Covenant Presbyterian Church

When you have a moment to reflect beyond your own experience, daily duties, and family needs, your thoughts may have drifted to the church, its present condition and future prospects. Why is it so fragmented, with many and widely divergent beliefs and practices? And, does it matter? Is not the important thing that we love God and serve men? Doctrinal details and practical differences are divisive, after all, and to the degree that we emphasize them, we create walls and isolate ourselves from one another. Then, you hear a negative reference from the pulpit about the beliefs or practices of another congregation. You wonder if the preacher is telling the truth, or if is he merely landing a mean-spirited, exaggerated jab at other believers who are trying to serve God the best they can and are not even present to defend themselves. "Let’s just do our thing," you think, "and let others do theirs. Such comments are a waste of time, unloving, and judgmental. Criticism gives the decided impression that we or people who think like us have a corner market on the truth. Who is to say that we are right and they are wrong?" These issues are worth considering. Preachers are often guilty of misdirected negativity and exaggerated descriptions of the errors and weaknesses of others. Unless we are humbled by God’s many gifts to us and loving toward other believers, we can arrogantly delude ourselves into thinking that we are the only ones left standing. At the same time, since we cannot embrace postmodernism, which is committed to the one truth that there is no one truth, we must be faithful to God’s word and call others to do the same. The questions remain, however: why has truth fallen upon such hard times? Why are so many in the church willing to sacrifice God’s word upon the altar of relevance? What has led to the present indifference to biblical doctrine? How can we be relevant and faithful?

For about three centuries, the worldview of the Reformation held sway over a significant portion of Europe and was the dominant belief system in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. Though differences in application, especially in the areas of church government and worship, were evident from the beginning and progressively increased, there was general consensus that the Bible is the word of God, that we are justified by grace through faith through the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, and that we should live by God’s holy law revealed in Scripture. The fold of Reformation Protestantism was always wide, but it shared these and many other doctrines in common. Other forces arose, however, that challenged these convictions and eventually resulted in the fragmentation that we now know by painful, frustrating experience.
(1) Satan’s response to the Reformation was the Enlightenment, which was the outcome of the humanistic strains of the earlier Renaissance. Enlightenment thinking characterized the church’s commitment to Scripture as foul authoritarianism. Enlightenment philosophy denied that man’s reason is fallen and must submit to Scripture in order to understand the truth about God, man, and the universe. Not unexpectedly, the twin philosophical strains of Enlightenment thought, empiricism, which believed that man’s senses and experiences were the source of truth, and rationalism, which gave priority to man’s reason, rapidly reached dead-ends - philosophically, morally, and culturally. Empiricism could not bring the uninterpreted, fragmented facts of human experience into rational unity; rationalism could not bring man’s reason into meaningful contact with the facts of experience. Both led to utter skepticism, in the realm of nature and grace, science and religion, reason and faith.
(2) Sensing that philosophy and European civilization was at a critical juncture, Immanuel Kant sought to save philosophy and make room for faith. His solution was to relegate faith to the sphere of human experience and moral necessity. It has nothing to do with reason; it is free from the demands of scientific proof and rational justification. From this point in the history of western philosophy, faith and reason, religion and science, were seen to be operative in two different realms - both necessary in their own way but with human reason holding sway in the realm of nature and science. Religion became irrational, i.e., not subject to the demands of reason but operative by its own methods and needs. It has nothing authoritative to say about "real life." Kant ended up saving nothing; the realm of reason was nothing but a subjective category imposed by the mind. Kant’s solution to ground the entirety of human experience and rationality in the mind deepened the darkness of skepticism.
(3) Darwin built furiously upon these teetering foundations and denied the divine origin of the world, advocated impersonal natural selection, and placed man at the same level as the animals, as an animal. In his influential but now lesser known book, The Descent of Man (1861), Darwin took the world of uninterpreted (by God) brute fact, anti-revelation, and pro-human reason to its logical and sterile dead-end by calling for genetic discrimination against the lesser evolved human forms through isolation and sterilization of the undesired elements. Lower-evolved forms should be "quarantined" into a social-genetic ghetto in order that the superior elements might not be harmed. (Interestingly, his program was instituted in the United States long before the Nazi’s ever came to power. Mandatory government school attendance, standardized testing, and the castration of social undesirables were all attempts to create the perfect society, a controlled society in which the middle class would remain a docile working and merchant class, thus giving the wealthy, academics, and social planners free reign to remake the United States into a socialist nation completely estranged from its generally Christian, Reformation foundations.).
The church initially resisted these forces and sought to maintain the old commitments. Many godly men and women knew what was at stake. But eventually segments of the church sought to recast the Christian faith in the light of these movements. Modernism was born.

