Atheist Crusaders

By Phillip E. Johnson
Touchstone Magazine

I have read Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great twice, in preparation for a book I have co-written with Biola University philosopher Dr. John Mark Reynolds. Due to come out this spring, our book is titled Against All Gods: What’s Right and Wrong About the “New Atheism.” Because not all readers may know at once who the new atheists are, I will say that they are a group of very fervent opponents of “religion,” of whom the best known are zoologist and science popularizer Richard Dawkins, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, and Hitchens.

What is new about these atheists is not their arguments, which will be familiar to anyone who has read the classics of religious skepticism. The new element that has made these writers famous or notorious is their insistence that it is time not just to stop believing in religion, but to stop treating religion with any respect whatsoever.

Hitchens’s book is one of the most readable of the new atheist polemics. Nearly everything he writes is lively and engaging because he is a highly skilled writer and a clever advocate who often brings up points that are worth pondering seriously, along with others that are downright frivolous.

On the frivolous side, Hitchens likes to deflate supposedly great men by calling them “mammals,” but this derisory term brings in the problem of self-reference. While Hitchens never refers to the authorities on his side as “mammals,” reserving that category for those whom he wishes to belittle, it will not escape the reader that if “great men” are only mammals, then so are scientists, including the esteemed Charles Darwin and the not-quite-so-esteemed Richard Dawkins, and so, of course, is Hitchens himself. Which raises the question: Why should we take seriously any speculation by a mere mammal, or even the consensus of mammal opinion, about the origin of its species, no matter how much evidence the mammals imagine themselves to have gathered?

Materialist Priests

Hitchens has two besetting faults: He does not define his terms carefully, and he does not know where to stop. The latter quality was evident in his obsessive efforts to hound Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and to discredit Mother Teresa for her resolute opposition to abortion. Both faults are evident in God Is Not Great. The subtitle of this book is How Religion Poisons Everything, yet Hitchens throws out accusations without bothering to define “religion” or, for that matter, “everything.” (Does the latter include, for example, art, music, and literature?)

Looseness with definitions helps Hitchens blame whatever is wrong with the world on “religion.” Consider his treatment of Communism. Suppose (as is actually the case) that atheistic Communist states are all brutal tyrannies that starve their citizens and deny them basic human rights. One would think that this consistent record of tyranny would show, at the least, that there are some things besides religion that “poison everything.”

But Hitchens sees that Communist states tend to be governed by ideologies that look like religions (however perverted), with their worship of leaders and their sacred texts that cannot be questioned. So he concludes that religion still poisons everything, because any ideology that is toxic is labeled as “religion,” even if, like Communism, it claims to be scientific and vehemently denies the existence of God. And so Christianity is blamed even for the deeds of tyrants who most brutally persecute the Christians.

One point Hitchens makes that I do appreciate is that the worst totalitarianisms often stem from a desire to perfect the human species in this world, under human rulers. And yes, at some times and places, priests have provided ideological justification for utopian projects and oppressive governments. The ideologues of Communism are materialist priests of that sort.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are materialist priests themselves, with their own vision of a perfected world, one in which everyone turns away from God and worships at the altar of human reason. If the true believers in that vision become rulers, I shudder to think how much coercion they would have to employ to achieve the godless society they envision.

The Truthfulness of Scripture: Inerrancy

By Michael S. Horton
Modern Reformation

Against the repeated claim that the doctrine of inerrancy, unknown to the church, arose first with Protestant orthodoxy, we could cite numerous examples from the ancient and medieval church. (1) It was Augustine who first coined the term "inerrant," and Luther and Calvin can speak of Scripture as free from error. (2)

Down to the Second Vatican Council, Rome has attributed inerrancy to Scripture as the common view of the church throughout its history. According to the First Vatican Council (1869-70), the Old and New Testaments, "whole and entire," are "sacred and canonical." In fact, contrary to the tendency of some Protestants (including some evangelicals) to lodge the nature of inspiration in the church's authority, this council added,

And the church holds them as sacred and canonical not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without errors, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their Author. (3)

Successive popes during the twentieth century condemned the view that limited inerrancy to that which is necessary for salvation, and Pope Leo XIII went even further than the inerrancy position by espousing the dictation theory of inspiration. Undoubtedly, this mechanical theory of inspiration is what most critics have in mind when they encounter the term "inerrancy." Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that inerrancy is not an invention of Protestant fundamentalists. Quoting the Second Vatican Council, the most recent Catholic catechism states, "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures." (4)

The Princeton Formulation of Inerrancy

Although inerrancy was taken for granted in church history until the Enlightenment, it was especially at Princeton Seminary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it became a full-blown formulation. This view is articulated most completely in Inspiration, a book coauthored by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield and published by the Presbyterian Church in 1881. Their argument deserves an extended summary especially because it remains, in my view, the best formulation of inerrancy just as it anticipates and challenges caricatures.

First, they point out that a sound doctrine of inspiration requires a specifically Christian ontology or view of reality: "The only really dangerous opposition to the church doctrine of inspiration comes either directly or indirectly, but always ultimately, from some false view of God's relation to the world, of his methods of working, and of the possibility of a supernatural agency penetrating and altering the course of a natural process." (5) Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect. Not only "the untrammeled play of all [the author's] faculties, but the very substance of what they write is evidently for the most part the product of their own mental and spiritual activities." (6) Even more than the Reformers, the Protestant orthodox were sensitive to the diverse means used by God to produce the Bible's diverse literature. This awareness has only grown, Hodge and Warfield observe, and should be fully appreciated. God's "superintendence" did not compromise creaturely freedom. In fact, "It interfered with no spontaneous natural agencies, which were, in themselves, producing results conformable to the mind of the Holy Spirit." (7) Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect.

Far from reducing all instances of biblical revelation to the prophetic paradigm, as critics often allege, Hodge and Warfield recognize that the prophetic form, "Thus says the Lord," is a "comparatively small element of the whole body of sacred writing." In the majority of cases, the writers drew from their own existing knowledge, including general revelation, and each "gave evidence of his own special limitations of knowledge and mental power, and of his personal defects as well as of his powers....The Scriptures have been generated, as the plan of redemption has been evolved, through an historic process," which is divine in its origin and intent, but "largely natural in its method." (8) "The Scriptures were generated through sixteen centuries of this divinely regulated concurrence of God and man, of the natural and the supernatural, of reason and revelation, of providence and grace." (9)

Second, Warfield and Hodge underscore the redemptive-historical unfolding of biblical revelation, defending an organic view of inspiration over a mechanical theory. They note that many reject verbal inspiration because of its association with the erroneous theory of verbal dictation, which is an "extremely mechanical" view. (10) Therefore, theories concerning "authors, dates, sources and modes of composition" that "are not plainly inconsistent with the testimony of Christ or his apostles as to the Old Testament or with the apostolic origin of the books of the New Testament...cannot in the least invalidate" the Bible's inspiration and inerrancy. (11) While higher criticism proceeds on the basis of anti-supernatural and rationalistic presuppositions, historical criticism is a valid and crucial discipline.

