adoration.

by Matthew Raley The question I'm wrestling with these days is what to do about evangelical music. I have been arguing (here and here) that sacred music should edify people by bringing them together before God, but that evangelical music mostly doesn't try. Instead, it merely pleases groups as segments of the consuming masses.

I divert today into what may seem an irrelevant story, but I plead your patience.

I think too much attention has been paid to recent demographic changes in America and their impact on evangelicalism. For these changes to have any context, we have to examine developments farther back in Western culture. Today, I'll sketch some problems in modernism concerning human individuality, problems that shifted the foundations of art music generally, and specifically undermined sacred music’s mission to edify, as I'll sketch next week.

Consider Thomas Mann’s character Hans Castorp, protagonist of The Magic Mountain.

Hans is from a bourgeois family in Hamburg. In the decade before World War I, he is about to take up his business career as a shipbuilder. On the cusp of this flatland life of science and profit, he journeys to Davos, high in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin being treated for a lung infection in a sanatorium. Hans stays there seven years, during which he has a spiritual and philosophical journey.

What does this fictional bourgeois individual feel about his place in the world?

Reinhold Niebuhr, in his Gifford Lectures (The Nature and Destiny of Man, New York: Charles Scribner's Books, 1941), might have answered that Hans was enduring his own gradual destruction.

Many modernists saw the defining human ability as reason. Niebuhr called these the idealists, tracing their philosophical roots back to the classical anthropologies of Plato and Aristotle, among others. The individual human mind, through the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, could express its greatness by mastering nature.

Hans comes from this rationalist, dominating culture: the shipbuilder from the flatlands.

But other modernists reacted against this view, as well as against its social consequences. They saw relatedness to nature as the defining human characteristic, a view which Niebuhr called romanticist. The romanticists saw primitive social forms and physical drives as more authentic than the machine-like operations of reason. For the individual to express himself, he needed to reach back to this natural vitality.

Which is why Hans stays on the mountain seven years. There, he is interacting with himself, with the mythic power of the altitude, the snow, the erotic, the night sky. The flatlands were not enough.

Niebuhr said (p 21),

The conflict between rationalists and romanticists has become one of the most fateful issues of our day, with every possible religious and political implication. Modern man, in short, cannot determine whether he shall understand himself primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his reason or from the standpoint of his affinity with nature; and if the latter whether it is the harmless order and peace of nature or her vitality which is the real clue to his essence.

Hans is adrift in this confusion, listening to the perpetual debates of the other residents of Davos, who are a kind of microcosm of European social history and ideologies.

Niebuhr analyzed that history. The bourgeoisie rebelled against the feudal order during the Renaissance, and created the modern world through its relentless application of reason and science. “This bourgeois individual felt himself the master of his own destiny and was impatient with both the religious and the political solidarities which characterized both classical and medieval life.” (p 22)

Hans the shipbuilder ought to be on top of the world.

But by using his reason this way, said Niebuhr, the bourgeois individual destroyed his freedom. Niebuhr asserted that “he lost this individuality immediately after establishing it by his destruction of the medieval solidarities. He found himself the artificer of a technical civilization which creates more enslaving mechanical interdependencies and collectivities than anything known in the agrarian world.” (p 22)

By the 19th century, the bourgeois individual was longing to regain his freedom, and he tried through romanticism (pp 81-92). But early romanticism (e.g. Rousseau) dissolved him into a universal consciousness, and romantic nationalism (e.g. Schleiermacher) swept him into a racial collective consciousness, while romantic nihilism (e.g. Nietzsche) unbound him from every restraint and empowered him with cruelty to express his own will.

It is these debates that Hans spends his time listening to, and the reader waits in vain for some resolution that will transform the shipbuilder into a man of vitality.

Hans finally leaves the mountain and is swept into World War I. The reader’s last look at him is not as an individual, but as a soldier in a mass of others on a flatland industrialized battlefield.

In modern times, Niebuhr said, the idea of individuality is “a tragically abortive concept,” destroyed by both of the modern movements that tried to guard it, idealism and romanticism. We are still living with the impact of this failure, only further down the slope of degradation. The American consumer lacks any rationale for living as an individual in community. He wants to be himself. But his sense of community is so dessicated that he ends up looking and sounding like everyone else.

What this death of individuality did to music is the next part of the story.

by Matthew Raley My post two weeks ago on the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Prop 8 initiated parallel discussions, one with fellow evangelicals (reflected in last week's post), the other with progressives.

My friend Dr. Ben Carson is a composer at U.C. Santa Cruz. He has been wondering what sort of conservative I am if I don't think Christian morality should be legislated. Ben wrote, "What kind of conservative recognizes society as [an] inherently plural nation in which the state has no business re-institutionalizing religious rites? And wants Jesus' teachings to be considered on a level playing field of alternatives? I think you might consider embracing your inner leftist."

I replied that the legal expressions of Christian morality are breaking down because our culture no longer lives by Christian morality. I want the motive for Christian morality revived -- namely, love. Ethics unmotivated by love have no integrity. Until Christ's love drives us, rebuilding the legal forms of Christendom can only lead to hypocrisy.

Christianity aims at this transformation of the soul as the key to transforming all else in human life. When Christians are motivated once again by the infusion of love directly from Jesus Christ, I believe the integrity of Christian ethics will quickly produce the most attractive lifestyle on a playing field of alternatives. If Christians do not regain this Christ-infused motivation, they will lose the culture and their souls.

Such is the background for Ben's further questions, which I thought were important and insightful.

How can I build a moral philosophy on love, a concept "that doesn't have a clear definition, or a clear criterion that signals its absence or its presence?"

Ben elaborates that love is supposed to be the motivating force behind a wide range of social relationships, sexual and parental in particular. "But it's so easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated in our language...what check do you have against its ephemeral nature? Couldn't selfishness sometimes masquerade as love, and then motivate a 'morality' that is immoral? If our morality is guided by love, then how do you work with that vulnerability?"

My answer includes scripture references, which I hope will not be tedious but illustrative of a quite different mode of reasoning.

1. In the New Testament, love is not defined in the abstract, but is shown as personally embodied.

I think what Ben says about love is accurate: it is "easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated." The more love is formulated in the abstract, the more vulnerable to manipulation it is.

The NT exhibits Jesus Christ as the embodiment of love in several ways. The Gospel narratives show him as love in action. Doctrinally, Christ is the security for reconciliation between God and sinners because he died to pay for sin. Ethically, his self-sacrifice for the sake of his enemies is the ground for all moral decision-making (Philippians 2.1-18), and is the standard for love in marriage (Ephesians 5.22-33).

The most neglected way Christ is shown as the embodiment of love in the NT is his participation in unity with the Father (John 17).

So the NT answer to the question of how define love is to point to a man.

2. In the NT, love is generated only through interaction with Christ, who embodies it.

Christ's resurrection and return are essential parts of the growth of love in the NT. Because he lives now, he is able to give us new life (Colossians 2.6-15) and to form himself in us (Colossians 3.1-17). Because he will return, our ability to love as he loves will be consummated (1 John 2.28-3.3).

Conversely, the NT explicitly and repeated denies that there is pure good apart from the love of Christ (e.g. Colossian 2.16-23).

So, not only is Christ the defining man of love, but is the sole source of it. There is no abstract teaching in the NT that can discipline a person's mind-and-heart to conform to Christ's example. There is only Christ's personal energy.

