The Need to Recover Apologetics
Even the most devout faith will sooner or later falter and fail unless those who hold it are willing to bring it into public debate and to test it against experience in every area of life. If the Christian faith about the source and goal of human life is to be denied access to the public realm, where decisions are made on the great issues of the common life, then it cannot in the long run survive even as an option for a minority.
Christian faith is in decline in America. A 2022 Pew research report observes that in 1972, 90% of Americans identified as Christian with 5% identifying as “nones” or religiously unaffiliated. Today, those identifying as Christians dropped to 63% with nones increasing to 29%. More staggering is the fact that according to a 2021 Arizona Christian University, Cultural Research Center (CRC) report, 43% of Millennials (18 -36 yrs) are “Don’ts”—Don’t know, don’t care, or don’t believe that God exists. Projections show a continuing decline in those identifying as Christians, so that by 2070 Christianity will be a minority religion in America with only about 35% of people identifying as Christian.
There is a concurrent decline in theological orthodoxy. According to the same 2021 CRC report, belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful Creator God who rules the world fell from 86% in 1991 to 46% in 2021. Belief in the Bible as the accurate Word of God fell from 70% in 1990 to 41% in 2021. According to a 2020 CRC study, 75% of evangelicals (defined as those who identify as born again) believe that people are basically good, which logically leads to the conclusion that Christ’s death is not salvific.
We could trace the decline back to the Enlightenment with contributions by historical criticism, Marxism, and evolutionary theory. We could even trace it further back to Adam and Eve who first decided to trust their own desires over God’s Word. Today some might add to the reasons for decline: the church is not welcoming enough, the church abused or oppressed people by calling them to repent; church scandals turn people away; the church’s Bible, theology, and practice are labeled misogynist, bigoted, and patriarchal. The list could go on.
In 1966, Time Magazine published an article, “Is God Dead?” that highlighted liberal voices attacking Christian faith. The author observes, “If nothing else, the Christian atheists [it would seem ‘Christian atheist’ is an oxymoron] are waking the churches to the brutal reality that the basic premise of faith—the existence of a personal God, who created the world and sustains it with his love—is now subject to profound attack.” Today the attack on Christian faith continues by news media, entertainment, academia and jurisprudence, with their voices magnified by 24/7 cable outlets and social media. The media reported recently that the Chief Diversity Officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Office of Diversity published a hierarchical list of oppressors, stating in the accompanying newsletter that members of these privileged groups have unearned advantages and favors, “at the expense of members of other groups.” Christians were listed sixth just after white people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people and males. Although she apologized for her list, the list is not unusual. It is a typical intersectionality list from the Critical Race Theory movement.
When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, which sought to preserve in law the biblical definition of marriage that existed for 2000 years, the majority of the Court labeled the Christian view as bigoted and harmful. Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissenting opinion wrote:
But the majority says that the supporters of this Act acted with malice—with the “purpose” (ante, at 25) “to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples. It says that the motivation for DOMA was to “demean,” ibid.; to “impose inequality,” ante, at 22; to “impose . . . a stigma,” ante, at 21; to deny people “equal dignity,” ibid.; to brand gay people as “unworthy,” ante, at 23; and to “humiliat[e]” their children, ibid. (emphasis added).”
Entertainment media also feels justified in attacking and ridiculing Christian faith. In the second season of the popular TV series West Wing, the President, played by Martin Sheen, ridiculed a talk show host, who was opposed to same-sex behavior based on Old Testament passages. Sheen confronts the host suggesting, “My chief of staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? …Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother, John, for planting different crops side by side?”
According to analyst George Barna, who heads up the Christian Research Center, “The United States has become one of the largest and most important mission fields in the world.” Yet, he explained, “many of the approaches now relied upon by Christian ministries—and especially churches—may be inadequate to impact the new population that needs to be reached with God’s truths and principles.”
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Encourage Discouraged Pastors
Perhaps more than anything else, just become your pastor’s friend. Friendship has a healing aspect to it. Open your home and care for them. Think of the pastor’s wife and kids. They need you also. I doubt that you could possible know what intentional love can do for those God has, in his providence, put over you in the Lord.
There are plenty of pastors with generous smiles on their faces each Sunday who, deep down, are very disheartened.
Pastoring a church is hard work. For one thing, it is usually thankless. I know there are some churches that seem to remember their pastors with such fanfare, but most do not ever esteem them. They don’t work for just the members ultimately, so they can get over it, but never hearing those words, “Thanks for what you do, pastor,” is discouraging. But you can remedy this one, can’t you? Perhaps right now is the best time to write that email or note, or to make a phone call.
Some pastors get discouraged because their people expect a Dr. Internationally Known Mountain, when what they really are stuck with is only Brother Molehill. Expectations are at an all time high in these days of exceptional media coverage. Every pastor is happy when a member listens to sermons every day, but he knows he doesn’t measure up to the gifted pastors these people hear most of the time.