Third, the Princeton theologians faced squarely the question of contradictions and errors, noting problems in great detail. Some discrepancies are due to imperfect copies, which textual criticism properly considers. In other cases, an original reading may be lost, or we may simply fail to have adequate data or be blinded by our presuppositions from understanding a given text. Sometimes we are "destitute of the circumstantial knowledge which would fill up and harmonize the record," as is true in any historical record. We must also remember that our own methods of testing the accuracy of Scripture "are themselves subject to error." (12)

Fourth, because it is the communication that is inspired rather than the persons themselves, we should not imagine that the authors were omniscient or infallible. In fact, the authors themselves seem conscious enough of their limitations. "The record itself furnishes evidence that the writers were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong." (13) Yet Scripture is seen to be inerrant "when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense." (14) Inerrancy is not attributed to copies, much less to our vernacular translations, but to "the original autographic text." (15)

Fifth, the claim of inerrancy is that "in all their real affirmations these books are without error." (16) The qualification "real affirmations" is important and deserves some elaboration. The scientific and cultural assumptions of the prophets and apostles were not suspended by the Spirit, and in these they were not necessarily elevated beyond their contemporaries. Nevertheless, that which they proclaim and affirm in God's name is preserved from error. For example, critics often point to Matthew 13:32, where Jesus refers to the mustard seed as "the smallest of all seeds." From the context it is clear that Jesus was not making a botanical claim but drawing on the familiar experience of his hearers, for whom the analogy would have worked perfectly well. If every statement in Scripture is a propositional truth-claim, then there are obvious errors. A reductionistic view of language is implied at this point both in many of the criticisms and defenses of scriptural accuracy. It is unlikely that in his state of humiliation, in which by his own admission he did not know the day or hour of his return, Jesus had exhaustive knowledge about the world's plant life. Whatever contemporary botanists might identify as the smallest seed, if it were unknown to Jesus' hearers, the analogy would have been pointless. We have to ask what the biblical writers are affirming, not what they are assuming as part of the background of their own culture and the limitations of their time and place.

If we do not hold ourselves and each other to modern standards of specialized discourse in ordinary conversation, we can hardly impose such standards on ancient writers. As Calvin observed, "Moses wrote in the manner of those to whom he wrote." If one wants to learn astronomy, Calvin adds, one must ask the astronomers rather than Moses, since his purpose was not to deliver supernatural information about the movement of planets. (17) Inerrancy requires our confidence not in the reliability of Moses and his knowledge of the cosmos but in the reliability of the historical narratives, laws, and promises disclosed in the Pentateuch. Even then, it is truthfulness, not exactness, that we expect when we come to the biblical text. (18)

To supplement their account, one could add that there are obvious discrepancies in biblical reports concerning numbers. However, these can be explained by recognizing the different methods of accounting, which are better known now than in the past. For example, on the basis of calculating the generations in Genesis, Archbishop Ussher concluded that the world was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. However, we know more now about ancient Near Eastern genealogies, which were not exhaustive but singled out significant and transitional figures. Similarly, Matthew's list is selective, highlighting the crucial (and sometimes surprising) links in the genealogy that led to Jesus Christ (Matt. 1:1-17). Their goal (or scope) is to highlight the progress of redemption, not to provide general historical or scientific data. It is impossible to know how many generations are missing from such genealogies, and therefore efforts at calculating human history from them are always bound to fail. The fact that evenhanded historical research has resolved apparent discrepancies such as this one cautions us against hasty conclusions. Many of the alleged conflicts between Scripture and science have turned out to be founded on flawed biblical exegesis. In every science, anomalies are frankly acknowledged without causing an overthrow of an entire paradigm or settled theory that enjoys widespread consensus on the basis of weightier confirmations.

On the one hand, we must beware of facile harmonizations of apparent contradictions. It is sometimes said that the Bible is not a book as much as it is a library. We have to resist the long-held assumption in our intellectual culture that plurality reflects a falling away from the oneness of being. God is three persons in one essence. Analogously, this triune God reveals the one truth of the gospel in a plurality of testimonies. Furthermore, God spoke through prophets and apostles in many times and places, each of whom was shaped by various circumstances of God's providence, and the variations even between the four Gospels enrich our understanding of the different nuances and facets of Christ's person and work.

On the other hand, we must beware of equally facile conclusions that depend on naturalistic presuppositions or our own incomplete knowledge. Like the biblical authors, we are not omniscient and must with patient reserve anticipate fuller research and explanations. This does not require a dualistic conception between "religious truth" (faith and practice) and "secular truth" (history and science), as theories of limited inerrancy hold. (19) If we cannot trust God as Creator, then we cannot trust God as Redeemer. Instead of this sort of a priori division, we must recall the purpose or intent of a biblical passage. Once again, it is a question of scope--what is being claimed rather than assumed. As Warfield explains, "It is true that the Scriptures were not designed to teach philosophy, science, or ethnology, or human history as such, and therefore they are not to be studied primarily as sources of information on these subjects." (20)

Sixth, these theologians also denied that inerrancy was the foundation of our doctrine of Scripture, much less of the Christian faith. (21) We must first begin with the content and claims of Scripture, centering on Christ. Christianity is not true because it rests on an inspired and inerrant text, but vice versa. In fact, the redemption to which Scripture testifies and that it communicates would "be true and divine...even if God had not been pleased to give us, in addition to his revelation of saving truth, an infallible record of that revelation absolutely errorless, by means of inspiration." (22)

The Original Autographs

The appeal to the inerrancy of the original autographs has been a bone of contention in this debate. After all, what does it matter if inerrancy is attributed only to the original autographs if we no longer have access to them? But this is not as abstract or speculative a point as it might first appear. We have to distinguish between the original autographs and their copies in any case, since the valid enterprise of historical-textual criticism presupposes it. The very attempt to compare textual variants assumes that there is an original body of documents that some copies and families of copies more or less faithfully represent. Errors in these myriad copies are a matter of fact, but they can only be counted as errors because we have ways of comparing copies in a manner that gives us a reasonable approximation of the original autographs.

