Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, September 6, 2024
Christians need to go to church. We grow to be more like Jesus as we repeat the actions of a Sunday: hear the word read and preached, say the creed, pray, sing, take the Supper, speak in tongues, hear and receive prophetic words. We grow to be more like Jesus as we eat with other Christians in their homes and they in ours; as we serve with them to help the poor in our church community and in the wider place that we live; as we speak the gospel to each other whenever we encounter each other.

Christian Formation II
If we’re formed by what we think, what we feel, and what we do—as I’ve argued we are—how does being formed by what we do work? I think there are two components to this: community and habit.
We become what we do. James K. A. Smith’s famous ‘pedagogy of desire’ argues that rather than doing what we love, instead we love what we do. If you want to train yourself to love something, then do it. Part of the Christian life is repetition. If you want to become a person who prays, then you need to start by praying. Obviously, there must be more to it than this—and there is, all three angles of formation are present all the time—but you won’t become a person of prayer unless you actually carve out time to pray in, and then pray at those times.
Of course, the early steps are faltering; of course it’s hard; and of course you can’t do it without the Spirit’s help. Charismatics sometimes make it sound like all you need to do is wait on the Spirit to change you. While a good thing we also need to ask him to change us (please teach me to pray is a powerful prayer) and then start doing it in our lives. This is partly because of the way the Lord has made us as creatures, but it’s also because the Christian life is one of actions: as I’ve argued before hope is an action, as are love, faith, and perseverance (1 Thessalonians 1).
Sometimes we can be down on the idea of daily devotions. You won’t find a direct reference to them in the Bible, which is understandable because they largely assume that you can both read and have the Bible in your native tongue. Devotions also have an individualised sense of how to pray; assuming it’s something we do on our own. The early Christians would have gathered to pray in the mornings. The common practice of morning and evening prayer arose from this. We could probably discuss the benefits of different types of daily prayer, but practice does make perfect in the Biblical sense: it makes us mature. Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s good to do it habitually.
Note the second feature rising up in that discussion, you often see Christians praying together. If you want to love to pray, then pray with people who love to pray. Do it a lot. Habitual actions are easier, and easier to sustain, when done with others. That’s because that’s the kind of creatures we are; firstly, for the love of marriage and the immediate family, and then secondly for the love of the kingdom, for friendship.
If you keep doing something you will grow to love it. If people in your church don’t like the Lord’s Supper and seem confused by it, just start doing it weekly. You’ll find a love for it will grow.
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Christianity has been through many conflicts throughout the centuries, some of which have been far more challenging and destructive than the current debates about justice. Being in the midst of a conflict is very hard, but God has always brought his church through those conflicts. And reorienting ourselves to the more complex world we live in is an important step in that direction.

We live in a time of division, as many of us can wearily testify, but we also live in a time of disorientation. Navigating divisions can be challenging, but the challenge multiplies when we are disoriented, and that is a less recognized element of the times we live in.
That we are disoriented and not just divided is evidenced by the numerous and diverse attempts to frame the disagreements among American Christians. Kevin DeYoung’s framing points towards postures, tendencies and fears; Karen Swallow Prior finds helpful framing in the exposure of syncretism in Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites; Voddie Baucham’s book is titled Faultlines, and identifies the problem as ideological; Timothy Dalrymple diagnoses three areas of fracturing: media, authority and information among communities; Michael Graham and Skylar Flowers frame the primary conflicts between Neo-Fundamentalists and Neo-Evangelicals, and between Mainstream Evangelicals and Post-Evangelicals; and denominationally speaking, Ross Douthat sees the liberal and conservative wings of Catholicism as misdiagnosing each other, while Trevin Wax says of problems facing the SBC, “Dig below the topics of debate and you’ll find different postures, competing visions, and broken trust.”
These attempts at framing are significant for how they indicate a heightened sense among American Christians that we are in a truly significant period of time for the Church in America. It also indicates that we are aware of a deeper root to our disagreements, but that we aren’t sure what that root is exactly. It’s a feeling that Brian Fikkert captures in the intro to his book, Becoming Whole:
Life feels unstable and uncertain, as if the foundations are shifting. But it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s changing, why it’s changing, and where it’s all heading. All we know is there’s a gnawing sense of anxiety that wasn’t there before.
