Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Christianity tells the world what it does not wish to hear. We should not expect to be embraced by those whose thoughts and deeds contradict the truths of our faith. Nor should we seek to make our faith more palatable, lest the salt lose its savor.

There are times in history when Christianity feels its place in ­society coming under threat. As it finds itself pushed to the margins, two temptations emerge. The first is an angry sense of entitlement, an impulse to denounce the entire world and withdraw into cultural isolation. In the early twentieth century, American Fundamentalism offered a good example of this tendency, renouncing public engagement and defining itself against alcohol, evolution, the ­movies—characteristic productions of the society by which it felt attacked. Arguably, we see something of the same thing today in evangelical support for Donald Trump, though in this case populist Protestantism is contending for ­America’s future rather than retreating from its present. I dare say readers of The Christian Century wish that truculent evangelicals would take the Benedict ­Option.
The second tendency is more subtle and more seductive. While appearing to be valiant for truth, it conforms Christianity to the spirit of the age. If fundamentalist fist-shaking is the temptation of the ragamuffin masses, accommodation appeals to those who seek a seat at the table among ­society’s elite. And these elite aspirants often blame the masses when their invitation to high table fails to materialize.
Over the last few years, America has witnessed plenty of both tendencies. We’ve seen the anger of the evangelicals who think the country is being stolen from them, and we’ve detected the condescension of those who blame their less urbane coreligionists for the woes of the Church and the nation. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. As often as Christianity has had its cultured despisers, it has had adherents who respond by warring against the age or by making entreaties to the despisers—often reinterpreting the anti-Christian sentiments of the moment as fulfillments of the true faith.
Today, countless apologists insist that a rejection of Christian sexual morality is actually a fulfillment of the Christian imperative of love, which they gloss as the imperative to “include.” But one of the first of these apologists, and arguably the most sophisticated, was Friedrich Schleiermacher. He is credibly called the father of modern theology, which really means modern liberal Protestant theology. Liberal Protestants pioneered the tactic of labeling critics “anti-modern” rather than engaging their arguments. Only in the last few decades, as liberal Protestantism has declined as a cultural force, have historians recognized that theologies framed to reject modern individualism, subjectivism, and historicism are themselves uniquely modern.
When Schleiermacher was a young man, an older, confessional Protestantism still had ownership of institutional culture in his native Germany. But even then society was in transition, and ­Christianity was losing ground among elites. The first generation of historical critics was shaking old Reformation certainties. Theology, once queen of the sciences and the crown of university education, was subject to fundamental challenges from Enlightenment thinking. The empiricism of thinkers such as David Hume called into question the traditional proofs for God’s existence and the credibility of miracles. Influenced by Hume, Immanuel Kant ruled out-of-bounds any possibility of knowing transcendent realities. In effect, Kantian philosophy, which rapidly came to dominate German intellectual life, made it impossible to sustain classical Christian theism. In the world of Kant and his successors, God was perhaps useful as a presupposition by which to anchor moral duty—what Kant called a “postulate” of practical reason—but theological notions served no substantive purpose. At the same time, Romanticism was placing sentiment or feeling at the heart of what it means to be human. This, too, ran counter to inherited forms of Christianity, with their dogmas and systematic theologies full of close arguments and fine ­distinctions. Christianity was being cordoned off from the influential modes of inquiry that inspired excitement and enjoyed the prestige of the new.
It was in this context that Schleiermacher produced his brilliant work On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. He did not dispute Kant’s strictures against metaphysics, which entailed that we cannot know God’s revelation and thereby denied that Christian doctrine has authority. Instead, he attacked Kant’s reliance on argument and analysis. God, Schleiermacher insisted, is not a postulate. He is rather the object of our most intense emotions. Religion is thus a matter of feelings, not of reason. The purpose of doctrine, therefore, is not to convey knowledge but to evoke intense ­feelings that move our souls. We do not “know” God; rather, we commune with God in an “­immediate feeling.”
One rightly marvels at Schleiermacher’s ability to concede all of Kant’s philosophical points while advancing a passionate case for the enduring relevance of pious emotions. At one point, ­Schleiermacher notes that Christianity is heatedly rejected by those influenced by Enlightenment thought—and the passion of unbelief indicates that religion has great power and significance. Yet it is not so much Schleiermacher’s argument as his strategy that is instructive. Rather than defend Christian orthodoxy, he concedes the ground claimed by religion’s cultured despisers. He redefines Christianity to make it accord with the assumptions of its critics. He argues that ­Christianity is not characterized by irrational credulity, because it is not concerned with beliefs at all, but rather with feelings. By Schleiermacher’s way of thinking, Christian beliefs are symbols, cherished because they evoke the “immediate feeling” that links us to the divine.