Even if we do not have direct access to these original autographs, we do have criteria widely employed in all fields of textual criticism that give us a good idea of what was originally written. (23) However, the methodological assumptions of textual criticism are quite different from those of higher criticism, which as an apparatus of theological liberalism follows naturalistic presuppositions. Where real discrepancies and doubts remain as to the authenticity of certain sayings, on the basis of textual-critical rather than higher-critical analysis, they do not affect any point of the church's faith and practice. (24) The very fact that textual criticism is an ongoing field yielding ongoing results demonstrates that reconstructing or approximating the content of the original autographs is a viable goal and that, for the most part, it has already achieved this goal.

The Faithful Inspirer

In evangelical circles generally, inerrancy was assumed more than explicitly formulated until it was challenged. Warfield and Hodge helped to articulate this position, which is more formally summarized in the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (see page 30). (25) Like any formulation developed in response to a particular error or area of concern for faith and practice, the inerrancy doctrine invites legitimate questions and critiques. However, its alternatives are less satisfying.

Whatever the holy, unerring, and faithful Father speaks is--simply by virtue of having come from him--holy, unerring, and faithful. In addition, the content of God's speech is none other than the gift of the eternal Son who became flesh for us and for our salvation. Revelation therefore is not merely an ever-new event that occurs through the witness of the Bible, it is a written canon--an abiding, Spirit-breathed deposit and constitution for the covenant community in every generation. Thus, the Christian faith is truly "a pattern of the sound words" and "the good deposit entrusted to you" that we are to "guard" by means of "the Holy Spirit who dwells within us" (2 Tim. 1:13-14; cf. 1 Tim. 6:20). It is an event of revelation that not only creates our faith--fides qua creditor, the faith by which we believe--but, according to Jude 3, contains in canonical form "the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints"--fides quae creditor, the faith that is believed.

Another Reason Why Boys Fail: A coarsened cultural environment has eliminated the heroic ideals that once inspired young men

By Stephen C. Zelnick
The John William Pope Center

Editor's Note: Stephen Zelnick is a member of the Department of English at Temple University and co-founder of the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC).

I happened to catch an interview with Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind. His is the latest voice in a chorus of writers who have focused attention on the weak performance of boys and young men in education. Whitmire, a capable and committed journalist, follows the social science approach of gathering statistics and then guessing at likely causes.

And the data are stunning. Boys do poorly in reading in the early grades, they fail in great numbers to graduate from high school, they go on to higher education at lower percentages than young women, and they fail to complete higher education programs at a noticeably higher rate than their female counterparts.

So many theories have been proposed for these failings that it is difficult to keep up with them. Boys’ brains don’t work right for what school does; boys’ energies are not suited to sitting still (more Ritalin, please); boys are biologically best suited to manual labor; boys lack male role models in school settings; boys see cooperative behavior as submission; boys resist cupboard-keeping neatness; and so on. Undoubtedly, these are all true, and always have been.

I would like to propose a wider perspective by looking for causes in the broad cultural environment. As a humanist who teaches literature and labors as a core curriculum and Great Books advocate, I premise my thoughts on old notions of human nature, social values, and cultural continuity.

Thus, I would add something I am not hearing in this discussion. Boys, and young men in particular, respond very well to noble purpose but haven’t had much to go on in the past fifty years of our bedraggled history. So many of the young men I see in my classes have mentally and emotionally quit, given up. They are not supported by inspiring ideals that help organize and focus their energies.

They seem prematurely weary, defeated by obstacles they haven’t met yet, bored and restless and merely going through the motions. Some have adopted the cool pose of indifference, and, indeed, they really don’t care. When I ask them where they are going with their educations, they look perplexed, as if I had awakened them from a deep sleep. Instead of a direction, they tell me a long wandering tale of possibilities, a tale told with an embarrassed smile and no conviction.

Our society has not totally forgotten about the affinity between young men and ideals of service and sacrifice. My guess is that the military’s advertising works precisely because it appeals to young men (and it is still aimed primarily at men) and their desire to serve a higher purpose and prove their valor. The football field provides another example of young men pulling together, sacrificing to win, admiring tradition, and responding powerfully to the strong-hearted guidance of a coach. However, these examples are too restricted to answer the needs of most young men, and I fear they live better as images than as sustaining realities. As far back as The Republic, Plato noted that the best leaders (he termed them “guardians”) are driven by visions of honor and service and not by dreams of gain. Our military seems still capable of producing soldiers and statesmen; I am less sure about our universities.

I am now an old codger approaching age seventy. Growing up, I could idolize sports heroes, but also scientists, and artists, and entertainers, and statesmen, and businessmen, and politicians. My sports heroes were never bigger than the games they played and were neither puffed up on mega paychecks or mega drugs. Businessmen were giants of industry and made things you could see and use, and created prosperity that improved everyone’s lot. Bankers, like judges, were noted for probity and not for manic and destructive inventiveness. Today’s celebrities run faster, express themselves with extreme energy and talent, and master the media with finesse and power never dreamed of by my heroes, but they seem not much motivated by anything other than greed. “Show me the money” is not an inspiring message for the young.

Though in my family we were reflex-Democrats, Eisenhower was viewed as a noble man, a decent and high-minded person who cared about the country and about the government that protected us. Perhaps that time was equally corrupt, but I wonder. Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men was shocking because it exposed the corruption of a political figure, Willie Stark. Would Jack Burden, seeking some nobility in Willie Stark, now seem merely credulous and naïve? Whatever the facts underlying the appearances, our public stories once were honorable in substance and intent.

As a boy, I revered George Washington and was not baffled by the fact of his slave-owning or his land dealings along the Potomac, as if that was all to be known about him. I hoped I would tell the truth about despoiled cherry trees; I hoped, like Benjamin Franklin walking down Philadelphia’s Market Street as a young man on his own, that I would see the world before me as an open field of possibilities; I believed I would, like Lincoln, chase after the poor woman who forgot her three pennies because it was the right thing to do. How does a boy become a man without these inspirations?

The social and cultural atmosphere has been so polluted one wonders how young people can form life-projects that demand decency and tenacious effort. Everything seems to be for sale, and no one is ashamed by it. The fix is in on the Left and the Right in Washington. Turpitude in the coal and oil industry, with their locust hosts of lobbyists to protect them from those who would protect the environment, is an old story. The new stories are about agri-business and healthcare and education, and now even the green NGOs that take big bucks to moderate their advocacy.