That gnawing sense of anxiety comes from disorientation, and it’s important to find where that disorientation is coming from. We know the key issues: race, Trump, gender roles, gay marriage etc., but the attempts at framing are seeking something deeper, as well they should. For decades, we have imagined American spirituality in a simplistic, linear way, but the events of recent years have proven that framing to be outmoded and inadequate.
The Simplistic Linear Imagination of American Spirituality
Picturing various modes of thought along a spectrum can be a helpful way of organizing ideas within culture. It simplifies and organizes perspectives in a way that can be easily taught. Tim Keller – to use one example among many possible examples – uses a ‘Spectrum of Justice Theories’ to picture the different ways of understanding justice that are common in Western Culture.
It is common to imagine various strains of Christian belief in a similar linear way. The particular labels can differ, but the vision is essentially this: Fundamentalism is at one end of the spectrum, and unbelief is at the other, with evangelicals and Mainline/Liberal Christians in between:

This spectrum maps fairly directly onto Kevin DeYoung’s 4 Approaches to Race, Politics and Gender, and is a simpler version of Michael Graham’s 6 Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism, but what’s particularly important about the spectrum is not just that it is a common way of imagining American spirituality, but also that it informs what a friend of mine has called ‘Slippery Slope Discipleship.’ That is, to imagine a linear spectrum of Fundamentalism to Secularism is to imagine a spiritual world where some modes of belief are considered safe, and others are thought to be dangerous, slippery slopes that lead out of Christianity altogether.
Thaddeus Williams, in Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth speaks this way of Christians who embrace a particular type of social justice: “There is… a predictable pattern: one [secular] doctrine tends to lead to another, then another, until many Christians end up abandoning their faith” (p164).
Al Mohler also speaks this way in The Gathering Storm:
Liberal Protestantism and secularization have merged, creating a new and dangerous context for biblically committed Christians… because of secularization’s effect, liberal theology sometimes even infiltrates churches that think themselves to be committed to theological orthodoxy. Secularism has desensitized many people sitting in the pews of faithful, gospel-preaching churches, leading them to unwittingly hold even heretical doctrines.
This way of thinking is common among the Neo-Fundamentalist Evangelicals and the Mainstream Evangelicals (to use Michael Graham’s terminology) who are concerned about the Church drifting into and assimilating with secularism. And many Liberal Protestants would proudly see themselves as occupying a third way between the extremes of fundamentalism on one side and unbelief on the other. But the Fundamentalism-Secularism spectrum is failing as a way to understand American Christianity, and we need to understand why.
In one sense, it should not be surprising that a linear spectrum is failing as a way to frame anything today. A significant part of Charles Taylor’s analysis of secularism in A Secular Age was to describe our contemporary age as a supernova of options for belief. Taylor has outlined many of the reasons for this, but there are particular changes that in very recent years have catalyzed the shift to the supernova in American evangelicalism, and I would argue that these changes are responsible for much of our disorientation.
Conservative and Progressive Secularism
Two of these changes deserve extended attention, but it is necessary to preface them by briefly addressing one particular issue: the increasing utilization of non-Christian thinkers by Neo-Fundamentalists. Voddie Baucham, for example, in Faultlines, heavily utilizes the work of James Lindsay, and Thaddeus Williams utilizes Andrew Sullivan, Jordan Peterson, and especially Thomas Sowell (whom he calls “the second Saint Thomas”). Many other examples could be given.