With this approach, Schleiermacher was free to partake of the rising criticism of theological systems. He need not defend the authority of doctrine or of those who believed that Christian doctrine made objective claims about reality. By turning the dogmatic faith of previous generations into a religion of feelings and intuitions, he construed Christian doctrines as expressions of religious sentiment rather than as statements of objective truth. For example, predestination was not for him a matter of divine action effecting the eternal decision or decree of God, which divided the human race into elect and reprobate. Rather, it was a conceptual-­poetic expression of the feeling of absolute dependence upon God, which Christianity evokes and Christians experience.
Schleiermacher is long dead, as is the Enlightenment audience he sought to address. But the problem of Christianity and its cultured despisers has not disappeared. It has become increasingly evident in recent decades. Powerful forces of secularism, metaphysical materialism, and scientism, among other factors, have driven religion from its former places of influence. One need only note that very nearly all private universities in the United States were founded by religious groups and were for a long time anchored in a religious tradition, only to become secular in the last two generations. In response to this pressure, Christianity has once again put forward those who seek to persuade its despisers that the faith is not inimical to polite society.
In the mid-1990s, a sustained effort was made to rehabilitate and defend the intellectual and academic integrity of orthodox Christians. The leaders of this movement, the historians Mark Noll and George Marsden, made valiant cases for the Christian mind. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll argued that American evangelicalism was hamstrung by its commitment to indefensible positions that lacked intellectual credibility. It consequently attracted the scorn of educated people outside the Church. Worse still, the lack of intellectual standards made life hard for thoughtful individuals within the Church. Noll focused on dispensationalism and literal six-day creation, arguing that these commitments were not defensible by the canons of reason, nor were they necessary for a rigorously orthodox Christian faith.
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was a bestseller and named Book of the Year by Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine whose purpose was, in part, to articulate a Christianity that avoided the excesses of fundamentalism while defending orthodox Christianity. Shortly afterward, Marsden argued for what he dubbed “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship” in a monograph of the same name. The historical portion of his case was based on research he had earlier published on the Christian origins of many of America’s most significant institutions of higher education. Marsden concluded that Christianity’s cultured despisers were simply wrong when they claimed that faith set a person at odds with the life of the mind. In the constructive portion of his case, Marsden argued that Christian scholars could cultivate careful respect for the canons of academic discourse and thoughtful, honest engagement with other academics within the guild without compromising their faith.
Unlike Schleiermacher, Noll and Marsden are careful to sustain full-blooded affirmations of orthodox Christian faith. And unlike ­Schleiermacher’s, I find their arguments convincing. There is nothing about belief in the saving death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ that undermines intellectual rigor or compromises academic standards—­unless, of course, those standards are deemed above criticism from the get-go. But there can be no doubt that the extraordinarily positive reception of Noll’s and Marsden’s ideas came about because university-­educated Evangelicals in the 1990s were anxious to be reassured. The universities they attended increasingly told them that their faith was disqualifying. Noll and ­Marsden argued otherwise, showing that a person of faith who ­engaged in self-criticism and discarded ­untenable beliefs could participate fully in modern ­intellectual life.
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Written by Guy M. Richard |
Friday, May 19, 2023
Christian confrontation, therefore, must not only entail “speaking the truth,” but it must also involve love. This means that the way we confront others is just as important as the truth we say, if not more so. We aren’t simply called to “get things off of our chests” as Christians, because that is selfish and the opposite of love. Rather we need to let love dictate what we say and how we say it.

On at least two occasions, in the context of speaking about forgiveness, Jesus instructs us to confront every brother or sister who sins against us and fails to repent or apologize. In Matthew 18:15, He says that we are to “go and tell” the one who has hurt us “his fault” in private. In Luke 17:3, He calls us to “rebuke” the one who has sinned against us in the hopes of bringing him or her to “repentance.” But, as everyone who has ever attempted to do these things will know, the way that we do them matters just as much as actually doing them. We can “go and tell” or “rebuke” others and end up making the situation far worse than it was before by doing these things in an unhelpful way. We can further damage the relationship, and we can even make the prospect of reconciliation less likely than ever by “telling” and “rebuking” in ways that hurt rather than heal.
I remember one time, many years ago, when I tried to confront my wife about something she was doing that was causing me offense. I thought about what I should say to her ahead of time, and I asked the Lord to give me the right words and the right tone of voice as well. But I didn’t give any thought to the timing of the confrontation (can you believe that I actually decided to talk to her right after we had gotten into bed and were ready to say goodnight?). And I didn’t approach the whole thing lovingly. Instead, as I discovered an hour or two later(!), I came across as arrogant and unkind. I didn’t have her best interests in mind, and she saw right through it all. Rather than fostering forgiveness and reconciliation, my confrontation backfired. It accomplished the exact opposite of what I had wanted it to accomplish.
