Jesus in Your Heart, Yes

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” says the risen Lord to the Laodicean church (Revelation 3:20). There is an evangelical tradition of using this verse’s imagery in evangelism, and Dan Wallace recently gave some attention to this notion of telling unbelievers to ask Jesus into their hearts. The bottom line is, according to Wallace, that’s not what the verse means in context (it’s a message to a church, not individual unbelievers) or in Greek (he distinguishes, somewhat subtly, between “come in to” and “come into”). Wallace also talks about the mis-understandings that might arise from the over-use, in some circles apparently even the exclusive use (!), of this idea that conversion is a matter of admitting Jesus into your heart. Vintage Dan Wallace, go and read.

Wallace is trying to solve a problem of reductionism, I think. He hears people reducing the richness of the biblical view of salvation to a decontextualized formula which has become trite from over-use, and which therefore doesn’t often succeed in pointing us back to what it’s really all about.

I took a different approach to the same problem in my new book, when I studied the way evangelicals talk. My goal was to do some digging, to see if there might be a robust trinitarian theology buried under some of our favorite formulas.

“Jesus in my heart” was one I was especially eager to investigate. What I found was a trail that goes from the flannelgraph gospel presentations, back through Billy Graham and Robert Boyd Munger to one of the great Puritan theologians, and trinitarian gold all the way along the path. We definitely need to watch what we say. But part of that watching involves knowing our own history, and sympathetically understanding why we originally started saying what we say.

Here’s an excerpt on the subject, from The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, Chapter 5, “Into the Saving Life of Christ”

The problem is not in being too Christ-centered, but in using Christ-centeredness to enable an unbiblical Father-forgetfulness.

An example is the tendency to think of Jesus as the one who lives in our hearts, without making reference to the Holy Spirit’s role as the direct agent of indwelling. There is a grain of truth to this: Jesus does dwell in the hearts of believers, and a handful of passages in the New Testament describe our relationship to Jesus this way (especially Ephesians 3:16-17). But the dominant message of the Bible is that we are in Christ, not that Christ is in us. And on those few occasions when Christ is said to be in us, the work of the Spirit is nearly always mentioned. This is not a theological subtlety noted only by overly-precise theologians, but a special emphasis of Scripture.

Billy Graham, who has certainly popularized a powerful message about accepting Jesus into your heart, identified this indwelling work of the Spirit in salvation as something that needed special emphasis:

One point about the relation of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ needs clarification. The Scriptures speak of ‘Christ in you,’ and some Christians do not fully understand what this means. As the God-man, Jesus is in a glorified body. And wherever Jesus is, His body must be also. In that sense, in His work as the second person of the Trinity, Jesus is now at the right hand of the Father in heaven…. For example, consider Romans 8:10 (KJV), which says, “If Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin.” Or consider Galatians 2:20, “Christ lives in me.” It is clear in these verses that if the Spirit is in us, then Christ is in us. Christ dwells in our hearts by faith. But the Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity who actually dwells in us, having been sent by the Son who has gone away but who will come again in person when we shall literally see Him.

Once again, it is not wrong to affirm that Jesus lives in our hearts, but it is wrong to ignore the Holy Spirit’s role in that indwelling.

It is interesting to see how this signature evangelical teaching about Christ living in our hearts has devolved and degraded over the years. If you trace it to its origin, it is a relentlessly trinitarian message, as we have already seen in Billy Graham’s presentation of it in the 1970s.

An earlier presentation of the message of Jesus in our hearts, and one that the Billy Graham team made extensive use of, is Robert Boyd Munger’s widely-reprinted 1951 sermon, My Heart –Christ’s Home. Munger begins with Ephesians 3:16-17, and then says, “Without question one of the most remarkable Christian doctrines is that Jesus Christ himself through the Holy Spirit will actually enter a heart, settle down and be at home there. Christ will live in any human heart that welcomes him.”

