Salvation Out, Self-Help In
Discussing the “saccharin-like” preaching of Joel Osteen, Wells says this of the kind of God he presents: “The dominant view, even among evangelical teenagers, is that God made everything and established a moral order, but he does not intervene. Actually, for most he is not even Trinitarian, and the incarnation and resurrection of Christ play little part in church teenage thinking—even in evangelical teenage thinking. They see God as not demanding much from them because he is chiefly engaged in solving their problems and making them feel good. Religion is about experiencing happiness, contentedness, having God solve one’s problems and provide stuff like homes, the Internet, iPods, iPads, and iPhones. This is a widespread view of God within modern culture, not only among adolescents but among many adults as well.”
In the old days, most people knew they were sinful beings in need of salvation and rescue. Today they see themselves as gods who need affirmation and self-realisation. We have moved from a view of the good life through self-denial and rejection of self to one of self-actualisation and self-affirmation.
This is a massive shift in the way we see ourselves, how we understand our troubles, and how we view the way out – the way of salvation. Instead of lost sinners needing saving, we are good people simply needing some therapy and affirmation.
Awareness of this major shift in thinking about who we are, what our condition is, and what is the way forward, have long been with us. Criticism of theological liberalism from a century and more ago can be mentioned, including the critique of J. Gresham Machen that I just again discussed in a new piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2024/04/03/the-gentle-regrets-of-roger-scruton/
Secular voices also noted this and wrote extensively about it. Most notable was the 1966 volume The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff (Harper & Row). In it the American sociologist said this: “Christian man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when ‘I believe!,’ the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to ‘one feels,’ the caveat of the therapeutic.”
Another crucial discussion of this appeared in the 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press) by another American sociologist, Christian Smith. In it he made use of the term “moralistic therapeutic deism.”
Deism is the view that God made the world but has no real direct involvement in it. So in his study of US teens, by MTD he meant that most of them feel that God wants us to be good and nice, and the main goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself. When we get in a jam we call upon God, but otherwise he has no real role in our lives. Sadly, it is not just non-Christian youth that think this way, but Christian youth as well.
A number of important Christian thinkers and cultural observers have made much use of the insights provided by Rieff and Smith. For example, in his 2008 book Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church (Baker), Michael Horton referred to this in various places. It is Christianity Lite, not biblical Christianity:
It was secular psychologist Karl Menninger who pointed out (in a book titled Whatever Became of Sin?) that the growing suppression of the reality of guilt in churches was actually contributing to neuroses rather than avoiding them….
If we feel guilty, maybe it is because we really are guilty. To change the subject or downplay the seriousness of this condition actually keeps people from the liberating news that the gospel brings. If our real problem is bad feelings, then the solution is good feelings. The cure can only be as radical as the disease. Like any recreational drug, Christianity Lite can make people feel better for the moment, but it does not reconcile sinners to God. Ironically, secular psychologists like Menninger are writing books about sin, while many Christian leaders are converting sin – a condition from which we cannot liberate ourselves – into dysfunction and salvation into recovery. pp. 35-36
David Wells
But one evangelical intellectual and theologian who wrote copiously about such matters is David Wells. He has taught theology for many years at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. (If I can add a personal note here, some students thought him to be a hard grader, so sought to avoid his classes. I quite enjoyed his classes, and only got As in them.)
A number of his many books have dealt with this shift in thinking about the human person and what he needs. Let me only feature four of them, with a quote or two from each:
No Place for Truth (Eerdmans, 1993)
We are therefore accomplishing in our culture what only such dystopian writers as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell ever imagined. We are replacing the categories of good and evil with the pale absolutes that arise from the media world —
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Disney Gone Awry?
Can it be said that our freedoms have blinded us and are holding us hostage, preventing us from bringing every thought captive to the word of God and keeping us from seeing the threat at our doorsteps? Some say that only time will tell, but I believe time is already telling! Let’s open our eyes and be accountable to truth.
“M. I. C. K. E. Y, M. O. U. S. E! Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck! Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck! …” Many of us remember this sing-along song that opened the Mickey Mouse Club program when as children we were enjoying the biggest name in entertainment. That, of course, was the wonderful world of DISNEY. At one time, Walt Disney’s family-oriented programming was enjoyed by almost everyone, adults and children alike. However, times have changed and so has Disney, so much so that ole Walt is probably “turning over in his grave”. Disney now promotes the progressive anti-family and anti-Christian LGBTQ woke culture that the founders of BLM intended for the destruction of the nuclear family.
