Havel, the great scholar of theater and social semiology, would have no problem correctly identifying our current mask theater as the destructive and repressive farce that it is, and those that refuse to play along as the bearers of light, and the custodians of the creative energies we will need to reconstruct and sustain freedom in the world.

For me, one of the worst inventions of the contemporary university is political science, a discipline that, with its mainly presentist and transactionalist orientation, tends to dramatically minimize the always very intimate relationship between politics and culture, especially the cardinal importance that public rituals have in every effort to radically reorient the operational concepts of the “reality” among the citizenry.
When, in his speech to the US Congress 31 years ago, Vaclav Havel said that “consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around,” he spoke not only as a politician, but as a man of culture, and more specifically, a man of the theater, a place where the semiology of the stage is often as important as the words that come out of actors’ mouths.
Thirteen years earlier, in the most decadent years of the Soviet period in Czechoslovakia, Havel  wrote “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay in which he uses his very detailed understanding of the symbolic codes of the stage to explain certain mechanisms of the system of oppression then in force in his country.
He focuses his exposition on a fictional manager of a fruit and vegetable store in his country who every morning  puts up a sign in the window of his shop that says “Workers of the world, unite!” The playwright then wonders to what extent this gentleman, and people passing in front of or entering the establishment,  believe in the words written on the poster. He concludes that the vast majority of them probably don’t think much, if at all,  about its content. The, referring to the greengrocer,  he goes on to say:
“This does not mean that his action had no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: ‘I, the greengrocer XY, live here and know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace.’  This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s  superiors, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers ”
In this way, according to Havel, the greengrocer  is saved from a confrontation with himself,  and the feelings of humiliation that this inner encounter would bring on:
“If the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I’m scared and therefore I’m unquestionably obedient’ he would not  be nearly so indifferent to its semantics even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation on display  in the shop window, and quite naturally so, as he is a human being, and therefore has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome his complication, his expression of loyalty must  take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction…..”
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Things aren’t exactly as they were during those heady days when that first T4G conference took place. We were a happy bunch then, but we are a divided bunch now—roiled over some of the issues I outlined in my concerns, with brawls over social justice and complementarianism chief among them. Collin Hansen proved prescient in his breakout session at the 2018 T4G conference assessing YRR 10 years after his book. Sadly, T4G is no more after this year for a number of reasons, including the divisions that have occurred among Reformed brothers.