What does it actually mean to “rebuke” someone? And how exactly should we “go and tell” others when they have offended us? What should the kind of confrontation that Jesus is advocating for in Matthew 18 and Luke 17 look like in real life? Jesus doesn’t give us much to go on in these two passages in order to answer these kinds of questions. But I think we can draw out a few guiding principles from the character of Christ Himself, which Christians are clearly called to emulate, and from other passages in Scripture as well. In particular, I want to suggest four things for us all to keep in mind when we have to confront someone who sins against us. These four things will help us not only to do it but to do it as helpfully and Christianly as we can.
Confront Slowly
The first thing I would say in regard to Christian confrontation is that we need to be very slow in actually “going and telling” people their sins. When I say this I don’t mean to suggest that we should delay our obedience to Jesus’s commands unnecessarily. We should never be slow in doing what Jesus asks us to do. But what I mean is that we need to be suspicious of our motives and our desires and to let that suspicion keep us from being “trigger-happy” in our confronting of other people. We should seek to discern why we want to confront them. Is it because we want to vindicate ourselves? Is it because we want to feel better about ourselves by tearing the other person down? Or is it because we genuinely love the other person and want what is best for them in this situation?
Practicing self-suspicion enables us to be more cautious in our approach to confrontation so that we are not confronting others unnecessarily. It helps us to be more selective in the things we choose to confront and the things we choose to let go. This is important because we live in an age that is overly sensitive. We are a thin-skinned people, by and large, and we are easily offended by the things that people say and do. When we continually confront people for trivial and unintentional things and when we constantly make mountains out of molehills, we become like the boy who cried wolf. People will stop taking us seriously.
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The purpose of the sacrificial system, however, continues to apply to the New Testament saint. The author of Hebrews teaches, “But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased” (Heb 13:16). Offering a burnt offering was a sacrificial act; it cost the worshipper something. In the same way, the New Testament believer should live a life of sacrifice, giving not only of one’s abundance, but even in one’s poverty to those less fortunate than oneself.

“Take now your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Gen 22:2). Chilling words. Abraham, however, does not ask questions. He doesn’t need a clarification; he makes no excuses, causes no delays. He understands the significance of the command.
So he rises early in the morning and saddles his donkey—to make the most sacrificial of burnt offerings.
In this act, Abraham becomes an example for Old Covenant believers to follow.
Understanding the history, practice, and significance of the burnt offering will also help New Testament believers understand the sacrifice of Abraham and apply his example to their own Christian walks.
The history of the burnt offering.
Without any explanation or instruction we know about, people after Eden included sacrificial offerings in their worship. The first Old Testament story after Adam and Eve’s expulsion tells the story of Cain and Abel’s offerings to the Lord. A few chapters later, Noah departs from the ark, builds an altar, and offers his own sacrifices: the first recorded burnt offerings (Gen 8:20).
This is a practice which, by this time in the Old Testament story, seems already well established. Abel’s offering, while not a burnt offering, establishes the proper prioritization for an offering and reflects the proper heart of worship (Gen 4:4). The “choice parts” of the animal are offered to God by fire (Lev 3:16).1 The worshipper can consume some of the animal, but the best cuts are devoted to the Lord by fire.2
The burnt offering was a completely consumed offering, one that left nothing but ashes. It is sometimes called the “holocaust sacrifice” because everything goes up in smoke (holo, “whole”; caust, “burnt”).
In Genesis, Abraham travels through Canaan building altars and presumably sacrificing upon them (Gen 12:7–8; 13:18), following the customs of those who had gone before him.
The practice of the burnt offering.
The book of Leviticus describes the process of completing a burnt offering. It details the worshipper’s responsibilities (Lev 1:3–17) and the priest’s responsibilities (Lev 6:8–13). The worshipper freely brings an unblemished male animal to the tabernacle. He presses his hand on the animal’s head and prays a prayer of confession (cf. Lev 16:21).3 He then kills the animal and captures the blood in a vessel, which the priest then sprinkles around the altar. The worshipper then skins the animal and cuts it into pieces. Then the priest takes the pieces of the animal and places them on the wood, where it is burned completely.
The peace offering, by contrast, burns only the fatty parts of the animal (the best parts), leaving the other sections for the priest and worshipper to eat (Lev 7:11–38).
The burnt offering is a very diverse offering, and some of the details differ depending on the animal sacrificed or the specific kind of sacrifice—sin offering (Lev 4:1–12) or daily sacrifice (Num 28:3–8). But the general idea of the burnt offering remains the same throughout the Old Testament: the entire sacrifice was consumed.
The Significance of the Burnt Offering
The burnt offering was one of the most frequent and significant offerings a worshipper could offer in Old Testament times.4 But because the ancient world was already very familiar with this offering, modern readers are left to discern its purpose and significance from only scant biblical data.
This much we can discern, however; the burnt offering had multiple purposes:5
1. The worshipper sought the favor of the Lord.
Whether it was to atone for sin (Lev 1:3–4) or gain a blessing (1 Kgs 3:4–15), the worshipper sacrificed something valuable to the Lord.
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