Munger definitely describes the indwelling of Christ as being “through the Holy Spirit” in this opening sentence. In the next few pages, he describes Christ’s ascension and the subsequent descent of the Spirit which made the indwelling possible: “Now, through the miracle of the outpoured Spirit, God would dwell in human hearts.” From this clearly Spirit-honoring beginning point, Munger goes on to develop the homey application that made his sermon a classic, as Christ the guest is shown through each room of the heart-house, extending his lordship into every part.

Even that element of Munger’s sermon can be traced further back, to John Flavel’s 1689 book Christ Knocking at the Door of Sinners’ Hearts, or, A Solemn Entreaty to Receive the Saviour and His Gospel. Flavel, whose radically and consistently trinitarian theology we have seen in the previous chapter, places Jesus decidedly in the context of the Father and the Spirit. Flavel’s book is even based (like Munger’s) on Jesus’ saying in Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” He carefully distinguishes the original intention of that passage (a warning to a church) from its legitimate extended sense (a personal invitation to sinners), and then dilates on the personal application: “Thy soul, reader, is a magnificent structure built by Christ; such stately rooms as thy understanding, will, conscience, and affections, are too good for any other to inhabit.”

With the trinitarian background in place, the message of Jesus knocking on the door of a sinner’s heart is a recognizably trinitarian gospel. It is not Father-forgetful or Spirit-ignoring in its classic exponents such as John Flavel, Robert Boyd Munger, or Billy Graham. Surely these three witnesses count as an evangelical pedigree, and can bolster our confidence in the theology presented through countless flannel-graph images of Christ knocking on the door of a fuzzy, felt heart-house. Surely with this trinitarian lineage in place, we can affirm that all the flannel-graphs are true! But we have to admit that the trinitarian connections are fairly easy to lose. They may have been there in Flavel, Munger, and Graham, but they are often lost in translation, especially in recent decades. Jesus is still presented as knocking on the heart’s door, but too often in a Father-forgetful and Spirit-ignoring way.

Just as we can lapse into substituting Jesus for our heavenly Father, we can replace the Spirit with Jesus when we talk about the divine indwelling. Taken together, these two errors constitute an unfortunately common distortion of the biblical message. They replace the Trinity with Jesus, or they center on Jesus in a Father-forgetful, Spirit-ignoring manner. Jesus becomes my heavenly Father, Jesus lives in my heart, Jesus died to save me from the wrath of Jesus, so I could be with Jesus forever.

Once again, there is no such thing, in Christian life and thought, as being too Christ-centered. But it is certainly possible to be Father-forgetful and Spirit-ignoring. At their best, and from their roots, evangelicals have avoided that. In recent decades, though, it requires vigilance to make sure we are presenting the evangelical message with recognizable trinitarian connections.

What Would Jesus Do? He would do the will of the Father in the power of the Spirit. He would send the Spirit to bring us to the Father.

A Giver of Rings

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Beowulf contains a great many lessons relevant to daily living. First, don’t go to sleep near the hero or the monster will eat you. Second, after you kill a monster don’t go to sleep before knowing whether the monster has a mother bent on vengeance. If you don’t take care, she might use your head to decorate her yard.

Following all this practical advice, the saga also contains more spiritual wisdom. As you get older, don’t get proud and cheap . . . keep giving presents to your old and new friends. A favorite gift at the time of Beowulf was a ring and so a good lord gave a good many rings as gifts.

Advertising advises giving ourselves gifts. We shop and so it becomes hard to know what to give the “man who has everything.” It is true that many of us can afford to buy our own rings, but in doing so we harm ourselves and others.

Recently, Hope and I have tried to give away stuff. We came to California with eleven boxes (not counting books), but even after hauling out many more than eleven boxes we still could go for another round. I noticed something interesting as we tossed and lightened our material load. It was easy to part with the things I purchased for myself, but it was rare to throw away a gift.