A recent National Public Radio interview featured a sexual dominatrix who earned praise from the interviewer for her entrepreneurial inventiveness. College campuses promote celebrations of sex and invite young men and women to share the dorm and each other. State and local governments pay their bills by sponsoring gambling and constructing casinos (when those are exhausted, is prostitution next?). No politician aspires to courage, or risks moral conviction; it seems to have become a great game for small prizes. Our wars appear to be not only immoral but also pragmatic embarrassments—founded on lies, blood, power, and profits. Young men can be excused for pondering whether ours is a wicked nation, or a stupid one.

In the “boys fail” discussion, girls enter as victims suffering from a lack of suitable life partners. The crisis now faced by well-educated African-American women in finding similarly high-attaining mates among African-American males is projected to the population as a whole. If women constitute nearly 60 percent of the four-year college population and graduate at a higher percentage than men, the future looks bleak for marital parity—and bliss.

I am seeing more aggressive young women and fewer aggressive young men in my classes. Unlike their female counterparts, young men tend not to complain about unpleasant grades and do not chase every stray GPA point in petty obsession to excel. Young women, praised for being strong and belittled for perpetuating weakness, cheer for King Lear’s Goneril and Regan and believe Cordelia is a wimp. This is not good for the future of couples, and it is not good for women. Without the restraint of shame, the encouragement of honor, and the inspiration of noble purpose, none of us can lead fulfilling and happy lives.

Young men are more uncertain about sex and marriage than ever. Women have been coached to take the lead and to think they need men “about as much as fish need bicycles.” They no longer seem to seek male protection and support. Our films and books and TV stories counsel the foolishness of depending on those expectations.

This shift to the narratives of distrust robs men of their edge and purpose. Historically, men have been ennobled as protectors and have justified their hard work and sacrifice as heads of families and protectors of their communities. Without that aspiration, young males can aspire to be earners and consumers and lonely foragers in the sexual forest, but that is not the same thing as being men.

Every time we hear yet another tale of mendacity from our muddied public life, our young suffer and education is driven down to a shoddy business of getting ahead. We end up with cynical business majors on the one hand, and the slackers on the other, both defeated by the atmosphere of unapologetic greed and self-promotion. We pay a heavy price in all our institutions, from poisoned food to dilapidated infrastructure to our ridiculous political circuses. How can education, this delicate flowering of culture, not be a front-line casualty?

Remythologizing Theology: An interview with Kevin Vanhoozer

Exiled Preacher BlogGD: Hello Kevin Vanhoozer and welcome back to Exiled Preacher.

KV: Seems like I was just here. I like what you’ve done with the place.

GD: Thanks. Your new book is entitled Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2010, 560pp, UK here, US here). In personal correspondence you described Remythologizing Theology as your first real work of theology. What does that say about your earlier writings?

KV: It says that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with questions pertaining to theological method and hermeneutics. While it may have been necessary, that work was merely a warm-up: an overture to the real opera. I don’t want to exaggerate. I have written “real” theology here and there, though this is my first book to talk primarily about God rather than about talk of God.

GD: What is your main aim in this book?

KV: For years I’ve felt that the doctrine of God was a relatively weak spot in evangelical theology. Then open theism happened and my suspicions were confirmed. One major aim, then, is to provide a retooling of classical theism that takes into account the concerns of open theists – in particular, the integrity of God’s loving relationship to the world – while simultaneously maintaining what I take to be the correct Reformed emphasis on divine sovereignty. Another aim is to scrutinize the oft-heard claim in contemporary theology that God’s love entails divine suffering.

GD: What do you mean by "remythologizing theology"?’

KV: I don’t mean “mythologizing again”! “Remythologizing” pertains first and foremost not to myth but “mythos,” Aristotle’s term for dramatic plot. I’m using “remythologizing” as a contrast term to Bultmann’s demythologizing. Where Bultmann fails to take seriously either the Bible’s depictions of God’s acts or the Bible as the product of God’s authorship, remythologizing starts: with God as one who speaks and acts, the latter often by way of speaking.

Remythologizing is a proposal for “first theology,” a way of thinking God and Scripture together. Specifically, it views God’s being on the basis of God’s acts, especially his communicative acts. God is as God does, and God does as God says. Remythologizing theology is all about speaking well of God on the basis of God’s own speech. To remythologize theology is to set forth the ontology of the one who speaks in Scripture, the one whom Scripture is also about.

GD: What is the status of Holy Scripture in "remythologized" theology?

KV: My doctrine of Scripture remains much as it has been: the Bible is triune discourse, a product of divine authorship and hence a form of divine action. What sets remythologizing apart from some other approaches is that it seeks to take into account the significance of the Bible’s literary forms, each of which is a distinct form of God’s communicative action.

Think of remythologizing as a form of biblical reasoning, a way of thinking about the subject matter of Scripture along the grain of the various forms of biblical discourse that present it. This means attending not only to the content, but also to the way in which the divine author employs a number of different human voices and forms of discourse to communicate it.

GD: In some treatments of the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the Trinity is tagged onto the end after extensive discussion of the divine being and attributes. What place does the doctrine of the Trinity have in the present work?

KV: The central place, both literally and symbolically. Chapter five is right in the middle of the book and is entitled “God in three persons: the one who lights and lives in love.” I argue that God is everywhere and at all times fully himself. The triune life – communicative activity oriented to communion – is fully realized in the immanent Trinity before it is actualized in the economic Trinity. God in time corresponds to who God is in eternity. I’m not, of course, the first to argue this. However, what is new is the focus on the Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct communicative agents who nevertheless share a common communicative agency.

GD: Barth famously taught that God's being is in his act. Here you set out the elements of a new "theodramatic metaphysic" where God's being is in his communicative act. Please explain.

KV: Theodramatic metaphysics is the attempt to formulate a comprehensive set of categories (i.e., metaphysics) for understanding what God has said and done (i.e., theodrama) to create and renew all things in Christ through the Spirit. Because God is real and not merely a story, biblical interpreters who would speak well of God must go beyond exegesis to ontology. If we are to understand who, and what, we are talking about when we use the term “God,” we have to say something about God’s being. For God is a real being. What is real makes a difference in the world because it can act on its own. Only God can act on his own for only God has life in himself; everything else depends upon God’s sustaining word and breath to remain in existence.

Remythologizing speaks of God on the basis of God’s own speech and action, the stuff of theodrama. What we can, and must, say of God is that he is the one who creates, commands, consoles, etc. by speaking. God makes himself known and shares his life largely through speech acts like promising, instructing, forgiving, and exhorting, as well as through his corporeal discourse – the Word made flesh – Jesus Christ. If we let Scripture guide our thinking, then we must say that God’s triune being is in his communicative activity. We derive our understanding of the divine attributes not by analyzing the idea of infinite perfection but by describing and detailing the predicates and perfections of God’s communicative activity.

