Tag: Unity

An Accurate Assessment of Christian Fundamentalism

~ Bob Hayton ~ 15 Comments

I came across an excellent article written by Steve Whigham, a graduate of BJU (apparently) and former administrater/faculty member of Northland International University, now working for World Magazine. [HT: Sharper Iron] His thoughts come with the recent controversy at Northland where the university board fired and then subsequently re-hired Matt Olson as president. Steve points out what others have mentioned, that the controversy was precipitated primarily by Northland’s change in its music. Whether or not that charge (that music is what the controversy at Northland is most about) is correct, Whigham’s rehashing of the history of fundamentalism is worth reading. I have excerpted some of the good parts here, but encourage you to read the whole thing.

This brouhaha about Northland has served to remind me of my reasons for not being a part of the fundamentalist movement. As Whigham points out, the original fundamentalists, historic fundamentalism if you will, prized certain fundamental points of doctrine as worth unifying around and defending. The fundamentalist movement today is prizing doctrines that are not truly fundamental — such as one musical style over another, and unifying around and defending these sub-fundamental doctrines. This is something I don’t see as healthy or helpful. Some of the sub-fundamentals that are being prized may well be good and grand in themselves. But the essence of what fundamentalism entails — prioritizing and defending cardinal truths of the gospel — this essence is lost when something less than the gospel becomes the main thing. I tried to say something to this effect years ago in my post, “Minimizing the Gospel through Excessive Separation.”

Here is the except from Whigham’s article, which you should bookmark as a helpful summary of the history and problem of today’s Christian fundamentalism.

In the late 1960’s and following, Fundamentalism mobilized its arsenal to a new battle front: sheltering the Christian faith from the worldly influences of an American culture run amok. Drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll were the targets… As it relates to practical Christian living, for many fundamentalists the mantra became, “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” So, many preachers began to wage campaigns against certain “worldly” behaviors and drew bold lines between the world and the fundamentalist norm. Women’s dress (skirts only, and must cover the knee) must be modest, “mixed” bathing (allowing girls and boys to swim together at the beach or pool) should not be allowed in order to protect each other from youthful lusts, men’s hair length (shouldn’t be over the ear), listening to rock music, smoking, holding hands for unmarried couples, and a host more, became not only expected behaviors within Fundamentalism, but was also touted as clear biblical mandates….

By the end of the 1980’s, the fight against modernism and German higher
criticism appeared to be over, but the fighting spirit of the movement continued… The battle lines were no longer being fought over the core doctrines of the faith (as was true in the early years) but rather over acceptable behaviors for a fundamentalist. The battles were no longer waged over theology, but over practical Christian living.

Today, there’s a new generation rising up within Fundamentalism which has little to no connection to the historical roots of the movement. These young millennials see a community led by perpetually angry leaders obsessed and divided over issues that have little to do with the more important expressions of Christian doctrine. What they perceive instead is a movement that is more about arbitrary command and control tactics to subdue behavior than about Christ’s core intentions for mankind. It’s a battle that appears to them as having shifted away from morals to mores. Many younger members of fundamentalist communities are no longer seeing “the Fundamentalist Cause” as worth fighting for and are choosing to leave the community for less rancorous pastures. What Fundamentalism is currently experiencing is, with a few exceptions, a decline in church attendance, a drop in fundamentalist school enrollment, and even a sharp reduction in the number of fundamentalist pastors and missionaries being sent out.

Fundamentalism is shrinking quickly and losing its next generation. As Fundamentalism shrinks, the remaining voices in the movement are becoming more shrill. In their sermons and blogposts you can sense the desperation….

In the beginning, the issues Fundamentalism chose to rally around united a community. They united because: (1) the issues were authentic fundamentals and (2) unity was still valued as a vital doctrine of the faith. By today’s use of slash-and-burn rhetoric against anyone with a different take on a point of Christian liberty, unity has been devalued. In order to protect the enclave, Christ’s call for unity has been stripped of all its moral weight. Currently, the issues most “surviving fundamentalists” are now opting to rally around divide rather than unite. And as long as their current fields of battle remain the same, I cannot see the end of the shrinking anytime soon….

R.W. Glenn on Reducing the Christian Faith to a Lifestyle

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

Crucifying Morality: The Gospel of the Beatitudes by R.W. GlennR.W. Glenn packs his small book on the Beatitudes full of grace-filled, gospel-centered wisdom. I posted my brief review of Crucifying Morality: The Gospel of the Beatitudes (Shepherd Press, 2013) earlier this week. Today I want to provide an excerpt where Glenn confronts a problem that is prevalent among conservative evangelical Christians.

