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The
Church in the West – While on sabbatical I pulled off of our
daughter’s bookshelf The European Reformations by Carter Lindberg
and could hardly put it down. This is an excellent introduction to
the Reformations of the 16th century and how biblical thinking gave
shape to the modern world. When Luther nailed his 95 Thesis to the
church door in Wittenberg in 1517 he had no inkling that his protest
would lead to reformation and give Europe essentially the political
shape of today. Lindberg also challenges us to see how distant we
are from the biblical worldview of the Reformers. “In our modern
world of religious and ethical relativism,” he writes, “the
16th century concern for truth appears strange even as we persecute
others for political deviance.” Then he quotes from Roland Bainton,
the great Luther scholar and author of Here I Stand. “We are
today horrified that Geneva should have burned a man [Servetus] for
the glory of God, yet we incinerate whole cities for the saving of
democracy.” These comments, I believe, reveal how far we have
distanced ourselves from the understanding of the 16th century Reformers,
a distance far greater and more significant than the mere passing
of time. A naturalistic worldview has replaced the biblical worldview
for much of the West and has become a faulty foundation for our moral
choices, for how we see ourselves, and for how we perceive the presence
or absence of God in the world. Today,
Europe is more distant from its Reformation roots than America. A
hundred years ago, for example, in Holland, 98% of the people attended
church. Today, it is around 2%. There are comparable figures for other
European countries. In the United States there is still a strong biblical
emphasis, but the church is being seduced to sell her birthright.
The media and leading pundits tell us that we are to be silent in
the public arena. Many in the church have accepted uncritically this
idea of the privatization of religious beliefs. The polls tell us
that a large percentage of the population affirms the doctrines of
Scripture, but at the same time reveals a canyon-wide gap between
faith and life. While we hear more and more about a “clash of
civilizations” in international affairs, we must not forget
that there has been a clash within Christendom for the past 200 years
between those who affirm the biblical tradition and those who allege
that the biblical worldview is out of date. The recent controversy
over same-sex marriage and the acceptance of Bishop Robinson’s
lifestyle in the Episcopal Church reflects this “clash.”
Ultimately this is a challenge to God’s created order, God’s
authority and wisdom and indeed His very character. I am reminded
of the words that God spoke to his rebellious people through the prophet
Jeremiah in the 7th century BC. An interesting exercise would be to survey our modern culture in light of the first chapter of Romans and Paul’s apologetic that cuts to the heart of the matter. There is a clear knowledge about God that is suppressed or held down, Paul argues, and this results in futile thinking and hearts of darkness. Claiming to be wise, in reality they have become fools, for they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God” for idolatry. Paul later argues that they exchanged “the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator.” Four times in this passage Paul says that God ‘gave them up’ to their hearts desire for autonomy with dire results; foolish thinking when it comes to first principles, the breakdown of authority, illicit sexuality and confused sexual roles, etc. I think that so many people today fail to see realistically what is true about human nature because they hold a romantic view of man’s goodness and progress. The utopian dream still lingers. Jesus spoke against this romantic idea about human nature when early in his ministry we read that he “would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for knew what was in a man.” [John 2:24-25] Peter Berger, in his book A Rumor of Angels, expresses a similar thought when he says that he “who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter-until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company.” The
“Third’ Church -If we look only at the church under siege
we might fail to see what God is doing worldwide. It may come as a
surprise to many Christians in America, but the church is exploding
in the third world at an unprecedented rate. In Africa alone, at the
turn of the last century there were10 million Christians… now
there are over 360 million! Statistics can be misleading, yet something
significant is happening. Within the wider Anglican community, for
example, it is certainly noteworthy that it is the Asian and African
church leaders who are demanding that the church remains faithful
to the word of God. This ‘third church’ is oftentimes
marked by poverty and want, but it is a people who can often see more
clearly than many in the West that we do live in a supernatural world,
that God can heal and perform miracles, that the Holy Spirit works
in and through the Christian community. Along with all of God’s
people throughout history, they joyfully proclaim” that the
LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant
of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his
commands.” You might want to read Philip Jenkin’s book
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Whether you
agree with his evaluation or not, this is a significant book to help
you see what is happening in the wider church. Whatever the coming
of global Christianity might mean for the church in the West, my point
is simply this: the church in the two-thirds world, with all its struggles
and imperfections and challenges of the future in terms of leadership
and education, may well be more faithful to the word of God than those
who have ‘supped’ with modernity and postmodernism. No
One Like Him - A recent essay by Rodney Stark Why Gods Should Matter
in the Social Sciences helps us understand at least one aspect of
how the church in the west was weakened. As the church retreated from
involvement in culture, the presuppositions of unbelief went unchallenged.
This was especially so in the social sciences. Stark quotes the ‘fathers’
of sociology to show that they began with the assumption that belief
about the gods or God was merely ‘unimportant window dressing,”
and that what was really important were the rites and rituals of the
religious community. The concept of God “is now no more than
a minor accident…Thus, the sociologist will pay scant attention
…to the different ways in which men and women have conceived
the unknown cause and mysterious depth of things. He will…see
in religion only a social discipline.” Stark then goes on to
show that the sociologists have got it all wrong, and that what people
think about God is the most important aspect of their religious belief. Let us pray that God will do unexpectedly great things in our time for His Glory, Larry We are glad to be back from our sabbatical. Jock and Alison did a wonderful job of keeping things going. We are very thankful for those who pitched in and helped throughout the summer, Dawn Dahl who came from English L’Abri for a month, Buffy and BJ Roland and Peter Merz from Australia who carried on during June and July. We already have a good number of students booked in for this fall and are looking forward to the next student term. Fall
Lecture Series November
7 Larry Snyder on The Legacy of the 16th Century Reformations Student
Terms
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