Evangelical Reformation

Evangelicals don’t allow straight talk. Likewise in the secular community. That has been the topic of the past several postings. The old adage observes, “The truth hurts,” and frequently it does. The contemporary perspective is that if a message hurts, we should not say it. This leaves us with an arrangement in which frequently we are not allowed to speak the truth, not even in love. This condition is devastating because we need the truth to be the people that God wants us to be and to have the quality of relationships that He wants us to have.

The good news is that as evangelicals we have the Word as a corrective. The Word contains straight talk, and as we study it and absorb it, it will lead us in the paths of righteousness. In other words, the Word is the cure.

The problem, however, is that in today’s evangelical world several factors prevent us from taking this cure. The difficulty begins with the fact that the Word of God is challenging to understand. In fact, a person can make the Bible say almost anything he wants it to say. Throughout history we find many heresies attributed to Scripture. Therefore, determining what the Word of God actually means requires disciplined and in-depth study.

That word discipline represents a problem for many contemporary evangelicals. Often we equate anything related to discipline with legalism. Telling someone that he or she needs to engage in serious Bible study on a regular basis is viewed as legalistic by many evangelicals. We are putting the person on a guilt trip.

As a result, the development of discipline has not been a strong point for the evangelical subculture. One byproduct of this trend is a lack of disciplined Bible study. Many believers consider five to 10 minutes perusing Our Daily Bread as sufficient spiritual input. I appreciate the ministry of Our Daily Bread, but it must be utilized as a segment of our input from the Word and not our whole diet. We must differentiate between a snack and a meal.

Another evangelical trend that prevents us from becoming serious students of the Word is found in Bible substitutes. Many evangelicals in referring to Bible study are not actually talking about studying Scripture. Instead, their Bible study consists of reading a devotional book. I believe that reading devotional books can be of value if they serve as a supplement to Scripture. However, when they become a replacement for Scripture, as frequently occurs in today’s evangelical world, they are inadequate for the task. It is only Scripture that contains life and power, and it is only as we dig deeply into Scripture that we can appropriate those qualities so necessary for our spiritual development.

The fact is that the evangelical community does not put much stress on serious Bible study. One Christian bookstore owner lamented that 80% of his business consisted of music and T-shirts. Serious Bible study books are not a hot item in today’s evangelical world.

Therefore, though Scripture is the cure, unfortunately the evangelical world is not ingesting enough of it to get well. More on this in tomorrow’s blog.

Again, let me reiterate that my goal is not to be negative, to curse the darkness, but rather to light a candle. It is my hope that evangelicals reading this might recognize the need to develop a serious, in-depth approach to Bible study for themselves. This is essential for an evangelical reformation and foundational to it.

The Hans-Hermann Hoppe Victory Blog tells the story that has now hit major media sources such as the Washington Times about the harassment of a renowned economist who teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was attacked for his rather matter-of-fact observations about economic trends among homosexuals. He merely pointed out that since for the most part homosexuals do not have children, they are more likely than those with children to focus on the present in their spending patterns.

For this observation, Professor Hoppe was subjected to a year of investigation by the University that resulted in a letter placing him under a gag order and threatening him with financial penalties. All of this is contrary to the school’s policy on free speech, which apparently only applies to those who speak freely in support of the biases of liberal elites.

Imagine the uproar had Professor Hoppe said something that was actually critical of the homosexual subculture. The liberal establishment attacks any straight talk that even tangentially touches one of their hot buttons in order to put everyone on notice that any serious criticism of their biases would result in a nuclear attack.

In our previous blogs we mentioned that evangelicals also ban straight talk. In the last post we cited a ban by evangelicals of straight talk in some Bible studies, where people are not allowed to express disagreement with stated perspectives, even though these perspectives might be unbiblical.

Not only is straight talk about biblical truth banned in some evangelical circles, but also we find straight talk about behavior is often prohibited. A friend of mine was involved in a campus ministry. At one of the meetings led by the local director, a seminary graduate, a girl ask for guidance in dealing with her roommate, who professed to be a Christian, but who had decided to start living with her boyfriend. The girl asked whether she had a responsibility to confront her roommate. The counsel of the group, including the local director, was that she should not confront her roommate because to do so would be judgmental.

This attitude is not uncommon among evangelicals. Many consider sermons dealing with sin to be unchristian. Often the critique of such a sermon is framed in words such as, “I felt judged,” conveying that any sermon that induced guilt must be wrong.

Though many evangelical churches would not place a ban on dealing with fornication, in most evangelical circles there is a general discomfort with dealing with anything that is negative in nature, this despite the fact that much of the ministries of Jesus and Paul and Peter and James was confrontational.

And if in some evangelical circles addressing behavior that is blatantly unbiblical is considered off-limits, imagine the response to efforts to deal with more subtle issues such as viewing ungodly movies or television programming. The charge of legalism has become a typical evangelical knee-jerk reaction to efforts aimed at addressing these types of issues.

The result of the evangelical ban on straight talk concerning sin is an ungodliness that produces spiritual weakness and the various symptoms discussed in other postings. Therefore, there is a desperate need for reformation among evangelicals that allows and encourages straight talk about sinful behavior.

As it has turned out, the historic advocates of free speech are unabashed hypocrites. They are the first to put a gag order on speech that disagrees with their perspective. One of the many recent instances that can be cited is reported in an article by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It involves Scott McConnell, a graduate student at LeMoyne College, who was expelled because in a paper he rejected multiculturalism and suggested that “light spanking” might help with disciplinary problems in elementary schools. The article points out that expelling McConnell is a violation of the college’s own policy on free speech. Apparently, freedom of speech is restricted to speech that agrees with the college’s biases.

A speech police case of far higher profile has to do with the President of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, who stated his position that gender differences might account for men securing more higher-level positions in the field of science. His statement of his position produced a firestorm that ultimately led to a vote of no-confidence by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

While the evangelical world may not be quite so blatant in its ban on free speech, we find the same mechanisms at work. I came across one manifestation in small group Bible study literature produced by a major evangelical publishing house. On the bottom of each page was printed an admonition that all opinions expressed in the Bible study were to be received and that none should be challenged. This approach to Bible study among evangelicals is not unique, but in some prominent groups it is standard policy.

While it is certainly biblical and wise to insist that any disagreements be expressed in a gentle and courteous manner, to allow all statements to go unchallenged is certainly not biblical. Many New Testament passages encourage us to deal with error. We have, for example, Paul’s admonition to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:2 to do this very thing: “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage— with great patience and careful instruction.”

The contemporary prohibition against challenging statements that one views to be erroneous is dangerous because it gives those who might propagate error the latitude to speak, while those who might seek to correct that error are silenced. A far more biblical approach would be to encourage discussion based on Scripture aimed at discovering the truth. Prohibiting such quest for biblical truth is unhealthy. Even worse is what it says about the values of the evangelical subculture. It indicates that we place protecting the self-esteem of the individual above the discovery of biblical truth.

One aspect of evangelical reform needs to be a return to straight talk, speaking the truth in love, so that believers can develop and maintain a solid biblical worldview.