“Reducing the Christian faith to a lifestyle” — Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are perhaps most famous for this trait, but a number of other evangelical groups have this tendency as well. In our zeal for protecting children from the evils of this world, and in our desire to live holy lives we sometimes turn faith into a religion, and the gospel into a sub-culture replete with its own rules and customs. Nostalgia for the good old days when sinful lifestyles weren’t on full display in public, and a fondness for large families and wholesome fun — these can be good things, but they can also define us. The problem comes when our familiar way of life, holy as it may be, becomes what we live for and what is most important to us. It takes the place of the gospel and the role of Christian doctrine, and this lifestyle-orientation can keep our kids from true Christianity. But don’t hear just my word for it. Listen to R.W. Glenn as he bemoans this same tendency, which we all should be on guard against.

In a post-Christian culture like ours where many regard moderate religiosity as a good thing, the danger for the church is to reduce the Christian faith to a lifestyle — a subculture complete with its own music and literature and fashions and jargon. This is especially dangerous for those who grow up in the church. Christian parents sometimes worry about their kids being influenced by worldly evils in our oversexed, violent, materialistic culture. They worry that their kids will be negatively influenced by the literature they read, the movies and television shows they watch, the video games they play, and the music they listen to.

Although these things are certainly not benign and do have the capacity to negatively influence children, they are not half as dangerous as reducing Christianity to moralistic religion. These kinds of Christian parents focus on relatively small matters and ignore the possibility of a much more terrible reality. Because it seems so likely that our churched children and teens would remain loyal to the church all their days and live very moral lives, we tend not to worry about them, but their very religiosity makes them even more susceptible to get crushed by the hurricanes of their own sin and the schemes of Satan than a bare house in the path of a Category 5 hurricane….

…if churched children remain unaffected by and inoculated to the gospel — wholesale consumers of just enough gospel lingo and institutional Christianity to look the part — they will completely miss the heart of Christianity. They will miss out on purity of heart. (Kindle Loc. 1359-1372)

I’m interested to hear what you think. Is this tendency a problem? Can you see how it subtly leads us from a gospel-centered Christianity?

Learn more about R.W. Glenn’s new book by reading my review or perusing the product page at Amazon.com or Shepherd Press.

Fundamentalism: Separation-Centered rather than Gospel-Centered

~ Bob Hayton ~ 3 Comments

President Matt Olson at Northland International University is stirring up his fair share of criticism as he enacts reforms and quietly changes the ethos of what was Northland Baptist Bible College. From afar, I applaud his efforts and his bravery. He is taking shots from all sides of the ring!

My blogging friend Will Dudding at The Reforming Baptist, recently explained the pickle that Olson is in a post intriguingly titled “Northland, CCM, Fundamentalism & the Separation Nazis.”

One particular comment from his post really resonated with me. I believe it is spot on and covers almost the entire gamut of fundamentalism. I have bolded the phrase in the except below.

The gospel as the central unifying factor and the matter of first importance is often scoffed at on their blogs. They regularly deride movements like T4G and TGC that are propelling the gospel forward more than Fundamentalism has been doing. Being Separation-centered is more important to them than being Gospel-centered. Fundamentalism as a movement has done nothing in my generation and is going nowhere except to the trash heap of history. Christianity will survive well enough without it. Matt Olsen would do well to eject, but it may cost him his school.

I believe this is the problem, fundamentalists as a whole eschew a gospel-centered unity in favor of a separation-centric modus operandi. I have shared similar thoughts on this idea before in my post “Minimizing the Gospel through Excessive Separation.”

What’s your thought on this? Is it unfair to say fundamentalism is separation-centered?

John Dickerson on the Fragmentation of Evangelicalism

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

The Great Evangelical Recession by John S DickersonIn my recent review of John Dickerson’s new book The Great Evangelical Recession, I was not able to spend as much time as I would have liked on Dickerson’s thoughts regarding the “fragmentation of evangelicalism.” This dis-unity of evangelicalism is indeed a problem, but there are a host of competing views as to what is the exact nature of this problem!

In his book, I found Dickerson’s emphasis on this point to be superb. He boldly calls the church to draw a clear line as to who is in and who is out of the evangelical movement, particularly with regard to the abandonment of penal substitution and inerrancy (p. 157). With regard to these positions, Dickerson says, “I believe it’s time we graciously call such revisions what they are: non-evangelical” (p. 157). Yet at the same time, he labors to point out how we need to be less divisive on the non-essential matters such as politics and some of our doctrinal differences. He lauds Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga and Carl F.H. Henry as men who “parsed a difficult trail between theological liberalism on the left and belligerent reactionism on the right” (p. 219). “True evangelicalism,” he says, “is uncompromising on the essentials and unconditionally gracious on the non-essentials” (p. 161).

