Dying to Self

Why Christianity Is Failing in America

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Over at First Things, Jared Wilson posts a passionate call by Ray Ortlund Jr. for a recovery of the Gospel in modern America. It’s a needful call I utterly support.

Yet despite the clarion nature of Ortlund’s words, a fundamental problem exists that we Christians in America have been entirely unable to overcome.

I don’t believe that American Evangelicals don’t know what the Gospel is. I admit that no one person seems to grasp the entirety of the Gospel and its implications, but most people who self-label as Christians get the Gospel to some point.

But the messes we’ve made of living out the Gospel in a redemptive way, those many tangents that Ortlund describes so well that distract us from the real Gospel, are what they are because of a fundamental problem with America and American Christians.

The following quote from Kierkegaard captures the problem in a nutshell:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

The Gospel demands something of us. It also forces us to see with a different set of eyes, God’s.

Red pill, blue pill--which will you take?The person confronted by the truth of the Gospel is like the person in the world of the movie The Matrix who is given the choice to take the red pill and see the world as it is from a different set of eyes or take the blue pill and stay blissfully doped against reality.

And that person, confronted with the truth of the Gospel of Christ, MUST then come to grips with these truths:

The American Dream is a vicious and all-consuming lie.

The way the American economy functions is antithetical to the Gospel.

The way we Americans live socially in our communities denies the Gospel.

The values we American hold dear more often than not war with the Gospel.

The Gospel demands the death of self, while the American ideal demands the exaltation of self.

The American system is cracked to the core and is rapidly failing, yet misguided American Christians spend enormous amounts of time and energy attempting to seal the cracks.

As Kierkegaard so ably said, if we American Christians genuinely lived the Gospel we say we believe, every single aspect of how we live, work, love, commune, and bleed would be radically altered. Almost none of the way we live would resemble the lifestyles we have becomes so enamored of. We wouldn’t recognize our old lives at all. And we would look so profoundly different from the rest of the world that it would have to sit up and take notice.

Ortlund makes the obvious statement:

To a shameful degree, we Christians are morally indistinct from the world. Why? One reason is that we think piecemeal, and our lives show it. We do not perceive reality from God’s perspective. We perceive reality from the perspective of our ungodly culture, and then we try to slap a biblical principle onto the surface of our deep confusion.

We all know this damning final assessment of the rich young ruler:

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.
—Luke 18:22-23

Our problem as Christians in America 2009 is not simply that we are more wealthy than 95 percent of the world’s population, but that every single aspect of how we live, work, love, commune, and bleed  MUST be “sold” to follow Jesus.

And we are simply unwilling to take that step.

But instead of going away sorrowful, we construct a syncretistic faith that melds the parts of the Gospel we can stomach with the life we cannot leave behind.

What makes this so troubling is that not a single one of us is immune to that syncretism. In fact, we have made it our religious security blanket, the warm, comforting deception that gets us from one day to the next. We marvel at the rich young ruler’s stupidity and yet we ourselves are even more deceived.

More than anyone, I want Ortlund’s call to resonate. But I fear it won’t. If we truly re-examined the Gospel and sought to live it purely, then nothing we experience in America would be free from questioning. In fact, everything that is not the Gospel MUST be questioned.

Yet who today will put up with those people who question the foundational shibboleths of the American Way of Life? We instead remain mute because too few of us are prepared to be martyrs for the cause. Taking the red pill may not only wake one up from the stupor, but it may also mean being attacked—and even from our supposed brothers and sisters in Christ.

If you and I truly stepped out in faith to live the Gospel we say we believe, it may well be that we would have to drop out of the corporate treadmill, suffer a freefall in the company hierarchy, watch our income plummet, and suffer the American indignity of no longer being able to keep up with the Joneses. It may mean we cannot get our children into the fancy private school, the top division sports team, and subsequently fail to send them to Harvard to mint their perfect future. It may mean that we reject consumerism and globalism, returning to a local economy that celebrates community and works to see that no one suffers at the expense of the richer among us, no matter how difficult it will be and what it will cost us. It may mean that we have to let go of long-time friends who suddenly hate our “class descent” and no longer want to be around us. It may mean that we live among the rejected people of the world (as we have become rejected ourselves). It may mean that we rediscover what the Lord meant by “give us this day our daily bread.” It may mean thousands of profound changes to the way we think and live that put us out of the mainstream and make life more chllenging, though in the end we realize the challenge is where Christ Himself dwells.

