Good morning dear friends,
It took me over a week to put the piece below together for my blog, normally it takes a few minutes...though of course I'm always thinking and meditating about these things. It was only as I read the Tozer piece that I felt I had someone else to witness to Vos's observations and could close the stream of thought.
Tozer's idea of "deviant Christianity" is helpful to me, as is Michael Horton's "Christless Christianity," a thought that has been with me for decades. I recently came upon a copy of a letter I wrote in 1978 in which I told my correspondent that "I don't think the Christianity we see today is Biblical Christianity any more than the Judaism of the scribes of Pharisees reflected the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings." I hadn't thought about that for a few years, but when I look around at the "Evangelical" church it seems the only conclusion I can draw. What I wrote to a friend when I was 28 years old is more true today when I am almost 71 years old.
Are we willing to ask hard questions of ourselves and our churches, of our traditions and our current way of thinking? Or will we remain mired in our pragmatic and parochial schismatic sin?
If a person were born in prison, and prison was all the person ever knew, would the person know he lived in prison? Does a fish know it lives in an aquarium? Do we know we live in Babylon? And frankly, if it isn't Babylon we live in, since it isn't heaven, then it must be hell - for to see Jesus Christ caricatured as He is within the professing church is perhaps as close to hell as we can get. To borrow from C.S. Lewis and Narnia, we've traded Aslan for Puzzle and the Great Ape - better to die with those faithful to Aslan and go "onward and upward" than to perish in the shadowlands.
Much, much love,
Bob
Continuing our
reflections on Geerhardus Vos’s Message on “Heavenly Mindedness” from Hebrews
11:9 – 10:
“Have we ever
been impressed in reading the narrative of Genesis by the peacefulness and
serenity enveloping the figures of the patriarchs? There is something else here
besides the idyllic charm of rural surroundings. What enviable freedom from the
unrest, the impatience, the feverish excitement of the children of this world!
“Our modern
Christian life so often lacks the poise and stability of the eternal. Religion
has come so overmuch to occupy itself with the things of time that it catches
the spirit of time. Its purposes turn fickle and
unsteady; its methods become superficial and ephemeral; it alters its course so
constantly; it borrows so readily from sources beneath itself, that it
undermines its own prestige in matters pertaining to the eternal world. Where
lies the remedy?” G. Vos.
Can you relate
to what Vos is saying? Does it make any sense to you?
If this is how
Vos surveyed the first half of the 20th century, what would he think
of today? I recall reading an observation by a Church Father, I think it was
Ephrem the Syrian, about the “noise of the world.” The world has noise and
hurry and ephemerality in every culture and every generation, and yet, are we
not experiencing noise and hurry exponentially? Dr. Richard Swenson wrote a
little book titled, Hurtling Ourselves Into Oblivion, that does seem to
be what we are doing with our frenzied lives – with our attention spans
becoming shorter and shorter, our lives in shattering fragmentation with
increasing velocity.
As the
professing church has sought relevancy in the world by adopting the world’s
thinking and the world’s way of doing things, it has become increasingly
irrelevant. We have become a fickle and unsteady people, our methods have
become superficial and ephemeral, we are always changing but never being
changed into the image of Jesus Christ, rather we are being changed into the
image of the world. The professing church is borrowing readily from sources
beneath itself; we market ourselves like the world, we preach and teach to
consumers rather than call people to take up the Cross and follow Jesus, we
raise money like the world, we have made sociology and therapy primary in our
thinking and practice, we have enthroned the pragmatic, and we have relativized
the Word of God. Yes, and we have done much more in our descent from the
heavenly to the earthly, but this is a blog and not the OED.
The tragedy is
that we don’t see this, we don’t know this – so dependent have we become on the
ways of the world and its animating spirits. Could it be that we have descended
so far that we cannot turn back? The fact that much of the professing church in
America, and I’m thinking particularly of those who style themselves
“Evangelical,” is not clothed in repentance and sorrow for its behavior and
thinking makes we wonder just who and what we really are.
The measure of
our Biblical Christianity is the measure of our love for Jesus Christ, and if
we love Jesus Christ we will be obedient to Jesus Christ! Jesus says, “If
anyone love Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will
come to him and make Our abode with him” (John 14:23). O that we would see
ourselves in Christ as the saints He redeemed us to be (Romans 6:6; 2 Cor. 5:16
- 21).
I do not see how
we can be heavenly – minded when our identity remains earthbound. I do not see
how we can walk with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob if our identity remains in Ur of
the Chaldees.
I have been
reading a dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary by James Joshua Tancordo in May
2018. The title is, A.W. Tozer, A Mystical and Confessional Evangelical.
Tancordo writes about Tozer considering much of what he saw in the American church
as deviant Christianity; Tozer even uses the image of spiritual
fornication as Vos does. What would Tozer think today? Here are some quotes from
the dissertation:
“I suppose my
suggestion will not receive much serious attention, but I would like to suggest
that we Bible-believing Christians announce a moratorium on religious activity
and set our house in order preparatory to the coming of an afflatus from above.
So carnal is the body of Christians which compose the conservative wing of the
Church, so shockingly irreverent are our public services in some quarters, so
degraded are our religious tastes in still others that the need for power could
scarcely have been greater at any time in history.
“I believe we
should profit immensely were we to declare a period of silence and
self-examination during which each one of us search his own heart and sought to
meet every condition for a real baptism of power from on high.” A.W. Tozer.
“Tozer writes
that every activity of service to God must pass the supreme test of having
biblical authority behind it, conforming to the letter and the spirit of the
Bible. The fact that is succeeds proves nothing, and the fact that it is
popular proves even less. Instead, Tozer wants to know, ‘Where are the
proofs of its heavenly birth? Where are it scriptural credentials?’” Tancordo.
“Tozer then
points out that this pragmatic philosophy [that the American church has
adopted] asks no revealing questions about the wisdom or morality of what is
being done but simply assumes that if the ends are good, the most appropriate
means are those that appear most efficient. Therefore, when leaders discover
something that works, they quickly find a biblical text to justify it and
plunge right ahead. Soon someone writes a magazine article about it, then they
publish an entire book, and finally the person who discovered it is granted an
honorary degree. After that, there is no longer any argument about whether or
not the method is biblical. After all, it is impossible to argue with success.
If the method works, it must be good.” Tancordo.
When Vos surveyed
the American church in the early 20th century, and when Tozer did
the same thing in the mid-20th century, they both saw the same
thing, a worldly-minded church relying on the world’s ways and the arm of flesh
– a spiritually fornicating people, rather than a heavenly-minded church living
by the Word of God and in the Holy Spirit with a pure devotion to the heavenly
Bridegroom, Jesus Christ.
So enmeshed are
we today in our spiritual fornication, so accustomed are we to the carnal, that
it all seems so natural to us, and indeed it sadly is.
Will we ask
Jesus to teach us to see as He sees, live in obedience to Him as He lives in
obedience to the Father, speak as He speaks, to do nothing outside of Him but
to abide in Him as He abides in us as our Way of Life?
O Holy Father,
deliver us from deviant Christianity!
