Category: Other Reviews

Trevin Wax on the Legacy of John R. Rice and Fundamentalism

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

I recently stumbled across another review of The Sword of the Lord by Andrew Himes. I’ve reviewed Himes’ look at his grandfather, John R. Rice’s legacy, and enjoyed his analysis of the development of fundamentalism. Well, I just found Trevin Wax’s review of the same book, and learned that he also shares a fundamentalist past. His review is excellent, and his thoughts on fundamentalism and John R. Rice are worth excerpting here.

First, Trevin opens his review with his own personal story regarding his fundamentalist upbringing:

I can’t make sense of my Christian heritage apart from the independent Baptist movement of the last century. My father was born in Wheaton, IL, the city where my grandfather was employed as the printer for the Sword of the Lord, the premier fundamentalist newsweekly during the second half of the 1900″²s. When John R. Rice, the founder and first editor of The Sword, decided to move the headquarters to Murfreesboro, TN in the mid-60″²s, my grandparents moved with him. It was in Murfreesboro, at John R. Rice’s church, that my parents met each other and were married.

Rice died in the hospital I was born in. Though he died six months before I was born, I was raised in the shadow of his influence. During the earliest and most formative years of my life, I understood my identity as an independent Baptist. I was well versed in the fundamentalist distinctions that separated us not only from the world but also from “Christians who love the world.”

I’m grateful for my fundamentalist upbringing, particularly for the amount of Bible knowledge I received at church and in my Christian school. I’m also grateful for an important impulse that continues to shape me today: hold fast to precious truths. The old-school fundamentalists knew there were truths worth protecting, worth holding onto, perhaps dogmatically at times. I think they were right.

But while the independent Baptist movement succeeded in teaching me what to think, it failed in teaching me how to think. When our family joined a fledgling Southern Baptist church plant, I quickly discovered what it was like to be an outsider to the tight-knit community that had once felt like home. Many independent Baptists today would consider me a “liberal” for letting my wife wear pants, for reading versions of the Bible other than King James, or for listening to music with drums. But most of the world would still label me “fundamentalist” — if by that, they mean I adhere the core beliefs at the heart of Reformational Christianity.

Then, after his review of Himes’ book, he gives an analysis of fundamentalism and the legacy of John R. Rice.

The story of John R. Rice offers several lessons for us today. First, we ought to be on guard against a Quietist gospel that would have us retreat from the public implications of the gospel. In Counterfeit Gospels, I write:

Fifty years ago, Southern Baptist pastors admirably preached against many forms of worldliness. But there was evil that many pastors never addressed. In small towns throughout the Deep South, outside the comfort of our sanctuaries on a Sunday night, there were African-American brothers whose bodies were swinging from the trees. And many pastors never said a word… Our preaching may have been loud, but it was all too quiet.

Preaching loudly against certain sins, while leaving massive injustice untouched and unspoken of should not be the norm for Christians who believe that Jesus truly did come out of the grave on Easter morning.

Secondly, we need to recognize and resist the fundamentalist tendency to exaggerate differences and distinctions in order to provide justification for our group’s existence. “Holiness” is not defined by the doctrines that set us apart from other Christians, but the actions and beliefs we hold in common with other Christians that set us apart from the world.

Third, we must not reject everything about fundamentalism. The independent Baptists recognized that there were indeed hills worth dying on. It is possible to conceive of the doctrines and practice of evangelical identity so broadly that the “big tent” falls in on itself. I believe we may be witnessing that kind collapse today. The fundamentalists were wrong to major on minors, but we are often wrong to not major on majors.

Finally, we need to ask God to make us aware of our blind spots. Rice’s legacy was tarnished by his toleration of segregation and racial inequality. He thought he was putting forth a mediating position, but in retrospect, it’s clear that his mediation served only to buttress the existing social structures of the day.