GD: Traditional theism has often described God's relationship to the world in terms of causality, with God as the First Cause or the Unmoved Mover. However, you propose that God's interaction with the world is best understood in terms of divine communicative action. Why the shift in emphasis?

KV: At this point in our time and culture, modern science has pretty much co-opted the language of causality. Consequently, even theologians who should know better sometimes speak of God’s causality as if it were on the same level as other creaturely causes. This is not how Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, or others in the tradition would have understood it. Nevertheless, open theists and panentheists have used this confusion to their advantage to attack classical theism. How, they wonder, can God be in a genuine loving relationship with creatures if he causes all things, including the motions of people’s hearts? Further, if God causes all things, must he not be responsible for evil as well as good?

I use the term “communicate” in a very broad sense, not merely in the sense “to transmit information,” but “to make common” or “share.” The most important thing that God communicates is himself: his light (truth), life (energy), and love (relationship). Whereas the end of causation is coercion, the end of communication is communion. The category of communicative action opens up new possibilities for theism and adheres more closely to the categories of Scripture itself.

GD: Where does your theodramatic approach leave the oft discussed relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom?

KV: Von Balthasar depicts theodrama as the interaction of infinite and finite freedom. My contribution is to think through this interaction in communicative terms. God is not like other communicative agents, of course. For God is the “Author” of the world who retains his authorial rights even as he enters into the story as a character. God’s sovereign interventions are in fact often interjections – calls, for example – that are efficacious but nor coercive. Here the paradigm is Calvin’s notion of the effectual call: God does not manipulate but sovereignly – which is to say, authorially – consummates his characters without manipulating them. On the contrary, the divine Author works according to our natures, via word and Spirit.

God authors answerable agents. Divine authorship thus names an asymmetrical communicative relation: a dialogical (i.e., covenantal) unity within an even greater dialogical difference (i.e., creation ex nihilo). I devote an important section to reworking the doctrine of providence, and Austin Farrer’s idea of the “causal joint,” in properly communicative terms. God’s speech is efficacious and brings about change in the world precisely by non-coercively bringing about understandings in human hearts and minds. What happened to Lydia is paradigmatic: “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14).

GD: What do the words of the subtitle, Divine Action, Passion and Authorship, say about your attitude towards the impassibility of God? Isn't he a being "without body, parts or passions"?

KV: The sub-title alone does not make a statement but announces a theme. The question of God’s suffering – that is, his ability to be affected by human creatures – is a red thread that runs throughout the book. If Nicholas Wolterstorff is right in comparing classical theism to a seamless garment where one loose thread spells the unraveling of the whole, then divine impassibility makes for an excellent case study.

Remytholgizing Theology is a minority opposition report on the “new orthodoxy” of divine suffering. While I want to take the biblical depictions of God’s dialogical interaction with human beings seriously, I don’t want to pull God down to the creaturely level. The challenge, then, is to specify to what the biblical descriptions of God’s emotions actually refer. There is not much on the meaning of divine emotions in the history of theology. Classical theists tend to take this language as anthropomorphic; open theists tend to take it literally. I had to resist the temptation simply to choose one side rather than the other. The prior question is: what is a divine emotion? I do provide an answer, but the water in that pool is a bit too deep to dive into here.

GD: In The Drama of Doctrine, you suggest that the task of the theologian is to act as a "dramaturge" who will help pastors to faithfully interpret and teach the biblical script to the people of God. How might pastors benefit from Remythologizing Theology?

KV: The first responsibility of pastors and theologians is to speak well of God. This means, minimally, avoiding idolatry. It also means speaking in a way that corresponds to Scripture and yields understanding, including understanding about God’s being, identity, and reality. My book helps answer the all-important question question: what must God be if God speaks and acts as the Bible depicts him as doing?

To understand God as a triune communicative agent has implications for understanding oneself, the Christian life, and the church as well. God calls us into being and communicates his light, life, and love so that we can communicate them to others. The pastor is a minister of God’s word – which means the whole panoply of God’s communicative acts – thereby helping the church to become answerable to God, able to communicate in all that we say and do what the Father is saying and doing in the Son through the Spirit. Theology assists pastors to know God so that they in turn may communicate the light, life, and love of God poured out for the world in Jesus Christ.

GD: Remythologizing Theology is published by Cambridge University Press and is currently only available in hardback. When will a more affordable paperback edition be published?

KV: I’m very sorry a paperback edition was not printed simultaneously. I did ask (and complain)! If all goes well – by which I mean, if enough people save their pennies and purchase the hardback – a paperback should appear in eighteen months, sometime in the summer of 2011. If I have indeed spoken well of God, it should still be worth reading even then.

GD: Thanks for dropping by for this conversation. I'm still saving my pennies!

“All Our Works, O God, Thou Hast Wrought In Us” (Wesley)

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

John Wesley (1703–1791) launched a religious movement, but he didn’t write a theology. Instead, he preached a lot. His masterpiece is the Standard Sermons, and that’s where you have to look to find out what he was about as a world-changing preacher. Just look at the first paragraph of his first sermon, and you can catch a glimpse of why his ministry changed the course of history.

Sermon number 1 in the Standard Sermons is “Salvation By Faith,” which Wesley preached at St. Mary’s church in Oxford on June 18, 1738. The Scripture text was Ephesians 2:8, “by grace are ye saved through faith.” This was a favorite text of Wesley’s, and he would take up the same text 27 years later as the basis of his most comprehensive sermon, Sermon number 43 on “The Scripture Way of Salvation.”

The first paragraph of Sermon 1 is classic. It is only 140 words long. It was written to be read aloud and to be understood immediately by listeners, clear and accessible, “plain truth for plain people,” as Wesley said in the introduction to the Standard Sermons. But for all its accessibility, it is a carefully-crafted product of a well-trained mind that was steeped in Scripture and the great Christian tradition. It repays close study, so here is a close reading of that first paragraph. First, the paragraph itself:

All the blessings which God hath bestowed upon man are of his mere grace, bounty, or favour; his free, undeserved favour; favour altogether undeserved; man having no claim to the least of his mercies. It was free grace that “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him a living soul,” and stamped on that soul the image of God, and “put all things under his feet.” The same free grace continues to us, at this day, life, and breath, and all things. For there is nothing we are, or have, or do, which can deserve the least thing at God’s hand. “All our works, Thou, O God, hast wrought in us.” These, therefore, are so many more instances of free mercy: and whatever righteousness may be found in man, this is also the gift of God

The leading idea is the gratuity of grace, which Wesley underlines with a fourfold repetition:

*his mere grace, bounty, or favour; (note: multiplying synonyms)
*his free, undeserved favour; (note: supplying adjectives)
*favour altogether undeserved; (note: intensifying with an absolute adverb)
*man having no claim to the least of his mercies. (note: paraphrasing the main idea)

It’s the classic, Reformation description of grace as God’s unmerited favor. Wesley is going to talk about salvation by faith, so he begins with the Protestant statement about grace. But his next move is to leap back to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, to make a point about how freely God created: “It was free grace that ‘formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him a living soul,’ (note: Genesis 2:7) and stamped on that soul the image of God (note: Genesis 1:26, but adding the idea that it is specfically the soul that bears God’s image), and “put all things under his feet (note: Psalm 8:6).”

