The Gospel is not something for us to be ashamed of, whatever shame the world may heap upon it, because by faith we can see God’s power at work in it to bring new birth and sanctification. Many today will try to dress up the Gospel in modern thinking to suit contemporary tastes. But we don’t need to exercise all our energy trying to create the right kind of context for the Gospel or trying to make the Gospel look a little better. What we need is confidence in the power of the Gospel itself and the God to whom it draws us.

At the beginning of his correspondence to the Roman church, in Romans 1:16, Paul says something that is surprising in its implications: “I am not ashamed of the gospel.”
Paul the apostle, ashamed of the Gospel? It hardly seems possible! In fact, many preachers and commentators will say that what Paul means is “I’m passionately excited about the Gospel,” with the same understatement with which John Lennon might have been able to say, “I’ve written a song or two.” Could such a man as Paul really have faced the temptation of being ashamed of the Gospel?
But we shouldn’t treat Paul like an angel among men, free from the temptations that assail us. The reason Paul denied feeling ashamed of the Gospel is because shame was a real possibility he faced. And we face it too.
The Bold Apostle, a Timid Man
Paul knew what it was to be fearful. Indeed, he describes his entry into Corinth like this: “I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling” (1 Cor. 2:3).
Paul probably didn’t get up in the morning, look at himself in the mirror, and say, “Corinth, here I come! I’m sure you can’t wait to see me and to hear from me.” No, his attitude might have been something closer to “I don’t know if I can do this.” He may have thought about his retreat from Damascus (Acts 9:23–25), or about his years of silence (Gal. 1:16–17), or his beatings and imprisonments and shipwrecks (2 Cor. 11:21–27). Paul had much to look back on with fear from a human perspective.
Alongside his own background was Paul’s keen awareness of what the Gospel was to outsiders: “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23), a dangerous superstition to be mocked and persecuted rather than a serious idea to consider. Whether to be ashamed of the Gospel was a real question because people really treated it as something shameful.
Yet in God’s eyes, things are different. Far from being shameful, the Gospel, Paul wrote elsewhere, is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24).
Read More
Related Posts:

The new education merely conditions. Having removed all objective value and consideration from reality, they are “free” to shape and mold future generations into whatever they want. Having seized the reins of social conditioning, they will condition for their own purposes (wherever those happen to come from) and with little or no regard for the constraints of custom, tradition, truth, or goodness.

Many people know C.S. Lewis as the author and creator of Narnia. A slightly smaller group know him as a remarkably effective Christian apologist. An even smaller group appreciate him as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. Fewer recognize him as a prophet of civilizational doom. But he was.
In a number of essays, in his lectures on The Abolition of Man, and then in his novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis clearly, patiently, and methodically identifies and warns his readers about an existential threat to Western civilization, and indeed to humanity as a whole.
This threat is a pernicious error that enables tyrannical power and totalitarianism. It’s a fatal superstition that slowly erodes and destroys a civilization. It’s a disease that can end our species and damn our souls. Lewis calls it “the poison of subjectivism.”
Doctrine of Objective Value
Until modern times, nearly all men believed that truth and goodness were objective realities and that human beings can apprehend them. Through reason, we examine and study and wonder at reality. When our thoughts correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of truth. When our emotional reactions correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of goodness.
Lewis refers to this as the doctrine of objective value, or, in shorter form, “the Tao.” The doctrine of objective value, Lewis writes, is
the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). (Abolition of Man, 18–19)
Poison of Subjectivism
The poison of subjectivism upends this ancient and humane way of viewing the world. Reason itself is debunked — or we might say today that reason is deconstructed. Instead of the human capacity to participate in the eternal Logos, reason is simply an epiphenomenon that accompanies certain chemical and electrical events in the cortex, which is itself the product of blind evolutionary processes. Put more simply, reason is simply an accidental and illusory brain secretion.
Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions onto an indifferent cosmos. Truth and goodness are merely words we apply to our own subjective psychological states, states that we have been socially conditioned to have. And if we have been socially conditioned in one way, we might be socially conditioned in another.
Education Old and New
Lewis thus refers to the apostles of subjectivism as “conditioners” rather than teachers. Under the old vision of reality, the task of education was to “train in the pupil those responses which are themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists” (22). Teachers accomplished this through initiation; they invited students into the same experience of reality in which they lived.
The new education merely conditions. Having removed all objective value and consideration from reality, they are “free” to shape and mold future generations into whatever they want.
Read More
Related Posts:

Two plenary keynotes at the CFH (one from Kristin Du Mez and the other from Jemar Tisby) encouraged Christian historians to embrace activism on behalf of justice, but I suspect that competing evangelical interpretations of what constitutes justice will lead some Christian academics to embrace some causes that are directly opposed to those that other Christian academics embrace.  This is not the first time, of course, that American Protestantism – or American Protestant higher education – has experienced a fissure on an issue of theology, social justice, or politics.  