Chances are that if you want to watch a good movie, sporting event, or have your child watch an animated cartoon program, more than likely it will be connected to the vast empire that Disney has become, owning a good portion of the television and entertainment world. Just three years ago Disney, for $73.1 billion, bought the film and TV assets that were held by 21st Century Fox, marking the transaction one of the largest media mergers in history.
The above is just for starters. Add to that the list of Disney-owned companies and you begin to get a sense of just how big Disney really is. That list includes ABC, ESPN, Touchstone Pictures, Marvel, Lucasfilm, A&E, The History Channel, Lifetime, Pixar, Hollywood Records, Vice Media, and Core Publishing among many others.
Included are recognizable brands and film franchises as the following: Star Wars, The Muppets, The Marvel Cinematic Universe (but not the X-Men – yet!), Disney Princesses/Princes (such as characters from Cinderella, Mulan, Frozen, Aladdin, and The Lion King), The Chronicles of Narnia Franchise, The Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise, Pixar Films, (such as Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Cars), The Winnie the Pooh Franchise, The Indiana Jones Franchise, Grey’s Anatomy and other popular ABC shows. See here.
The LGBT culture is alive and flourishing within Disney. During a recent virtual meeting, a group of Disney filmmakers together with employees said they have been given the freedom to add “queerness” and LGBT characters to children’s programming, but they believe a lot more needs to be done. Such was expressed during an “all-hands” meeting following controversy regarding Florida’s parental rights bill that prohibits classroom teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has signed the bill into law. See here.
In a series of videos released by journalist Christopher F. Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Disney executive Karey Burke told attendees of the meeting that she is the “mother of two queer children – one transgender child, and one pangender child”. Wanting to see more LGBT characters in Disney programs, she states, “We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories, and yet we don’t have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories.” Rufo, in a tweet, said that Burke added in the video that she wanted a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. See here and here.
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When Pastors Water Down the Truth of God’s Word
It is important for ministers of the gospel to, at one and the same time, avoid that theological dilution by which we fail to bring up children “until they are farther advanced” while rejecting that ecclesiastical elitism that refuses to “accommodate to the capacity” of those we are instructing.
“We keep our preaching basic because we have so many new believers. If we give them too much doctrine, they won’t be able to understand it.” I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard church planters and pastors say such things. Sadly, as their ministries begin to grow numerically, mature believers in the congregation are left to languish in spiritual malnourishment and discouragement.
Ministers need to learn how to break down, rather than water down, the truth of God’s word.
On the other hand, there are those churches (though significantly fewer in number) in which ministers seem to wear their academic interests on their sleeve in the pulpit. They burden the congregation with highly nuanced theological subjects or phraseology in the name of faithfulness. Whether it is compromising ministers diluting God’s word to the spiritual malnourishment of the congregation or ivory tower pastors caring little about bringing along new believers, one of the great needs of our day is for preachers to learn how to break down, rather than water down, the truth of God’s word.
We find this important principle at work in the ministry of the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin. On the whole, Calvin tended to reserve his more academic prowess for his work The Institutes of the Christian Religion and his commentaries rather than for his sermons. In his essay, “Calvin’s Sermons on Ephesians: Expounding and Applying Scripture, ” Randall C. Zachman helpfully observes,[Calvin’s] sermons differed from the commentaries both in terms of their audience and their objective. The commentaries have, as their audience, the future pastors…with the goal of revealing the mind of the author with lucid brevity. The sermons have, as their audience, ordinary Christians within a specific congregation with the goal of expounding the intention or meaning of the author, and of applying that meaning to their use, so that they might retain that meaning in their minds and hearts, and put it into practice in their lives.
Calvin sought to adjust himself in different ways to his readers and hearers, distinguishing between what he wrote for the academy and what he proclaimed from the pulpit. A brief comparison of his commentary on Genesis and his sermons on Genesis serve to demonstrate this difference of approach. To be sure, it is a task of no small difficulty.
Ministers must be careful to neither deny the sovereign working of the Spirit nor intellectually insult the congregation.
In our day, when ministers water down God’s word they almost always do so from behind a missiological smokescreen. Insisting that a robustly theological ministry is a detriment to reaching the unchurched, they introduce a number of serious problems.
