What is Coming Next for Canadian Churches?
Carl Trueman offers some powerful advice in the aforementioned essay, including being deeply rooted in doctrine and Scripture; rejecting the postmodern worship practices that have come with our “childish age”; and putting “our own lives in perspective…before God.” We must work to defend our communities and shape the minds of our children while also seeking to love our neighbours. Canada is post-Christian, but Christians in Canada are thus far facing social and political marginalization rather than persecution. There will be a cost for Christian beliefs in the coming years, both social and financial. We should use this time to prepare for what may come–and what is likely to come.
Canada’s federal government is overtly hostile to orthodox Christians. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has consistently accused those of holding Christian views on issues like abortion and sexuality of being fundamentally unCanadian; he has sought to deny government funding to summer jobs programs that will not overtly affirm his views on these issues; he has insisted that those who share the views of the vast majority of people throughout Canada’s history are hateful and bigoted. But when 68 churches were damaged or burned down in 2021 with a collective shrug and late-coming, muted protest from Canada’s progressives, it became glaringly obvious: apathy towards and disbelief in the religion of Canada’s founding has become overt hostility. Polling shows that an increasing number of Canadians believe that Christianity is damaging for society.
I have thought for some time that intolerance towards Christians in Canada is likely to grow. The vicious protests of the Toronto Public Library in 2019 were a wakeup call—activists raged outside the library for hours and even called for violence because an event featuring a pro-abortion, pro-gay feminist speaker named Megan Murphy had been allowed to proceed. Murphy agreed with progressives on everything—except for the idea that biological men identifying as women should be allowed into female-only spaces. For that, the mob bayed for her head. If they hate her that much, I wrote at the time, can you imagine how much they hate us? And furthermore: What stands between that mob and what they want? Our federal politicians? Provincial legislators? The courts?
The answer, of course, is almost nobody. Canada’s Conservatives, with a few notable exceptions, are eager to prove their loyalty to the LGBT movement and are unlikely to be reliable allies. (The “freedom candidate” Pierre Poilievre is a reliable vote for everything the LGBT movement asks for, including the “conversion therapy ban” that effectively bans some pastoral and parental conversations.) Canada’s media only pays attention to Christians when conflict with the LGBT movement or abortion industry erupts; post-Christian mainliners like Michael Coren are paid to write the same tired columns over and over again insisting that Christianity is akshually supportive of the sexual revolution and that 2,000 years of Christian teaching have gotten it all wrong.
Considering the fact that there are very few Canadians who still participate in religious worship and the overt hostility of those who control Canada’s institutions, what are the coming years likely to bring?
In a recent essay for First Things, Carl Trueman—one of our post-Christian era’s most trenchant observers–noted that Christian churches “face an unprecedented challenge” due to “the collapse of the broad moral vision that made them coherent entities.” The churches which have thus far escaped the wrath of the secular progressive elites, he noted, are those who have burned a pinch of incense (or, in many cases, several handfuls) and attempted to reconcile themselves to the new moral order by suddenly discovering that Christianity permits and endorses what it had previously called morally abominable.
It is important to note that we are just entering the post-Christian age—things are likely to get a lot worse. Trueman predicts that the chasm between the post-Christian churches and those that cling to Christian orthodoxies on life and sexuality is going to grow:
I would anticipate that within five years we will witness a significant disruption across all major representatives of the Christian faith.
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Reductionism: The Disease that Breeds Conflict
Reductionism is killing us because it’s killing our conversations. It’s killing open, receptive dialogue. It’s polarizing the nation, even the world. For our part, we have to start identifying and assaulting reductionism whenever it crops up in our conversations.
I hate conflict. And it’s not just a hatred that festers into frustration; it has bodily symptoms: a tightening throat, shortness of breath, increasing heart rate. I’m sure it’s related to my anxiety, but it appears to run deeper than that. It’s a Matthew 5:9 reaction, a visceral response to discord, a response that seems mysteriously rooted in the heart of God. I don’t know how else to explain it.
But this can make it tough to live in our world, since we have so very much conflict these days, over COVID and climate change, politics and personal freedom, meaning and morals. But beneath all that conflict, there’s a disease. It’s what we might call a mental disease: reductionism.
What’s Reductionism?
So, what is reductionism? It sounds like one of those academic terms that’s too abstract to be of any use. But that’s part of its danger. It’s quite simple to break down, but to do that, I need to tell you where it came from. Are you ready?
Satan. There. I said it. I’ll give you a minute.
Reductionism is the stepchild of our desire for mastery (complete control), which emerged from the ancient evil of autonomy, and autonomy comes from the heart of the father of lies (John 8), Satan. I realize I’m making things harder for myself by continuing to introduce terms that may not be widely understood. I’ll pause. Autonomy is “the idea that you are a law unto yourself.” In other words, it’s the idea that you’re completely and utterly independent. Here’s how John Frame puts it:
Sinners at heart do not want to live in God’s world, though they have no choice about it. They recognize the truth to some extent, because they need to get along and to make a living. But they would very much like the world to be different, and often they either try to make it different or pretend that it is. In the unbelieving fantasy world, the Lord of the Bible does not exist, and man is free to live by his own standards of truth and right. In a word, the unbeliever lives as if he were autonomous, subject only to his own law. Nobody can be really autonomous, because we are all subject to God’s control, authority, and presence. But we pretend that we are autonomous; we act as though we were autonomous, in the unbelieving fantasy world.John M. Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology, p. 22
Satan, you’ll remember, wanted to be completely independent, like God. He wanted to be autonomous. And he convinced Adam and Eve that this was worth a shot in the dark. In fact, it ended up sending them into the dark. It sent them into a lie, because no one can be autonomous except God himself.
