David French's Letter From America

The Sad, Necessary Division of the United Methodist Church

It’s about much more than gay marriage.

David French


Last week, believe it or not, there was a news development of generational importance that had absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump. The two different factions of the United Methodist Church agreed to divorce. Here’s the New York Times with the basic facts: 

A group of leaders of the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States, announced on Friday a plan that would formally split the church, citing “fundamental differences” over same-sex marriage after years of division.

The plan would sunder a denomination with 13 million members globally — roughly half of them in the United States — and create at least one new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination that would continue to ban same-sex marriage as well as the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy.

The church announced the plan to divide less than a year after a close denominational vote (led by the denomination’s African and other overseas churches) to reject a plan that would have allowed “local congregations, conferences, and clergy to make their own choices about conducting same-sex marriages and ordaining LGBT pastors.”  Instead, it adopted a “Traditional Plan,” which “affirmed the denomination’s teachings against homosexuality.” But the vote hardly ended the internal debate. Delegates from America were largely opposed to the Traditional Plan.

The agreement to divide still has to be approved at its global conference in Minneapolis this May, but approval is likely. And if the agreement is approved, it will represent—in essence—the final fracturing of the traditional American church from two primary streams of Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) to three—Catholic, Mainline, and Evangelical.

The secular media will cast the divide primarily in the terms it understands—as focused on “LGBT issues”—but that’s incomplete. The true fracturing point between Mainline and Evangelical churches is over the authority and interpretation of scripture. The debate over LGBT issues is a consequence of the underlying dispute, not its primary cause. As I explained in my first Sunday newsletter, there is a strain of Protestant Christianity that views the Bible as valuable but not infallible or inerrant. Evangelical Christians, by contrast, strongly dissent from that view.

Works Righteousness--The Old Enemy of the Gospel

Whither Evangelical Purity Culture? 

Thoughts on the Legacy of a Lost Pastor


David French
National Review Online


If you don’t live in Evangelical-world, you probably missed this news. An influential Evangelical author and pastor named Joshua Harris announced on Saturday that he was in the process of “deconstruction.” His statement was clear. “By all the measurements I have for defining a Christian,” he said, “I am not a Christian.” He apologized to the LGBT community for not affirming gay marriage and for the ways that his writing and speaking “contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry.”

For Christians, it’s a sad statement, but it’s also full of real integrity. Rather than try to jam Christianity into his evolving worldview, he respects orthodoxy by opting out.

Harris burst into prominence as a young Christian with every author’s dream: a giant, influential first-book bestseller. It was called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and it sold almost a million copies. If anything, however, the sales numbers understated its influence. It was part of the foundation of Evangelical “purity culture,” and it revolutionized parenting and dating for countless Christian parents and families.

I remember it well. I was a youth pastor for a few memorable months at the height of the courtship craze. The year was 1998, I was a youth volunteer at a small church in Georgetown, Ky., when our youth pastor left. Until we could find a new youth pastor, I was in charge. I preached the youth service every week, I led the youth Sunday school, and I led the youth prayer groups. I was also a commercial litigator in a big law firm, and suddenly I had two full-time jobs. It was one of the best times of my life.

But we also had a problem.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Outlaws and Bystanders, Culprits and Idiots

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

INTRODUCTION

As the disintegration of our evangelical institutions continues apace, I would like to have you all sit down at a table here. Once you have done so, I will roll out a chart that diagrams the tragicomedy for you. Just watch and see if I don’t.

THE CONTEXT

Of course, the secularists are establishing the overall environment in which all of this happens. They are in charge of their enormous kultursmog machine—talk about carbon emissions—and that is the stuff that we all of us have to breathe. The machine discharges vast rolling coal clouds of woke-smoke. Evangelicals in our institutions have to breathe it also, and there are four basic reactions to it. There are four basic kinds of people involved.

THE LOCATION OF OUR LITTLE DRAMA

What I am about to describe for you is what is happening in absolutely every evangelical institution that employs more than 3-5 people.

