The Evangelical Middle

One of the too many books I’m playing around with is Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You’re Irrelevant and Extreme. It written by David Kinnaman of the Barna Group and Gabe Lyons of Q Ideas. These are two pretty foundational institutions and voices in contemporary evangelicalism.

The premise of the book is that Christians in the West feel increasingly marginalized by virtue of changes in society, most notably LGBTQ issues. In the landscape of the evangelical culture wars these two are decidedly moderate. They resist the progressives in affirming same sex marriage but resist the more right wing militancy of those more conservative. Their QPodcast on LGBTQ issues where they admonish not changing “position” but rather “posture” exemplifies the current evangelical middle ground.

The Line

Their approach to the increasingly felt marginalization of moderate evangelicals from the cultural mainstream is portrayed in a narrative of secularization and movement from other to self.

Their big example of the secularization narrative begins by quoting Lincoln’s second inaugural and even pointing to speeches by Bill Clinton to show how The Bible was once more at home in the American public space than it is today. This is evangelical boilerplate. It demonstrates a few things but I think is a bit facile. If you’re listen to a few of Obama’s statements at prayer breakfasts and other religious holidays he can sound about as religious as Lincoln or Clinton. While I agree that the way the Bible is appealed to continues to change I think this broad brush is a bit simplistic. Oprah can quote scripture.

This isn’t where the line really is for them. They follow a trail that David Brooks has blazed in his book The Road to Character. The great divide for them is regard for others vs. regard for self.

For a couple centuries of American public life, a soft reliance on the state to endorse Christian values seemed to work just fine. Since most people assumed America was a “Christian nation,” it made sense that federal and state laws tacitly affirmed a biblical worldview and actively promoted Christian morals. From gambling and alcohol prohibition to tax exemptions and modesty laws, nominal Christianity benevolently reigned over the public square. Everyone stayed buttoned up, and, for the most part, we appeared to be a virtuous people, a moral people.

But in the twentieth century, more and more people began to see Christian morality as standing in the way of a new moral code: the morality of self-fulfillment. Throwing off burdensome traditional mores, people began to imagine life without a bothersome God standing watch. John Lennon captured the zeitgeist in his perennial hit: “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try . . .”

New research, as shown in the next table, highlights the extent to which Americans pledge allegiance to the new moral code, summed up in six guiding principles.

1. To find yourself, look within yourself.
2. People should not criticize someone else’s life choices.
3. To be fulfilled in life, pursue the things you desire most.
4. Enjoying yourself is the highest goal of life.
5. People can believe whatever they want as long as those beliefs don’t affect society.
6. Any kind of sexual expression between two consenting adults is fine.

The morality of self-fulfillment is everywhere, like the air we breathe.

Kinnaman, David; Lyons, Gabe (2016-02-23). Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You’re Irrelevant and Extreme (p. 57). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I think this is a very good list. Kinnaman in his polling background is a very helpful cultural exegete.

It is contrasted by what is portrayed as the Christian view.

In contrast to the dominant culture’s embrace of self-fulfillment as the highest good, good faith Christians believe living under God’s moral order leads to human and societal flourishing. As Scripture says, physical training is of some benefit, but “training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come” (1 Tim. 4: 8).

Yet the extent to which the morality of self-fulfillment has taken hold of the hearts and minds of practicing Christians exposes an area of dangerous weakness in today’s church. This grafting of cultural dogma onto Christian theology must stop. In order for us to flourish as God’s people, his moral order must be allowed to rule our lives.

What are the principles of God’s moral order? Contrasting the new moral code are six statements about the way life ought to be, with Jesus at the center.

1. To find yourself, discover the truth outside yourself, in Jesus.
2. Loving others does not always mean staying silent.
3. Joy is found not in pursuing our own desires but in giving of ourselves to bless others.
4. The highest goal of life is giving glory to God.
5. God gives people the freedom to believe whatever they want, but those beliefs always affect society.
6. God designed boundaries for sex and sexuality in order for humans to flourish.