What Wesley is going to tell his audience is that they are saved by sheer grace, but he knows that these lukewarm Anglicans of the eighteenth century might be inclined to disagree. The eighteenth century was quite impressed with human achievements and the potential for progress. So he secures their agreement with a less controversial point: None of us did anything to deserve to be created. When we were nothing, God not only brought us into being, but made us bodies with souls, in God’s own image, and in dominion over the rest of creation.

The grammar of the next sentence needs some updating for our times: When Wesley says, “The same free grace continues to us, at this day, life, and breath, and all things,” he is using the verb “continue” as a transitive verb, meaning “to cause something to endure or extend.” To us, the word sounds more intransitive, so we want to read “grace continues” as “grace keeps coming.” But with a transitive verb, the sentence means “Grace makes these things reach all the way down to us: life, breath, and all things.” The blessings of creation-by-grace are not in some primeval past, but reach all the way down to us, giving us “life, and breath, and all things.”

That little catalog, by the way, is an allusion to Acts 17:25, a passage from Paul’s speech on Mars Hill. The immediate context is Paul’s point that God does not need to receive anything from humanity, least of all religious duties like temple-building and temple-service. On the contrary, God gives what humanity needs. When John Wesley quotes six words from another part of Scripture, he might just be decorating his sentence with the beauty of Bible language. Sometimes he does that. But surprisingly often, his borrowing of a few words is in fact a pointer to real, extended overlap between his current topic and the entire passage he takes the words from. This is one of those cases. In fact, the reason Wesley’s mind reached out to grab the specific words “life, and breath, and all things,” is that he is proclaiming a doctrine taught there in Paul’s speech in Acts. First, he thought of the doctrine, then his mind gravitated toward the key passage, and then his mind returned from Acts carrying a half-dozen words that he used for their poetic force. But he covers his tracks as he returns: He doesn’t cite chapter and verse, he doesn’t signal the theology of the Areopagus speech in any other way. The members of his audience who are fluent in Scripture will know where the words are from, and their minds will be flooded with the associations from Acts. In the terms used by Richard Hays in his book on “echoes of Scripture,” their “canonical memories” will be activated by the allusion. The listeners with less developed canonical memories will miss out on the power of the allusion, but they will still feel the force of the words themselves: “Life, and breath, and all things” is a great little triadic phrase, made of one-syllable words. It just packs a punch, with or without the echoes.

It also sets Wesley up for the most important move in the paragraph, the hinge on which his opening argument turns. He jumps from one triad of monosyllables to another, from “life, and breath, and all things,” to all that “we are, or have, or do.” With the poetic beauty and the momentum of these linked triads, Wesley moves his audience forward from our existence (what we are) through our possessions (what we have) to the main point of a sermon about salvation by faith: our actions (what we do). Under the banner of grace, Wesley brings us to the point of agreeing that just as our existence is by God’s favor, and our possessions are gifts from him, any good actions we perform are also from him. The question to be decided in a discussion about salvation by faith is a question about our works, and Wesley has placed that question in front of his readers in a very artful and effective way.

That is why, having turned the decisive corner of his introduction, he immediately quotes (without citation), a version of Isaiah 26:12: “All our works, Thou, O God, hast wrought in us.” The wording of his quotation differs somewhat from the Authorized Version (KJV) which Wesley usually quotes, and it may be mediated through some liturgical source like the Book of Common Prayer; I haven’t been able to locate this exact wording. Wesley read widely and had a remarkable memory, which makes source-hunting a hard task.

But Isaiah 26:12 is a passage that has been popular in the Christian mystical tradition for a long time, because it gives a glimpse of some mysterious presence of God’s own work in our human works. In a mystic like Meister Eckhart (whose wording of the quotation is, in translation at least, very close to Wesley’s), this concurrence of divine and human works can become all ooey, gooey and mingly, blurring distinctions that ought to be kept clear. But sober souls like the martyr Nicholas Ridley were also fond of using Isaiah’s words here to point to the mystery of our good works proceeding from God. In his commentary on Philippians, expounding the statement that “he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it,” Ridley thinks very carefully about the way God’s operatio precedes and makes possible our co-operatio. Whoever Wesley had been reading (and he read too widely for us to be certain of his influences in many cases), his use of Isaiah 26:12, “All our works, O God, thou hast wrought in us,” are aligned with Bishop Ridley’s gospel-centered Anglicanism.

In his explanatory notes on the Bible, Wesley’s comment on Isaiah 26:12 is, “All the good works done by us, are the effects of thy grace.”

To conclude his opening paragraph, Wesley says that all good works are therefore “so many more instances of free mercy,” and summarizes that “whatever righteousness may be found in man, this is also the gift of God.”

This paragraph reflects a comprehensive view of grace. Grace is the basis of man’s physical creation, soulish image-bearing, ongoing preservation, moral action, and righteousness. Grace is both favor and power. We receive it both passively (inoperatively, when we are created from nothing) and actively (cooperatively, when God works in us). In both cases, what draws Wesley’s attention is its gratuity, its freedom. All of it is “free, underserved favour… altogether undeserved,” “free grace,” “free mercy,” gift.” His opening paragraph drives toward a conclusion about human action: It is as much a gift from God as our existence and our possessions. Wesley begins with our creation, in which we had no part, as the clearest instance of “mere grace,” and locates moral action (“our works”) and uprightness (“whatever righteousness”) inside of that framework.

Thus he approaches the teaching about salvation. Wesley’s approach helped launch the great evangelical awakening of the eighteenth century. This was, in fact, a work that God wrought through him.

Pragmatism’s Gift

By Stanley Fish
New York Times - Opinionator

“Pragmatic” is a compliment sometimes paid to politicians (Barack Obama’s supporters describe him that way), and it is often used as an honorific indicating a person of common sense who knows how to get things done. “Pragmatic” is also related (at least etymologically) to pragmatism, the name of a distinctively American philosophy that emerged in the early decades of the 20th century in the work of William James, John Dewey and C.S. Peirce. Pragmatism may or may not be an ethical program depending on whose version you are reading, but it always emphasizes the resources of historically given institutions and practices and de-emphasizes the role played in our lives by supra-historical essentialisms (God, faith, truth, reason, brute fact, overarching theory) even to the extent sometimes of denying their existence.

