“I don’t know that evangelicals have been sufficiently self-reflective to admit their basic and personal insecurities. It’s just no fun being an outsider to mainstream culture. We all just want to be loved, and if not loved, at least liked and respected. Elite evangelicals are not just savvy evangelists but also a people striving for acceptance.” ~Mark Galli

Former editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, wrote a jaw-dropping column last week. Galli’s essay discusses where the next generation of evangelical leadership is going to emerge from. Will it be from among “elite evangelicalism” (e.g., Fuller Seminary, CT, Intervarsity Press, World Vision, etc.), or will it be from among the constellation of “reactionary Reformed conservatives” (e.g., Doug Wilson)? Galli then goes on to talk about his tenure at Christianity Today and what it revealed to him about the priorities of “elite evangelicalism.” He writes,
Elite evangelicalism (represented by CT, IVPress, World Vision, Fuller Seminary, and a host of other establishment organizations) is too often “a form of cultural accommodation dressed as convictional religion.” These evangelicals want to appear respectable to the elite of American culture. This has been a temptation since the emergence of contemporary evangelicalism in the late 1940s, the founding of Christianity Today being one example…
I don’t know that evangelicals have been sufficiently self-reflective to admit their basic and personal insecurities. It’s just no fun being an outsider to mainstream culture. We all just want to be loved, and if not loved, at least liked and respected. Elite evangelicals are not just savvy evangelists but also a people striving for acceptance.
I saw this often when I was at CT. For the longest time, a thrill went through the office when Christianity Today or evangelicalism in general was mentioned in a positive vein by The New York Times or The Atlantic or other such leading, mainstream publications. The feeling in the air was, “We made it. We’re respected.” …
This tendency has only gotten worse, as now the mark of a successful evangelical writer is to get published regularly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s interesting about such pieces is that (a) such writers make a point that affirms the view of the secular publication (on topics like environmental care, racial injustice, sexual abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evangelicals should take the same point of view. However, their writing doesn’t reach the masses of evangelicals who take a contrary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writers are really interested in getting those evangelicals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the mainstream press. Better to try to get such a column published in the most popular Pentecostal outlet, Charisma. Ah, but that would do nothing to enhance the prestige of evangelicals among the culture’s elite.
Evangelical columns in large part merely bolster the reputation of secular outlets, as these publications can now pat themselves on the back and say, “See, even religious people agree with us.” Rarely if ever will you see an evangelical by-line in such outlets that argues to protect life in womb or affirms traditional marriage.
We see an ancient dynamic here: When you seek to win the favor of the powerful, you will likely be used by them to enhance their own status. And along the way, many of your convictions will be sidelined. We’ve seen this happen on the religious right in the political nightmare of the last few years. But it happens on the left just as often.
Anyone paying attention to CT over the last decade or so is not surprised by any of this. What’s surprising is that Galli confirms it in so many words. He basically admits that “elite evangelicals” aim to win the respect and praise of Christianity’s cultured despisers and that such is the temptation in the CT newsroom itself.
What he describes is nothing other than the age-old temptation of theological liberalism, which in many ways was simply an attempt to make Christianity acceptable to cultural elites. As we all know now, that project led to the denial of core teachings of the Christian faith. For miracle-denying “Christians,” theological liberalism became the faith of the apostates not the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). It was a failed project in the last century, and it will be a failed project in this one to the degree that “evangelical elites” pursue it.
Pursuing the approval of elites is a fool’s errand. Those undertaking this project never seem to learn that “he’s elites are just not that into you.” They never have been and never will be (John 15:18-19). A part of faithfulness in our generation and in any generation is to have a holy indifference about the approval of those who despise Christ. That is why Paul warns, “For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10).
Galli writes that it’s no accident that CT more or less snubs complementarians and 6-day creationists. It’s a direct consequence of their not wishing to offend elite sensibilities.
I saw this accommodation dynamic as CT managing editor and then editor in chief.  We said, for example, that the magazine did not take a stand in the complementarianism or egalitarianism debate. But we rarely if ever published an article that endorsed complementarianism; we did offer many that assumed egalitarianism in family and church life (not to mention the many women pastors who we published).