I am thankful for men like John R. Rice. I’m thankful for their belief in truth and their willingness to defend important truths of the Christian faith. Apart from Rice’s ministry to my grandparents fifty years ago, I might not be a Christian today. I’m also thankful for my independent Baptist upbringing. The church folks who nurtured me knew the Bible well and wanted me to know it too. And although I can spot weaknesses in the fundamentalist movement, I admit that evangelicalism also has its fair share of flaws. Even so, I rest in the knowledge that God raises up imperfect people to serve imperfect people and that even through our weaknesses, God shines a spotlight on His magnificent grace.

You may also be interested in the comments under Wax’s post, because there someone mentions the possible impact that Rice and his Sword of the Lord may have had on the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention.

On another note, on The Sword of the Lord book’s website, they’re offering a summer digital sale. You can get an ebook copy of the book for only 7.99. Details here. You can also pick up the book at Amazon.com.

Spirituality, Homosexuality and the Primordial Cosmic Unity

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

Recently, I’ve explored the issues of homosexuality. I reviewed The Complete Christian Guide to Understanding Homosexuality edited by Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche (Harvest House) and Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill (Zondervan). Both books demonstrate concern and awareness of the plight of people struggling with same-sex attractions yet still aiming to be committed to the Christian call for sexual chastity.

Yes, I do believe Christianity calls us to live a life devoted to holiness and that does mean no sex outside of heterosexual marriage. We are to live in light of God’s created intent for this world: one man, one woman together in mutual love and submission for life, as husband and wife. But this is a fallen world and we all battle sinful urges which compel us to violate God’s standards for a holy life. Innately, and biologically even, we are driven toward pride, dishonesty, sinful strife, jealousy, and yes we are drawn to fantasize sinfully over objectified people of either gender. Some struggle one way, others another, but just because we were born as sinners and have a bent toward sinning, doesn’t mean we are not called to “abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.”

I wanted to point out a significant book review which brought up something I hadn’t truly considered before when it comes to this controversial topic. Dr. Peter Jones of Westminster Seminary, California, reviews a new book by Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (IVP, 2011). His review is worth the long read as it covers where we are in evangelical Christianity today on this issue. One of the points in his review is “the worldview implications of sexuality”. Without further ado, I want to excerpt a good portion from his review here for your benefit. Please do read the whole review, however.

Such thinking not only ignores biblical morals but also denies biblical cosmology. Homosexuality and other forms of sexual blending have deep religious significance within pagan cults. Paris mentions the berdache, the he/she that appears in over one hundred tribes as a “two-spirit” man or woman who functions in the opposite gender, but she claims we know little about them, except that they perform spiritual rituals (67). She also mentions ethnic groups in Siberia, Borneo and the Philippines that “grant religious roles for those of ambiguous sexual biology or those of same sex attraction” (67-8). Never once does she inquire as to what those religious roles might be, nor the spirituality there practiced.

The End of Sexuality fails to recognize that homosexuals have functioned consistently, from the mists of time and all over the globe, as occultic shamans in all kinds of pagan religions. Mircea Eliade, a world-renowned authority on world religions, and one of the architects of the new spirituality, demonstrates that through time and space a commonplace figure in the pagan cultus is an emasculated priest. This common religious universal, or archetype, is identified with a particular kind of spirituality. We see the myth of a bisexual or androgynous god in ancient Mesopotamian and Indo-European nature religions, as well as in the myths of Australian Aborigines, African tribes, South American Indians and Pacific islanders, all still surviving today. In all these religions, observes Eliade, “ritual androgynisation” is a “symbolic restoration of Chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” Homosexual androgyny, the joining of male and female in the same person, functions in these countless traditional religions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum…symboliz[ing]…perfection…[and] ultimate being.”

