Archive of October 2006
How did practical minded mainstream Americans buy into the “I have a right to do my thing” mantra of the hippies?
Americans have a reputation for being practical people, not philosophical eggheads. Yet, there is nothing at all practical about assigning the individual the right to do his own thing.
Common sense insists that doing so will result in chaos. For example, if you tell a college student that he has the right to do his own thing, do you think he will go to class? Do you think that instead he might get his girlfriend pregnant and then bail out on her?
This is precisely where that philosophy has led. We find the rubble all around us.
We understand why college students would buy into this philosophy. During those idyllic days with no spouse and kids to support and mom and dad footing the bill, it is not hard to choose between responsibility and fun. Give them a philosophy that makes doing their thing noble, and of course they will immediately grasp its profound wisdom.
But one would think that mom and dad would know better. Well, they did, that is until a psychologist named Carl Rogers came along.
Just as an aside, it seems that every society adopts its own gods. The Canaanites chose Baal, the Europeans, after rejecting Christianity, opted for philosophy. Americans, in our post-Christian pagan state have deified psychology.
As Isaiah demonstrates so graphically, idolatry is idiotic, making fools out of its followers. Philosophy has made fools out of intellectual Europeans. Psychology is doing likewise for Americans.
Rogers taught that we optimize ourselves as human beings by accepting ourselves unconditionally, i.e. feeling good about ourselves regardless of how bad we live. A bad self-image is the ultimate disease and unconditional self-acceptance is the cure.
However, we can only accept ourselves unconditionally if significant others accept us unconditionally. This means that allowing our kids to do their own thing will not turn them into unbridled hedonists, but will make them into psychological saints—wholesome, actualized individuals.
This belief that unconditional acceptance fixes broken people and makes them into the persons they were meant to be dovetails beautifully with the gospel denuded of repentance, described in the past two postings.
In the absence of repentance, the gospel is reduced to unconditional acceptance. Though this is an unbiblical message, in our culture shaped by the psychology of Carl Rogers it feels right.
Rogers taught us that unconditional acceptance provides the power to change and grow. The gospel stripped of repentance seems to be saying the God agrees. It seems the grace is synonymous with is unconditional acceptance. Salvation comes through a realization that God accepts me “just as I am.”
Change comes, not from repentance, but from this realization that God accepts me apart from any intent to change—even though I am living with my girlfriend, watching pornography, and smoking pot. As I experience God’s grace, His unconditional acceptance, I change will come spontaneously.
This is a life-changing gospel in the sense that it gives people freedom from guilt without change of lifestyle—sort of like spiritual Paxil offered free at your church pharmacy. This is not a biblical gospel and, as George Barna has demonstrated, the promised change in behavior is not occurring.
However, evangelicals are hooked on the message because it is extremely comfortable, fits well with secular culture, and sells well.
Evangelicals have sold a lot of this elixir to their Republican friends. Now these politicians know the God feels good about them regardless of self-serving pork and political duplicity.
Polls reveal that the American voters are not accepting them unconditionally. They may make it, but only because the political alternative is worse.
Make it or not, one can only hope that the voters’ ire will generate enough repentance-producing guilt to produce some change in their behavior.
Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, sensing that the coming election may spell disaster for Republicans, have taken to incessant pleading with GOP faithfuls to forget the Republican failures of the past six years and get out to vote.
Valid though their point is, that a Democrat-controlled House and Senate would be the worse of two evils, there is still that driving desire in many of us to teach these compromising, self-seeking, character deficient Republican legislators a lesson, and the White House, too. Let them know that we won’t take their making fools out of us any longer—that we are not cool aid drinkers.
Incredible though it may seem, we can trace the roots of this morphing of Republicans to look almost like Democrats back a hundred years.
To follow these roots, we begin with the reality that evangelicals must be the Republican conscience. The Democratic Parrty, the party of abortion, homosexual power, and the Clinton White House, has no conscience. We expect more from Republicans because of their affinity to the evangelical community.
Because God calls and empowers evangelicals to be salt and light, we expect that they will engender within the Republicans Party a modicum of character.
Why haven’t they?
One reason, developed in the previous post, is that the teeth have been extracted from the evangelical gospel presentation. Evangelicals have stripped repentance from the message, reducing it to a free ticket to heaven issued to anyone who prays the prayer. Ask Jesus into your heart, live on your terms, and ultimately arrive in heaven. No wonder many in our society have participated in the plan.
This downsizing of the gospel is traceable back to the modernist/fundamentalist (aka liberal/evangelical) controversy of the early 1900’s.