3. In this moral philosophy, a church's role is two-fold: call people to interact with Christ and nurture his love in community.

Practically speaking, I have never been successful at changing anyone's behavior. I do not want to try anything so presumptuous. My role is to point to the love of Christ that a person has already experienced and help him or her proceed further with that love.

This kind of work can only occur in the context of deep trust and interaction. Law can't even approach it.

In sum, a moral philosophy derived from the NT must be predicated on unbreakable bonds with each other in Christ's love. NT love says, "My commitment to you is irrevocable because Christ's commitment to me is irrevocable."

Love in our society has become an easily-manipulated abstraction, in my view, because we flee belonging in favor of autonomy. We keep the exits from our relationships clear. Our society cannot have a vision of love without strong grounds for self-sacrifice, and I do not hear any such ground articulated by anyone, left or right.

by Matthew Raley Sometimes I slip statements into my posts to see who's paying attention to what. The award this week goes to my brother Chris, who spotted a matter of some importance in last week's post about the court decision on Prop 8.

What I said was,

Having entered the political fray with a fractured base — a base that opposes threats to marriage in principle but that is under the thumb of family courts in fact — the religious right has little option but to find enemies and blame them. That’s elementary, abc stuff. If the base is not united, your tool is fear.

So the enemies are homosexuals.

This strategy is Pharisaical. Which is to say, it is the wrath of man leveraged to produce the righteousness of God.

Chris pulled out the last sentence: "That has a lot of implications. Like, to what extent do we do this to fellow Christians?"

My allusion was to James 1.19-21. In teaching how to endure temptation, James commands us to be "quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger." He is warming up to say later that wrangling and fighting is demonic (3.13-13; 4.1-12).  But here, the basic reason he gives to resist anger is that "the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires."

Rather, we must lay aside our own wickedness, and "receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls." The word of God implanted in the receptive heart-and-mind is the source of godly obedience. Our anger is not the source.

James would say that we do inflict our wrath on other believers to produce righteousness, and we must repent. Here are some specific ways that we do what James forbids:

1. We often rely on conformist instincts to uphold standards.

No one wants to provoke the community's anger and bring shame or rejection on themselves. It is a high cost to bear. So, much of the time, church-goers keep their heads down. They will avoid any public non-conformity to the church's explicit and implicit standards, hiding any behavior that might expose them to disapproval.

Threats of the anger of man, in this case, produce lying rather than truth.

James teaches that God's righteousness is produced when someone responds directly to God's goodness (1.18). "Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures." Conformity to other human beings is spiritually barren.

2. We often use guilt manipulation to motivate people to godliness.

Guilt manipulation, to define it broadly, is making people feel bad about what they've done. It is what one human being does when trying to control another human being's behavior. This comes in a range of language from "Burn in hell, you sinner" to "We're disappointed in you." We do this because we know that shame is a disabling emotion.

In this method we, the human beings, are supposed to police sin and arrest it.

The use of shame is a kind of vengeance -- which is to say, the satisfaction of anger. It does not produce righteousness because it is disabling, not redeeming. God nurtures a living, joyful righteousness.

Obviously, a church needs to confront sins. James is not teaching that we can shirk that duty, nor am I. Rather, confronting sin must be done with abundant listening and the tender maintenance of meekness. God is the one who convicts sin, not us. It is his implanted word that has the power to save, not our emotional appeals.

3. We fight to preserve a culture that reflects our standards, believing that this will save future generations.

The whole motivation behind the campaign against gay marriage is to preserve our society's reflection of particular biblical values. This and other such issues are labeled the culture wars. They are social battlegrounds. The scenes of anger.

What these battles have unleashed in the conversation of Christians around me is not the righteousness of God. They have unleashed jealousy, mocking, lying, brawling, gossip, slander, and condemnation. If we "win," I can say with some confidence that not one soul will gain eternal life as a result. As for the souls of our children, many are filled with revulsion.

And all this for a goal that is of dubious value. Jesus Christ does not redeem human cultures. He redeems souls. Those redeemed souls then alter the character of the cultures in which they live.

James would not have shrunk from declaring God's will for sexuality, nor will I. But let the focus of our speech be where James focused his, on maintaining the meekness of souls to receive the implanted word.

No souls will be saved any other way than by the new birth in Jesus Christ.

The apologetical style I exhibited in recent sermons and developed in a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) is not designed to be aggressive. That is, my argument is not intended to close the sale with unbelievers, but to supply what is appropriate for a season. I think the stance of evangelists has been too rigid about procedure. There is a moment in which you become a Christian, the moment when you pray the sinner's prayer. When you pray the prayer you pass from darkness to light. The appeals of evangelists and the arguments of apologists have often been designed to drive a person to that moment.

Many Christians are rethinking this stance, wondering if important decisions are really settled by a single prayer. Two theological truths are relevant.

First, there is no middle ground between those who are in Christ and those who are not. The two heads of household in the world, Jesus and Satan, are at war, and a person is in one house or the other. "[The Father] has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." (Colossians 1.13-14)

The purpose of the sinner's prayer, to articulate a moment of transfer, is important.

Still, secondly, the Bible prescribes no spiritual pitocin for inducing the new birth. The sinner's prayer is not found in any conversion in the New Testament. Baptism declares a faith that already exists, and is not a means of belonging to Christ. The gospels show many individuals engaging with Jesus in a process of transfer (e.g. John 3.1-21; 7.45-52; 19.38-42) that is slower than the moment of praying the prayer. This process is under the direct management of the Holy Spirit (John 16.7-11).

While there is nothing inherently wrong with the sinner's prayer, then, it is only one possible means of coming to Christ, and I know many people who have shown the fruits of the new birth without it. Biblically, the radical change that moves a person into Christ's household has a process behind it. The change does not occur in a moment, but perhaps may become apparent in a moment.

The aggressive style of apologetics that claims positively to prove Christ's claims, and to disprove competing claims, has been too focused on The Moment of conversion, and not focused enough on the process in which people find themselves dealing with Christ.

I am trying to develop a style to bring clarity to that process, a style that frames choices instead of driving points. It involves several assumptions about audience.

For starters, I assume that no one needs me to drive them to Christ. Christ is driving them to Himself through his Holy Spirit. If the Spirit is at work in a person, then I need to assume the honesty of the person's intentions. If the Spirit is not motivating the person, then no argument from heaven or earth will work.

In other words, I am talking to people who are well and rightly motivated in their decision-making. They will be moved by words that are in harmony with the Spirit's voice (1 Corinthians 2).

Furthermore, I accept that someone investigating Christ is uncertain. He or she is weighing claims, and is trying to find the best basis for deciding between them. That uncertainty is not a spiritual problem, but is, in fact, the Spirit's goad. The evangelist who tries to force certitude before the individual has genuinely found it is making the disastrous error of being disrespectful. In accepting people's uncertainties, I am not compromising with "relativism," but am recognizing that their questioning is what God will use to draw them to himself.

Where the Spirit is involved, a person's doubts are an ally, not an adversary.

Finally, I recognize that there are many factors involved in making life decisions, and each of these factors has to be treated with its own ethic.

Intellectual factors are significant in such decisions, and these must be addressed with rigor. But people also make spiritual decisions in response to pain. It is not appropriate to intellectualize someone's pain, as if suffering can be "answered." Even further, people make life decisions out of their sense of who they are: can they see themselves on a particular course with a particular group? Facts and logic often have little to do with this issue, since it turns more on culture and experience.