Now, if you’re trying to be God (despite the laughable futility of that), what do you want to do? You want to master your life. You want full control. The thing is, you can’t have that…you know, because you’re not God. You’re limited by nature. That’s how you and I were made. But we’re so stubborn that we don’t accept limitation. We refuse to think we can’t master our own lives. So, within what Frame calls the fantasy world of autonomy, we chase after mastery, and when we can’t get it (again, we never will get it), then we pretend to have it with…reductionism.
I promise we’re getting closer to the definition of reductionism now. If we can’t master our lives, then we can simplify them and make it seem as if we’re in full control. We can reduce the complexity of our own lives, the people in them, and the problems that surround us. We can take, in other words, an issue or person with a thousand dimensions and pretend that there’s only one dimension. That’s reductionism. Put differently by my friend and teacher, reductionism happens when people “reduce the world to one dimension of the whole…But reductionism is poverty-stricken, not only in its threadbare endpoint consisting of only one dimension, but also in its explanatory power” (Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy, p. 111).
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Heaven is Coming
I need a view of heaven in every situation. I need to be reminded of heaven in my relationships with Christians. I need to see eternity in regards to my finances and my job. I need to remember that heaven is coming when I make choices about my family and my friends and my enemies. What a shame it will be when we give an account to God for the grudges that we kept, for the good we refused to do, for the godliness we refused to walk in. These surely must be some of the tears that will need wiping away on that glorious day.
Moses asked God to teach us to “number our days” (Psalm 90:12). David prayed that God would make him to know his end and to “let me know how fleeting I am” (Psalm 39:4-5). James reminds us that we are “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). Takeaway: Our life is short.
Jesus understood this truth and reminded his disciples often. He said things like, “For the Son of Man is going to come” (Matt 16:27), or “for the Son of Man is coming” (Matt 24:44). The Apostle Paul would go on to speak of “the Day” revealing and disclosing the secrets of the heart (1 Cor 3:13). Takeaway: Heaven is coming.
Based on these two truths, how then should we live? I have been burdened by these thoughts. Life is short and heaven is coming. We have 70, or by reason of strength 80 years on this earth, and then we walk into eternity.
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Repenting of Our Agnosticism
Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
How often do we all conduct our lives as if we lived in some sort of closed universe not actively upheld and sustained by the God who is, who spoke everything into being?For a few months I have been thinking about a phrase I first encountered in 1995 when I was teaching an introductory course in theology at Wheaton. We were using Alister McGrath’s reader as the primary text for the class and he quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) as saying that, in Modernity, we must learn to live “etsi Deus non daretur” (as if God is not a given).
Bonhoeffer was trying to figure out how to be a Modern person and affirm Christianity in some sense.
Contra at least one recent evangelical rendering of Bonhoeffer, which follows a trend that has existed for some time of treating him as though he were educated in Moody Bible College rather than in the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin, Bonhoeffer did not hold the historic Christian faith. He was a Modernist, i.e., he accepted as a given the Enlightenment critique of the historic Christian faith and understanding of the world. What does that mean? It means, as one of my undergraduate profs said in 1979: “In the 18th century God went to the corner for a beer and never came back.”
Bonhoeffer, like Karl Barth and others, was trying to figure out how to be a Modern (Enlightened) person and affirm Christianity in some sense. As I understand him, Bonhoeffer was a dialectical theologian. He was proposing a kind of “death of God” theology and affirming a kind of belief in God simultaneously. This is the sort of thing dialectical theologians do.
Are Christians living “Etsi Deus Non Daretur” (As if God is Not a Given)?
The phrase etsi Deus non daretur comes to us from Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). He was a great Dutch polymath. He made contributions in biblical studies, legal theory, theology, and politics. He was one of the major figures in Dutch cultural and political life in the 17th century. His treatise, On The Law of War and Peace is still a basic text in international relations. He was also a Remonstrant and suspected of being a Socinian, i.e., a rationalist who rejected the essential Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, and the substitutionary atonement. This was perhaps because a number of Remonstrants did become Socinians so that the line between the two movements was blurred. It is also true, however, that Grotius wrote a treatise on the satisfaction of Christ to which the Socinian Crell responded. As I understand it, Grotius used the phrase etsi Deus non daretur to say that natural law would be in effect even if God were not assumed. Bonhoeffer took the phrase, mediated to him by German scholars such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and put it to use in a rather different context (WWII and the Holocaust) and to a rather different end.
What has been troubling me about this phrase is the way it seems to describe so much of Modern and Late Modern life. How often do we Christians go about life as if we were practical agnostics, as if God were not a given? A major impetus of Modernity, i.e., the Enlightenment movements that swept across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, was to reject the historic Christian understanding of the world, to assert the autonomy of the human intellect and will, and to relegate God to an unnecessary hypothesis. Evangelicals have adapted to Modernity (and Late Modernity) by adopting a God-of-the-gaps approach: whatever cannot be explained naturally they explain with the God hypothesis: the supposition that God exists.
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