On one of my office book shelves there is a sculpture of a daddy rabbit carrying his baby rabbit child. It was given to me by one of my children, I know whom but am not telling, and nobody would describe it as great art. My guess is that it came from the “AWANA Store:” a place where Bible memorizing young people can spend “AWANA bucks” accrued as a reward for learning Scripture. AWANA is very Wesleyan: kids do well by doing what is good. My kids often used their AWANA bucks to buy Christmas presents and so a rabbit sculpture moved from the Ninety-Nine Cent Only store to the AWANA store to me by way of John 3:16.

I will never throw it away. My masterful child acted as a young lord or lady should and gave it to me as a gift of esteem and love. It is more than the sum of its parts: it is one of the first rings a child gave to express thanks for service. What is the value of such a gift?

Isn’t my rabbit sculpture fairly worthless? This is true only if you forget what it is through ignorance. Even a barbarian knows that sentimental value is real value and that family relationships are part of the framework that shapes objects into prized possessions. A skeptic might declare that the sculpture only has value to me, but this is also wrong. It is only ignorance of my child or my family or a failure to understand the importance of any child or family that easily could discard such a gift.

This ignorance can best be conquered by telling the story of a gift. The two rings on my hand, one from my wife and one from Torrey, come with a tale: the first romantic, the second one of friendship. Because I did not buy them, this is a tale I can tell to the praise of the giver of the rings: my beloved Hope and the Torrey class of 2004.

Things I buy for myself may have a story, though most objects purchased do not, but this tale is not so safe for me to tell. I was the giver of the ring and the recipient of the ring. Modesty would forbid my telling the tale!

We hope someday to have a house filled with gifts or mementos from others and to give away as much as we get. Sparse possessions are a sign of youth in such a system and a hall full of gifts the mark of a happy old age.

Beowulf reminds us that the hall full of gifts must not stay full of gifts. My mother and father have taken to giving my brother and me gifts that are family heirlooms. I can now hang my ties on my grandfather’s tie rack, an object I saw him use as a little boy. The previous rack was fancier, but this rack is ringed by precious memories. It brings my youth and middle age together and reminds me of those heroes gone before me.

Give gifts. Our Lord said it was more blessed to give, than to receive. Try it and see if He was right. As much as is possible give gifts that are the product of a shared history. Then spend some evenings gathered in the living room talking about the objects in it. If your living room is filled with priceless or merely functional objects, then you don’t have a living room, but a place to sit.

There is caution needed, however, in the giving and receiving of rings. If we plan to be blessed by giving, we shall have to take the risk of receiving. J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us that it safer to give rings than to receive them. If the lord of rings gives you one, make sure the lord is a good lord. If he is merely a glowing eye, then don’t take the gift. A gift always creates a bond, an obligation. Be cautious about the persons that you will allow to give you gifts.

Ring giving need not be the exclusive sphere of the rich, though the rich are blessed to get to do a great deal of it. One of the lordly givers of gifts I have known was a woman at the foot of the hill where we lived in West Virginia. She loved beautiful things, but gave them away generously. We were not in her family, but she still gave us objects with a rare insight into what my mother, a very young woman at the time, would cherish. Those gifts still grace my parent’s home.

She was not a rich woman, but she was a great ring giver.

The rabbit sculpture on my bookcase and the rings on my finger give life a “back story.” The back story of my life is what gives the present moment depth and the love behind each gift points to eternity. This gives my life hope.

I think I will go give something away.

Shouting, “Peace! Peace!” Where There Is No Peace

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Peace is a good thing, but not the only good. One handicap to Middle East peace is that peace just now, with the present regimes, leaders, and attitudes, would be a false and ugly peace. We all pray for peace, but we also pray for justice. It might be better to hope for a wary and watchful tension in the Middle East, than a peace bought at the expense of the rights of minorities in the region.