The significance of this is that it disrupts the way that Mohler, Williams, and other Neo-Fundamentalists often speak of secularism, when, as quoted earlier, they describe secularism as if it was inherently aligned with progressive politics. With popular unbelieving conservatives like Ben Shapiro, James Lindsay, and Jordan Peterson, we must understand that secularism very much exists today in both left-leaning and right-leaning forms, such that if there is a ‘slippery slope’, it does not descend in only one direction. For any framing to be useful for understanding our divided times it must account for Neo-Fundamentalism being flanked by a conservative form of secularism. A slightly more accurate (but still flawed) version of the Fundamentalism-Secularism spectrum would distinguish between ‘Conservative Secularism’ (represented by Andrew Sullivan, Jordan Peterson, Thomas Sowell and others) and ‘Progressive Secularism’ (represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and others) and might look like this:

With this clarification, we can consider the two significant disruptions to this spectrum. I would identify those two key changes as:
1) the on-going development of what could be called a ‘Second Fundamentalism’ (especially involving the topic of social justice)
2) the delegitimizing of evangelical moderacy by conflicts over racism and abuse (which plays out even more broadly through the conflict between emotional health and stoicism)
It’s important to consider each one of these changes, and then seek to re-form our imagination of how American spirituality is playing out.
The Proliferation of a ‘Second Fundamentalism’ with Theological Concerns
The Fundamentalism-Secularism imagination is being disrupted in large part through a new kind of fundamentalism which has proliferated among evangelicals oriented to justice, particularly those who would identify as Neo-Evangelical or Post-Evangelical in Michael Graham’s formulation. These concerns about justice are not simply social in nature, but they are also very much theological, and this means that this ‘Second Fundamentalism’[1] cannot be simply viewed as one step away from secularism and unbelief.
Using the term ‘fundamentalism’ in any identifier can sound like a back-handed way to mark advocates of justice with disparaging terminology, but it is precisely their similarity to the original fundamentalism of the early 1900s that is important for understanding how they disrupt the simplistic linear imagination.
Consider some well-known quotes of J. Gresham Machen, which I have lightly edited to show how much Christian advocates of social justice today sound like him (with substituted words in italics):
“It is impossible to be a true soldier of Jesus Christ and not fight for justice.”
“I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of earth, but neglects the children next door.”
“Christianity is not engrossed by this transitory America, but measures all things by the thought of love.”
“Patriotism is a mighty force. It is either subservient to the gospel or else it is the deadliest enemy of the gospel.”
Or compare Machen’s rousing call to stand strong against opposition to the gospel to Beth Moore’s call to do the same in the face of White supremacy:
Machen:
Let us not fear the opposition of men; every great movement in the Church from Paul down to modern times has been criticized on the ground that it promoted censoriousness and intolerance and disputing. Of course the gospel of Christ, in a world of sin and doubt will cause disputing; and if it does not cause disputing and arouse bitter opposition, that is a fairly sure sign that it is not being faithfully proclaimed.
Moore:
If you’re gonna let a little name-calling keep you from standing up for what you believe according to the Word of God… you ain’t ready. White supremacy has held tight in much of the church for so long because the racists outlasted the anti racists. Outlast THEM.
They’re going to call you a Marxist, a liberal (their worst possible derision) & a leftist. They’re going to make fun of your “wokeness” & they’re going to say you’ve departed all faithfulness to the Scriptures. If you teach or preach, they’ll say you are a false teacher/prophet.
Just as Tom Holland has argued in Dominion that secularism is an expected and unsurprising product of Christianity, so we might also say that the Second Fundamentalism is an unsurprising way to follow the lead of Machen.
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It is in man that God has implanted his law, the rule of right action according to the created order that reflects it. It is eternal law, the law of God’s essence, given by divine condescension to the creature for his good, unto his temporal and eternal happiness. Man is meant to live with others; this requires order, which, in turn, requires law—even in paradise this would have been so. In short, man’s nature requires him to participate in God’s law by making law too. That human law must then reflect, respect, and reinforce human anthropology—now under assault—for which it is made, and glorify the God who made it.

Whatever its genesis and cause—some suggest Karl Barth’s infamous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner—Protestants largely abandoned the natural law tradition sometime amidst the tumultuous twentieth century. It should be noted that this abandonment conspicuously coincided with the advent of a positivist Supreme Court led by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his militant campaign from the bench to detach law from a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.”
Unsurprisingly, Protestant-positivist conceptions of law (like theonomy) have filled the void in the interim. Originalism—a sort of first-in-time positivism now generally identified with the Constitution’s original public meaning—albeit popularized by a Roman Catholic, dominates the Protestant jurisprudential posture. Like many American Protestants, Originalists—there are some, heavily qualified exceptions—decry judicial use of the classical natural law tradition as tantamount to so-called living constitutionalism and judicial overreach. But recent social trends evince that this form of originalism is radically insufficient. It inordinately fixates on method to the detriment of a substantive vision of justice.