Homosexuality is not limited here to morals or the lack thereof. It is employed as the attempt to define the very nature of the cosmos as inherently divine. It is for this reason that the Old Testament denounces homosexuality in such strong terms, since it is a sign of pagan religion. Paris’s dismissal of Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality as “the five or six passages” fails to see the injunctions as part of a major polemic against anti-creational paganism. The context of the much-cited prohibition against homosexuality states, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan” (Lev 18:3; see Lev 20:23). Leviticus presents sexual activity between two men as an example of the pagan religion of the Canaanites, which the people of Yahweh should avoid. In other words, it is the religion (implicit in the act, in its rejection of God the Creator), more than the morals, which is in view.

Certainly, not all homosexuals see these religious connotations, nor have they come to homosexuality for religious reasons. Nevertheless many contemporary homosexuals see this deep connection. It is what J. Michael Clark, professor at Emory University and Georgian State University, and a gay spokesman, understood about the berdache. Clark, once a Christian, could not find an adequate place for his sexuality in biblical faith, and turned to Native American animism for an acceptable spiritual model. He found in the berdache, this androgynous American Indian shaman, born as a male but choosing to live as a female, “a desirable gay spiritual model,” because the berdache achieves “the reunion of the cosmic, sexual and moral polarities,” that is, the classic pagan “joining of the opposites.” …

Other notable contemporary homosexuals understand their sexuality in occultic religious terms. Professor Emily Culpepper, an Ex-Southern Baptist and now a lesbian pagan witch, sees gays and lesbians, in her words, as “shamans for a future age.” She reserves a spiritual role for homosexuals, for a shaman is “…a charged, potent, awe-inspiring, and even fear-inspiring person who takes true risks by crossing over into other worlds.”

A contemporary gay theorist, Toby Johnson, inspired by the modern-day popularizer of pagan mythology, Joseph Campbell, believes that present-day gay consciousness represents a new religious paradigm, for:

  • it undermines the authority and legitimacy of the institutions of traditional religion;
  • it helps to see the world with a harmonious, non-dualistic vision;
  • in its ecstatic pangs of longing inspired by same-sex beauty, it experiences reverberations and recollections of humanity’s common mystical oneness with Gaia; and
  • it helps humanity to get over dualistic, polarized (male-dominant) thinking, and thus save the world in awareness of common planetary identity.

With the place of homosexuality firmly established as an essential component of cultic and religious nature worship, it was inevitable that a Jungian, June Singer, would give the ultimate expression of the deeply religious importance of homosexuality. She said already in 1977, “the archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to …the primordial cosmic unity, that is, it is the sacrament of monism, functioning to erase distinction…[this understanding of sexuality was] nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal God-image.”

Clearly, Singer’s non-binary definition of sex does not fit “a Christian understanding” of creation (34). How powerfully, in its pagan self-understanding, it opposes what Paris also opposes, a “rigid sexual dimorphism” (32). Paris says that “viewing sex on a spectrum…male and female…positioned on the same line, not in two separate categories…makes a credible space for intersex people,” but, alas, such a view also makes an enormous space for occultic spirituality–once the connection of sex with spirituality is made (33).

The theological implications of this opposition to sexual binary categories are enormous. Such naiveté plays into the hands of the non-binary, or non-dual spirituality, which, in its Hindu form, is taking over much of the Western mind and soul. Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West, calls this a spiritual “revival,” based on the Hindu term Advaita, meaning “not two.” The spiritual synthesis, to which progressives believe we are advancing, will be “non-dual,” non-binary. Goldberg declares that Advaita and “non-dual…oneness, unity around non-separation” are “the generic term[s] increasingly used to describe the present and coming spirituality in America””meaning that God and the world are not two.”

I apologize for the lengthy quote, but I wanted Dr. Jones’ case to be established here. This spiritual aspect of homosexuality needs to be understood as evangelicals grapple with the increasing prominence of this issue today. The “otherness” of the Bible’s teaching on this issue should make sense given this wholistic viewpoint. It really is a different spirit and a different religious perspective that fights against the Created order presented in Scripture.

For more on this check out my review of Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill particularly. There I explain how I see Christianity impacting those who have homosexual tendencies.

[HT: Sharper Iron Filings]