To treat all of these factors appropriately and biblically is to treat the process of conversion with the respect it deserves.

In other words, there is a time to reason, and a time to react; a time to think, and a time to feel. There is a time to analyze and a time to synthesize.

In the process of life-change, there is a season for every kind of word.

by Matthew Raley The generalization that all religions teach the same basic truths retains a powerful hold on the liberal imagination. It feeds the hope that the world can find peace through understanding, that if religions could realize how much ground they share, then people from different cultures could come together.

But this hope for a corporate final salvation leaves the individual human heart in despair.

Last Friday, On Faith in the Washington Post published comments by Feisal Abdul Rauf about President Barack Obama's upcoming trip to Turkey. He provides a specimen of how a hope for common ground devolves into an impersonal set of ethics.

Imam Rauf's examples of common ground between Islam and America are pretty abstract. Both cultures, it seems believe in law.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Creator endowed man with these unalienable rights. The framers of the Constitution wrote that they were establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty.

In the same way, Islamic law believes that God has ordained political justice, economic justice, help for the weak and impoverished. These are very Islamic concepts. Many Muslims believe that what Americans receive from their government is in fact the very substance of what an Islamic state should provide. American beliefs in individual liberty and the dignity of the individual are Islamic principles as well.

These comparisons are shockingly facile. Concepts of justice do not become anything more than slogans until they are instantiated by real cultural transactions. It is precisely the cultural specifics that drive the Muslim and American worlds apart.

The Imam becomes more specific when citing President Obama.

Obama sent a shockwave through the Muslim World when at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5 he quoted a hadith -- "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." The president equated that tenet of Islam with Jesus' "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and the Jewish Torah commandment, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow."

There is indeed a broad and sometimes precise agreement about ethics among the world's religions and cultures. There is also agreement that the dynamics of right and wrong are built into the universe just as securely as its physical dynamics. C. S. Lewis, to name only the most prominent thinker, documented this agreement in his series of lectures, The Abolition of Man, in which he argued for the existence of a Tao, a moral law that is universal.

Imam Rauf and President Obama are correct when they find the golden rule articulated across cultural boundaries.

But their purpose goes beyond the diplomatic to embrace the liberal's final hope.

Christian liberals have long sought to reenergize ethics in the here-and-now, and deemphasize the "last things" of human history and eternal salvation. Or more precisely, they have adopted a new doctrine of the last things.

Here is the ultimate End, articulated by the Imam. President Obama

can emphasize the commonality of Western and Islamic values. He can say that if the United States lives up to the values in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and if Muslims can live up to the principles of Islamic law, then we will find we have fewer points of conflict and more common ground.

Once this commonality can be established, Muslims no longer will fear Western domination and the West no longer will fear Islamic expansion. Then, the phony "Clash of Civilizations" can be put to rest.

The liberal imagination, whether Christian or Muslim, sees world peace as the End of History, the ultimate goal of religion. Their path is to spotlight common ground and ease sharp differences into the shadows.

Where does this leave biblical Christianity?

The Jesus of the Gospel of John speaks to individual despair, the death and darkness of sin in each human soul. His cure for this despair is not an abstract system of ethics, which serves only to mark sin and not to redeem the sinner. His cure for darkness and death is his own historical death and resurrection.

The world will be reunified in Christ's household of the redeemed.

This is the preeminent difference Christianity has with other religions. To follow the vision of liberalism, we must silence Jesus' claims about individual redemption while keeping his ethics. The Imam can easily live with that. President Obama can easily live with it.

But the human soul, taunted by an abstract law it has never kept nor can keep, will remain dead.

My college student friend is like many people today who form their beliefs with an almost total disregard for evidence. He is open to supernatural claims, but closed to logic-chopping. He's ready to believe in ancient traditions, finding them not merely interesting but enlightening, and discusses them alongside the latest in string theory. Christians today are conflicted about how to address this mentality. The apologetical mode for decades has been focused on proof, but the audience for proof is dwindling.

Should I try to persuade my friend that evidence matters? Or should I provide him with a plausible narrative for faith, excusing myself from the standards of intellectual rigor?

It may help to be more specific about the postmodern person's suspicion of evidence and logic.

I believe that the use of logic to build systems and discover truth is regarded by many today as a bluff, a game played by the erudite to intimidate the uninitiated. Evidence and logic matter, but an individual's relatively small knowledge base leaves him open to counterfeits. He feels that he can't untangle truth from falsehood because he lacks expertise.

I don't think the average person agrees with the anathemas against reason pronounced by academic postmodernism. Rather, like my student friend, he is suspicious of what he cannot personally verify.

In working to persuade people of this mentality to follow Christ, there are two issues to untangle.

1. To agree with much academic postmodernist thinking that reasoning is artificial and without significance is to undermine human thought and embrace nihilism.

A biblical thinker should recognize the law of non-contradiction as foundational to thought and communication. The classic arguments for the existence of God, for example, are founded on deductive reasoning from this law, and have never been refuted. We should not pretend that speculative logic is worthless.

But these arguments have been set aside, and for good reason, to wit ...

2. Audience does matter -- its capabilities, its knowledge base, its experiences.

The abstract reasoning of, say, the ontological argument for the existence of God has always been a matter for audiences with technical fluency. There are real problems in trying to popularize such an argument.

To begin with, for most people even to comprehend it would require lectures for which they have no interest,  patience, or, in particular, use. We can agree with Mortimer Adler that every person should be a philosopher while recognizing that few have been educated as he would have educated them.

A Christian apologist has to decide whether he is a philosophical educator or a preacher of the gospel. The two callings are jealous of devotion.

Another problem with popularization is that the smiling apologist who reduces a classic argument to its breeziest simplicity will puff an audience of Christians with overconfidence and self-satisfaction. Oversimplification is not part of a healthy spiritual diet.

So propriety in reasoning matters. But so does audience.

I believe that, in our context, the Christian apologist should employ logic defensively, not to attempt positive proofs of the faith but to refute competing claims. And he should reason about matters genuinely open to his audience's knowledge base.

In my current sermon series, then, I am taking on a proposition that is heard incessantly. The world's religions are merely different expressions of the same spiritual realities.

The average person in my church has heard this. His or her friends have said it over and over. So this proposition is within his or her knowledge base, something the person is competent to evaluate.

My argument establishes a fact. The world's religions are not different expressions of the same spiritual realities. They express different spiritual realities, and the differences are consequential.

In the sermons, I have used documentation from primary sources, and analysis of those teachings in comparison with John 10 to establish this fact. I have posed questions to my audience to drive home the contrasts, inviting their own investigations of other religions to test my statements.

The focus of this approach is narrow. I want to equip my audience to dispose of a flippant generalization. I also want my audience to evaluate the claims of Christ with greater specificity and rigor, regardless of whether they already claim to believe in Jesus.

Here's my bet: take away people's generalizations about Jesus and they will have to deal with what Jesus actually said. And if they deal with what he actually said, they will end up dealing with him.

This is a method that I believe maximizes what reason and evidence can accomplish, while speaking to issues that an audience is competent to assess.

by Matthew Raley Let's step out of the mode of persuading skeptics for now, and think more specifically about the experience of conversion. We'll get back to the issues of persuasion next week. They're important. But I'm convinced we can't construct a sound apologetic for our Christian faith without understanding of what has happened to us.

Jesus is specific in John 10 about what moves people to follow him: recognition.