Then there was the six-day creation/evolution debate, in which again we said we took no stand.  But try to find an article in the last three decades that argued for or assumed six-day creation. And yet we published several pieces that simply assumed a billion-year time span for the history of the earth.
It’s not a coincidence that complementarianism and six-day creation are anathema to secularists, features of a religion out of touch with reality.
I offer one personal anecdote that confirms this in my own experience. Four years ago, a number of evangelical leaders and scholars gathered in Nashville, Tennessee to complete and endorse what would come to be known as “The Nashville Statement” on biblical sexuality. Over the next four years, an impressive array of evangelical seminaries, colleges, churches, and ministries would adopt the statement as a confessional standard. Two years ago, the PCA adopted it as a faithful tool for discipling their members. The same year, the Southern Baptist Convention also adopted a resolution adopting language taken directly from The Nashville Statement.
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The western world’s gnostic separation of the human person into a good soul and a bad body has manifested itself in the postmodern transgender movement. This radical, ultimately anti-humanistic form of dualism drives an arbitrary wedge between a person’s physical, biological sex and their so-called gender. To honor their “true” or “authentic” internal sense of gender, no matter how nebulous or confused it may be, many people today, an alarming number of them children, will hire surgeons to mutilate their body so as to bring it into conformity with their “soul.”

Most American Christians are aware that it is an ancient heresy to say that Jesus was man but not God (Arianism); less are aware that there were just as many heretics who promoted the opposite error: that Jesus was God but not man (Gnosticism). The reason Gnostics denied that God became fully man in the incarnation is that they held a low view of matter in general and flesh in particular. For Gnostics, matter and flesh were not products of a good creation that fell; the creation of matter and flesh was itself the fall.
         Although there are very few full-blown Gnostics in the church today, many Americans hold to a soft dualism that sees the soul as good and the body as bad. It is because of that theological misunderstanding that many Christians imagine that when we die, we become angels: that is, pure souls. Although Christians affirm in both the Apostles and Nicene Creeds their belief in the resurrection of the body, a suspicion of the flesh persists.
         Thankfully, this gnostic, anti-biblical demonization of the flesh was dealt a decisive blow 1600 years ago in Book XIV, chapter 3 of The City of God. Although Virgil seemed to teach, in Aeneid 6, that the body weighs down the soul, Augustine insists that the Christian
faith teaches something very different. For the corruption of the body, which is a burden to the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of Adam’s first sin. Moreover, it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; on the contrary, it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. Though some incitements to vice and vicious desires are attributable to the corruption of the flesh, nevertheless, we should not ascribe to the flesh all the evils of a wicked life. Else, we free the Devil from all such passions, since he has no flesh. It is true that the Devil cannot be said to be addicted to debauchery, drunkenness, or any others of the vices which pertain to bodily pleasure—much as he secretly prompts and provokes us to such sins—but he is most certainly filled with pride and envy. It is because these passions so possessed the Devil that he is doomed to eternal punishment in the prison of the gloomy air. 
If flesh were the seat of evil, then none of the angels could have fallen. There are sins that rise up from the flesh, but they tend to be less wicked and corrupting than pride and envy, which rise up from the soul (see Mark 7:14-23). Indeed, it is more often the soul that leads the body astray than vice versa.
         No, Augustine explains in chapter 4, “the animal man is not one thing and the carnal another, but both are one and the same, namely, man living according to man.” In fact, he continues in chapter 5, it is wrong “to blame our sins and defects on the nature of the flesh, for this is to disparage the Creator. The flesh, in its own kind and order, is good. But what is not good is to abandon the Goodness of the Creator in pursuit of some created good, whether by living deliberately according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according to the entire man, which is made up of soul and flesh and which is the reason why either ‘soul’ alone or ‘flesh’ alone can mean a man.”
