Rethinking "Reformed," Part 2

"Rethinking 'Reformed'" sparked an unexpected response among several of my Reformed friends, some fervent in their praise, others equally fervent in disagreement. I'm sure some of that is due to my own poor arguments which might have been interpreted to mean more than one thing. But I feel dignified that so many people engaged the piece so articulately. I need to clarify and elaborate a bit.

First a couple of the responses. J.R. Caines, a long time friend and compatriot, presently a teacher and intern pastor in Chattanooga, wrote:

Representing a less positive camp were critiques written by Reformed people in an email discussion group, and not directed to me personally. Timothy Terrell of Liberty University wrote very thoughtfully and at length (the entire response is online):

This is the point-of-view with which I grew up, and I am sympathetic with it. In fact, I still agree with the kernel of it: There are "other ways to glorify God than through evangelism." Anyone who knows me knows that I love the many vocations and pursuits of the world; I adore them naturally. My bent is to explore, to taste, learn and produce. I am a poet, a writer, by most counts fairly thoughtful and liberal. I am also saved by grace. So why the sharp disagreement?

For one thing, I recognize now that my essay lacked clarity. I was attempting to express two different things without realizing it: (1) we have become too accommodating of the world in our Reformed lifestyles, and (2) we are losing our evangelical edge. Somehow, I let those things become muddled up with a poorly conceived critique of the Reformed tradition and the "cultural mandate" at large, which was a mistake. I'll try to state my case more clearly in paragraphs below.

For another, I really am beginning to have some different beliefs about the way God wants Christians to live, beliefs that do not jibe with typical Reformed Christian practice. Over the past few months, my intellectual assumptions have been challenged by Solzhenitsyn, Merton, and Nouwen – Christian writers who see society from the outside looking in. At the same time, my spiritual heart is being quickened by the Gospel of Mark and other parts of the New Testament, as well as by fellowship with several friends who are beginning to burn with the fire of God's love. While all that is going on, Becca and I have been attending a church that is making inroads into communities of failed humanity, and I (independently) have spent the past two months teaching at an elementary school in one of the bleakest parts of crumbling St. Louis.

The first problem is one not of theory but of practice. I believe that we have lapsed into a mode of accommodating the world's form of society rather than transforming it (again, I have to credit Dr. Steve Kaufmann for helping me to clarify this). In that sense, we are not really even Reformed. While it is good that we have become doctors, lawyers, library clerks, tellers, construction workers, high-school teachers, academics, and architects, it is not at all good that so many of us are indistinguishable from the rest of society. Our goals are, very often, their goals. We share their agenda. We even feel the anxiety of sharing the world's agenda, though many of us suppress it. Another Covenant College graduate expressed this wonderfully:

I shiver even speaking of "our goals" and "their goals," so accustomed am I to conflating the two. But whose agenda does the advertising copywriter serve? Does it not matter, as long as he practices his trade to the best of his God-given ability?

I am glad to see that Timothy Terrell believes that our daily work is not "spiritually neutral." In fact, it is spiritually charged. Our work also has secular value, which is why we get paid for it. We are adding value to our society, supporting the GNP, developing the universe in many ways. We are subduing and cultivating creation, together with other engineers, software developers, marketing professionals. As Christians we work in two realms, the natural and the supernatural. No, there is nothing inherently wrong with accepting payment for services rendered. However, there is something wrong with losing our telos, our goal, our sense of unique mission in the world.

My problem with the way that we operate in society today is not that we have jobs or are capitalists. It is that we do not aggressively question our own activities. We underestimate the evil of these days, and the power of Satan and his angels. We underestimate the radical effect of the Fall. We don't recognize that the chief end of our work and income is to build the church, to advance the name of Christ, to penetrate the walls of men's hearts with the love of Christ and the news of salvation. We don't wonder why our church is not oriented toward the conversion of new Christians. We don't wonder why many of us aren't rebuilding and recasting our civilization, but simply playing a role in it, practically indistinguishable from any other citizen's role.

Some people say, "But it's good to work in a trade, refashioning and reforming the essentially good creation God left in our care. To do that penitently and worshipfully is enough." Here's a great quote from an Edmond Clowney book I bought today, called The Church:

There's much more in Clowney's book worth quoting, and I had to skip around a little to give you the skeleton of this particular idea. The point is, not only are we accommodating worldly ways and underestimating the forces of darkness at work, we are kind of missing Christ's point. I feel convicted by Clowney's tongue-in-cheek mention of Galilean fishing craft. Christ did not come to earth to topple Rome, or to mingle with the powerful and subtly effect change in people's opinions. Christ defied conventional expectations: he walked on water.