"The sheep hear [the Shepherd's] voice." (10.3) "[T]he sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow ... for they do not know the voice of strangers." (10.4-5) "I know my own and my own know me." (10.14) "And I have other sheep that are not of this fold ... and they will listen to my voice." (10.16) "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me." (10.27)

Jesus is describing at least two things.

There is a quality in his voice that turns his sheep. The quality is personal, unique to Jesus, and it is communicable from him to his sheep. In other words, there are subjective characteristics inside Jesus (pardon the redundancy, but I'm emphatic about this point) that are expressed in his voice. His interior qualities constitute the object of the sheep's recognition.

I know him.

Further, there is something in his sheep that instinctively responds to his voice. Subjectively, each sheep recognizes the qualities of the Shepherd through the medium of his voice. This experience is, by definition, not something one person can share with another, but only describe.

So Jesus teaches that the decisive factor in conversion is an interaction. While the experience is subjective, Jesus clearly expects people to reflect on it. He describes, in other words, a reasoning process that accepts subjectivity as part of decision-making.

Last Sunday evening, as part of our church's discussion of the morning's sermon, I asked participants to tell me how they knew God was speaking to them. They described several characteristics, of which I give two:

1. Automatic change.

One woman said that after her conversion to Christ some of behaviors simply reversed. She no longer did the things she had desired in the past. It was a change she couldn't help noticing, but had never initiated.

2. A source of thoughts and motives other than self.

Several people described the experience of thinking, saying, or doing things that they could not attribute to themselves. The source, they said, had been Other. This is a different experience from an intuition or sub-rational process issuing in an action. A person can say, "I don't know why I did that," while still recognizing that the action came from him- or herself. But the participants described actions that they could not recognize as coming from themselves.

There were other characteristics, but these two illustrate that the people could describe a specific kind of experience.

Remember, we're out of the mode of persuading skeptics. We'll get back to it later.

Suppose we accepted this subjectivity as a legitimate part of spiritual decision-making. Is there a basis for reasoning about it? True, information from the two kinds of experiences above is fragile, and will only bear so much weight. The information is falsifiable, and is not open to objective proof. Even so, can we reason about this kind of subjectivity?

Consider two analogies.

The many indicators of falling in love are also fragile, also open to falsification, and all too frequently misunderstood. But romantic love is nevertheless a real experience.

A more fruitful comparison might be made with pain. Medicine does not have truly objective measures of pain, but tries to plumb the experience in search of diagnosis. The question What do you feel? is primary. Such information as location, kind, and scale of pain is limited by the patient's ability to communicate, verbally and physically. The information is indirect, fragile, and open to falsification.

But pain is real. Reflection and conversation about it can yield legitimate conclusions.

I believe our understanding of evangelism and apologetics should be revolutionized.

No one's decision-making process is purely objective. Decisions that mix objective and subjective priorities are the only decisions human beings are capable of making. So in evangelism, we shouldn't merely give evidence that points to Christ, urging people to make an inference that Christ's claims are true. Nor should we merely give evidence that proves competing claims false, hoping that people will convert to Christ by an analytical process of elimination.

Rather, the evangelist's goal should be to nurture an awareness of Christ's voice, the recognition of which is all the evidence people will need to follow him.

In my junior high years, I spent hours each week boning up on evidence that the Bible is historically accurate. I wore out Walter Martin tapes, marked up creationist books, and tried to turn conversations toward my findings. The most frequent response I got from non-Christians was no response. I was not saying anything that seriously challenged anyone's worldview. I was not provocative, as I had hoped to be. Nor was I even interesting.

My series on Jesus' truth claims in John 10 is a rare exercise for me in apologetics, the defense of Christian doctrine. We are contrasting Jesus' teachings with those of other religions, showing that the belief in Jesus as the only way to salvation is reasonable. Tagging along with this series, I'll devote a weekly post to some of the more technical issues.

As an opening question, why are my forays into apologetics so rare?

As a matter of theological principle, to begin with, I'm convinced that God's view of human life should not be defended, but asserted. The general tone of the Bible, whether history, epistle, or poetry, is declarative. The Lord spoke. The Lord acted. Heaven and earth obeyed. At some points in the Bible, human beings try to debate God (Job 38:1-42:6; Romans 9:14-21), but they are met with rebuke, not argumentation.

I favor this aggressive stance because God is the ultimate persuader of the human heart (1 Corinthians 2). My job as a preacher is assert his point of view and let his Spirit drive home the contrasts.

My reluctance to defend the Bible is founded on more than theological precept. I also have strategic doubts about the power of evidence-based arguments.

The accumulation of evidence to defend, say, the historicity of Noah's ark responds to modernist attacks according to modernist terms: the hard sciences define truth. In other fields of persuasion, like politics or law, each contender knows that he or she must set the terms of the debate in order to win. For Christians to have allowed modernists to frame spiritual questions in terms of human rationality has been to concede from the beginning that the Bible does not stand on its own. We have followed a losing strategy.

Human beings have to defend themselves according to God's terms, not the other way around. What possible confidence could I have in human justice?

Even further, I find logical problems with the evidence-based approach to apologetics, at least when its aims are confused.

The enterprise has been to confirm biblical veracity with independent data, say, from an archaeological dig. The prophet said this city would be swept into the sea, and lo, here are fibers from the very broom. But a conclusion heavier than the evidence will bear often gets dropped on the listener. Because we have the broom fibers, you should believe that the Bible is the true word of God.

In the first place, one would have to confirm every other detail in the Bible to reach that conclusion legitimately.

Additionally, and more importantly, the central assertion of Scripture is not that everything God says is true. The central assertion of Scripture is that "God spoke all these words." The reason to believe in the veracity of the Scriptures is that they were given by God. Even if one were able to find independent confirmation of every datum in the Bible, he still would not have proved that God is the Bible's source.

I rarely teach apologetics because the arguments are defensive. They can be legitimate, but are always limited. They can wear down an attacker and parry a blow, but they cannot convert the human soul.

Only a bold assertion of God's rights, without apology, can do that.

Sermon audio (11-9-08): The Blind Man Finally Sees The ongoing furor over Proposition 8 -- the successful California initiative banning same-sex marriage -- heats up the question of how churches should relate to society in general and governments in particular. The intensified hostility against evangelicals, pointedly expressed on picket lines and in court rooms, is focusing believers' minds up and down the state.

In our church, we have just finished studying the man born blind in John 9, the beggar who stood alone against the rulers. What are the potential applications of his example in today's California? Will Christians face persecution because of their stand on marriage? More broadly, how does the New Testament portray the relationship between 1st century Christians and the societies in which they lived?

Some not entirely random observations, starting with the broadest issue:

1. The culture portrayed in the New Testament was diverse, and idolatry and sexual immorality were mainstream, institutionalized fixtures.

Roman society had many gods, with cultic practices that varied from city to city. The idolatry permeated civic and social interactions, and no Christian could escape direct contact with it (1 Corinthians 8-10). Places such as Corinth and Ephesus were notorious, but not unusual, for their public sexuality. In 1 Corinthians, Paul dealt with the impact of this immorality on the church, issues like which sexual relationships were legal and illegal, and the common use of temple prostitutes (1 Corinthians 5:1-2; 6:12-20).