Augustine famously wrote in his classic testimony, Confessions, that the human heart is restless till it finds rest in God. Indeed, the best of us can suffer from restlessness at times.
Yet, there remains a restlessness for some within this movement that leaves me concerned. We’re not as young as we used to be, many of us are still Reformed, but too many remain restless in terms of how their theology and ethics land on the ground. In what follows, I will offer six reflections on those concerns.
(If you haven’t read my positive reflections in Part 1, now would be a good time to hear those before reading on.)
1. A Loss of the Complementarity of Law and Gospel.
The Westminster divines and the framers of the Second London Confession gave robust expression to Reformed Theology out of a clear-headed understanding of the complementarity between law and gospel. Yes, the law says “do” and the gospel says “done,” but you cannot understand the holiness of God, man’s need, and the fulsome glory of what Christ did at Calvary without the law.
As Robert Haldane said in his classic commentary on Romans, “Men perceive themselves to be sinners in proportion as they have previously discovered the holiness of God and his law.”[1]
My generation struggled with legalism. In church we talked a lot about which movies were off-limits for believers, whether rock or country music was from God or the Devil, and whether it was a sin for women to wear shorts during summer.
I fear this generation risks over-correcting the previous generation’s error and is slouching toward antinomianism. There seems to be skepticism when it comes to proclaiming the imperatives of Scripture, with such preaching often dismissed as legalism or old-school fundamentalism.
Christian liberty seems to be more in vogue among younger Reformed evangelicals today. This has led to numerous ugly moral failures of several well-known leaders and a generation that is becoming intimately acquainted with the phrase “deconstructing my faith.” Legalism and antinomianism are equally deadly ditches; we need to recover the biblical equilibrium.
2. An Imbalanced Preference of the Mind over a Commitment to Godliness.
Mark Noll’s important 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind awakened evangelicals of the need to recover a Christian mind, which was one of the great entailments of the Protestant Reformation. I couldn’t agree more. However, I often hear people lauded for their brilliant mind but seem to hear less about their godliness or humility.
Without question, Reformed Theology is a sublime and deeply satisfying exercise of the mind. But we need to recover the balance of our Puritan forefathers such as Jonathan Edwards and John Owen who were among the most luminous intellectual lights in church history and men of profound humility and holiness. Sound doctrine should lead to sound living.
3. A Tendency to Bracket Off Same-Sex Attraction into a Special, Protected Species of Sin.
I have been deeply concerned by the number of writers, pastors, and teachers over the past few years who have openly and rather matter-of-factly identified as same-sex attracted (SSA). Some who struggle with SSA have written on it helpfully and hopefully, but a few seem fixated on SSA and at least insinuate that it is part of their fundamental identity. The Revoice conference comes particularly to mind here.
Same-sex attraction is a bonafide struggle for some and the church should compassionately and patiently apply the healing balm of the gospel to that struggle. But we should never make a particular sin a part of our identity and wallow in it as if to signal to our LGBTQ+-sympathizing neighbors, “See, we’re not such narrow-minded bigots after all.” I fear flirtation may lead to celebration. It is one of the few sins today that receives such kid gloves treatment with an almost protected status. But as John Owen famously said, we must be killing sin, or it will kill us—no matter what form that sin takes, no matter how culturally relevant that sin struggle is.
The term “gay Christian” is dangerous and grossly unbiblical. Can you imagine adopting the descriptor “adulterer Christian” or “homicidally angry Christian” or “covetous Christian”? And even in the church we are attacking the binaries of male and female when God has filled creation with binaries.
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May the Lord help us to kill entitlement. May he remind us by his Gospel what it cost his son to save us. That it’s his breath that keeps us alive and his hands that hold the universe together. Help us Lord to kill this sense of entitlement in us. Help us so that we may serve you wholeheartedly. That we may give cheerfully. To serve others with a clean heart and approach you with thanksgiving in our hearts. Give us the posture of Jesus that approaches the cup with trust in you. 

Many times we approach God like we do an employer. We come not broken and indebted but rather anxious and annoyed at him. Why? Well because we feel he’s failing us. We come to collect our paycheck for service rendered and it’s late or unavailable. We feel we’ve done our part better than most but when we need him he’s not there. Think about when you’ve needed that job so badly. Perhaps it was a business deal or a relationship you were pursuing. Think of when you were unwell or had an ailing loved one. Perhaps you were facing loss. The lie says you serve God, give your best and he’ll get you sorted. It’s more like being the employee of the year and your boss will look after you. He’ll surely not want to let you go. Except that’s not how it works.
Many who blame God and quit the faith do so because of this wrong expectation. We feel God owed us and yet he didn’t come through for us when we needed him. It’s a relationship bound to have a bitter ending. But it’s not really a relationship, to begin with. It’s more or less what exists between you and your shopkeeper. The goods are what bring you together. Without them, you’ve really no need to know each other. You’ve no relationship outside of this business. Such is what happens when we view God as our boss or shopkeeper. We expect a wage for service rendered and our relationship doesn’t go beyond what we get from him.
Privilege is the Posture of Scripture
With this entitlement, we feel wronged when God doesn’t come through for us. How could he not? We feel betrayed because we believe he owes us this much. But scripture puts across a different posture altogether. In place of entitlement, it gives us privilege. It says we owe him everything. We owe him our lives and for the Christian our second lives. It says ours is a relationship of grace. That what we have is not ours. What we do is not our work. And our very lives are not our own. In this regard, God doesn’t really owe us anything and yet he’s called us to ask everything from him.
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