The Rot Within Western Christendom

Many Evangelicals Confused and Ill-Taught

Believe God Accepts Worship of All Religions

By Leonardo Blair
Christian Post


A majority of evangelicals now believe that God accepts the worship of all religions, according to a new study released by Ligonier Ministries that shows many have also grown confused about some core doctrines of the Christian faith.

Chris Larson, president of Ligonier Ministries, says the results of the 2018 State of Theology survey conducted by LifeWay Research and released Tuesday shows an urgent need for bold teaching of historic Christianity.

"The State of Theology survey highlights the urgent need for courageous ministry that faithfully teaches the historic Christian faith. It's never been popular to talk about mankind's sinfulness or the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ, but at a time when a darkened world needs the light of the Gospel, it's disheartening to see many within the evangelical church confused about what the Bible teaches. We hope this survey provides local churches with a little more insight into what people in our neighborhoods and in our pews actually believe," Larson said in a statement.

In the survey in which a representative sample of 3,000 Americans were interviewed, evangelicals were asked about their views on a series of theological statements including: "God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam."

Some 51 percent of respondents were shown to agree with the statement, while 42 percent disagreed. Two years earlier in 2016, 49 percent of evangelicals were found to agree with the statement while 43 percent said they disagreed.

"The Bible is clear that the Gospel is the only way of salvation, and God will not accept the worship of other faiths. It is only through Jesus Christ and by His Spirit that we are able to worship the Father in spirit and in truth (John 4:24)," the researchers note.

Counter Revolution

An Australian Historian Lobs Some Grenades

Stuart Piggin was the director of the Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience at Macquarie University and head of the Department of Christian Thought of the Australian College of Theology.  Mark Powell published an interview with Dr Piggin in the Australian Presbyterian (Spring 2018).

Piggin has written numerous articles for academic books.  His most recent book is entitled The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian History, 1740-1914 (Monash University.)  Part of the interview with Powell covered the supporting role of British evangelicals (Anglican and Methodist) in the transportation of convicts to Australia.  How could evangelical Christians be involved in such a horrid practice?

A Perfect Marriage:

Evangelicals and Conservatives in Latin America

Javier Corrales
New York Times

[The author of this piece is sympathetic neither to Evanglicals nor Conservatives in Latin America.  Nevertheless he bears grudging testimony to a remarkable growth in the Church that has taken place in that region over the past fifty years.]

Evangelical churches today can be found in almost every neighborhood in Latin America — and they are transforming politics like no other force. They are giving conservative causes, and especially political parties, new strength and new constituencies.

In Latin America, Christianity used to be associated with Roman Catholicism. The church held a near monopoly on religion until the 1980s. The only challenge to Catholicism was anticlericalism and atheism. There has never been another religion. Until now.  Evangelicals today account for almost 20 percent of the population in Latin America, up from 3 percent three decades ago. In a few Central American countries, evangelicals are near majorities.

Ecuadoreans at an evangelical church. Evangelicals today account for almost 20 percent of the population in Latin America. Credit Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Evangelical pastors embrace varied ideologies, but when it comes to gender and sexuality, their values are typically conservative, patriarchal and homophobic. They expect women to be completely submissive to their evangelical husbands. And in every country in the region, they have taken the strongest stands against gay rights.

The rise of evangelicalism is politically worrisome.

A Year of Redemption?

The Problem is Spiritual, Not Political

2016 has been a disaster and the future looks bleak. The first thing we must do is repent for our part in getting the country here.

By David French
National Review Online

It’s time for compassion, but it’s also time for hard truth. While there are a number of influential Evangelicals who have tied themselves so closely to Trump that they now feel obliged to publicly excuse the inexcusable, there are millions more who look at the present political situation with abject despair in their hearts. The true limits of Evangelical political power have been revealed, Christians seem to lose another critical political or cultural battle every week, and there is simply no clear political path forward.

Even worse, we have no one truly to blame but ourselves.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The Great Imposter

Multitudes in the Valley of Decision

Evangelicals are finally coming out of the closet in the current US Republican primary.  It has been disheartening to see "evangelicals" supporting Donald Trump.