The New Testament commands Christians to look after their own purity in sex and worship. It nowhere commands them to legislate Jesus Christ as the official God of their cities, or to pass laws that reflect biblical standards. Cultural and economic upheaval is anticipated as more people follow Christ, but only as a secondary consequence of Christ's power, not as a result of direct agitation by Christians (Acts 19:21-41).

2. Christianity in the New Testament was an urban phenomenon. The apostles went from city to city, and the gospel thrived in the hustle of commerce and the competition among new ideas. Indeed, the fact that ethnic and religious identities were softened by so much cultural interaction was a major opening for the news that a Jew had died for the whole world.

3. We are living in the decaying civilization called Christendom, an accumulation of habits, institutions, and modes of thought rooted in Athens and Jerusalem. This era of decay is a monumental time in Western civilization, at the end of which a new collection of cultures will emerge with ethics, religions, and polities that are not entirely foreseeable now. In the sweep of human history, this process is normal. The Bible records many such shifts.

California is not at the leading edge of this transition. Europe is.

4. The end of Christendom is not something to celebrate.

The decay of old habits and institutions is destabilizing and even corrupting. The cynicism and decadence that we find everywhere now are signs of selfish and purposeless living, not signs of intellectual vitality. When a simple virtue like gratitude for our cultural inheritance is held up to scorn, we can be assured that other personal disciplines like courage, integrity, and fidelity have long since passed.

Declining to throw a party over the end of Christendom is not a sign of cultural arrogance. It is simple realism. All cultural decay, at all times, and in all places leads to moral confusion.

5. The fight to preserve Christendom is misguided.

Same-sex marriage is not the tipping point in the demise of Christendom. That point was passed long, long ago. (World War I might be a good candidate.) As much as we may mourn at the grave of our heritage, it is not a sign of health to try and dig up the corpse.

Again, Christians who mourn the loss of what was good in our inheritance are not wrong. But, as they mourn, they need to do the day's work. The end of governments founded on broadly Christian notions is an opportunity to change what Christendom built in error -- specifically, we can now detach the spiritual from the political.

6. Christianity can thrive in California.

Our context is more like the first century than the nineteenth, more like the societies in which Christian faith exploded than those in which it was dying. The predictions of the death of the faith in California are foolish. There is nothing happening now that hasn't constituted an opportunity for believers in the past. The faith may indeed die out here, but if it does, it will not be the result of unstoppable external forces. It will die because Christians stop believing.

7. Christians can now thrive if they will think of themselves more like the beggar in John 9 than the rulers.

Evangelicals project a sense of ownership in American society, ownership that is at best debatable and probably specious. Their populist calls to arms are all based on the planted axiom that the rightful authorities have been usurped. This is the wrong posture. We face a confident and established culture of secular priorities. The unbelievers rule. Let's be the beggars.

The beggar's individual integrity is more powerful than collective activism. His first-hand testimony about Jesus Christ is more potent than arguments about the shape of social institutions. And the beggar's suffering is for one cause and one only: the name of Jesus Christ.

I'll put it differently. When each Christian in California has the simplicity and tenacity for Christ that the man born blind had, we won't worry any longer about the death of our traditions. We will be at the beginning of a Christian counterculture.

Sermon audio (11-2-08): Simple and Stubborn On Sunday evenings at our church, I lead a Q & A session about the morning's sermon. Last Sunday, with Barack Obama haunting the auditorium, we discussed the man born blind in John 9, and the challenge of bearing witness to Christ now. A key point in the sermon (audio above) had been that the beggar was a great model: when under pressure, just repeat what you have directly seen Christ do in your life.

One question responded to that point, and got close to the heart of why I did this series on individuality in Christ.

Bob the logger noted his charismatic upbringing, from which he learned not to take people's testimonies about Jesus seriously. He said that, because of the sensationalism he saw among pentecostals, he has not talked much about his personal relationship with Christ, using objective arguments that apply beyond subjective experiences instead.

Was I saying that he should reverse course? Should he talk about his personal experiences without worrying about universals, logic, or principles? Isn't that a surrender to postmodern thinking? (Our loggers are well-read, in case you're wondering.)

Three observations:

1. The death of reason has been greatly exaggerated. Reasoning has merely changed focus.

Many fear that the postmodern person uses experience as a substitute for logic, that the only thing she respects is emotion. I haven't found this to be the case. Rather, I find that the postmodern person is rightly suspicious of extravagant claims, having once believed too many scientific studies that were biased, too many news reports that served an agenda, and too many experts who were paid to bluff the uninitiated.

Postmodern people will listen carefully to any argument that splices together from many points of view a picture in 3-D. They know that reality is complex, and that we are too easily faked out by our narrow perceptions. And they are right to raise the bar on claims to objectivity.

2. Younger Christians' apologetical shift from propositional arguments to personal experience reflects postmodern suspicion. But their reflection is inarticulate and potentially dangerous.

It's one thing to accept the postmodern challenge to show the truth of Christ from many points of view. This acceptance deals with our culture as it actually is, without compromising the Bible's radical claims. But it's quite another thing to abandon the truth of Christ, saying instead that all points of view are equally valid. While this approach certainly deals with our culture as it is, the approach does so only through capitulation.

I believe Christians can shift the focus of their reasoning without compromise, but only with careful thought about what they are doing and why. To wit . . .

3. In John's Gospel, the argument for the truth of Christ is not being made by believers but by the Lord.

The logic of the Gospel of John is founded on the testimony of individual witnesses, and the book is written with the density of a legal narrative. Each witness gives distinct and specific testimony, establishing distinct and specific facts. No single witness proves the entire case, but all of them taken together do prove it. The person who deploys all the witnesses to make his argument is Christ himself.

For example, John the Baptist comes as a witness to the light (1.6-8). His testimony is that he saw the Spirit descend on Jesus at his baptism, just as God had told him (1.31-34). "And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God." Jesus later cites John the Baptist's testimony (5.31-35). "You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth." John the Baptist was part of Jesus' larger argument. John delivered one authentic point of view.

The beggar in chapter 9 is another example. Jesus says (9.3) that the man was born blind "that the works of God might be displayed in him." The healing of the man's sight was only the warm-up for that display; the main event consisted of the beggar telling the same story about Jesus repeatedly, and insisting (9.25), "One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." From his unique point of view, the beggar was able to conclude, "If this man [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing."

With the ascendancy of Obama and the diverse, postmodern culture he represents, many Christians will look more frantically for killer arguments. They will want to prove the morality of the Bible and the claims of Christ within the terms of philosophy, science, and especially social science. But they will fail to find these arguments -- fail in the sense that they will not persuade the unbeliever, no matter how incisive their arguments may be.

What you can do now is just what Bob the logger suggested with his question. Reverse course. Instead of using a lingo of proof that rightly arouses people's suspicions, you can speak from within your own point of view, describing what Christ has done for you. You can put your testimony in the context of what God says in the Bible. And you can do this without fear of compromising the truth.

God will make his own case, deploying your testimony just as he deployed the beggar's. We are God's witnesses, giving testimony under pressure, as the Holy Spirit persuades the world of the Gospel (15.26-16.11).

In other words, in the culture we now face, it has never been more important for you to reflect the light of Jesus Christ as an individual.

Audio (September 28, 2008): Limitations You Would Never Choose I love the visual energy of the iPod ads that feature young Dionysians wired for sound and abandoned to their music.

But I don't love the spiritual energy. The ads express the dominant American religion of Self. I need to throw off restraints. Inside of me is a unique vitality that I should unleash, and if I can live in my own sonic space (courtesy of Apple) my ecstatic power will burst out.