The Ottoman Empire demonstrated that it is “easy” to get centuries of peace in the Middle East. Turkish military power made the Middle East peaceful, even a sleepy backwater, but not a happy or prosperous area. Muslims, Christians, and Jews have existed in the region for centuries peacefully, but it was a peace bought by the sword and by the acceptance by Jewish and Christian minorities that they would be second-class citizens in their own homes.

The problem in the Middle East is not fundamentally the attitudes of the Christian or Jewish minorities. It is also not an exclusively “Islamic” problem, since Islamic minority groups also face persecution and second-class citizenship.

Peace in the Middle East is difficult to achieve today, partly because past “peace” has been achieved the wrong ways. Colonial powers imposed peace, including Eastern and Western powers, but this taught the wrong lessons. Everyone can and sometimes should cry, “Give me liberty or give me death,” but a just society also has members who shout, “Give my opponent liberty or give me death.”

The difficulty is that the majority in the Middle East will not accept the rights of the minorities to live in peace. They do not do this because they are religious—often their religion is the only thing softening their bigotry—but because they are the majority and feel their power. This is easy to see when one looks at the persecution of Islamic minority groups by the majority in the culture.

The problem is not that the majority of people in these states are too “religious.” Israel herself is a secular state with a majority of the population not overly given to piety. Egypt and Syria are both secular regimes and have been so for decades.

Anyone who has visited the region knows that many people in the area are secularists, but that secularist majorities or power groups are no more peaceful than the religious. The “secular” regimes of Egypt and Syria demonstrated this truth in the past. These secular states were internally peaceful, but at the price of being unjust states. Property rights were ignored. Minorities faced persecution. These secular nations went to war with a secular Israel, because they did not accept the existence of the Jewish state and felt they could impose their desires by force.

What are the major impediments to a just peace in the Middle East?

Part of the problem of the Middle East is anti-Semitism in the world. The irrational hatred of Jewish people is not the sole domain of religious or non-religious people. Secular and religious states have persecuted and killed Jews. Stereotypes about Jews exist in religious and non-religious groups. Secular non-Jews, for irrational secular reasons hate, secular Jews. Religious non-Jews, for irrational religious reasons, hate Jews.

Secularism and religion are both infected with anti-Semitism. If there were no religion in the entire Middle East, this bigotry would still exist. Until such bigots are purged from the body politic there can be no peace in the Middle East. This purgation must begin with recognition that Jewish people have a right to self-governance in the one tiny area of the Middle East where they are a majority: Israel. It must continue by granting Jewish people full civil rights in all the nations of the Middle East.

“Peace” in the Middle East is no great victory if it is won by trampling on the hopes for minority groups in every nation outside of Palestine. One target during this period of watchful waiting should be for every minority group in the Middle East to have the rights of religious and cultural minorities in the state of Israel.

A key problem is tolerance of thuggish regimes if they are found in former colonies or places with oil. Many of the governments in the Middle East are plutocracies that buy complacency from their subjects by fueling religious zeal they lack with part of their loot. These secular rulers pay for anti-democratic forms of religion because it allows their regimes to continue. In some places, extremist religious groups have turned on the hypocrites who created them, but in most places that has not happened yet.

Islam is corrupted by pay-off money from oil sheiks not noted for their personal piety. The problem is not religion, but the corruption of religion and every other decent idea in the Middle East by wicked men intent on keeping up their looting and stealing. There can be no lasting peace in the Middle East when many of the nations there ignore the rights of the majority of citizens, let alone the rights of minorities.

Fanning hatred of Jews, as if Israel is the reason for the poverty in most of the region, is the same ugly strategy used in Russia to keep another tottering regime in power. But peace bought by pogroms only puts off the inevitable day of doom and makes the bill higher by combining injustice with more wickedness. The United States might find a temporary truce between Israel and her neighbors, but the rotting anti-democratic regimes in the region cannot be counted on to keep it.

Peace treaties signed with ugly thuggish regimes cannot be trusted past the lifetimes of the ugly thugs that rule them.