Consider that two ethical concepts presently captivate the popular political imagination: justice and the common good. One currently serves as the causa belli of the progressive-woke left and the other saturates the rhetoric of the nascent post-liberal right. Both bewilder many observers. Both, in their own way, spring from the demand for a thoroughly moral socio-political regime, a comprehensive vision of life oriented to something higher.
Protestantism, if it is to have a political future, must recover a moral vision that rightly defines, orders, and mediates these contemporary emphases, which–if taken in isolation–drive many to dangerous ideological and political extremes. Rightly understood, the apparent dichotomy between the two is false, one manufactured by recent, shrewd efforts of rhetorical capture. Law is the common denominator of justice and the common good, although such a notion has been lost as of late. As Thomas Aquinas defined it, law is an ordinance of reason, promulgated for the common good, made by one who has care of the community.
In a very real sense, then, justice and the common good are inseparable according to the tradition only lately jettisoned by Protestants. The way back is the way forward. Protestants need to play catchup to remain players. This isn’t demagoguery or pandering. It is about recovering a coherent vision of a moral order and the goods toward which said order must be oriented to be just. It is about rediscovering a proper understanding of law by, inter alia, rejecting Justice Gorsuch’s now (in)famous positivist quip in Bostock, “Only the written word is the law.” For law is more than pure fiat; it must attend to reason and nature and conform to something ethically and metaphysically higher.
Such a recovery project requires an extension of the ad fontes enthusiasm amongst Protestants over the past couple of decades to the Protestant legal thought once firmly planted in the natural law tradition. Scholars like Stephen Grabill and Jordan Ballor have already begun this project. The works of Matthew Hale (1609-1676), Johannes Althusius (1557-1638), and Franciscus Junius (1545-1602), to name a few, are now accessible thanks to these scholars and many others. The Angelic Doctor is increasingly appreciated by Protestants (as he was in the past) as much as the Fat Doctor.
Yet, this is about more than resourcement. Protestants must readopt and embrace the child they once forsook, namely, a classical understanding of law, its source, rationale, and function in society. Shockingly, even at this late hour, by an acquired instinct of recent vintage, much of orthodox Protestantism still shuns, or is ignorant of, the natural law tradition.
Without it the future of political Protestantism is bleak indeed, in part because Protestants will be far less equipped to answer the most pressing ethical questions of the day, and will not be as able to adjudicate all-powerful rights claims like those in Bostock, Obergefell, and Roe. Neither will they be able to offer a positive politics, nor a metaphysically coherent account of human nature powerful enough to bring certain inseparable political themes  together, themes such as justice and the common good. (Politics, after all, is but an actionable, lived extension of metaphysics.) They will, rather, remain political infants, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness.
Under a natural law-based jurisprudence, positivist, mechanical, proceduralism is insufficient. Law as law must be reasonable, which is to say, the means law employs to attain its ends must be fitting to the ends themselves. Most importantly, law must be cognizant of, and congruent with, the metaphysical realities of creation, especially an appreciation of the givenness of nature and natural limits.
As Pierre Manent put it recently, “the most precise way to designate what afflicts us, what troubles and demoralizes us, is to say simply: we no longer know what law is.” The key question is, “If our actions are not to be regulated by law, then what shall regulate them?” Ryan Anderson has identified the same problem plaguing debates within conservatism writ large. Responding to common good skepticism from a (typical) right-liberal (who essentially accepts that government mostly only exists to protect individuals from harm, and to protect their individual rights) Anderson asked how “the scope of […] rights” can be determined “without some account of human flourishing and the common good?” For instance, how can the conflict between the woman’s bodily autonomy and a baby’s right to life be mediated otherwise? What about rights of conscience? All exercise must have limits. A rule of right action must apply else we fall into the chaos of mere competing rights claims without means of adjudication—no lodestar to guide us. That way lies devolution into pure power politics. That way lies madness.
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