The individuality in Christ that we are studying in John 9 is the opposite of iPod religion.

When Jesus passes a beggar born blind, the disciples ask him why the beggar is so disabled, so limited. Who sinned, the man or his parents, to bring such a doom upon him?

A pretty revealing question. The disciples assume that the beggar's suffering was caused by unrighteousness, an assumption for which they offer no evidence because they regard the blindness as evidence enough.

But they also seem to view the beggar's limitations as destroying his potential. What might he have become if it weren't for his or his parents' sin? For the disciples, potential value is all about personal power. In relation to the beggar, they see themselves as righteous and free. They have their sight, their ability to move around unaided, their ability to work for a living. Their powers are what make them vital, valuable individuals.

To be sure, the disciples feel the beggar's condition is tragic, but only from a speculative point of view.

Jesus does not see the beggar's limitations the same way. He teaches the disciples that the man's blindness was permitted so that "the works of God might be displayed in him." The man's potential, for Jesus, is not in capabilities. It's in limitations. The man's blindness and low status will offer a glimpse of God's power that will be uniquely valuable to the world.

In saying this, Jesus does not minimize the severity of the beggar's suffering. In fact, by healing the man's blindness, Jesus rebukes the darkness of this world that creates pain and loss.

But Jesus does see limitations as divine opportunities.

Consider this: the limitations around the beggar do not disappear once he is healed. They just morph. The authenticity of the man's experience is questioned by his neighbors, and he becomes a political target of the Pharisees. The man's own parents, though they acknowledge him as their son, refuse to affirm his story out of selfish fear.

In releasing the man from one set of limitations, Jesus leaves him in another set. The man is even more alone now than when he was blind.

Yet it is the man's solitude that displays God's glory for a second time, in an even greater way than the healing. The beggar's stubborn adherence to Jesus when no one else will support him speaks to us. "Whether [Jesus] is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." God uses a poor, illiterate man to rivet our attention and bolster our courage even after two thousand years. He uses the man's limitations.

According to Jesus, the limitations on your life are full of potential for God's glory. Your individuality in Christ is not just your advantages over other people, but is your whole person -- especially your suffering.

The iPod religion of throwing off restraints, living in your inner world, and releasing your Self, is a heresy against life. Life is limited. Those who want to live do not dissipate their powers in fantasy.

Instead of the Dionysian madness of fake freedom, Jesus gives us the Christian madness of real joy.

Sermon audio: Should God Send People To Hell? Henry Adams, the 19th century man of letters, said that his sister Louisa was "quick, sensitive, wilful . . . energetic, sympathetic and intelligent . . . ." In their relationship as adults, Adams wrote (referring to himself in the third person) that "he was delighted to give her the reins -- to let her drive him where she would." (The Education of Henry Adams, Riverside Editions, 1973, p 85)

In 1870, Louisa was thrown from a cab in Italy, and by the time Adams arrived from London at her bedside, he wrote, "Tetanus had already set in." "Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsions." (p 287)

Adams wrote, "[T]he idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. . . . God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person." (p 289)

In so exaggerating the biblical view of God, Adams expressed what many 19th century people were thinking about God and human suffering. God could never cause or permit torment. The idea was unbearable. So He was portrayed more and more as impersonal, a new, humanitarian god rising over inhumane urban landscapes, and rising very much in the distance -- uninvolved in real life, only in idealized dreams.

But here is the way Adams described Louisa's end, one paragraph before his rejection of God's being a person. In her death, Adams had finally seen "Nature." Read the passage (p 288) at length, if you can:

Nature enjoyed [her death], played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with midsummer blood. The sickroom itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

Though Henry Adams could not bear God as a person, he felt able to personify nature -- the nonrational, primal person tormenting Louisa, and loving it. In fact, Adams was working up to the theme of his Education, that the essence of modern life is the shift from God's power to Nature's. Human beings are still held by vast forces, but at least the savagery squashes us without reason.

It's hard for me to see what problem Adams solved.

Many evangelicals seem to have appropriated Adams' vaporized god. When the issue is even more intense than human suffering, like the question I got this year about whether God should send people to hell, evangelicals often spin into waltzes of abstraction. They hope to make the doctrine of hell bearable with banal euphemisms.

The gold standard for evading the realities of the biblical hell has been set by the phrase, Christless eternity. That is where unbelievers go, into that . . . whatever it is. The phrase is a gem of emotional dishonesty: one feels that a Christless eternity must be quite bad, but only theoretically. The apparent doom is enough to cover the phrase's total inaccuracy (Revelation 14.9-11).

In such versions of hell, God is safely depersonalized. He is absent, passive, merely allowing unbelievers to feel their poverty. Evangelicals often do the same thing with hell that Adams did with human suffering in general: make God incapable of involvement. Evangelicals apparently feel that the picture of a Personality capable of vengeance is indefensible.

But in order to answer questions about hell, that very picture is the one we must face. The Bible claims that God will take judicial vengeance on those who revile him (Jude 8-16). In fact, when the Bible pictures God in judgment, it places his personal hatred of sin front and center. Psalm 2.4-6, in which God laughs at the kings of the earth and terrifies them by pointing to Messiah, is a relatively tame example. The final judgment, as Christ himself taught it in Matthew 25.31-46, is explicitly a personal cursing of the wicked.

So evangelicals should not pretend that the question about hell is whether God punishes sin actively and personally. He does. The question is whether he is right. That is the issue we address on Sunday.

Like Adams, evangelicals do not solve any problems with a vaporized god. Hell is no less painful, no less eternal, when it is described in euphemisms. We should deal with hell as it is, not as a place where God turns away from sinners in disappointment, but as a place where He turns toward sinners, those who never wavered in their hatred of Him, with personal, perfect fury.

Hell is, by definition, unbearable.

Intellectuals thrive on complexity. They regard certainty and simplicity as signs of immaturity, and they have some good reasons. Take Brian McLaren's critique of mainstream evangelicalism. McLaren has identified an attitude that is a hindrance to everything from effective persuasion to loving fellowship. The attitude is the us v. them, chip-on-the-shoulder, we're-right-they're-wrong impatience with which evangelicals tend to deal with the wide surrounding world. From his writings, one gathers that McLaren has had enough.

The problem with evangelical pomposity is that it has preempted learning. If we're right and they're wrong, then all we have to do is stay right. Tell the unbelievers one more time why their views on abortion, education, government, and values are heinous. Our fidelity to the truth can reduce to repeated talking points -- say it again, this time with feeling! -- a tactic that shuts out feedback and degrades relationships to mere exchanges of rhetorical bullets.

McLaren wants to change this attitude, and he is right. I have devoted many posts to the cultural backwater that is evangelical populism, where applications of truth are stagnant.

But McLaren's desire for greater openness seems to have led him to oversimplifications of his own, and ultimately to a redefinition of truth itself. The book is, of course, A Generous Orthodoxy.

His now-famous modification of orthodoxy with generous suggests that orthodoxy by itself is petty. When he comes to defining what orthodoxy is, McLaren starts this way (p 28): "For most people, orthodoxy means right thinking or right opinions, or in other words, ‘what we think,' as opposed to ‘what they think.'" For McLaren, orthodoxy tends to be petty because most people view it in adversarial terms.

The sentence is an early bit of slippage. I know many self-satisfied Christians who like few things better than to hear the us v. them story again and call it Christianity. But their pettiness does not determine what orthodoxy is. McLaren is building up to his redefinition by implying a simple choice between orthodoxy alone (petty) and orthodoxy plus generosity (loving).