The Middle East may face a few more decades of conflict before the rights of the Middle East minorities are secured. Until a Jew can dream of being President of Syria or a Christian can be head of government in Iran, there will be no just peace in the Middle East. Our goal should be to minimize conflict, not to hastily impose “peace on the Middle East.”

A “peace” that left the vile regime now in Tehran free to gain nuclear weapons would only be the prelude to bloodier conflict.

“War is never the answer” bumper stickers are pithy, but false. Israel’s defensive wars in the last century saved the lives of thousands of Jews.

War is bad, but is it always the worst evil? Certainly nuclear holocaust would be impossible to defend, but more limited wars have been fought and done great good to balance off their evils.

Our nation would not exist if it was not for war and arguably the South of this nation would never have voluntarily freed its slaves. Certainly generations more African-Americans would have lived in bondage if the Union had not been preserved by a bloody war.

The Allies’ defeat of Napoleon left the world freer than if one man had been allowed to be emperor of Europe. World War II answered a good many questions. South Koreans must be glad that they do not live under the North Korean regime thanks to the Korean Conflict. The Cold War resolved several others in a manner generally favorable to the human condition. Even the people of Iraq are better off today than they would be if we had left Saddam in power. Does anyone doubt that Vietnam would be richer, if the United States had won the Vietnam War?

Let us hope that, slowly, nations in the Middle East will begin to protect the rights of the minorities. Perhaps Turkey, Iraq, or Jordan will begin to show the way Islamic societies can become democracies and respect the rights of minorities, but they are not doing so now.

All decent men and women hate war and long for peace, but all decent people also hate injustice and long for justice. We hope for the day when all people can live in harmony, but that day is not yet.

I pray for the peace of Jerusalem, but also the safety and rights of all the people who call that city home. Until then, people of good will in the United States should continue to support our democratic ally Israel, encouraging her to be true to her constitution, while also standing for justice in the other nations of the Middle East.

How To Start the Gospel

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Last week I got to speak in Biola chapel, as part of a faculty series on the first chapter of John’s gospel. It’s a thirty-minute sermon, and you can view it at Biola’s video chapel archive. It’s always a blast to speak to the Biola community,and this series on John is very well designed, with a bunch of us coming at the chapter from various disciplines.

I pull some “public-speaker-in-a-gymnasium” antics for the first few minutes, and then get into the big, trinitarian idea of this amazing passage. Here is a rough transcript of the first major point.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Is that the greatest opening of all time? That’s got it all.

Think about this: Say you’re an apostle or one of their disciples, and your job is to write a gospel. What are the rules for how you start a gospel? Well, there are only four real gospels, let’s check them out real quick.

Mark begins this way: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Well, that’s easy, very straightforward. Oh, it goes on, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, as it was written in Isaiah the prophet, ‘Behold I send my messenger… prepare the way of the Lord.” With some prophecy. Nice. It gets you back into the kings of Israel, back before the Babylonian captivity. So God didn’t just think up this gospel thing, he’s been talking about it since Isaiah. And then John the Baptist says “I baptized you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” So when Jesus shows up, we know what to expect. Nice work, Mark.

Now Matthew does all of that, too, but he has a different plan for an introduction. He wants to go even further back, to make sure you’ve got enough context, so he says, “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.” See that, he’s reaching further back than Isaiah, going back through David to Abraham. Nice work, Matthew. Way to start a gospel.

Luke comes in like a reporter, and says, “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us… it seemed good to me also… to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.” And then he provides all kinds of backstory, two whole chapters about the events leading up to the birth of Jesus, and even a story about something Jesus did when he was twelve. Finally he gets to a genealogy, and decides to trace that family tree back through David and Abraham to Adam.