First, ministers—perhaps inadvertently—give the impression that the ability to impart spiritual understanding lies within the power of the messenger rather than in the working of the Spirit and word of God. In essence, they suggest that the outcome of their teaching is commensurate with the supposed intellectual ability of the hearers. This not only denies the sovereign working of the Spirit of God through the word of God—it levels an intellectual insult at the people to whom they minister.
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Of Doctrinal Standards & Good Faith Subscription
Most PCA elders have accepted Good Faith Subscription in the sense that they acknowledge stated differences are permitted within the denomination. However, there is a lack of clarity about what should happen once a stated difference is made known. BCO 21-4.f states that it is the obligation of presbyteries to consider whether the difference undermines the fundamentals of the system of the Westminster Standards as well as the vitals of religion.
For as long as I have been a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (ordained in 2011), there have been intramural debates within the denomination about subscription to the Church’s agreed-upon edition of the Westminster Standards (Confession of Faith, Larger, and Shorter Catechisms) as its theological documents. The disagreement has not been about the existence of the Standards, but rather about how they should be applied. It is not my intention to rehearse for you the history of the development of the PCA’s official position on this point. Rather, my intention is simply to draw some observations about the current ecclesiastical lay of the land, consider some wrong responses to the present reality, and encourage some ways to move forward.
What Is Good Faith Subscription?
The term “Good Faith Subscription” does not appear anywhere in the PCA’s Book of Church Order (BCO). However, it is the label given to what is codified and described in BCO 21-4.e:
While our Constitution does not require the candidate’s affirmation of every statement and/or proposition of doctrine in our Confession of Faith and Catechisms, it is the right and responsibility of the Presbytery to determine if the candidate is out of accord with any of the fundamentals of these doctrinal standards and, as a consequence, may not be able in good faith sincerely to receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and Catechisms of this Church as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures (cf. BCO 21-5, Q.2; 24-6, Q.2).
This section gives clarity about one part of the PCA’s relationship with the Westminster Standards. It outlines step one in understanding the PCA’s view on subscription: a candidate may disagree with parts of the Westminster Standards. This reality is understood and practiced within the PCA. By way of example, the Candidates & Credentials Committee of the Savannah River Presbytery (on which I serve) has received stated differences from candidates ranging from the omission of Aramaic as one of the languages of the Old Testament autographs (Westminster Confession of Faith 1-8), to issues surrounding the Bible’s account of creation (WCF 4-1), psalmody (WCF 21-5), images of Jesus (WCF 21-1), the keeping of the Lord’s Day (WCF 21-8), and others. The disagreement in the PCA, for the most part, is not about a man’s right to state a difference. It is rather about the degree to which such differences are acceptable.
The BCO does not permit a “carte blanche” holding of differences. Stating a difference subjects the candidate to the scrutiny of his particular presbytery. The Presbytery must examine the difference and make a decision regarding whether it is compatible with the Standards (BCO 21-4.f):
Therefore, in examining a candidate for ordination, the Presbytery shall…require the candidate to state the specific instances in which he may differ with the Confession of Faith and Catechisms in any of their statements and/or propositions. The court may grant an exception to any difference of doctrine only if in the court’s judgment the candidate’s declared difference is not out of accord with any fundamental of our system of doctrine because the difference is neither hostile to the system nor strikes at the vitals of religion.
This paragraph provides step two in understanding the PCA’s view of on subscription. Our constitution in BCO 21-4.f makes it clear that one thing Good Faith Subscription does not mean is that all differences are de facto permissible. The presbytery is not obligated to “grant an exception.” The Presbytery grants an exception only when it judges a candidate’s stated difference as neither undermining the system of doctrine presented in the Westminster Standards nor denying the essence of the Christian religion. There are several implications of this mandated scrutiny.
Good Faith Subscription—Implications
First, a generic sincerity of position and a heartfelt love for God in Christ on the part of the candidate is not adequate in and of itself to grant an exception. In other words, a candidate does not need to deny a fundamental doctrine of the Christian Faith (e.g., the Trinity or the Incarnation) in order to be barred from ordained ministry in the PCA. A denial of any doctrine expressed in the Westminster Standards of the PCA – even when such a matter is not shared by other Christians – is important and must be examined (and granted) before a man takes up a particular call in the PCA. It is at this point that the PCA’s troubles start.
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