What Must the Label “Evangelical” Do to Be Saved?
Written by Jonathan M. Threlfall |
Friday, April 5, 2024
Quite possibly, it is losing its usefulness as a word to describe people who cherish the Bible, prioritize on the gospel, embrace the new birth, and work for spiritual renewal and social good—as evangelicals historically have done. If so, this I know: the evangel itself—the joyful announcement about Jesus—will never outlive its usefulness.
“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare’s lovelorn Juliet.
Wouldn’t her beloved Romeo still be a pretty cool guy, even if his name was Bob, Octavius, or even Orange Marmalade? After all, she reasoned, a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.
But names and labels get more complicated when it comes to religious, social, and theological movements, especially when the name of the movement—as in the case of evangelicalism—has a very important word embedded in it: evangel, the Greek word for the gospel.
The gospel is central to what evangelicals have historically believed. Narrated in the pages of the Holy Scriptures, the gospel is the joyful announcement that Jesus, by his death and resurrection, can give people his Spirit, restore them to a right relationship with God, and energize their efforts to live out his life and to spread this good news to more people.
Michael Reeves, in his recently published book Gospel People: A Call for Evangelical Integrity, insists that “there is a biblical case to be made for the importance and the goodness of being evangelical” (13). At the same time, he offers this important caveat:
I do not mean to defend everything that calls itself evangelical. Far from it. Looking around at the phenomenon of evangelicalism today, it seems a mile wide and an inch deep. . .
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The Moral Decline of Elite Universities
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were originally founded as seminaries. They are seminaries once again. The doctrine they embrace is both insecure and oppressive in its prohibition of insiders and outsiders from pursuing free inquiry. Rather than wrestle with hard questions about human dignity, individual agency, and speech, many in the Ivy League seem poised to double down on fanaticism. Cults tend to excuse their failures: The world is ending, but our mystic math was a little off. As this crisis unfolds, America’s elite academics are tinkering with their doctrinal formulas. Rather than abandon their theology, they’re attempting to rejigger the charts and reweight the numerology.
In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.
Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.
Despite the stylistic similarity of these two images, they had a substantive distinction. Yes, both sets of presidents sat atop sectors experiencing a collapse of public trust. Higher education commanded the confidence of 57 percent of Americans a mere eight years ago, but only 36 percent of Americans by this summer, and a steeper decline is likely coming as a consequence of the grotesqueries of the past two months. And yes, both sets of testimonies—of the tobacco executives, and the elite-education executives—revealed a deep moral decline inside their respective cultures. But here’s a difference: The tobacco executives were lying, and subsequent legal discovery showed how extensive their understanding of nicotine was. The three university presidents, however—with their moral confusion on naked display—were likely not lying; instead, we saw a set of true believers in a new kind of religion.
It is important to note that the three presidents who testified before Congress—Liz Magill, who subsequently resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania; Sally Kornbluth, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Claudine Gay, of Harvard University—didn’t open themselves up to perjury charges. Instead, they revealed themselves as having drunk the Kool-Aid of a new and cultlike worldview. Along with so much of higher education, especially outside the hardest of sciences, they have become acolytes of a shallow new theology called “intersectionality.” This is neither a passing fad nor something that normies can roll our eyes at and ignore. As Andrew Sullivan presciently predicted a mere six years ago, the tenets of this all-encompassing ideology have quickly spilled beyond trendy humanities departments at top-30 universities, and its self-appointed priestly class tried tirelessly to enforce its ideology.
At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight—all of these must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or powerlessness of certain sociological categories. This victimology decrees that the world, and every institution therein, must be divided by the awakened into categories of oppressors and oppressed. Immutable group identities, rather than the qualities, hopes, and yearnings of individuals, are the keys to unlocking the power structures behind any given moment: All the sheep and goats must be sorted.
The bullying certainty of this belief system is indeed boring, but that is not to say that every move is predictable. For instance, depending on their skin tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, tenured Ivy Leaguers earning five times the median American income may be categorized as oppressed. Conversely, depending on their skin tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, janitors at Walmart may be considered, within the intersectionality matrix, to be irredeemable oppressors.