Part of our accommodation is that we have become like our fellow humans in the way we treat people in distress: often coldly, rationally, and at a distance. We try to fix problems with laws and economic policies, but the contrast between the comfortable and the destitute continues to increase. Like the rest of middle-class America, most of our homes and public buildings are geographically separated from places of poverty. We don't take seriously Christ's specific command to minister to the thirsty, the poor, the imprisoned, the diseased among us. We don't follow his lead in eating with tax collectors and prostitutes. We have lost the sense of the power of God's love, and of our obligation to channel it back out into the world.

Instead we content ourselves within our communities of worship, lounging on our futons with dog-eared volumes of Kuyper and Plantinga, reaffirming the concept that the main goal of the community of faith is to "conquer society in the name of Christ" (Kuyper's phrase). Yet we do not even do that; we integrate, accommodate. Yes, I'm creating a "straw man," but it's one that I've met and known personally: myself.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, outspoken Reformed thinker and former head of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College, speaks about a mysterious change that overtook the Calvin student body during the 1970s and 1980s:

So how should we live in this fallen world? Once we've made sure that we are living lawful lives, what should we do? How can we leave no doubt in the minds of onlookers that we are Sons of the Most High? What is it that we lack? If the scriptural answer is clear, then it must be found in passages that have been abused again and again by fundamentalists and other simplistic evangelicals, such as Christ's words to the young ruler: "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me" (Luke 18).

Should Christians actually sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor? I hope not! I myself haven't sold all I have. (I've thought, "what, including my underwear? This can't mean what it appears to mean.") No, Christ is speaking hyperbolically, but clearly. Our lives must be lived in sacrificial dedication to those in need (see Luke 10 for a definition of "needy" – they are the marginalized, untouchable, unwanted, passed over, and neglected in need). We give what we can, what we feel compelled to, and constantly pray for the Spirit to break our hearts that we may give more. The needy are our first earthly priority, together with the unsaved.

"When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field'" (Matthew 9:36-38).

I believe our twofold calling in these "dark days" is to spread the fire of God's salvation, and to show mercy to those in need. These are the two primary activities of Christ's life, and they ought to be of ours as well. If we were to reset our priorities with these activities at the top, there would be no mistaking us.

"What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs" (Matthew 10:27).

So it is not so much the theory of Reformed life with which I take issue, but the average practice. It is not at all wrong to work as a lawyer, but it is wrong to work as a lawyer who passes beat-up travelers. When we do this, we become like the rest of the world: loving those who love us and keeping our enemies at arm's length. It is the sense of accommodation that characterizes so much of our lives. There ought to be a stark difference between ourselves and our non-Christian peers. I do not mean this in terms of ethical goodness; staying home from violent movies, refraining from cussing in public (passive). I mean it in terms of our calling to be bearers of light and love in the world (active).

During the past month I've had the opportunity to read fifty or sixty of Max Belz's letters from the 1940s, written while he was studying theology in Dubuque, Iowa. He was preparing for the pastorate. His writing contains a sense of pioneering, a feeling of urgency that I do not feel in our churches or among our brothers at the seminary. There's anticipation, revolution in the air. Dust eddies, gospel radio broadcasts, tumbleweed. Different from today.

Over the past twenty or thirty years, I think we have changed our view of ministry itself. We no longer see preaching, evangelizing, missions, and mercy as the principle activities of the community of faith. In fact, we no longer see ourselves as primarily Christ's light-bearers and secondarily secular workers. We have combined the two in perception and practice, and we leap to our defenses if that combination is questioned.

We no longer regard pastors as sacred men. We measure all of the trades with equal and trained analysis. We see stockbrokers and missionaries as performing functions of theoretically the same value to Christ's kingdom. We treat our ecclesiastical leaders as employees: our seminaries prepare them for practical, vocational lives of preaching and pastoral counseling. We interview them, hire them, and give them vacation days and benefits. They are businessmen, like us. They work in a service industry. We listen to them, eat dinner at Ryan's Steakhouse, go home, take a nap, and go to evening service if we have nothing else going on. Our experiences at church are cordial, comforting, but not revolutionary.

I believe the Church should be the central focus of our lives as Christians. Its mission, to subvert the enemy's plan through sacrificial lives of ministry and mercy. The mood should be that of a French Resistance hideout. It should be like the control room of a battleship. We should be training and deploying missionaries, preparing lay evangelists for local work. How easily we forget that we are part of a war between Good and Evil!

Even before his conversion to Christianity, W.H. Auden saw what so many of today's Reformed Christians do not seem to see. Tough-mindedness is not necessarily a good characteristic. There is a human need, even a spiritual need, to leap into a life of faith: