If you are not in the habit of reading Middlebrow, I highly recommend it. Excellent stuff. Fred Sanders recently wrote a very insightful piece on Marmosets Underfoot in which he discussed Calvin and footnotes (and marmosets), but what he really wanted to talk about was temperament, as in conservative- vs. liberal- , in discussing Decadent Conservatism.
All cultures and subcultures move through stages, and two notable stages are the classical and the decadent. In cultural terms, a classical period is a time when all the parts of a community’s life seem to hang together, mutually reinforce each other, and make intuitive sense. By contrast, a decadent period is marked by dissolution of all the most important unities, a sense that whatever initial force gave impetus and meaningful form to the culture has pretty much spent its power....Evangelicalism in our lifetime seems to be in a decadent period. In some sectors of the evangelical subculture, there is not even a living cultural memory of a classical period or golden age; what we experience is decadence all the way back.
Ouch. But I think he’s right. He fleshes these statements out in the post and you must go read it.
...under the condition of decadence liberals become streamliners and conservatives become packrats. Evangelicals have long tended toward the packrat temperament, even though there are some signs that we may currently be exchanging that temperament for its relatively less happy alternative. What it leaves us with is an impressive stock of doctrinal and devotional bric-a-brac that we don’t know what to do with, or how it originally went together. Maybe Dwight Moody knew, maybe R. A. Torrey knew, but we can no longer articulate the unity.
The final statement is the clincher:
Until we can do that, we’re left to squat in the ruins arguing about whether we should throw things away because we don’t understand them, or enshrine them unquestioningly forever because we don’t understand them. Conservatism is to be preferred, but only in a very relative way. Having marmosets in your footnotes is no way to live. The only real way forward is to understand why things are where they are. (emphasis added)
Now, hold that thought.
Back in August, Sanders presented Bruce McCormack on the Future of Protestant Theology. One of the things I really appreciate about Sanders is that he manages to be both funny and dead serious at the same time. His humor is of a most clever and, uh, kind kind too...a rarity these days! Anyway, Sanders wondered where one might go to find Reformed theology by the middle of the 21st century, since mainline churches are “keeling over and dropping the Protestant baton.”
What McCormick says about it, as quoted by Sanders, is that
... it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.(He also makes some interesting statements about non-denominational evangelical churches and Southern Baptists not being creedal, but I put that aside for this discussion.)
Sanders believes that Protestants must “work for a clearer theological witness in evangelical congregations and institutions...it’s possible for evangelicalism to function as a much more ‘obvious institutional bearer of the message of the Reformation.’”
Otherwise, if the current trend runs to its end, we might see this:
...imagine yourself in the year 2047. The last PCUSA church in America has just sold its property to the thriving evangelical Korean congregation that’s been meeting in its basement for decades. The bishop of Canterbury now lives in Nigeria, but in America the Anglicans are now a loose network of Community Church congregations “united” by their use of the Book of Common Prayer (2035 revision). A Garrison Keillor simulacrum-droid is still pumping out Prairie Home Companion, and people still laugh at his Lutheran jokes but they’re not sure why because nobody has ever met a Lutheran. The United Methodists (”Open Minds. Open Hearts. Open Doors.”) have merged with the United Church of Christ (”God Is Still Speaking”) and the Unitarian Universalists (”Whatever”), and between them they have nineteen gorgeous buildings to host Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and not much else. The largest denomination in the USA is the Revived Shaker Church, but they do not self-identify as Christian.
OK, maybe a bit Brave New World. But unless the theology that’s propagated becomes more truth-ful, and Protestant Christians of all Protestant traditions become more committed to living by the truth of the gospel in all of its ramifications, something similar could come to pass perhaps by the end of the 21st century.
I sense that McCormick’s suggestion is merely a strategy to “save” Protestantism, or evangelicalism, and if so I believe it’s the wrong approach. We ought to be forging community with fellow brethren of all stripes, not to save anything, but because it’s the right thing to do. Any approach that is works-based rather than faith-based is the wrong one. The only truly redemptive, edifying, God-honoring and Kingdom-advancing approach is one that flows from faith in the truth, regardless of what "churchy" name we give it, and a conviction that God desires all believers to be in true fellowship with one another and to love even our enemies. The only source and impetus for such an active conviction is the gospel grace of God.
My question in this is: can Protestantism of the traditional kind be saved by rallying one another (which does seem to be happening as of late), outside of God willing the rallying, or willing the effectiveness of the rallying? Or, more saliently, ought we be concerned with preserving great Reformation truths, or rather with each of us seeking God ourselves and living out this faith in the world, serving not men or institutions but God Himself, in Spirit and in truth?
You see, I don’t believe we can truly understand theology unless we really understand it, including everything that influenced and informed it. And that’s one formidable task. But it’s the only way. What influenced the theologians themselves? What influenced the way they behaved and the way they wrote? And, most importantly, just what theology is required of us to know?
We can also ask why things are the way they are today in evangelical Christendom. How did we get here? We can point to cultural factors, we can point to one church after another bailing on foundational truths of the Reformation, yada yada, and these are important. But I think that what these all point to is a lack of focus upon the very Lord God Himself. It’s not just “the culture” that’s lost God. (That’s either a no-brainer or an incredibly offensive statement, but think about it.) Isn’t it oh-so-easy for all of us, including myself, to not merely capitulate to the cultural influences both outside and inside the church that are rightly bemoaned, but to play the blame game? We point to this or that, and, while we may very well be right, the question that follows is, “So what?” If all these terrible things are happening, what of it? What are we going to do about it?
Perhaps pray. And set about getting our own houses in order, meaning, get back to the Source. Oh I know, a tired cliché. But what I mean is, not this guy’s interpretation of the Source, or that guy’s, or this gal’s, yada yada yada, or even a literal interpretation of a theologian’s words (straight from the source), but mind-changing of the type Joe Carter suggests. This may lead us to appreciate one another for who we are, in all that entails, and not just for what we believe or how we act or look or whatever. It may also lead us to take full responsibility for our own words and actions and to be honest people. It may lead us to be, in Joe’s words as reported from the GodBlogCon, better Christians. And that will accomplish everything we hope for.