By way of disclosure: I am a university president turned United States senator turned university president again. The institution I now lead, the University of Florida, faces all sorts of challenges, and Florida is the site of important battles about the responsibilities of academia to our society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and dedicated faculty aim to provide an elite education that promotes resilience and strength in our students so that they are tough enough, smart enough, and compassionate enough to engage big ideas in a world where people will always disagree.
Growing up, I idolized Martin Luther King Jr., who championed universal human dignity with clear-cut moral authority. From memory, writing in a jail cell in Birmingham, he synthesized, refined, and applied the Western canon’s greatest philosophers, from Socrates to Abraham Lincoln, to America’s predicament. While damning the original sin of white supremacy, he consistently offered hope that our country could overcome injustice with love. It’s gut-wrenching to think that America’s greatest civil-rights leader—one of the greatest Americans in the country’s entire history—would have his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” criticized and dismissed for citing only dead white males if it were written today. Too much of elite academia cares little for universal human dignity, leaves no space for forgiveness, and exhibits no interest in shared progress.
Today, free will, individual agency, forgiveness, personal improvement, and healthy cultural cross-pollination are all obliterated by omnipotent determinisms. This is why academics at the Smithsonian created a graphic for children that portrayed America as an irredeemably racist society, asserting that “rugged individualism,” “the nuclear family,” and “hard work” are “internalized … aspects of white culture.” The message is clear: Success is always a privilege given, never the result of hard work; virtues such as self-reliance are unattainable for minorities.
These elites believe that the world must be remade. Since the beginning of time, oppressors—the “privileged”—ran roughshod over the oppressed or marginalized. Now oppressors must be brought low to atone for history’s sins. It is a faith without guardrails, without grace, and certainly without reconciliation. It requires a life of moral struggle against the devil and the world, but with no eschatology of hope. There is no heaven coming here.
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Augustine and Antisemitism
Written by James R. Wood |
Monday, December 4, 2023
Augustine never promoted a Jewish state, but rather expounded the theological significance of Jewish scattering. However, one wonders if he might support such a state as a way to protect Jewish lives and practice in light of the antisemitic hostility that we have seen simmer over the centuries, erupt in Western nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and remain an ever-present threat in relation to Islamic extremists who now have the sympathy also of Westerners. This is speculative, but one can imagine it as a post-Holocaust extension of Augustine’s basic teachings on the Jews. And to extend his logic in this way does not require one to embrace dispensational Zionism.October 7th forced the West to face up to some grim realities. One is that we remain in history, and our intractable political conflicts have not been resolved by liberal nation-building. Another is that antisemitism remains with us and afflicts a variety of tribes, both political and ethnic, both at home and abroad. This animosity is evident not only in Hamas and Hamas-friendly Palestinians, but also progressives in Western nations who have come to classify contemporary Jews and the state of Israel as privileged oppressors. At the other end of the horseshoe, there is also an emergent strain on the new Christian right that winks at Jew-hatred while it seeks to curb what it sees as Western over-commitment to the modern state of Israel. Much of this is explained as a correction of sloppy post-War geopolitical thinking, which linked up with the dispensational theology that led many Western Christians to uncritically support Israel, and Zionist Jewish leaders in Western nations. This has led to a supersessionist backlash that seems to sanction hardened attitudes toward Jewish suffering in Israel and hostility toward Jews in the West.
Some form of what has come to be called “supersessionism” is the majority report in church history. Supersessionism broadly posits that Israel has been replaced by the Christian church, and that Jews who do not believe in Christ are no longer to be identified with God’s chosen people. According to this traditional belief, Jews lost the rights to the covenant promises in their rejection of Jesus. Dispensationalism–a more novel theology, and one not uninfluenced by the astonishing founding of the state of Israel in 1948–is adamantly opposed to this reading, presenting Israel and the church as two distinct peoples of God, with two distinct plans of salvation. Dispensational theologians strongly emphasize the irrevocability of the promises to national Israel; this leads many to view the modern state of Israel through a prophetic lens. Dispensationalists and those unknowingly influenced by this theology tend to be those most sensitive to the plight of Jews in our day, while supersessionist theology has been weaponized in service of hostility toward Jews, and those who adopt the supersessionist framing tend to struggle to articulate anything positive about the perdurance of Judaism and contemporary Jews. This is exacerbated by the very common pattern of people who have grown up in dispensationalist circles finding more classical Protestant theology, stumbling upon Luther’s floridly antisemitic comments, and as a result reacting against their enthusiastically Zionist upbringing (and parents) by embracing a maximally antisemitic read of the Reformers.