At its foundation, Modernism, which reached its zenith in this country between 1900 and 1930, was an attempt by many theologians, authors, and academics, to make the Christian faith relevant to the desire and needs of modern society. Modernists were driven by the desire to be intelligent men according to the canons of the new science and the new theology while remaining somewhat connected to the stream of historic Christianity. Their solution was to recast and redefine the faith in order to make it intelligible and acceptable to men and nations that no longer held the old worldview commitments. Since the Bible had supposedly been discredited by German higher criticism and unbelieving scientists, it could no longer be trusted as God’s inspired, trans-historical word to man. Following Hegel, Schleiermacher, and a litany of German luminaries, religion was no longer viewed as bound by revelation, creeds, and theologies. It is subject-driven, focusing upon the realization of the spirit of the age in the evolving human personality. There was a great deal of talk about the "Jesus of history" as over against the "Christ of faith" during this period, for Modernism at its heart was an ethical and social movement that sought to realize the moral ideals of Jesus’ life without embracing his divine person, incarnation, or substitutionary atonement. Since these were based upon a now-discredited Bible, they were rejected. What remained was a loving Jesus, who taught us to embrace "men as men," without artificial distinctions based upon creeds. His ethic could be imposed by the ordering of human reason alone, without any appeal to revelation. By following his ethic of love and elevation of the human personality, the kingdom of God would be built on earth - a socialistic kingdom in which men would receive fair wages, schools would be free for everyone, and democracy would hold sway over this nation and eventually the world.

Two world wars did not make the world safe for democracy. They sounded the death knell of Modernism. Man’s ordering of the universe apart from revelation did not make the world a better place; devolution rather evolution seemed to be occurring. Man’s technology resulted in horrible bloodshed and statist atrocities. The logical conclusion of Darwin was Hitler, who infused Darwin’s genetic purification program with German nationalism. In the decades following the Second World War, a new philosophy began to take rise. We now call it Postmodernism, but this is a misnomer. It is really the intensification of the skepticism that lay at the root of Modernism. Whereas Modernism believed that social order and progress were attainable by human reason set free from the shackles of revelation, Postmodernism denied that such an order was possible because ultimate truth is not attainable by man, with divine revelation or without it. Its existentialist roots taught man to embrace his aloneness in the universe; there is no God, no revelation, no truth --- just brute fact. The authentic life is lived in freedom from the constraints imposed by divine revelation and the artificial moral constructions of society. Each man must discover or forge his own "ultimate reality," his meaning. He is the solitary captain of his uncertain fate.

Under the influence of post-modernistic thinking, philosophy gave up the pursuit of absolute truth. It gradually became dominated by the philosophy of mind (how the mind works to structure reality and experience), the philosophy of language (how language is a product of the mind, socially conditioned, and purely subjective), and the philosophy of human psychology (how man responds to the breakdown of society, his psychoses and their cure). In other words, post-modernistic philosophy is descriptive. Since we cannot arrive at ultimate truth, if it even exists, we must learn to cope, to survive in this brave new world of reason set free from revelation, of experience without interpretation, man independent of God, and modern society imposing limits upon the freedom of the sovereign individual. This is where we are. We have not made much progress. The old dichotomies and poles remain isolated and unresolved: reason and faith, science and religion, nature and grace, determinism and freedom. And again, the post-modernist church, like the modernist church, is seeking relevance.

But how? Men have lost confidence in words; therefore, they do not read. Hence, the church in many circles has returned to pictures to tell the old story of Jesus and his love. Men are not interested in doctrine, so it is not discussed. Post-modernistic Christianity is concerned with encouraging men to feel good about themselves, about God, and about life. Through its music and programs, serious thought is discouraged. The emotions are what counts. If modernistic Christianity sought to make religion subject-centered, post-modernistic Christianity has given up the religion part of this definition and has settled upon the subject, man. All that counts is that he feels good about the worship experience, about his own ideas of God, about the legitimacy of finding his own meaning in a fragmented world. Post-modernistic Christianity would bring the world into the church, baptize it with religious sentiment, and call it Christianity. This powerfully hit me the other evening when I heard a Christian jazz group perform their routine to the music of Freddy Mercury, the lead singer of Queen. "We will, we will rock you," which was the symbol of rebellion, unbelieving sexual perversity, and drug use, was put to the words, "Jesus, Jesus, loves you, loves you." Now Mr. Mercury practiced the philosophy of his song; he has been crushed upon the only Rock, Jesus Christ, and is in hell. Yet this troupe danced to his beat, now set to Christian terminology. This is post-modernistic Christianity in a nutshell. Relate to men according to the standards of the world, bring a little Jesus into the mix, and claim success. Relevance is the same standard in post-modernistic Christianity as it was in modernistic Christianity. But at least modernistic Christianity endeavored at some level to remain in the stream of historic Christianity. This is now passé. The only thing that matters is relevance - forget history, forget the old battles, forget everything but how you feel.