Like any philosophy pragmatism offers answers to the questions the tradition of philosophical inquiry has been asking since its beginning. What is truth? What is real? How are we to act? What is the source of moral and/or epistemological authority? Pragmatism’s basic move is to declare that the answers to these questions will not be found by identifying some transcendental universal and then conforming ourselves to its normative demands (like “Be ye perfect”). Rather, we must, and can, make do with the “ordinary aptitudes of human beings (ourselves) viewed within a generously Darwinized ecology, without transcendental, revelatory, or privileged presumptions of any kind.” Pragmatism “completely undermines any assurances, empirical or transcendental, that exceed the provisionality of what we may consensually construct (in our own time) as a workable conjecture about the way the world is.” I quote from Joseph Margolis’s new book “Pragmatism’s Advantage,” which is, he says, that it is among the “very small number of Western philosophical movements … that … never exceed the natural competence and limitations of mere human being.”

Why is that an advantage? Because, Margolis asserts, it avoids having to choose between “the alleged necessity of some ineliminable invariance in thought and/or reality” and some wholesale subjectivism or idealism that claims “that the natural world is itself constituted or constructed by the cognizing mind.” On the one hand, no “transcendental faculty” of reason or some other quasi-deity that will guide us infallibly if only we attach ourselves to it (not that there haven’t been any candidates for this honored position; there have in fact been many, too many). On the other hand, no surrender to the “preposterous doctrine” that we just make it all up as we go along. Instead pragmatism, Margolis explains, “favors a constructive (or constructivist) realism … freed from every form of cognitive, rational, and practical privilege … [and] committed to the continuities of animal nature and human culture, confined to the existential and historical contingencies of the human condition, and open in principle to plural, partial, perspectived, provisional, even nonconverging ways of understanding.”

Quite a mouthful, but we can make it manageable by asking just what is a “constructive realism”? In the vocabulary pragmatism rejects, “realism” is (among other things) the thesis that (a) the world is independent of us and our thoughts, and (b) therefore our thoughts (or interpretations or calculations) should always be checked against, and evaluated as adequate or inadequate by, that independent and prior world. Pragmatists by and large accept (a), but not (b). They believe with Richard Rorty (a key figure in the revival of pragmatism in the last quarter of the 20th century) that “things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include mental states” — the world, in short, is “out there” — but they also believe that the knowledge we have (or think we have) of the world is given not by it, but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms (Thomas Kuhn’s word) that are in place and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, according to measures and procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any description.

While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: “The real world … is not a construction of mind or Mind … but the paradigm of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive powers of the human.” Thus the content of realism — of what the best up-to-date accounts of the world tell us — is constructively determined by the workings of a culture-bound process of hypothesis, experiment, test and calculation that is itself a constructed artifact and as such can change even as it guides and assesses research. In the absence of the alternative pragmatism rejects — something called Mind equipped with something called reason which enables it to describe accurately something called the World (Bacon’s dream) — “realism cannot fail to be constructivist, though reality is not itself … constructed” (Margolis).

A constructive realism will still make use of words like “true” and “better,” but these are judgments that a proposition is or is not warranted — has sufficient evidence backing it up — within the prevailing paradigms. (What higher judgment could here be? Kuhn asks.) In the event of a paradigm change — not an event that can be predicted or planned; it takes the form of conversion not demonstration — there will be new canons of evidence and new measures of warrant. Notice how far this is from saying that “anything goes.” At any moment the protocols and procedures in place will enforce a rigor of method and interpretation; it is just that the rigor lives and has its shape entirely within “the existential and historical contingencies of the human situation” and not in a realm of extra-human verification and validation, whether that realm be theological, philosophical or empirical.

The implications of the pragmatist argument are at once far reaching and unthreatening. They are far reaching because, as Margolis points out, “If realism takes a constructivist turn, then all the normative features of the sciences (say truth and validity) must be constructivist as well — as … our moral and political norms would be.” These implications are unthreatening because if the pragmatist account is right it is describing what has always been the case. When Margolis announces that there are “no privileged faculties, no preestablished harmony, no exceptionless universals, no assured natural necessities … no escape from the contingencies of whatever we report as ‘given’ within human experience,” he is not ushering in a new age, but describing the necessary condition of all the old ones. It has ever been thus (again, if pragmatism is right), and yet the world’s business has always been done.

Often, however, it has been done badly and that explains what Margolis calls “our remarkable appetite for the dictates of reason,” for something that would, if we could specify it and hold to it, enable us to avoid error and reduce contingency and provisionality to the point where our actions, both physical and mental, would be truly and firmly grounded. Pragmatism takes that hope away and tells us that all we can do is muddle through, that we have been muddling through for a long time, and that, with luck, we will continue to muddle through, and in the process, perhaps, develop new forms of the “cultural artifact” we are and develop too new forms of knowledge to serve our artefactual purposes. The story so far has been an amazing one, full of wonder and full of horror. It is a story, says Margolis (following Kuhn) driven from behind and not by a teleological end awaiting us in the form either of a union with deity or an ascent to the realm of pure Reason. It is, Margolis tells us, “an extraordinary form of bootstrapping.”

Does knowing that we are bootstrapping rather than marching to the tune of some “ineliminable invariance” help us to do it better? Is pragmatism’s advantage more than philosophical, in the academic sense? Does it enable those who are persuaded by it to live improved lives? Rorty thought so, thought that pragmatists would be less cruel, more open, more tolerant and inclusive than those who were bound to an essence that called them to acts of exclusionary judgment.

Margolis flirts with the idea that pragmatism confers such benefits of character in a single sentence when he says of our “deep longing” for invariance that is “has siphoned off our energies from the better prospects of what to believe and do under the conditions of practical life.” But we hear no more in that line and that’s a good thing because the last thing pragmatism should want to do on its way to jettisoning every supra-historical assurance in sight is to offer itself as a superior one.

But if pragmatism doesn’t have real a world payoff, if it is of no help when the next crisis comes your way, what’s the use of it? Why should anyone be interested in it? Behind these questions is a larger one: why should anyone be interested in philosophy in any of its versions? The usual answer is that philosophy, by identifying first principles, can serve both to guide and justify our actions. When pragmatism tells us that there are no first principles, it not only disqualifies itself as the source of guidance and justification; it disqualifies the whole enterprise, at least in its more ambitious forms. What it leaves are the pleasures of doing philosophy, the pleasures of thinking about thinking freed from the burdensome expectation that we will finally get somewhere. Now there’s an advantage and a gift to boot.

