Evangelical Reformation

After all, what an indictment. In our society the only uses of the word are pejorative. You don’t want people to think of you as “holier than thou,” do you, or a holy Joe. Holy cow, that would be awful.

How often have you heard the word used in a positive sense in memorable history? “I have the utmost regard for Polly; she is a very holy person,” or “that is a wonderful church; they have the reputation of being holy people.”

The term holy means to be separate from defilement. It is the opposite of profane. In American homes, the floor is profane. We walk on it with the same shoes we use to walk on the street polluted by who knows what. You would not think of eating off your kitchen floor. Conversely, dishes are holy. They are sanitized (made saintly—separated from their defilement) with hot water and soap and stacked away (separated) in the cabinet for the next use.

Likewise, Scripture calls us to be more like dishes than the kitchen floor, to be separate from the defilement of the world.

Doing so can lead to some negative results if we are not careful. We can become so detached from the world that we are not reaching or influencing it. We can develop a “holier than thou” attitude.

However, today’s evangelical community is well out of the danger zone in that regard. George Barna substantiated this conclusion in a recent survey. It comes as no surprise that the secular public is not into holiness, but Barna has discovered that only 46% of born again Americans believe that God expects them to be holy. Without even having holiness as a target, we tend to miss it on a regular basis.

Perhaps this indifference to holiness is motivated by our desire to mingle with the world so that we might reach people. Perhaps defilement results from pollution’s ready access to our homes and hearts through television, movies, the internet, music, and other conduits, that we have been beguiled by the same sensuality that allures the rest of the world.

Maybe it is the old pendulum swing, the effort to distance ourselves from an earlier era that did isolate itself and developed a self-righteous attitude. This may explain the lack of emphasis on holiness within the evangelical community.

The evangelical community can be applauded for being engaged with society. Much good has come out of that. However, traveling too far in that direction can result in the world reaching us instead of our reaching the world. In that case, we have nothing to win people to.

Barna concludes his finding with this challenge to Christian leaders in their ministry to their people: “To align their hearts with the notion of being holy, we must move them away from a ‘cheap grace’ theology and replace people’s self-absorption with focus on God and His ways. To help them pursue holiness, we must help them comprehend and accept biblical theology regarding God, Satan, the purposes of life on earth, the nature of spiritual transformation and maturity, and the necessity of bearing spiritual fruit.”

Following Barna’s agenda might instigate an evangelical reformation.

We have been billing the Sermon on the Mount as the ultimate success seminar. A major reason for this designation is that the sermon tells us how to get along with God, and that is the ultimate basis for success. After all, if the God of the universe is blessing you, you will be a success, and if He is not, you are in trouble.

How do we get along with God? Jesus provides an answer in our next Beatitude: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” (Matthew 5:7)

This verse does not tell us explicitly who will show the merciful mercy, but the clear implication is that it is God. True, when we are merciful, other human beings may be more likely to cut us some slack, but that is not the message here.

One reason I say this is that this is not always the case. No one was more merciful than Jesus, yet the world showed Him precious little mercy.

More to the point, the Beatitudes tend to be talking about God’s response to us. It is God who comforts the mourning, who rewards the persecuted, etc. Therefore, in this Beatitude Jesus is telling us that if we are merciful, God will show us mercy.

Therefore, Jesus is teaching us that we get along with God in regard to being recipients of His mercy by showing mercy to others.

This seemly innocent teaching in reality represents a frontal assault against the current evangelical worldview. The shapers for contemporary evangelical thinking assure us that our behavior does not affect God’s attitude toward us or treatment of us. That is all of grace.

However, this Beatitude seems to teach otherwise. And to make matters worse, this same message permeates this significant sermon. The next chapter records Jesus teaching that God only forgives those who forgive others (Matthew 6:14-15), and in the following chapter Jesus teaches that those who judge will be judged by the same standard (Matthew 7:1-2).

Therefore, Jesus consistently asserts that contemporary evangelical leaders are wrong, that God deals with us according to our behavior. If you are nasty, God will be nasty to you, and if you are nice, you can expect similar treatment from God. Want to get along with God? Be righteous and kind. Love your neighbor.

This, of course, does not exclude grace. We are saved by grace, i.e. God justifies us by grace. We can go to God for forgiveness of present sins. Beyond that, God bestows many undeserved blessings on us.

However, it is a mistake to use this great truth to paint God as a one-dimensional personality. We have a low opinion of one-noters. Why would we think that God is one of them?

Why would we? Maybe because we have come under the influence of Rogerian psychology with its teaching of unconditional acceptance, which has led us to believe that “I will get along with God just because I am me, and I am special.”

This orientation has misled us to believe that the blood of Christ makes our behavior inconsequential to God. That view suggests that God feels just fine with us when we hurt others, the implications being that we are the only person in the universe that matters to God.

This view, seeing ourselves as the only person that matters, constitutes great existentialism and Rogerian psychology, but makes for really bad theology. It also engenders bad behavior, as revealed in George Barna’s findings regarding evangelicals.

If we would start to believe that how we treat others will influence how God treats us, this could start an evangelical reformation.

This past week saw the Muslim world inflamed over cartoons that portrayed Mohammed in an unflattering light. This resulted in demonstrations, burned flags, a burned church, and dead bodies.

This spectacle raised the question of how Christians should respond to insults of Christ. Two diametrically opposite perspectives surfaced.

John Piper presented his thoughts in an article entitled: “Being Mocked: The Essence of Christ’s Work, Not Muhammad’s.” How should Christians respond to insults to Christ? Piper expressed the gist of his position as follows: “On the one hand, we are grieved and angered. On the other hand, we identify with Christ, and embrace his suffering, and rejoice in our afflictions, and say with the apostle Paul that vengeance belongs to the Lord, let us love our enemies and win them with the gospel. If Christ did his work by being insulted, we must do ours likewise.”

Dinesh D’Souza, in “Blasphemy,” an article on his website, wondered if we might not learn from the Muslim response. He lamented that as Americans we might take to the streets over racial issues, but American Christians tend be passive in their response to insults to Christ such as the depiction of Christ in a bottle of urine by Andres Serrano, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. D’Souza observes:

But what is striking about conservative Christians is how passive and invertebrate so many of them are when their deepest beliefs are violated. The distinguishing quality of the Christian seems to be niceness, and I don’t mean this as a compliment. When a man calls your wife a whore it is not a virtue to respond with niceness. When your religion is mocked and blasphemed, it is sign of cowardice to pretend not to notice….

When the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ” came out several years ago, it was shown to critical acclaim throughout the West despite its blasphemous portrayal of Christ’s sexual fantasies at Calvary. The only countries that banned the movie were the Muslim countries. The reason is that Muslims consider Christ, like Moses, to be a prophet. Not only do Muslims protect the reputation of Muhammad, but apparently they also care about how Christ is portrayed as well. Whose reputation silent Christians are protecting is anybody’s guess.

Unfortunately, D’Souza does not tell us what we should do about such insults. It seems like the biblical response might be somewhere between doing nothing by way of protest as suggested by Piper, and the Muslim response cited (though not suggested) by D’Souza.

And we have done some things. For example, the American Family Association fights hard to keep anti-Christian programming off the air. Its work resulting in the cancellation of NBC’s anti-Christian series, The Book of Daniel provides an example. The power to achieve such results comes from activist believers.

Current Muslim outrage over insult to Muhammad and the resulting divergent Christian musings over how we should respond to similar insults of Christ would indicate that there is need for more dialogue on what the appropriate reaction to blasphemy of Christ should be. I welcome your comments on this issue.