This will not work. Satan worship at the altar of relevance, ever updating the forms of his presentation. He embraces relevance; he loves it when the church does, when God’s people desperately try to survive by appealing to the world according to its forms, music, expectations, and goals. Ironically, this is not relevance; it is joining the other team. And this is why we cringe more than slightly at negative comments about the beliefs and practices of other professing believers. This is why we are uncomfortable with strong preaching that says "Thus says the Lord" rather than "How feel you?" We have become infected. More than this, we have lost faith in the abiding relevance of the word of God for all men and nations. Even more than this, we have become cowardly. It is hard, admittedly, and I feel it every day, to hold to the old commitments, to make them new in my daily experience through faith, repentance, and communion with the Spirit in the word. It sometimes feels like trying to bring down a huge monster with a spitball. It is much easier to sing "Jesus, Jesus, loves you, loves you."

This is how we can be relevant to the world. First, we must re-confess the antithesis between light and darkness, God and Satan, righteousness and sin, the church and the world. God instituted a battle between these immediately after the Fall (Genesis 3:15), and it is has been our temptation and folly ever since to diminish the scope and intensity of this battle. We must remember what John said: "Friendship with the world is hostility against God." If we endeavor to befriend the world by adopting its philosophies, standards, and goals, we have declared war against God. Hence, modernistic and post-modernistic Christianity, in their attempt to recast and redefine the faith in terms of the world’s beliefs and practices, are evil. They were and are at war against God. Second, we must accept the fact that the world will never like biblical Christianity. Never, under any circumstances. Being God’s servants commits us to a life and death struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Biblical Christianity exposes the sinfulness of man, calls him to turn from his sins and to submit to the enthroned Savior. This is not a pleasing, self-congratulatory message. Men are naturally inclined to hate it. Hence, dressing it up really means watering it down. Third, we must have faith that the "world in its present form is passing away, but he that does the will of God abides forever" (1 Cor. 7:31; 1 John 2:17). Fads are, well, fads. Whether music, philosophy, or fashion, the world is enslaved to fads because it does not build upon that which lasts. The constant cycle of newness and change that lies at the heart of secularist consumerism are symptoms of fundamental discontent and frustration. The truly relevant believer, family, or congregation is the one that builds upon the word of God. God has called reality into existence; his word defines reality. You can either opt for permanence or passing away, relevance according to human standards or by the Lord’s. When the church chose the latter, she grew, shed light, and challenged kingdoms, all the while watching one fad after another go the way of the Dodo. She did not simply endure; she defined and overcame. This will happen again. If we are to be a part of our Savior’s unfolding warfare and victory in our generation, we must believe the word of God, that he who believes and does it is the most relevant person and congregation in the world. Fourth, we must have a transformational worldview. The only reason modernistic and post-modernistic Christianity felt compelled to capitulate was a loss of confidence in the transforming power of the gospel. Both felt that the church was about to be swallowed up by philosophical and cultural forces against which the old commitments were impotent. Many in the church today feel the same. Why? Secularism is attractive only to perverts. Its leading arguments are uncensored access to pornography, murder on demand, and the loss of liberty and meaning. Its fruits are disease, despair, and death. We have nothing to fear from such a worldview.
What we must fear is that we, the church, will fail to seize this moment. Post-modernistic thinking is the last gasp of a dying worldview, the logical outcome of the Enlightenment, Kantian dualism, and Darwinian naturalism. The flame-throwers of the gospel will hasten its demise. Dancing to Queen tunes will not. The preaching of the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. Sometimes the proclamation of this word requires us to make distinctions, offer correctives to our brothers and sisters, and to confront the world. In challenging the world, we must first be challenged and purified. The pure milk of the word will make us uncomfortable, for we have sins that need to be addressed, thoughts that need to be transformed, and priorities that need to be abandoned. Be faithful, child of God, and the Lord Jesus will give you a crown of life, feed you upon the hidden manna, and confess you before the Father. In history, victory is certain - not upon the path of shallow relevance that seeks to conform the gospel to the tastes of the dead and dying, but upon the Rock of our salvation, the enthroned Savior, who overcame the world and now calls us to march in his train of victory. This alone is relevance. Truth alone is relevant.