Some are discouraged because they are physically worn out. It just takes a few sensitive members to help him remedy this problem by pulling him away from normal tasks for a break.
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How Men Were Made Redundant
Reeves’ work may be the most well-researched compilation of problems plaguing the modern male. Mothers, fathers, wives, employers, and educators are “really worried about boys and men,” Reeves emphasizes. “We need a pro-social vision of masculinity for a post-feminist world.”
Men are losing their grip. Literally. Adult men today have a 30-pound weaker grip strength than four decades ago, writes Richard Reeves in his latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. And that’s not their worst problem.
Grade-school boys are far more likely than girls to fail math, reading, and science, and twice as likely to have developmental disabilities. The problem persists through higher education: Women receive more than half of bachelor’s degrees in the United States and the majority of master’s degrees, associate’s degrees, law degrees, and doctoral degrees. Women now dominate most previously male-led fields. As Reeves explains, “there have been no equivalent gains for men…nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world.”
Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is not alone in identifying the male species’s decades-in-the-making downfall. “America’s boys are broken,” comedian Michael Ian Black wrote in the New York Times in 2018. “And it’s killing us.”
Hallmark feminist Gloria Steinem wrongly assessed such a situation in her 1970 essay, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win.” She predicted that with women “bearing financial responsibility, and with the idea of ‘masculine’ jobs gone, men might well feel freer and live longer.” She praised Sweden, which adopted radical feminist policy years before America, as a soon-to-be “working Women’s Lib model.” Reeves claims Sweden once again leads the way: The country in 2010 penned the term pojkkrisen (boy crisis) to address the widening gender gap, the same year Forbes magazine declared America’s “Year of the Woman.”
Women won. And after decades of diligent feminism, men are worse off. While the sexual revolution liberated women to leave men behind in the dust, it also left men right there in the dust. Women wrote themselves a new economically and physically independent script, and men never drafted a response. Instead, the feminine mystique paved the way for what Reeves calls the male malaise.
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Healing Comes with the Sabbath
Written by David T. Koyzis |
Sunday, June 26, 2022
On a weekly basis we sinners confess our transgressions before the God who has forgiven us through Jesus Christ. We live our lives in this age in anticipation of being raised to new life on that still-to-come seventh day. In this life in the meantime, when we gather to worship on each Lord’s day, we reenact liturgically the promise of redemption to which we look forward with hope, confident that healing will come with the sabbath.The Gospels record seven instances of Jesus healing someone on the sabbath day.
The three Synoptic Gospels tell of his healing a man with a withered hand (Matt 12:9–13; Mark 3:1–6; Luke 6:6–11). All three again relate the very brief story of his healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law of her fever (Matt 8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4:38–39). Two Gospels tell of Jesus casting an “unclean spirit,” or demon, out of a man (Mark 1:21–28; Luke 4:31–37). Luke alone relates the stories of Jesus curing a woman with “a spirit of infirmity” (13:10–17) and a man with dropsy (14:1–6). Finally, the Gospel of John relates two occasions when Jesus healed on the sabbath: the sick man at the pool of Bethzatha (5:1–18) and the man who had been born blind (9:1–41).
Each of these occasions saw Jesus incurring the wrath of the Jewish religious leaders because he had apparently violated the Torah’s prohibition against working on the seventh day (Exod 20:8–11; Deut 5:12–15). As the indignant ruler of one of the synagogues put it, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be healed, and not on the sabbath day” (Luke 13:14). The story continues with Jesus’ response:
You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger, and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day? (13:15–16)
This reply put the people to shame, we are told, yet it only stiffened the resolve of the authorities to put an end to Jesus’ ministry.
How shall we interpret Jesus’ actions? Was he deliberately healing on the sabbath to make a point? And, if so, what was that point? Might Jesus have been underscoring the negative effects of legalism?
There is something to this. After all, Paul wrote, “One man esteems one day as better than another, while another man esteems all days alike. Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom 14:5). And, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath” (Col 2:16). In his letters to the believers of Rome and Colossae, Paul appears to relativize the importance of sabbath-keeping, along with other observances to which the ancient Jews were accustomed.
The notion that Jesus was combating legalism is one that we are likely to find deeply attractive, given the dominant metanarrative of expressive individualism to which Charles Taylor and others have called our attention. Enforcing the letter of the law may conflict with the spirit of the law, an insight that we find as early as Plato, who for that reason preferred the rule of the virtuous to the rule of law. We need not go that far, of course, to recognize that the law needs to be tempered by mercy and the good judgement that often comes of long personal experience.
Nevertheless, we ought not to assume that the principle of sabbath rest has been abrogated. Indeed, its importance can scarcely be overemphasized for the larger biblical redemptive story. In Genesis 2:2–3 we read that God rested on the seventh day after he had made heaven and earth, including his human image, the capstone of creation.
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