This question was on my mind in the days leading up to the 2022 Conference on Faith and History that met at Baylor University last week, and now that I have returned from the conference, the question continues to concern me.  Two plenary keynotes at the CFH (one from Kristin Du Mez and the other from Jemar Tisby) encouraged Christian historians to embrace activism on behalf of justice, but I suspect that competing evangelical interpretations of what constitutes justice will lead some Christian academics to embrace some causes that are directly opposed to those that other Christian academics embrace.  This is not the first time, of course, that American Protestantism – or American Protestant higher education – has experienced a fissure on an issue of theology, social justice, or politics.  But this time, when evangelical higher education fragments over issues of social justice, I expect that there will not be merely two separate factions, as there were in the modernist-fundamentalist debates of the 1920s.  Instead, there will be at least five.

Faction 1: Conservative Culture Warriors
The most politically conservative evangelical faction to emerge from this split will be the culture warriors.  Staunchly opposed to critical race theory, feminism, and so-called “socialism,” culture warrior colleges and universities (and faculty that identify with this view) see their Christian mission primarily in terms of training a new generation of Christians to resist cultural liberalism through a Christian faith that is inextricably connected with conservative political principles.  Some of these institutions, such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry College, have developed close relationships with the Republican Party or conservative elected officials in recent years.  Others, such as New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, may not be election campaign stops for conservative Republican presidential contenders but are just as politically conservative and are closely connected with a Christian homeschooling movement that attempts to reject cultural liberalism in all its forms.

Culture warrior institutions are a leading segment of Christian higher education today.  Liberty University enrolled 15,000 residential students and 80,000 online students in 2020.  (By comparison, Wheaton College enrolls slightly less than 3,000 students; Calvin University has about 3,300 students; Azusa Pacific enrolls just over 10,000; and Baylor has an enrollment of slightly more than 20,000.  Messiah University, the academic home of the current CFH president, has 2,338 students).  Liberty University’s history department has two chairs – one for its residential program and the other for its online classes – and it offers a Ph.D. program.  But at the CFH, the nation’s leading culture warrior institutions are barely represented at all.  This year’s conference did not include any papers from faculty or students at Bob Jones University, Regent University (the university in Virginia Beach that Pat Robertson founded – and that hosted the 2016 CFH), or Patrick Henry College.  There were two panelists from Liberty University, but neither one was a member of that university’s history faculty.  So, if one looks only at the CFH, one might not know that culture warrior institutions are attracting tens of thousands of new evangelical undergraduate students every year.

Not every faculty member at these institutions fully embraces the Christian nationalist ideology of their school, but those who do necessarily become activists – but activists for a cause that is diametrically opposed to the social justice mission that Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby encouraged historians to embrace.  The chair of Liberty University’s residential history program teaches a graduate course, for instance, on “American Christian Heritage.”  He is a member of the university’s Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement at Liberty University.  Other members of the department teach courses such as the upper-level undergraduate course “Reagan’s America.”  In addition to classes such as “Reagan’s America” and “American Christian Heritage,” Liberty University’s online catalog offers classes on Jacksonian America, “The World of Jonathan Edwards,” “History of American Entrepreneurship,” and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but not a single class on the civil rights movement, African American history, the history of American women, or any aspect of gender studies.  Instead of activism on behalf of minority groups, this Christian nationalist version of Christian higher education features an activism for a particular brand of conservatism – the conservatism that holds the American military and free enterprise in high regard and that celebrates the only two American presidents whose names headline a Liberty University history course: Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan.