We’ve purposely expressed these six principles as a response to the six principles of the new moral code. Christians express something truly counter-cultural when we insist that real morality is rooted in something outside ourselves. Even if it feels uncomfortable at first, we have an obligation, in good faith, to speak as a counterculture to the spirit of the age. Beyond using our voices, we need to do the hard work of being counter-cultural in our own lives and churches. Only when we are consistent will our lives stir outsiders to rethink their own moral compass.

Kinnaman, David; Lyons, Gabe (2016-02-23). Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You’re Irrelevant and Extreme (pp. 60-61). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This too I think is a helpful list. In my own preach and teaching I regularly contrast two ways to live: “my well-being at your expense” and “your well-being at my expense”.

Is this Approach Compelling?

Remember, the occasion for this book is the collapse of a plausibility structure exemplified by a particular issue. The force of the argument is that “living God’s way will give you your best life now-ish”.

Lyons and Kinnaman, and the evangelicals for whom they give voice are not Prosperity Gospel peddlers but in some ways pitching their argument this way throws a slow, fat, softball down the middle of the plate for the broader cultural narrative of self-fulfillment.

Consider the majority narrative of gay liberation. A gay individual who has grown up in the Christian church under a regime that catechized them into “God’s Moral Order” that said that same sex attraction is disordered and will not lead to flourishing. After years of trying to do the right thing, maybe of getting involved in the Exodus movement, of prayer, counseling, etc. they collapse exhausted looking for flourishing in trying to live God’s way. Along comes someone else of the same sex who has been trying to live the same way in utter frustration and together they find love, acceptance, fulfillment and something that they would certainly describe as flourishing.

The narrative flows easily for those around this individual. Aren’t they so much happier now that all that struggle, self-loathing, angst, etc. is behind them? The real solution to the problem of flourishing was there all alone. Just make a slight adjustment in our understanding of “God’s Moral Order” and bang, the world is put back together. After pages and pages of psychology and theology of the recent Classis Grand Rapids East Communication to Synod  the mechanism for conversion is to live this narrative close to someone.

Conservative Reaction

The conservative reaction to this is usually simply to double down on the “moral order” part. It goes in some different directions. Sometimes there is an implicit threat of hell supported by prooftexts. Sometimes it is the the message that “it may SEEM like flourishing now, but you just wait and see…”

The argument of illusory flourishing or temporary flourishing can certainly be strong, but it isn’t terribly well targeted. Plenty of heterosexuals find the promise of flourishing in heterosexual romance as well which explains the vast evangelical publishing industry designed to enhance and prop up Christian marriage.

A Shout Out to Charles Taylor

I don’t want to write this without noting also that the “God’s Moral Order” argument fits nicely into Charles Taylor’s narrative of providential deism. This easily becomes a Christiany version of karma. Dealing with an impersonal system that us subject to our own will leaves us so much more in control than dealing with a personal, holy God’s whose judgments aren’t always as predictable as we imagine we want or subject to our own excuses as we would like.

The Moral Order Narrative is New Testament Weak

There is no question in my mind that there is a creational moral order. The Old Testament drips with it. The book of Proverbs is all about engaging in this moral order argument. It is also an approach that fits cleanly into law. “Here are God’s laws. Obey them and you will live. Here is God’s covenant. Comply with it and you will flourish!” Read the book of Deuteronomy. It’s all there.

Jesus and Paul and the New Testament surely don’t deny this reality, but they do modulate it. While this is still My Father’s World it is broken, skewed, and confusing. My grasp on it is confused and my ability to appropriate the law, to live by the moral order is deeply compromised. There is beneath the moral order, a deeper magic as CS Lewis would call it. The deeper magic, the mysterion as Paul called it is revealed in Jesus, his incarnation, his life, his crucifixion and resurrection.

The Corinthian church would be more than happy to have Paul peddle wisdom to them. Paul says that God’s wisdom is Christ crucified and when he says that he doesn’t just mean Jesus crucified but Paul and his church as well.

In my adult Sunday School class I’ve been going through 1st and 2nd Corinthians and we are now in Paul’s argument in 2 Cor 2:14f about he and us as captives in the conquering Christ’s triumphal procession, as we with Christ as the sacrificial animal atop the altar being a pleasing aroma to God while smelling like death to the world.