The Christian Post is a widely read publication.  It rarely takes sides in political contents.  But it seems that Trump is a bridge too far.  It is good to see not just a critical piece, but an unequivocal rejection of the Christian credentials of the man.  How much of an impact it might have is difficult to tell, but it is heartening to see a principled Christian opposition to the Great Imposter, nonetheless.

Donald Trump Is a Scam  Evangelical Voters Should Back Away
CP EDITORIAL
February 29, 2016

Editors' Note: The Christian Post has not taken a position on a political candidate before today. We are making an exception because Trump is exceptionally bad and claims to speak for and represent the interests of evangelicals.

We the senior editors of The Christian Post encourage our readers to back away from Donald Trump.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Blowing Bubbles From the Bottom

Posted on Friday, February 7, 2014 

B by Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

 

If you think you are up to it, and if you have a cast iron stomach, and if you have not ingested your recommended weekly allowance of piffle over the last few days, you may go here and fix everything.
The short form is that Rosaria Champagne Butterfield — whose book was fantastic, by the way — was invited to speak at Wheaton College. This, all by itself, was sufficient to set off a small protest festival of marginalization and hurt.

I would draw your attention to the last several paragraphs, where the crucial task of telling the gospel story is transformed into a bizarre form of narratival masturbation. The central human predicament, what Luther called incurvatus in se, is transformed into a narcissistic virtue, resulting in a self-righteous circle jerk, only without the sex.

As for the response of Wheaton as an institution, I believe that someone should tell the authorities there that blowing bubbles from the bottom of the pool is not the same thing as breathing.

And . . .

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Book of the Month/May 2013 

Book Review
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 02 May 2013

This was truly a refreshing book. Every liberal pastor needs to get and read it as part of the process of becoming evangelical. Moreover, and this is the crucial thing, every evangelical pastor needs to get and read it as part of the process of becoming evangelical. We have gotten to the point where we think we know what certain words mean because they are much in use, but it is high time we clicked the refresh button.

Neglecting Duties

Subtle Disobedience

An abiding temptation to Christians and the Church is to distort the truth by emphasis.  It is a subtle form of disobedience.  If the landowner gave his stewards a list of ten responsibilities and they focused on one only, neglecting the other nine. the unfaithfulness and disobedience of the stewards would be apparent to all. But not to the stewards, we suspect.  Their uber-faithfulness to one duty would be used to justify the neglect of their other duties. 

When Christians overemphasise a responsibility clearly taught in Scripture to the neglect of other commandments their defalcation is usually not immediately apparent to them.

Getting Beyond Slogans

I’m Tired of Hearing “The Gospel” (Warning: Mild Rant)

Thabiti Anyabwile


. . . . It’s Tuesday.  I’m on vacation (which is why I’m ahead on blogging).  And someone has sent me another note chastising me (mildly) for not concluding a post with “the gospel.”

It doesn’t matter what the topic is.  Men and women struggling to get along in their marriages?  ”The gospel.”  Someone struggling to find work in this economy?  ”Believe ‘the gospel’.”  The mechanic just “fixed” your car–again–and charged you–again–for the same problem you noticed last week?  Think of “the gospel.”  The Russian high court sentencing a punk rock band to two years in prison for a flash mob performance in a Russian Orthodox cathedral?  ”They need the gospel.”  Want rock hard abs?  Try “gospel” aerobics.  I smashed my little toe against the dresser?  All together now, “the gospel.”