         Those who are aware that St. Augustine played the central role in formulating the doctrine of original sin might be surprised to find Augustine here defending the body from its detractors. To be fair, Augustine, who went through a gnostic (Manichean) phase before embracing Christianity and whose pre-conversion years were marked by sexual promiscuity found it necessary to adopt a celibate lifestyle for himself and did sometimes speak in a disparaging manner of the flesh. Still, nowhere in his writings does he equate original sin with sex, nor does he treat the body as inherently fallen. Just as original sin tainted body and soul alike, so Christ’s atoning work on the cross restored body and soul alike.
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According to Hebrews, it is by faith that we understand. And of course, if Christianity is actually true, that understanding requires knowledge of the invisible. By faith we know who God is, the truth that He created all things in the beginning and will judge all things in the future, and even present unseen realities like our union with Christ, our nature as Image of God, and the moral order. These invisible realities and their interconnections are at the heart of Christianity. Faith, therefore, is necessary for grasping the Christian vision of the world: it is by faith that we understand reality as it really is.

The things I love deeply are also the things that irk me most easily. And most profoundly. This makes sense: when we love, we care. (Likewise, indifference breeds apathy.) For nerds like me, this applies especially to books.
Let me first say that I love Luc Ferry’s little gem A Brief History of Thought. It’s a gem because it succinctly if simplistically traces through the whole history of the Western intellectual tradition by articulating four major epochs; and it does this by charting the ligaments between metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. So, so helpful.
But as this is the internet, we must race past vague, general praise toward concrete, specific, detailed, brash criticism.
Allow me, dear reader, to explain what irks me about Ferry’s book. Ferry thinks of philosophy as an attempt to construct a theory of salvation without recourse to divine revelation. In religious traditions, the divine brings salvation to humanity. In philosophical traditions, humanity seeks salvation on its own. In the introduction, Ferry puts it this way: “Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far as our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.” (p. 6) I happen to think this is an unhelpful way to differentiate religion and philosophy, but what really irks me is that word ‘blind’…
Ferry is, of course, not alone in insinuating that religious faith is an agent of blindness, that to have faith is to shut oneself off from some aspect of reality, that faith requires persistent belief without evidence or even in the fact of evidence to the contrary. Both outside the church and, more troublingly, inside, Christians are often told that the claims they are meant to hold most dear, the claims they ought to order their lives around, are either irrational or, at best, a-rational. Anyway, the central, credal claims of Christians throughout history aren’t subject to the sort of careful, reasoned investigation that, in the physical universe known to humanity, only humans can undertake. We must simply believe.
1. Seeing the Invisible
The Scriptures paint a different picture of faith’s relationship to sight.
In the letter we know as 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul connects faith in God to Christians’ ability to suffer well. He writes:
For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. … Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believe, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. … So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. … So we are always of good courage. … [F]or we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor. 4:6-10, 13-14, 16-18; 5:6a, 7)
Notice that Paul runs headlong into a connection between faith and knowledge: we believe by faith, and so speak, because we know we will be raised. This connection between faith and knowing, which is not unique to Paul, eliminates the idea that faith is opposed to knowing, and therefore to reasonable belief. Notice that Paul includes the faith-sight contrast in this very context. In whatever sense faith is opposed to sight, faith simply is not opposed to knowledge.
We can go further.
The author of Hebrews toys with the idea of knowing by faith through seeing the unseen as well. Moses is said to have endured the wrath of Pharaoh “as seeing him [that is, God] who is invisible”. (11:23) Moses looked to his unseen future reward. (11:22)
Hebrews goes beyond Paul: “By faith we understand”, it says. (11:3) The things understood are themselves invisible: the creation of the world by the Word, the promises of God fulfilled, Jesus seated at the right hand of God. This goes further than mere knowledge because understanding requires knowledge but is more than knowledge. Understanding is knowledge organized and applied. To understand is to systematize what you know and be able to utilize that knowledge in the right circumstances.
2. Understanding by Faith
In the context of religion—or, more broadly, any perspective on the whole of reality—understanding involves not just knowledge of certain religious facts, but the systematization of those facts.
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