Few other scholars, even at the most conservative Christian institutions, take this sort of Trumpist conservative partisanship seriously – which is why institutions in this category that once had some sort of connection to the CFH and the rest of the Christian scholarly world have become increasingly alienated in a faction of their own.  They might have a substantial part of the evangelical market share, but they’re no longer in conversation with the rest of Christian academia, which increasingly views them as engaged in a wholly different enterprise from their own educational mission.
Faction 2: Color-Blind (but anti-nationalist) Conservatives
The second most-conservative faction to emerge from the split will be color-blind conservatives who eschew Christian nationalism.  Like the culture warriors, institutions and individual academics who fall into this category are deeply concerned about the perceived moral decline of the United States, and they are also generally politically conservative and committed to free-market principles, but they don’t want to make their institutions adjuncts of the Republican Party.  Evangelical institutions that fall into this category are strongly committed to biblical inerrancy and gender complementarianism, and they are critical of critical race theory.  Among conservative intellectuals in the never-Trump crowd, faction 2 is attractive; it allows one to remain committed to all of the traditional principles of political conservatism while remaining critical of the Trump phenomenon, which has hardly any support among humanities faculty in colleges and universities, whether Christian or not.  But as conservative as faction 2 evangelicals might seem to outsiders, they sometimes face a difficult time navigating the politics of their highly conservative denominations and evangelical culture in general because of their unwillingness to support Donald Trump.

Despite issuing an official statement opposing CRT, Grove City College became the subject of a months-long uproar after the college allowed Jemar Tisby and Bryan Stevenson (founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) to speak on campus but then found itself caught in a bind between the criticism from parents who worried that the college was embracing CRT and faculty and students who identified as conservative but didn’t want the college to compromise academic freedom.  This week’s college conference on “The Limits of Government,” sponsored by the Institute for Faith and Freedom, presumably represents the type of activism that is more in line with Grove City College’s core constituency.  Instead of Jemar Tisby, the conference will feature Lenny McAllister, an African American Republican who is described on the conference announcement as a “civil rights advocate” who is promoting “equality” through “free market solutions” and “adherence to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.”

Evangelicals who fall into faction 2 profess a genuine concern for racial justice, but they define it in individualistic terms and often deny the existence of structural racism – especially when it challenges the principles of the free market, which they believe offers the greatest hope for long-term poverty relief.  In doing this, they genuinely believe that they are upholding important principles of fairness; critical race theory, they think, is racist and therefore antithetical to Christian values.  While often criticizing Donald Trump and the evangelicals who support him, they are usually unwilling to vote for pro-choice Democrats, because they view the sexual revolution and abortion as the most urgent moral problems of our time.  So, for them, activism is much more likely to mean participating in a march against abortion or speaking out in defense of religious freedom when they feel that it is threatened by legislative initiatives such as the Equality Act than advocating for racial justice.

The historical scholarship of academics who endorse the beliefs of faction 2 is likely to be shaped by a conservative interpretation of American history that sees the decline of sexual morality or traditional religious practice (rather than debates over equality) as the most important trendline of the last few decades.  Carl Trueman’s (Westminster Theological Seminary) The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution, is a wonderful example of the type of scholarship that one can find from historians in this camp.  It’s certainly activist in the sense that it is attempting to diagnose and correct the perceived problems of the sexual revolution rather than present a dispassionate narrative in the mode of Leopold von Ranke.  And it’s unapologetically Christian and deeply theological.  But it’s not the sort of activism that Jemar Tisby highlighted.
So, evangelical academics who fall into faction 2 are caught in a bind.  They’re often critical of Christian nationalism in general (and may even view it as dangerously heretical idolatry), which separates them from evangelicals in faction 1.  Indeed, some evangelical historians teaching at faction 2 institutions have written thoughtful critiques of Christian nationalism, as CFHer John Wilsey (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) did in two separate books on civil religion and the idea of a Christian America.  But at the same time, their strong opposition to the sexual revolution and their general belief in limited government and the free market makes them wary of joining evangelicals to their left who believe that Christian politics should center on opposition to structural racism and gender inequities.  In the view of many members of their own highly conservative denominations who voted for Trump, these faction 2 academics may already be too progressive, but from the standpoint of most other Christian academics, their refusal to embrace anti-racist activism that is defined structurally rather than individually makes them far too conservative.  Outside of a small group of faction 1 and faction 2 institutions, the assumptions about race among faction 2 academics are diametrically opposed to the prevailing assumptions of the profession and of secular academia in general.  This will probably mean that faction 2 evangelical scholars will be increasingly intellectually marginalized in nearly all parts of academia, with the single exception of a small conservative academic subculture that only a few other historians are willing to engage with.

In the view of most of academia, faction 2 academics are on the wrong side of morality and history.  Despite their attempts to separate themselves from the pro-Trump evangelicals, they’re going to have a hard time convincing other academics in the age of DEI that their views are not politically dangerous and immoral.  I wish that were not the case, because I respect many scholars in faction 2 even if I don’t fully agree with them on every issue, but I think that my expectations that this faction will become increasingly marginalized and beleaguered are probably realistic.

Read More