It’s ubiquitous.  And it’s becoming an inflexible law.  We dare not face any issue without the requisite hat tip to “the gospel.”  If we do, there’s bound to be someone to write us a ticket for our verbal violation, to insist we missed a “gospel” opportunity.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Evangelicals Confronted by a Leper

Douglas Wilson
Thursday, December 23, 2010
So the sexual socialists found a few craven Republicans and jammed a sea change bit of legislation, the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" through a lame duck Congress. Instead of the president having to leave town in humiliation over the high-handed antics of a discredited Congress, this, and a few other passed and signed monstrosities, are now being touted as proof that the elections didn't affect the president the way everybody was talking like they might. "Don't count him out early!" What the elections actually didn't affect was the president's hubris and messiah complex. Just imagine, if you have the horsepower to do so, a conservative president pulling the same tactical stunt. Your inability to do so should not be taken as a reflection on you -- the current zeitgeist is rigged against the very possibility of such a thing happening. There are only two sacraments in the Church, baptism and the Lord's Supper. But these sacraments teach and instruct us about God's ways with man in all things, and so from them we should learn that many more things are sacramental. Sexual union is one such sacramental, or mystery, as Paul puts it in Eph. 5, and is at the beating heart of family government, and from that position it is necessarily at the heart of every civilization. A people who screw this up are screwed up in everything. And everywhere we look, we see Christians accommodating themselves to these new sexual derangements outside the church, or preparing themselves for such accommodation when the opportune moment comes. It will not do to prove your purity in the meantime by holding aloft a narrowly-construed and very truncated gospel, one that passes muster with our (equally narrow) doctrine cops. A truncated and inert gospel is no gospel at all. You will call His name Jesus for He will save His people from their . . . what? One of the best books I have read in a long time was John Piper's God is the Gospel. As soon as I was done, I started right over at the beginning, and am reading it again now. It is required reading (especially chapter two) for all those believe that gospel purity can be accomplished by means of setting up a tiny little evangelical kennel, in which the gospel will be required to be a yippy dog thoroughbred. No, the gospel is as wide as the character of God Himself, and is therefore something which encompasses heaven and earth, and all that they contain. This is not to say that everything is the gospel, but it is to say that the gospel pervades everything. This includes, as it turns out, the sex lives of upscale urban professionals . . . who will almost certainly find a plain statement of this cosmic reality as judgmental and offputting. Refusal to be specific about what these sins those might be is evangelical cowardice. But someone might reply that if he preached against sodomy, well, this would just get everyone in an uproar. Well, that's something we find in the New Testament, right? A total absence of uproar whenever the gospel is preached? You might reply that if you tried that kind of message in Los Angeles or Manhattan, you would lose your audience. But if you leave out sin, there is no point in having an audience. There is a way of appealing to your audience which is just a (thinly) disguised way of revealing how much your audience has successfully appealed to you. And it will not do to say that this is being done in order to winsomely reach those who have not yet heard the gospel. Those who construe the gospel as a limited set of propositions which, if affirmed in a repentance-free and abracadabra-like fashion, will get one's sorry butt into heaven may discover, at the end of the day, that this is not where their sorry butt actually went. When the story of the collapse of academicky evangelicalism is finally written, compromises on these sexual issues will be right at the center of the autopsy. The coroner will have circled that business with a red pen. When the winds of sexual doctrine finally blow over the cardboard cut-outs of John Knox and Hugh Latimer that we have set up in our Reformed Card and Gift Shop, there will be no end of a mess to clean up. Whenever a stiff breeze blows through this shop of ours, papers, cards, and cardboard go everywhere, cause that's all we have anymore . . . paper products. What issues am I talking about? Here is a sampling, a representative list of issues that the respectable part of the conservative evangelical world is currently handling very badly -- headship and submission in marriage, women's ordination to the ministry, women's ordination to the diaconate, women enrolled in seminaries, women in combat roles in the military, evangelicals ceding control of what constitutes legitimate discourse about sodomy over to the perpetually offended, the legitimzation of sodomy as a federally protected vice, the delegitimization of opposition to said vice-nurturing, women doing everything an unordained man can do, pervasive hostility to genuine masculinity within the church, puff-translations of the Bible that cater to the heresy of feminism, complementarians becoming complimentarians, and the spectacle of effeminate homosexuals fighting for what they believe in a far more manly way than Christians do. How's that for starters? Now I know that my reception at the great banquet of evangelicalism resembles, as the fellow once said, that of badly dressed leper. Quite all right. I won't stay long. I just had this message to deliver, and I'll be on my way.