In a recent interview of the author by Trevin Wax, Dickerson elaborates again on his vision for evangelical unity. The exchange below is reflective very much of my own views, at this point. I guess I could consider myself a “true evangelical” (if we want another label to be thrown around)! I remain conservative in theology but see the need to be welcoming and gracious (to a point) in how I hold to my various theological and cultural positions. I am interested in my readers’ thoughts on this topic and their assessment of Dickerson’s view as well. So read the excerpt below and let me know what you think.

Trevin Wax: What role does the fragmentation of evangelicalism into distinct tribes and camps play in the “recession” you believe is on the horizon? What can Christians do to combat this tendency toward fragmentation?

John Dickerson: In the book I get to spend two chapters – Dividing and Uniting – on these questions. This is one of my favorite topics, because Jesus spoke so often of the unity of His true believers (see John 17:20-23 in particular).

The power of diverse churches working together was, in my estimate, the greatest strength of American evangelicalism during the 20th Century. And yes, the “fragmentation” of the “movement” plays a huge role in the present decline of American evangelicalism.

Humanly speaking, it will take a miracle to combat fragmentation in the 21st Century. Presently, I see evangelicals falling into the same three positions they took during the early 20th Century, in the Fundamentalists vs. Liberalism debates.

I see more evangelicals separating and defining themselves by who they oppose. This is really a new manifestation of Fundamentalism. Simultaneously, other so-called “evangelicals” are getting soft on Scripture and atonement. They are essentially reincarnations of the old theological liberals who sabotaged the mainline denominations. History demonstrates that those extreme oppositional and capitulating views both fail Christ and the Church over time.

Back in the 1940′s and 50′s, Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga and Carl F.H. Henry, cut an intentional path between Fundamentalism and Liberalism. They avoided the militant negativity on one hand, and they avoided the spongy pluralism on the other. These men cast vision for an evangelical movement truly defined by both grace and truth. My heart, my real passion is for a new generation to step in where Graham, Ockenga and Henry once did, to rally evangelical believers around Christ again.

I pray regularly that God will lift up a new generation of Spirit-led 21st Century Evangelical leaders who will clean that old path between the two extremes—the path that is uncompromising on doctrine and Scripture, but also gracious, loving and ultimately focused outward, toward the world we are called to reach.

This was my driving passion in writing this book, to perhaps be a small voice in a bigger conversation toward evangelical unity in the 21st Century. It is a passionate prayer of mine that God raises up leaders like this for our generation – to lead souls and organizations down this road of uncompromising Grace and Truth. Biblical unity is more important than ever—but it’s also more challenging than ever.

Trevin Wax: What can Christians do to combat this tendency toward fragmentation?

John Dickerson: The book really digs into this, but here are a few passing thoughts.

  • We have to stop tearing each other down, period.
  • We have to actually believe Jesus’ words in John 17:23, when He prayed “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:23). According to Jesus, unity is a guaranteed apologetic for His followers. Because Jesus took this seriously, we’d better start taking it seriously.
  • We do have to graciously clarify non-evangelical departures from the atonement and the infallibility of Scripture, and part company when non-evangelical doctrines are held.
  • We have to start local—by praying with and caring for other pastors and leaders in our proximity.
  • We have to start praying for the Kingdom, beyond our own congregation and brand. At Cornerstone in Prescott, we often pray—by name—for other evangelical congregations in our city. We do this during our Sunday worship, as we pray that God’s Kingdom would truly come and His will would be done in our community.
  • We must unite around Christ Himself as the Head of the Church—and around His simple Gospel message of salvation by faith alone in His work on the cross alone.
  • We must maintain Scriptural authority as an essential in the unifying creeds. As the nursery song says, we only know how much Jesus loves me, because “the Bible tells me so.”

Pick up a copy of this book at Christianbook.com, Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or direct from Baker.

Disclaimer: This book was provided by Baker Books. I was under no obligation to offer a favorable review.

Book Briefs: “The Glory of Grace: The Story of the Canons of Dort” by William Boekestein

~ Bob Hayton ~ 3 Comments

The Glory of Grace: the Story of the Canons of Dort by William Boekestein Once again William Boekestein has given us a fantastic book for children. The Glory of Grace: the Story of the Canons of Dort is his third book in a series from Reformation Heritage Books. Each book is illustrated by Evan Hughes and looks at the historical background to one of the confessional statements that make up the “all three titles. You won’t be disappointed.

Pick up a copy of this book at any of the following online retailers: Westminster Bookstore, Christianbook.com, Amazon, or direct from Reformation Heritage Books.

Disclaimer: This book was provided by Reformation Heritage Books. I was under no obligation to offer a favorable review.

About Book Briefs: Book Briefs are book notes, or short-form book reviews. They are my informed evaluation of a book, but stop short of being a full-length book review.