Believing the Gospel will destroy our American lifestyles. But as long as we are Americans first and Christians second, we have nothing to fear from the Gospel, and we can be thankful we downed the blue pill.

I am not confident that what Ortlund writes will make any difference. When the call for change comes from the very people who are enmeshed in the system and prefer it that way, hope comes hard. I know that every day I struggle to put off the shackles from which Christ has freed me. He unlocked the chains, but their weight upon me has become too comforting, too familiar. I am like a man for whom the entire world is a chain, because that is all I have known—and anything that is not a chain is too difficult and frightening to understand.

Your Best Dog-Licked-Sores Life Now

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“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.'”
—Luke 16:19-31

What do you wanna bet that this passage is never preached by Joel Osteen, Rod Parsley, Ken Copeland, Paula White, or anyone else like them?

Slope Lube

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From Wikipedia’s list of logical fallacies:

Slippery slope: argument states that a relatively small first step inevitably leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant impact

If my own life and the experiences of the last nearly 47 years are any indication, as much as people want to call slippery slope a fallacy, Slippery slopeI’ve seen very few cases where whatever was heading down the slope reversed course. One could argue that civil rights are in much better shape than they were when I was a child of the 1960s, but most everything, especially in pop culture, whirls to the bottom of the downward spiral.

I wrote earlier this week (“The Money God“) about yet another voter proposition in Ohio arguing for casinos. It seems every other year for the past 20 we’ve encountered one of these darned things, and every time it gets closer to passing. That relentless chipping away…

One of the most pressing arguments this time around in favor of the casinos is “Indiana has them, and so do other states.” I find this tactic amusing, as it falls into the category of moms everywhere yelling, “Well, just ‘cuz Jimmy got a shotgun doesn’t mean you should have one too!” Any ad that trumpets that Indiana is stealing Ohioans’ money—cold, hard cash that Ohio itself could be stealing from Ohioans—is about as slippery slope as it gets.

So we get our casinos. And legalized drugs, prostitution, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, bestiality, and so on are at the hilltop gate waiting for their own race to the bottom.

Someone should have told the Holy Spirit He was committing a logical fallacy when He encouraged the Apostle Paul to write this:

A little leaven leavens the whole lump.
—Galatians 5:9

Or this:

…evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
—2 Timothy 3:13

I’ve read a few things by Christians lately arguing that Halloween ain’t so bad. Well, that may have been true back in the 1960s, but a trip to the local Halloween chain store today will have you wondering whether it’s owned by H.R. Giger and Larry Flynt. One 6-year old running around as a zombie drenched in fake blood and the “bedsheet ghost” of not-so-long ago seems like a relic from the pages of Little House on the Prairie. Halloween 2025—well, it’s hard for me to imagine what kind of ghoulish, occultic bacchanal that might be given the astounding amount of grease on the hillside already.

The Church is not exempt.

No matter where we stand on the issue of the ordination of women in the Church, the result is the ordination of homosexuals.

No matter what we might think about psychology, the synthesis of it and the Bible only further taints our contemporary theology.

No matter how we feel about modern Bible translations, the latest ones always seem “dumber” and less reliable than the ones before.

No matter what we think of megachurches with satellite branches driven by widescreen TVs, the result is a loss of genuine Christian community.

No matter what our opinions on capitalism and its ability to raise standards of living might be, we now treat God and the Church as commodities.

I’ve written Cerulean Sanctum for more than six years now. I could probably write another hundred “no matters…” for today’s list. But what I want to write about more than anything else is that someone, somewhere who is resisting the downhill slide. I want to hear more stories of Christians who washed the slope clean of grease rather than added more lubrication.

So if you would like to add a slippery slope example that just rots your insides, then please do. But also give us a story that ends not in the valley but standing atop the pinnacle of hope.

God knows we need to be hearing more of those positive stories in the days ahead.