See what he did there? It’s almost like the gospel writers are in a contest to see who can start the good news of Jesus far back enough to get the whole picture in; a contest to see who can get you to open your mind wide enough to get the whole context to make sense of the Jesus story. Mark starts with Isaiah, Matthew with Abraham, Luke starts with Adam. Adam! Beat that! You can’t get older than Adam.

Well, here comes John, and he beats it. John is not messing around. His opening move: “IN THE BEGINNING.” That’s older than Adam, isn’t it? It’s almost like he’s saying “That’s the trump card, no more gospels.” Four is quite enough, and besides, there’s really nowhere to go from here, now. What are you going to do, say ‘before the beginning?’ Copycat.

It’s like when kids are fighting back and forth with a “times two,” “oh yeah, times four,” “oh yeah,” and then one of them the Infinity Card. “Oh yeah, times INFINITY.” Once the infinity card is exposed, the game is kind of over.

Now of course another famous book begins with the words “In the Beginning,” and that is Genesis. To start another book with “In the Beginning” is to say we’ve got to start over. That is, it reboots the Bible.

You’ve got to understand when you read the Jesus story, Jesus isn’t God’s next big idea. He’s God’s first big idea. He’s not the next word in a series of messages that God has been sending; he is the first word. Or, if you look at Genesis and say, “My Bible says that God’s first word was Let. As in ‘Let there be light.’” But John’s telling you that what he learned from Jesus is that there was a word before that word.

“In the beginning,” says Genesis, “God said Let there be light.” But John says, “In the beginning, before you hear that word, there was already this word. This word was already with God. And this word we’re talking about WAS God.” Jesus Christ isn’t the next word in a long conversation. He’s the first word, he’s the word above all words, he’s the word who God is. Part of the problem with going back to the beginning is, once you get there and go beyond it, there’s nowhere left to put anything except IN God. And that’s where John puts Jesus.

What breaks through in Christ is that which was from the beginning.

This is the NT way of talking. One of the characteristic differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the New Testament is bold to make such statements. Look, for instance, at the way the New Testament takes a step further back with its declaration of salvation: Where God declares in the old covenant to Israel, “I have chosen you,” the new covenant announces that he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Think about that phrase, “before the foundation of the world.” It’s a Bible phrase, but it’s specifically a New Covenant phrase. The prophets do not make declarations about what happened “before the foundation of the world,” but the apostles do.

And why do the apostles do that? Because Jesus did it. Later in John’s gospel, in chapter 17, Jesus will say “before the foundation of the world” twice. He’s talking to his Father, and we get to overhear these words between Jesus the word and God the Father: “Father” he says, “glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” John 17:5. And in 17:24 he adds, “Father, I want those whom you have given me, to be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” That’s the keynote, that’s the New Testament way of talking.

The coming of Christ, and the teaching of Christ, forced the thought of the apostles farther down, down deeper into the ultimate foundation of God’s ways and works. When Christ brought salvation, the apostles had to decide whether the life of Jesus Christ was one more event in the series of God’s actions, or whether, in meeting the Son of God, they had come into contact with something that was absolutely primal about God himself. Christ did not leave them the option of considering him just another prophet, or a servant of God in a series of servants. That’s why it was such a major decision for them to decide where they would start in telling the story of Jesus.

That’s why the introduction matters: It frames everything about the story.

Ultimately, they knew that the best way to acknowledge Jesus as the eternal Son of God was to go back further than the foundation of the world and confess that he had been there previous even to that. That backward step beyond the foundation of the world is a step into the eternal nature of God. So the Old Testament starts with the foundation of the world: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” But the story of Jesus starts before that, because the Son of God was already present by the time of the beginning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Hebrews is for Hard Times

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Hebrews is a book of the Bible for people in hard times. Should you read it now, or later?

