Heavenly Mindedness (43)

 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 20^th 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 20^th century, and when Tozer did the same thing in the mid-20^th 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!