His alternative definition comes in the next sentence. "In contrast, orthodoxy in this book may mean something like ‘what God knows, some of which we believe a little, some of which they believe a little, and about which we all have a whole lot to learn.'" The truth is beyond our reach, in God's mind, and the various factions of human spirituality each have pieces of it. To follow orthodoxy, according to this definition, is to be generous to the other factions and to learn from them.

Orthodoxy may mean that. It may mean something like that. In this book.

The care with which McLaren poses as tentative and playful is necessary to disguise the enormity of what he puts over in that definition. Orthodoxy is inaccessible. It's "what God knows." This is a romanticist punt, even transcendentalist. Emerson could've written it, irony and all. Intellectuals may feed on such continually evolving knowledge, but the gruel is too thin for simple believers.

Actual Christian orthodoxy teaches that God himself is incomprehensible, but that he has given us a revelation of his nature and will by which he is knowable. Orthodoxy is not in God's mind. It's in his Word, both written and incarnate. It's accessible. The distinction between the living God and the doctrines about him --the distinction that ought to keep us humble -- already thrives where theology is a scholarly discipline rather than a grass-roots rallying point.

But I just ran smack into another sentence closing McLaren's paragraph on orthodoxy. McLaren says, "Most people are too serious, knowledgeable, and busy for such an unorthodox definition of orthodoxy." So he makes an intriguing definition tentatively and then bluffs his way out of being examined, an escape-hatch from accountability that he seems to open pretty often.

The definition I've analyzed comes in a chapter titled, "For Mature Audiences Only." How would McLaren define mature? I'll venture a definition for him: "For most people, maturity means being accountable for what you say. In contrast, maturity in this book may mean something like being comfortable with irony."

I hope we can learn and grow as human beings without intellectual games.

The headline in the New York Times on Sunday read, "Anglican Conservatives, Rebelling on Gays, Will Form New Power Bloc." Conservatives from Africa, South America, India, Australia, and the United States met in Jerusalem to "create a new ecclesiastical province in the United States and Canada to absorb the parishes that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions." The story put my week at the conference of the Evangelical Free Church of America in perspective. As we debated a thorough revision of our statement of faith in St. Louis, there were none of the Anglican agonies.

My Episcopalian brothers and sisters have endured a crisis of doctrine, conscience, and fellowship for years, a crisis induced by an American leadership determined to remake Christianity in their own image. Only now do conservatives have a chance to emerge from the crisis with a communion they can embrace. My friends with Episcopalian parishes would affirm the work God has done among their people, but the strain in their voices when they describe meeting with machine-driven bishops tells some of the cost of that work.

I continue to be inspired by their example while thanking God that I don't have to carry their burden. I am blessed by the godly leaders of the EFCA.

When I first heard about the proposal to revise the EFCA statement of faith, I was suspicious. I have little confidence in organizations. One of my largest challenges as a leader is my own cynicism about institutional goals: I can't bring myself to use the lingo of teams, which I associate with conformism. So when the word unity shows up on banners, I'm chiefly interested in discovering the agenda behind it.

But now I can honestly say --

I interrupt this repentance just to emphasize that my suspicion of many leadership practices in institutions is unchanged. I don't like grand visions, glossy marketing, rah-rah speeches, videos, ads disguised as magazine articles, groupthink disguised as fellowship, the exaltation of the team player as the ultimate example of godliness, or the permanent smile of the mass communicator. Just so that's clear.

I like networks of people in relationship with each other. I like to see those people, as unique individuals interacting with other unique individuals, make corporate decisions on the basis of biblical principles and their shared history. I like leaders who understand that this kind of process can't be reconciled with marketing, but only thrives on good old deliberation.

The reason I was won over to the revised statement of faith is that the EFCA's leaders -- President Bill Hamel, the board of directors, credentialing director Greg Strand, and the Spiritual Heritage committee -- showed that unity was not their slogan but their goal. They showed their integrity with patient engagement and transparency.

To strengthen our unity, we need a statement of faith that stirs us with its truth and timeliness, and the proposed revision certainly delivers. Its statement on the doctrine of God slams the door on open theism, letting the Lord's full glory out:

"We believe in one God, Creator of all things, holy, infinitely perfect, and eternally existing in a loving unity of three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Having limitless knowledge and sovereign power, God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for Himself and to make all things new for His own glory."

The new statement on the Bible is specific and sweeping:

"We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises."

Paragraph #4 on Jesus Christ is filled with terms evoking the biblical narrative of redemption, and paragraph #8 on Christian living is a needed affirmation of God's purposes for salvation. As a confession of the biblical heritage of Evangelical Free churches, this statement will deepen our unity for decades to come.

But more important than producing a strong document was how the leaders produced it. A key issue for many pastors and lay leaders around the country was whether an affirmation of the premillennial return of Christ (#10) should be included in the new statement. At first, the spiritual heritage committee recommended that the term premillennial be dropped. They had good reasons, and at first I agreed with them. It is not an essential doctrine for a person's salvation, and it does pose difficulties for our cooperation with outside ministries.

But as I listened to older pastors in the movement, the significance of my own commitment to premillennialism deepened. This particular teaching was a passionate focus of the fathers of our movement more than a century ago. It has relevance today as evangelicals decide whether their engagement in politics is a matter of Christianizing the State or evangelizing souls. The EFCA is not among those calling for Christian laws in order to hasten the return of Christ. Christ will set up his own law, in his Father's time.

The EFCA leaders said they would listen to input from the churches. When that input showed a strong desire to retain premillennialism in the revision, the leaders did listen. They put the term premillennial back in the statement. Then they won over most of those who had originally supported dropping it. They impressed me with their reverence for history and fellowship.

The 2008 conference adopted the revision by an 86% vote. I am proud to have been a part of it. I'm grateful for the consistent orthodoxy of our movement. And I'm encouraged to have witnessed the deliberation of a network of people, not the operations of a machine.

Every Sunday, flights of lunacy from pulpits make sober Christians cringe. I guess, sooner or later, a maniacal statement was bound to go viral. For one thing, lunacy in preachers is so common. For another, the presidential campaign this year demanded a Republican sacrifice to balance Jeremiah Wright. And for another, the reliable men who provided self-satire in the past have either retired or gone to their reward. So, in the providence of God, John Hagee became the guy who took evangelical lunacy to the next level.

Major news organizations had been eying him suspiciously ever since he endorsed John McCain for president, principally because Hagee has described Roman Catholicism in the pungent terms of whoredom. But his elaborate support of Israel had been in his favor, at least freeing him from the taint of anti-Semitism. Alas, there was a sleeper.

Hagee had preached that the holocaust was part of God's plan to get the Jews back to the land. As reported in the New York Times, he said,

How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter. . . . That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, "My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Late last week, McCain dumped him.

By Monday evening, Joe Liebermanwas pushed to answer whether he would speak to Hagee's group supporting Israel, becoming the latest politician to wish he hadn't consorted with preachers. (Lieberman said he will speak to the group.)

Hagee's comments about Hitler provoked debate that almost reached theology. There was, for instance, a post by Claire Hoffman on Sunday about the many "plans" God seems to have for the world.

The offense Hagee gave was in making God the author of Hitler's genocide. His statement as reported is exegetically indefensible. Jeremiah (the prophet from Jerusalem, not Chicago) never wrote that the murder of six million Jews would bring the Israelites back to the land. That idea is pure Hagee.