Relocating the Christian Life into Gratitude rather than Flourishing through the Moral Order

Christians holding the traditionalist position on same sex marriage have long tried to assert that sexual holiness for the hetero isn’t any different from the same-sex attracted individual. This argument usually falls flat also because of the moral order argument.

“Hey Mr. or Ms. hetero. What does living in God’s Moral Order really cost you? You get to have sexual satisfaction and maybe even fulfillment with the church’s blessing and we don’t. What’s fair about that?!”

I prefer the movement of the outline of the Heidelberg Catechism. It embodies the ambiguities and frustrations of our failed relationship with God’s moral order. We fail to love God and our neighbor no matter how we imagine we follow the guidelines of this moral order. This is our misery, whether we’re genetically or sociologically equipped to easily comply with whatever version of God’s Moral Order is in vogue today.

Deliverance of course reflects the strangeness of the man who lived fully within God’s Moral Order and for this we take offense. He demonstrates that our grasp on the moral order is self-convenient and self-serving, usually at the expense of others who either don’t see it the way we do or who can’t for whatever reason live up to our standards for their compliance with God’s moral order. It was God’s chosen people filled with zeal for the law who delivered him to hands of Imperial Rome and trumped up the charges against him. This is who we are. This is how He saves.

The old catechism then turns and suggests that the Christian life is an expression of gratitude. The revealed moral order, together with our weaknesses to comply with it, together with our obviously ability to grasp it and our propensity to manipulate it, can become a way for us to respond in gratitude for the work of Jesus.

For most of us schooled in the moral order of the CRC this is old hat. This is the message of the Sunday evening sermon. This is the indoctrination we were schooled in right from the beginning. This is what we should have mastered. Why should we start to hammer on the God’s Moral Order argument?

What do We Want? 

Part of the reason traditionalists, even nice ones like Kinnaman and Lyons grab for the moral order argument in this fight is that it seems to give us what we want, an answer. THIS is why we’re not changing the rules!

Misery, Deliverance, Gratitude seems like weak sauce in terms of keeping the church hetero-normative. Whose to say that someone in an affirming gay relationship can’t be living out of gratitude too? This doesn’t give us justification in not letting such a person into membership or leadership in the church.

I think we need to be able to manage multiple things at once.

To me it is reasonable and helpful for churches, like the CRC, to inform, teach, and even discipline according to their vision of what God’s moral order looks like. If you believe living the Christian life is a matter of living out gratitude then you also do need revelation in order to inform that shape of that living. This is, of course, what Calvin called “the third use of the law.” It is legitimate for a church to say “we don’t believe that same sex relationships are in keeping with God’s design for sex and marriage.”

Affirming groups may disagree. Affirming churches may set up shop in their own subculture where they want to adjust their view of God’s moral order along these lines, but we are all well accustomed to seeing different communities express different visions of this moral order and have healthy conversations between them regarding their differences.

A Liberationist Confession

You might note that this is not really the fight that churches are having. We tend to be seeing a moral order vs. liberation fight. One group pounds the moral order argument while the other pounds the liberation argument, that same sex marriage is not only permitted but the embrace of it embodies Christ by leading into flourishing while the old law gave death.

The reason the fight is developing this way may be because of the ways “flourishing” arguments are changed by secularization. The moral order within providential deism is obtained by us for our good and we can clearly tell that for fulfillment and flourishing are acquired by these means.

Traditional renunciation narratives could embrace sacrificial expressions of gratitude by leveraging a very vivid communal narrative of resurrection and life beyond the grave. Those goods tend to get cut off in the secular sphere where all flourishing must be appropriated here and the mechanisms for its appropriation ascertained within the deistic moral order.

My Hope for the CRC

There is probably no other Christian denomination that has grasped the Heidelberg Catechism so tightly than the CRCNA. I hope as we move towards our debate at Synod 2016 we might keep our eyes on the confessions we have not necessarily in terms of answering the questions of our culture in “yes” or “no” ways, but rather in relativizing this passionate and divisive debate by locating it in the contexts of our present confessions.