This essay will investigate how Augustine’s theology relates to all of this. What I will argue is that Augustine’s “witness doctrine,” while it certainly cannot be categorized as a species of dispensationalism, does not fit neatly in most expressions of supersessionism either. Augustine, while presenting the Christian church as continuous with Israel and as the fulfillment of Old Testament promises, and while being fervent about the need for Jews to repent and believe in Christ, also provides a positive account of Judaism. Working from within the contra Iudaeos stream of patristic rhetoric and theology, Augustine added a somewhat revolutionary contribution.
Background: Contra Iudaeos
Early in the church’s history, a form of supersessionism developed that viewed the Jews as rejected by God for having rejected Christ. Much of this tradition employed an allegorical reading of Esau and Jacob as prefiguring Israel and the church, inspired by similar interpretive moves in Paul’s writings. Already by the second century, theologians and Christian apologists began to present opposition to the gospel as a permanent feature of Jewish identity and Jewish-Christian relations.[1] Such Christians devised arguments to explain why Jews were seemingly incapable of perceiving that Christians had the true understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures. As Paula Fredriksen explains in her important work on Augustine and the Jews, the rhetorical force of these arguments was exacerbated by the failed Jewish revolt led by Bar Kokhba in AD 132-135. “Gentile Christians,” explains Fredriksen, “viewed the earlier, first-century destruction of the Temple through the prism of this bloody second-century defeat.”[2] Christians linked these two failed Jewish revolts (i.e., AD 66-70 and AD 132-135) with the New Testament predictions of the destruction of the Temple and the latter’s relation to Jesus’ death. This all served to confirm the idea that the Jews killed Jesus, and thereby surrendered their special covenantal status. Christian thinkers increasingly developed the “trail of blood” motif that associated the Jews with Cain, arguing that just as the Jews killed the prophets, so they killed Christ, and thus they remain ever hostile to Christians.[3] Interestingly, the term “Jewish” was employed in various theological treatises, sermons, and debates to apply to any heresy or enemy of Christian truth. Christian theology was tempted at various points to disparage the Old Testament and “fleshly” religion. By the time of the late fourth century, rhetoric contra Iudaeos had come into its own.[4]
Augustine’s thought is somewhat unique in this context. His conception of the Jews and Judaism is marked by two poles: one more comfortably in line with the contra Iudaeos tradition, seen in his presentation of non-Christian Jews as judged and humiliated,[5] and the other a revolution within that rhetorical tradition exhibited in his doctrine of positive Jewish witness.[6] For the purposes of this essay, we will simply look at the key aspects of his witness doctrine and his reasons for espousing it. There is a strange ambivalence in this doctrine for Augustine, for it simultaneously conceives of the Jews as judged and protected, as humiliated and preserved.[7] But this ambivalent Augustinian doctrine might offer something to our contemporary debates.
Early Developments in Augustine’s Doctrine
To introduce Augustine’s “witness doctrine,” I will provide an overview of the main images employed by Augustine at each stage in his development of this theme, and then conclude with a summary of the key tenets of his mature thought on the topic.
Augustine begins to approach the witness doctrine in his early battles against the Manichees, particularly Faustus,[8] and his debates with Jerome. Here a key image is flesh. Faustus appropriated the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the day, but directed it at the catholic church. The Manichees espoused an extreme Law-Gospel contrast and pitted the Old Testament and “fleshly” faith against true “spirituality,” the latter being most purely expressed by the Manichees. Much of the early contra Iudaeos tradition was based on a derogatory dichotomy of flesh vs. spirit; true Christianity was “spiritual” and heresy was “carnal,” rhetorically rendered as “Jewish.”[9] Faustus went even further by arguing that sacrifice and “bloody” religion were inherently wrong.
Augustine made the case for the positive theological status of flesh against Faustus and the Manichees, but, in so doing, also supplied a defense of Judaism. He was helped by the writings of the Donatist theologian Tyconius, something evident in On Christian Doctrine, which Augustine began writing in 396-397. With the aid of Tyconius, Augustine began to rethink how to read the Bible and the Church’s relationship to Judaism.[10] Tyconius helped Augustine conceive of a positive understanding of the Law and of continuity between the Old and New Covenants.[11] The Law is good, and so was the Jewish understanding of the Law and Israel’s traditional practices. Christ did not abolish the Law, but revealed its depths and telos in himself. In Answer to Faustus, a Manichean, written in 398-400, Augustine argued that bloody, fleshly sacrifice was needed to point to Christ, to prepare the way for the incarnation and crucifixion–which were fleshly and bloody.
This leaves open the question about ongoing Jewish cultic practice after the coming of Christ, something which leads us to Augustine’s debates with Jerome, which are found in Augustine’s letters 40 and 82, from AD 396 and 405, respectively. These debates centered on Jerome’s interpretation of Galatians 2, but were ultimately about the truthfulness of God’s Word and the role of post-apostolic Jewish practice. Surprisingly, Jerome had argued that the debate between Peter and Paul in Galatians 2 was not genuine, since it made no sense that a Christian leader would be confused about or tempted by Jewish practices after Christ.
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Blasphemy in the Presbyterian Church in America: A Reflection before the General Assembly
Does he believe sexual immorality is shameful (Eph. 5:12) and corrosive (1 Cor. 6:18) and ought not to be discussed, or does he believe that being a ‘[insert sin here] Christian’ is just another form of Christian experience? Does he believe that it is blasphemy to associate Christ’s holy name with enduring sin and to make that sin central to one’s identity, experience, personhood, or ‘authentic self,’ or does he think it is needless alarmism and decidedly unwinsome to object strenuously to such obviously worldly notions?
It is one of the ironies of life that the writings of dead men often contain a better understanding of contemporary affairs, albeit unwittingly, than do many contemporary observers. They have the advantage of being immune to the distorted thought patterns, banal conventional wisdom, and often imbalanced priorities and mistaken values that frequently cause contemporary pundits to see only a part of any given matter, and to see even that askew. To understand the present one must read from the past. One must get away from our debates even to understand them, just as one must sometimes leave his workplace – say, by taking a walk around the building – to understand what is going on in that workplace. One must leave the atmosphere of urgency, raw emotion, conflicting perspectives, unhelpful advice, differing personalities, and other thought-corrupting elements in order to see them rightly and to think with one’s reasonable faculties rather than by spontaneous habit or emotion.
So it is that one of the best critiques of that contemporary social movement that is called, with doubtful accuracy, ‘social justice,’ appears in the lectures of a Dutch historian from the mid-19th century.[1] So it is that one of the best criticisms of what is now called postmodernism appeared in Chapter III (“The Suicide of Thought”) of the English journalist G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 partly autobiographical book Orthodoxy. So it is that many a Presbyterian professor of yesteryear has left us thoughts which bear an abiding vitality even now. To our purposes here is an excerpt from Chesterton’s 1905 book of social criticism, Heretics, but before quoting it I must note that he is a not wholly reliable thinker who failed to understand the Reformed tradition and who entered the Roman communion in later life. In that work he wrote:
Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.
We live in an age of wide unbelief, with the result that we live in an age of obliviousness to the evil nature of many words and deeds. To be clear, Chesterton was not speaking of the objective reality and severity of blasphemy, but rather about how it is perceived by those that have committed or witnessed it. The evil of blasphemy in no way depends upon the conscience or faith (or rather, lack thereof) of its human subjects in order to be blasphemous. It is a terrible offense against God, whose eternal majesty and omniscience never change, even where the sinner is ignorant of the real nature of what he has said. In order for one to realize that someone has committed blasphemy it is necessary for him to have a measure of faith; and where there is a lack of awareness of blasphemy, there is occasion to fear that true faith is lacking as well.
It is with sadness then that I say that there is blasphemy present in the evangelical world, and that it does not receive the censure it deserves or which we would expect if it were recognized in its true nature. The other day I passed a car with a bumper sticker that read, in total: BINGE JESUS. Undoubtedly this was an attempt to commend him to the public, a praiseworthy goal. And yet it seems to be lost on the vehicle owner that putting our Lord in the same category as junk food and cheap thrills is quite irreverent, and that there is something terribly amiss in suggesting that people should relate to him in the same way as many people relate to Netflix. I doubt the car owner would concur that his sticker could be paraphrased as ‘approach Jesus like you approach your weekend drinking habit,’ and yet given the actual meaning of ‘binging’ in our culture it is more likely to be interpreted in that way (if subconsciously) than met with the thought that Jesus is God Incarnate and worthy of total submission.
Binging anything is an intentional loss of self-restraint, the deliberate consumption of something in excess for pleasure. It is a contemporary form of revelry and a species of that seldom condemned sin of gluttony to which Scripture ascribes such woeful consequences (Prov. 23:21). That is emphatically the opposite of what is involved in following Christ, who expects steadfastness at all times (Mk. 13:13) and who presents following him as an act of self-denial fraught with hardship rather than an easy thrill whose appeal soon fades (Rev. 2:10; Heb. 3:14; 10:39).
To associate binging with Christ is then a sort of casual blasphemy which, however well intended, actually portrays Christ in a very misleading way. Elsewhere we see ministers, including some in the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), use certain four-letter words to express themselves. The case can be made that all cursing is blasphemy, because the one who does it arrogates to himself something which is the prerogative of God alone, and directs it toward circumstances which God has sovereignly ordained for the good of the sufferer (Rom. 8:28), or toward people who are made in his likeness (Jas. 3:9). It is a bitter truth to remember that our sufferings are ordained by God, and it is a truth which must be used with immense tact and prudence; but still, to curse our hard circumstances is to curse God’s providence, which is a grievous evil indeed. And yet some of the men who represent God and serve him actually do such things themselves! They who should be calling men out of such sins of the tongue are giving an example of them to the wayward. “These things ought not to be” (Jas. 3:10).
This which we are discussing is a large part of the ongoing fitness for office controversy in the PCA. There are many who have criticized certain forms of self-description for denying progress in sanctification or for other errors, which are serious faults. But there has been too little denunciation of such terms on the ground that they are simply blasphemous. Well might a man stop his ears and tear his clothes to hear some of the phrases which people have used to describe themselves even in prominent forums and in our General Assembly. Words which have a well understood meaning in contemporary English as referring to people whose lives revolve around transgressing (or wanting to transgress) Leviticus 18:22 are applied to our new life in Christ, and those who object are accused of petty, inconsiderate Pharisaism for wanting to ‘police language’ and ‘argue over terms.’ God says to not even name such things (Eph. 5:3), and yet many among us assert that they have an indisputable right to refer to themselves with such terms, and do so brazenly without shame or fear (comp. Jude 12). And many others have not the spiritual understanding to see that this is brazen blasphemy, and do not join in efforts to forbid it.
“Blasphemy depends upon belief” — and if one does not see the blasphemy he ought to examine his heart to see what are his actual beliefs. What are his beliefs about holiness and sin, judgment and redemption, the nature of the flesh and the nature of our new lives in Christ? Does he believe that “to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21) and that following him involves a life of suffering and sacrifice (Matt. 10:16-24), and of denying oneself (Matt. 16:24-26) and following him in a way that involves endless war upon one’s remaining sin nature (Gal. 5:17; Jas. 3:2)? Or does he believe that it is acceptable to name oneself by his indwelling sin, sin which is abominable in God’s sight and for which he subjects the nations that approve it to his wrathful judgment? Does he believe sexual immorality is shameful (Eph. 5:12) and corrosive (1 Cor. 6:18) and ought not to be discussed, or does he believe that being a ‘[insert sin here] Christian’ is just another form of Christian experience? Does he believe that it is blasphemy to associate Christ’s holy name with enduring sin and to make that sin central to one’s identity, experience, personhood, or ‘authentic self,’ or does he think it is needless alarmism and decidedly unwinsome to object strenuously to such obviously worldly notions? “Blasphemy depends upon belief” – and where there is no objection to blasphemy, well might we suspect the beliefs of the silent and suggest they test themselves to see whether they are Christ’s (2 Cor. 13:5). For it is written of him: “Zeal for your house has consumed me” (Ps. 69:9). The church is his house (1 Cor. 3:16-17) and we his people are to imitate him (11:1; Eph. 5:1-2). Where then is our zeal to silence blasphemy in our own house?
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
[1] Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer’s Unbelief and Revolution
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