Doctrinally, Hagee's statement is loose -- at best. While he did say that God allowed, rather than caused, the holocaust, Hagee still explained the holocaust as God's calculation that Israel's return to the land was more important than six million lives. That explanation is, as theologian John McCain might say, "crazy and unacceptable." (Necessary qualifier: it is possible that Hagee makes other statements elsewhere in the sermon, or in other sermons, that clarify his understanding of God's wisdom and justice.)

But a neglected aspect of Hagee's offense is pastoral. His statement minimizes the unspeakable human cost of Hitler's genocide, a cost that is still within living memory. It's a clichéd spiritualizing of loss to say to the grieving that God had better things in mind for them than living with the ones they love. God does not call his pastors to glorify him by trivializing human suffering.

Inhumanity is entirely human. God has no complicity in it. The only reason there are not holocausts in every nation, every day, is that the good hand of God restrains human malice.

It is tempting to pronounce woes against the gotcha culture that has claimed Hagee. But I think the current animosity against preachers could be part of God's plan. Preachers must now remember that we can be YouTubed, and that our fulminations can reach those who won't interpret us charitably. We may learn how significant our words really are. We may discover a godly caution that is appropriate to teachers (James 3), and may find boldness in truths instead of self-indulgent abstractions.

But that, of course, will require us to study.

Three weeks ago, my dad gave me a book, which the old man almost never does. From the early seventies, when he devoured The Lord of the Rings, to the mid-nineties, when he discovered that Calvin and Luther agreed with him about predestination, Dad was not a reader. Even now that he has books going much of the time, he doesn't talk about them much. So, for him to haul off and give me The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer -- not just recommend it, but hand me a copy -- was urgent enough that I started it immediately. That night, I sat in the orchestra pit during the dialog of the Sondheim show I was playing, and devoured page after page -- only putting the book down when the conductor insinuated that a downbeat was headed my way.

I have been writing in a meandering, bloggish sort of way about evangelical populism. I have described it as a mindset of suspicion and resentment, of "us versus them," that has shut down cultural interaction between evangelicals and other Americans. I have also noted populism's emotional shallowness, as well as its conformism and corruption.

To close this theme (and the blog's readers sighed with relief), I sum up my problem with evangelical populism: it has fostered a damning self-complacency.

When we present Christianity as a social program, as one side in a protracted culture war, we commit several crimes simultaneously. We mistake the cultural legacy of biblical faith, Judeo-Christian civilization, for the gospel itself. It is a well-worn heresy, though wrapped now in the old red, white, and blue. We also take a rhetorical posture that is alien to the New Testament, that of the debater who scores points off the gaffs and weaknesses of his opponent. This vandalizes the office of preacher.

But most alarmingly, we teach ourselves by rote, election after election, that we stand for the truth, that we defend God's holiness, that we are the Lord's people doing the Lord's work. That is to say, we teach ourselves a lie. A mere glance into the family lives of church-going people these days confirms their utter lack of spiritual power.

To foster such self-complacency is to freeze souls against the grace of God.

Which brings me back to Tozer's book. The Root of the Righteous is a collection of editorials he wrote for his denominational magazine during the 1950s, and their dated quality as artifacts gives them, for me, a kind of prophetic unction, as if the Spirit makes the dust of the decades say amen.

Take the very first sentence of the book:

One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. (p 3)

That alone is a lot to ponder. Tozer meant that, in the 1950s, believers regarded a "serious-minded approach to sacred things" as something to smile at. He said, "Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief, bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season." (p 4)

Take this blunt assessment: "Probably the most widespread and persistent problem to be found among Christians is the problem of retarded spiritual progress." (p 7) Or this observation about "the inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment" in the 1950s:

The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his own breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him. (p 31)

Churches in the 1950s surrendered to the consumer mindset. Tozer says (p 33) that they "have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate 'producers' peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency."

Tozer also makes the striking observation that religious life in the 1950s showed "a lack of integration in the religious personality. There seems to be no vital connection between the emotional and volitional departments of the life. The mind can approve and the emotions enjoy while the will drags its feet and refuses to go along." (p 56)

Tozer fed people with an exalted view of Christ that nurtured reverent fear, not prim judgmentalism. He wrote and spoke with authority about the God who had won his submission.

Imagine strong words like his in a denominational magazine today. It's impossible: such publications have become mere public relations pieces. They would never warn Christians against dead spirituality, or its specific symptoms. That would be way too preachy.

This is a measure of how much leaders flatter us, and how deeply we need their flattery.

It's also a measure of my old man's good taste. Calvin, Luther, Tolkien, Tozer.

This post may become a rant. We'll just see. A big part of my beef with populism is that it corrupts evangelical leaders, and I choose the verb corrupt for its precision. Populism rots a leader's soul.

1. Populism substitutes the lowest common denominator for unity.

I've said that evangelical populists whip up people's negative emotions, like resentment and suspicion, using carefully chosen enemies. The problems with "our society" are the fault of "the Hollywood elites" or some other class. I've also said that the populist can only evoke people's positive emotions through sentimentality, using symbols that have nostalgic, tear-jerking potential.

This simplistic emotionalism enables large groups of people to feel united by cheering or booing. It's easy to feel bonded while we cheer the armed forces or boo the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A leader just has to speak to his audience's gut, and common cause has been achieved.

But evangelicals in America both need and desire a deep identification with Jesus Christ. They need the unity of the Holy Spirit, which is only attained through doctrinal purity and relational grace, through truth and love -- the very highest things anyone can imagine. What sort of leadership tries to achieve any other kind of oneness?

2. Populism substitutes clichés for truth.

The much-touted evangelical passion for the Bible is now largely spent, not because average evangelicals don't care what the Bible says but because their leaders won't teach it to them. The vast majority of sermons preached in American churches quote biblical snatches, as if Scripture were a sacred Bartlett's. Structurally, however, these quotations are not the focus of teaching, but are called upon to support the preacher's points. They are little better than slogans.

This preaching strategy is unavoidable for a populist, who conceives of his audience as virtuously stupid. He can't presume to teach The People, who already know everything they need through their vast common sense, and who are sick and tired of the university elites telling them what to think. The only thing he can do is remind them. After all, they don't need to know the conjugation of Greek verbs, and their attention span is . . .

The average evangelical in America both needs and desires God's word. In fourteen years of preaching, I have yet to encounter a single stupid person. I have heard a lot of stupid preachers, who use their audience's education level as an excuse never to master the arts of communication. What sort of leadership ducks the responsibility to teach?

3. Populism substitutes manipulation for leadership.

Manipulation is control. Manipulation is arousing people's emotions without paying deference to their intelligence. Manipulation is blame-shifting, making other classes responsible for cultural evils. Manipulation is flattering people's self-regard. Manipulation is the attempt to modify people's behavior without edifying their souls.

American evangelicals need spiritual leadership -- and I am convinced that they'll respond to the genuine article. What sort of leadership uses the tools of control?

The reason populism corrupts evangelical leaders is this: Populism is a lie. It tells The People that they are virtuous simply because they are The People. It tells them they are one when they are merely conformist. It tells them they have knowledge when they've only inherited a collection of Bible verses misapplied. And the worst populist lie of all is that The People are a herd instead of a body.

Can any leader believe such things without his soul rotting in cynicism?