The liberals, denying the supernatural elements of Christianity, reduced it to an ethical system, which included a works salvation. Evangelicals, in order to distance themselves from this liberal heresy, swung with the pendulum to the opposite extreme, divesting the gospel of any hint of works.
In this environment, the preaching of repentance sounded too much like works. Therefore, evangelical bleeped repentance from the message. Now a person could go to heaven while doing his own thing.
Nonetheless, this hollowed out gospel was functional in a society rooted in a biblical worldview. People instinctively understood that becoming a Christian included a commitment to follow Christ.
Then came the hippie revolution with its existential worldview. Now people really did believe that they had the right to do their own thing. Since God was so wise, certainly He knew that, too. In this environment, “the free ride to heaven while doing one’s own thing” gospel now made all the sense in the world.
Therefore, though evangelicals began to sow this truncated gospel in the early 1900’s, it was not until the 1960’s that it began to bear its poisonous fruit. The gospel became the really good news that I can live with my girlfriend and be okay with Jesus—have heaven both hear and there.
This message, still propagated by today’s evangelicals, is not a conscious-arousing, character-building gospel. If the Democrats have no conscience, this gospel allows the Republican to function just like them, even the ones who have prayed the prayer.
The salt has lost its savor, and now there is a threat that the voters will trample them under foot.
However, there is more to the story. This emasculating of the gospel by the existential philosophy of the hippies, was helped along substantially by humanistic psychology. That, Lord willing, will be the topic of our next post.
You can imagine the response of the pastor, or maybe you can’t.
He had just collected the information forms from each of the six couples attending the pre-marriage class and was scanning through them. This evangelical church was considered one of the finest, most solid in the community, and it was.
As he scanned the forms, his eye drifted toward the “address” portion. He had developed this habit because he occasionally came across couples that were living together.
Sure enough, here was one, and another one, and another…. It turned out that five of the six couples in the class were living together.
This is a true story. Granted, most of these cohabiting couples were not from core church families. Nonetheless, they had been attending the church long enough to know about the class. These were church people at least in the sense that they wanted to be married in a church, and they wanted pre-marriage counseling from a Christian perspective.
Therefore, it seems strange that they were not concerned about being Christian in one of the most foundational aspects of life. As we think of sin from a scriptural perspective, historically sex outside of marriage, what the Bible calls fornication, has been considered one of the most blatant forms.
Therefore, it is difficult to imagine those who view themselves as Christian couples, who attend an evangelical church, being so casual about it. Having sex before marriage is wrong, but deciding to live together seems to be in God’s face about the whole thing.
Though five out of six is a rather strong (or weak) showing, cohabitation is not unusual among the evangelical community. And if a blatant transgression such as cohabitation is common, how much more do other forms of sin run rampant?
How does it happen that righteousness is so neglected by evangelicals? The problem begins at the beginning of the evangelical’s experience—with the salvation message.
Scripture teaches that we are saved by faith alone and not by our works. Yet Scripture indicates that repentance is a significant aspect of the gospel message. In fact, Peter, in his sermon on the day of Pentecost, mentioned repentance and faith is not.
How do we reconcile these two scriptural conditions for salvation? The answer is that faith is more than believing facts. A person is not saved just by believing the facts that Jesus is God and that He died for our sins. As James notes, “the devils also believe and tremble.”
A closer look at the definition of faith as used in Scripture reveals that faith also includes a commitment or submission to Christ based on the facts related to Him.
A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament by Dana and Mantey is one of the classic texts on Greek, used by many seminaries across the years. This text gives evidence that in biblical times the Greek phrase translated “believing in Him” meant “surrender or submission to.” (italics theirs) Based on the evidence they provide, the authors go on to say, “Thus to believe on or to be baptized into the name of Jesus means to renounce self and to consider oneself the life-time servant of Jesus.” (p. 105)
Since saving faith connotes commitment or surrender to Jesus, faith includes repentance. Surrender to Jesus encompasses an intent to turn from our sin. We are not saved by turning from our sin. That would be works. However, we cannot be saved if we are unwilling to do so.
Nonetheless, the gospel message as presented in most evangelical churches does not include this dimension of surrender and repentance. In most cases, a person is told that he can be saved merely by asking Jesus into his heart or receiving the free gift of salvation.
Consequently, our couples who are living together can ask Jesus into their hearts, can receive the free gift, and continue to live together. Or Republican members of Congress under the influence of evangelicals at one level or the other can make self-serving choices and still be keeping the “faith” as defined by evangelicals.
How did we get to this watered down understanding of faith and the gospel? I plan to address that in the next post.