Glenn Beck, Social Justice, and the Limits of Public Discourse

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck is famous for launching verbal grenades, and he did so again in recent days, calling upon church members to flee congregations that promote social justice. His comments incited an immediate controversy, where far more heat than light has yet been evident. As expected, there is more to this story than meets the eye -- or may reach the ear via the public conversation.

During his March 2, 2010 radio broadcast, Beck said this:

I beg you, look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice" on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! If I'm going to Jeremiah's Wright's church? Yes! Leave your church. Social justice and economic justice. They are code words. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, "Excuse me are you down with this whole social justice thing?" I don't care what the church is. If it's my church, I'm alerting the church authorities: "Excuse me, what's this social justice thing?" And if they say, "Yeah, we're all in that social justice thing," I'm in the wrong place.

Almost immediately, reaction statements emerged with furor, found in press releases and public statements made by figures like Sojourner's editor Jim Wallis and various social justice advocacy groups. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, various media outlets rounded up the "usual suspects." The resultant public conversation has not been very substantial, but it has offered media magnetism.

Some of those outraged by Beck's statements immediately insisted that social justice is the very heart of the Gospel, while others insisted with equal force that Beck had offered a courageous call for Christians to flee liberal churches that had abandoned the Gospel.

As anyone familiar with incendiary public debates should have expected, though the truth is a bit harder to determine, the issue is indeed worth whatever hard thinking a clarification of the issue requires.

Is Glenn Beck right? That is the question most in the media were asking, along with a good number of Christians who were aware of the debate. With just a few words, Beck, a convert to Mormonism, set the world of American religion into a frenzy of discourse.

At first glance, Beck's statements are hard to defend. How can justice, social or private, be anything other than a biblical mandate? A quick look at the Bible will reveal that justice is, above all, an attribute of God himself. God is perfectly just, and the Bible is filled with God's condemnation of injustice in any form. The prophets thundered God's denunciation of social injustice and the call for God's people to live justly, to uphold justice, and to refrain from any perversion of justice.

The one who pleases the Lord is he who will "keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice" (Gen. 18:19). Israel is told to "do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness you shall judge your neighbor" (Lev. 19:15). God "has established his throne for justice" (Psalm 9:7) and "loves righteousness and justice" (Psalm 33:5). Princes are to "rule in justice" (Is. 32:1) even as the Lord "will fill Zion with justice and righteousness" (Is. 33:5). In the face of injustice, the prophet Amos thundered: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:18). In a classic statement, Micah reminded Israel: "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

To assert that a call for social justice is reason for faithful Christians to flee their churches is nonsense, given the Bible's overwhelming affirmation that justice is one of God's own foremost concerns.

But, there is more going on here. Glenn Beck's statements lacked nuance, fair consideration, and context. It was reckless to use a national media platform to rail against social justice in such a manner, leaving Beck with little defense against a tidal wave of biblical mandates.

A closer look at his statements reveals a political context. He made a specific reference to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and to other priests or preachers who would use "social justice" and "economic justice" as "code words." Is there anything to this?

Of course there is. Regrettably, there is no shortage of preachers who have traded the Gospel for a platform of political and economic change, most often packaged as a call for social justice.

The immediate roots of this phenomenon go back to the mid-nineteenth century, when figures like Washington Gladden, a Columbus, Ohio pastor, promoted what they called a new "social gospel." Gladden was morally offended by the idea of a God who would offer his own Son as a substitutionary sacrifice for sinful humanity and, as one of the founders of liberal theology in America, offered the social gospel as an alternative message, complete with a political agenda. It was not social reform that made the social gospel liberal, it was, its theological message. As Gary Dorrien, the preeminent historian of liberal theology, asserts, the distinctive mark of the social gospel was "its theology of social salvation."

Even more famously, the social gospel would be identified with Walter Rauschenbusch, a liberal figure of the early twentieth century. Rauschenbusch made his arguments most classically in his books, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). In a 1904 essay, "The New Evangelism," Rauschenbusch called for a departure from "the old evangelism" which was all about salvation from sin through faith in Christ, and for the embrace of a "new evangelism" which was about salvation from social ills and injustice in order to realize, at least partially, the Kingdom of God on earth. He called for Christian missions to be redirected in order to "Christianize international politics."

The last century has seen many churches and denominations embrace the social gospel in some form, trading the Gospel of Christ for a liberal vision of social change, revolution, economic liberation, and, yes, social justice. Liberal Protestantism has largely embraced this agenda as its central message.

The urgency for any faithful Christian is this -- flee any church that for any reason or in any form has abandoned the Gospel of Christ for any other gospel.

As I read the statements of Glenn Beck, it seems that his primary concern is political. Speaking to a national audience, he warned of "code words" that betray a leftist political agenda of big government, liberal social action, economic redistribution, and the confiscation of wealth. In that context, his loyal audience almost surely understood his point.

My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ -- the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church's main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ's command and the example of the apostles.

There is more to that story, however. The church is not to adopt a social reform platform as its message, but the faithful church, wherever it is found, is itself a social reform movement precisely because it is populated by redeemed sinners who are called to faithfulness in following Christ. The Gospel is not a message of social salvation, but it does have social implications.

Faithful Christians can debate the proper and most effective means of organizing the political structure and the economic markets. Bringing all these things into submission to Christ is no easy task, and Gospel must not be tied to any political system, regime, or platform. Justice is our concern because it is God's concern, but it is no easy task to know how best to seek justice in this fallen world.

And that brings us to the fact that the Bible is absolutely clear that injustice will not exist forever. There is a perfect social order coming, but it is not of this world. The coming of the Kingdom of Christ in its fullness spells the end of injustice and every cause and consequence of human sin. We have much work to do in this world, but true justice will be achieved only by the consummation of God's purposes and the perfection of God's own judgment.

Until then, the church must preach the Gospel, and Christians must live out its implications. We must resist and reject every false gospel and tell sinners of salvation in Christ. And, knowing that God's judgment is coming, we must strive to be on the right side of justice.

Glenn Beck's statements about social justice demonstrate the limits of our public discourse. The issues raised by his comments and the resultant controversy are worthy of our most careful thinking and most earnest struggle. Yet, the media, including Mr. Beck, will have moved on to any number of other flash points before the ink has dried on this kerfuffle. Serious-minded Christians cannot move on from this issue so quickly.