In terms of the book’s actual background, we don’t know much for certain about the situation of those who first heard these words. There are dark suggestions of hardship in a few verses of chapter 10:

You endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

The anonymous author calls his letter a “word of exhortation,” using a Greek word that elsewhere is translated “comfort” or “consolation.” Encouragement under relentless pressure is the keynote of Hebrews. One commentator has noted that “the whole practical thrust of the epistle is to persuade those to whom it is addressed to resist the strong temptation to seek an easing of the hardships attendant on their Christian confession by accommodating.”

So when should you read a word from God that is about hard times?

Option A: Obviously, read it when you’re having hard times. That’s precisely when it is a word in season. But sometimes that doesn’t work. Grief usually blocks us from being able to do hard mental work, and there is some hard thinking to do in Hebrews. Probably by the time you’re in hardship, you should have already read and pondered this book. For example, standing at the graveside is not the most opportune time to work out the details of our theology of death. Grief can make you hard of hearing. Grief immerses you in the felt experience, but processing takes some abstraction or perspective.

But pray for the miracle of hearing God’s word, and maybe you can hear what you need in a difficult season.

Another objection to Option A, by the way, is that not all hard times make a dramatic entrance, or come with a label. Some of them sneak up on you week by week, month by month, until you wake up somewhere in mid-life to find yourself lost in a dark wood with no sign of the pathway. You were in trouble all along, but you didn’t know you were in trouble.

Option B: Read it in the calm, before hard times. Yes, that’s precisely when you should prepare yourself for future affliction. But sometimes we can’t make ourselves attend to difficult words when all is right with the world. Prosperity can make us hard of hearing. Sitting in your home while reading about people losing theirs; digesting a big meal while reading about the hungry; these are not things that give you a felt connection with the reality of hardship. Reading Hebrews with the air conditioning on. It makes perfect sense to do so, but it also gives you too much distance from the speaker’s situation.

But pray for the miracle of hearing God’s word, and maybe you can hear what you need for future hardship, in a time of calm.

It’s no surprise that the solution in both cases is the same: pray for the miracle of hearing God’s word. After all, this hearing is a major theme of the theology of Hebrews: “Today if you hear his voice, don’t harden your heart.”

On Civil Religion and Glenn Beck

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Civil religion may be one of the few things less popular than Glenn Beck at Harvard. Two psychological conditions account for most of this fear and loathing. A combination of theophobia–the irrational fear of all things religious–and political dextrophobia–an unhealthy worry about the right side of the body politic–runs unchecked in the blood stream of such schools, disabling the open-mindedness normally prized.

The sad person so afflicted cannot see the difference between the Taliban now killing Americans in Afghanistan and the nice folk who gathered on the Mall in Washington the last weekend of August. Since the Taliban is motivated by religion and most Americans at the Glenn Beck rally were motivated by religion, they must be similar. This is akin to believing that a man being drowned is in the same condition as the man being offered a drink of water after a workout.

Beck’s group was so orderly that they would not even litter while at the Mall. From such folk terrorists are not made.

Oddly, the same phobias, having been acquired in graduate school, are rampant in many Christian college faculty lounges. Few things irritate Christian academics more than the lazy assumption they are all Republicans or political conservatives.

Yet in this case both the objects of scorn, civil religion and Glenn Beck, are good for the nation. Glenn Beck spent the weekend urging a return to the civil religion of his childhood and he was right to do so.

Christians who oppose civil religion often do so for good reasons. Some people do confuse civil religion with Christianity, but America is not the Church and patriotism is not the greatest love. History demonstrates that you can be a patriot, even a hero of the nation, and a bad man in your private life. Thomas Jefferson did good service, at times, to his nation, but he was a cad and a bounder in his private life.

What good is civil religion?

Civil religion will not save anyone from damnation in the next life, but it allows the damned and the saved to work together in this life. Civil religion is the minimum claim that my allegiance to the United States of America is under God. Civil religion limits the domain of the state to one area of my life. Washington is not my lord.

I am a participant, not a communicant, in the civil religion.

The American civil religion allows all the great monotheistic faiths to agree to disagree on the vital details of religion. Those important, indeed most vital, questions are left to the family, private society, and religious organizations.

You cannot, however, form a nation on the mere agreement to disagree. It was the genius of our Founders, influenced by centuries of Christian historical experience, to find the minimum affirmation of loyalty that would allow both Christians and Jews (to use the historical example) to both be equal citizens of the state. We would limit government and keep it out of the family and vast swatches of private life. This would be the domain of family and church or synagogue. The government would demand our allegiance, but accept that this allegiance to the American ideal was limited to any decent man’s allegiance to Judeo-Christian values.

For this reason, the Constitution did not force Christians with an objection to “swearing oaths” to swear oaths to the state. For the same reason, the military rapidly developed ways for religious pacifists to serve the nation without bearing arms. Though inconsistently at times, civil religion allowed us to accommodate both minimal religious and ethical unity while allowing for diversity.

Eventually it allowed for secularists to also become full members of the commonwealth, because of the limitations placed on the power of the state. If they too would agree, for their own reasons, to Judeo-Christian morality, then we would tolerate their failure to agree to the foundations for that morality. For many Americans this was and is a close call, but tolerance where possible is always the right thing to do.

There are, however, two reasonable causes for worry about the sort of civil religion on display at the Beck rally. First, the aesthetic was cloying and too narrow to sustain a national revival. Second, conservatives always should worry about mass movements, because excellence can be lost and extremism bred.

For conservatives to achieve their goals, they will need to reclaim cultural and not just political leadership. For too long, they have given up on the arts, including popular arts, and been content not “to know much about art, though I know what I like.” This attitude does not encourage excellence or innovation in the arts. It does encourage false sentimentality, bathos, and ugliness.

Some critics of Beck obviously hate all sentiment, but the way to counter their soullessness is not through schmaltz. Both Wordsworth and Hallmark Greeting Cards produce poems about flowers, but Wordsworth did it well and Hallmark often does not. Artists can (and often have) become inbred so that they talk only to themselves, but conservatives will only encourage this if they refuse to elevate the tastes of their audience. Conservatives should encourage more Rembrandt and less Kinkade.

Conservatives are not afraid of experts and of knowledge, including in the arts. The Beck rally was often artistically trite and fell into simple audience manipulation, because it confused social conservatism with artistic “safety.”

What do I mean? Artistic snobs sniff at all popular or country music and Beck has good reason to ignore snobs. However, some pop music is bad music even if the audience of the moment happens to like it. This sort of stuff is unendurable to watch if you are not at the rally and sounds dated days after the rally has happened.

Beck and his crowd must find artists and craftsmen that will both encourage and challenge their tastes. Otherwise the ugliness and artistic falseness of the presentation will drive away potential allies and get in the way of making converts.

Finally, in any mass movement there is the every present danger of demagoguery and tyranny. Some opponents of Beck cry demagogue too lightly and fear theocracy every time a child draws a crèche in government schools, but even the irrational fears of a lover of liberty cannot be ignored.

Many people are mad and feel powerless. Conservatives know that this is the very time not to stoke fears or hatreds, but to calm them. No conservative wants a “revolution,” but thoughtful and gradual renewal of basic values. A virtue of the Beck presentation was that it centered on “faith, hope, and charity” and not on the “bad guys.”

Demonizing foes is very dangerous stuff. Nobody can avoid drawing distinctions or saying why they disagree with their foes, but the twentieth century is full of examples of this going bad. Beck worked hard to get this right, and did, but the danger still exists.

Traditional Christians know that Beck could never be “their leader” as traditional Christians, because he is not one. They know that America is not the “promised land” and that patriotism is not the only or even the highest virtue.

Most American Christians are thankful to live in a land where they can practice their faith. They wish for a government small enough to make social stability possible, because it does not make religious or philosophical decisions best left to families, religious groups, and societies. Beck mostly gets this and so, hard as it is for an academic to admit, Beck is mostly right.