Joy for the World E-Book

Greg Forster

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Cultural Renewal
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 503

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Many of us recognize the declining influence of the church today. And while we may be interested in doing something to reverse the trend, few of us realize we are part of the problem. Greg Forster comes to our aid by first laying out the historical factors that have contributed to the church's loss of influence in our society today. He then explores the significance of foundational practices such as preaching, worship, and discipleship—showing how the Holy Spirit uses them to produce joy in us that changes our churches, families, offices, and communities.

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“Bouncy title, thoughtful subtitle, tight writing, and nuanced analysis: Joy for the World lays out enjoyably what we need to understand to save freedom of religion. Greg Forster brilliantly shows that we should expect, embrace, and work to preserve a crowded and uncomfortable public square, because if we’re scared by it, the naked public square that results will weaken Christianity and America.”

Marvin Olasky, Editor-in-Chief, World News Group

“The miracle of Christianity is that it offers a joy that goes beyond emotion and a hope that goes beyond time. In Joy for the World, Greg Forster presents a picture of this joy that inspires readers to hope and live in such a way that they transform their communities, their culture, and their world.”

Ed Stetzer, President, LifeWay Research; author, Subversive Kingdom

“This book is against sequestration—the sequestering of Christian life into ‘spiritual’ enclaves and churchly ghettos. But it also wants the church to be the church—uncompromised, vibrant, and filled with joy. Both are necessary for the Christian community to be an agent of transformation in the civilization in which God calls it to serve, witness, and bear fruit. Greg Forster argues for a renewed form of holistic obedience, and he does so not only with joy, but also hope. Recommended with enthusiasm!”

Timothy George, Founding Dean, Beeson Divinity School; General Editor, Reformation Commentary on Scripture

“When I speak or host my daily radio talk show, I deal with three categories of Christians. Many believe we should be isolated from the culture or conclude that Christians who engage the culture can’t make a significant difference in the world. Others believe we should engage the culture, but don’t know how. Then there is the remnant trying to engage the culture that could use some instruction and encouragement. This book is for all three. Forster encourages us to be salt and light, explaining how Christians can make a difference and be a significant witness for Christ. This is a book for all Christians.”

Kerby Anderson, President, Probe Ministries; Host, Point of View radio talk show

“Forster’s deft grasp of history, philosophy, and theology enables him to offer up this rigorous yet accessible book. He offers rich, unique insights into the story of how Christians lost their civilizational influence. More importantly, he describes how a vigorous embrace by the church of whole-life discipleship—that shapes our personal, family, workplace, and community lives—can create Jesus-followers who are genuinely good citizens and good neighbors.”

Amy L. Sherman, Senior Fellow, Sagamore Institute for Policy Research; author, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good

“Greg Forster offers a passionate call for Christians to pursue industrious, thoughtful, and patient labor in all of their life’s callings for the humble and biblical goal of blessing their neighbors. Those tempted to dismiss their ordinary occupations as necessary evils will find much to challenge and motivate them in these pages. Especially helpful are Forster’s chapters on economics and politics, and their stimulating discussion of work, citizenship, and neighborliness.”

David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics, Westminster Seminary, California

“With a refreshing depth of biblical, historical, and cultural insight, Greg Forster presents a compelling way forward for the church to rebuild influence in American society. Joy for the World opens up broad vistas of the Spirit-filled life with its transforming power, yet remains wisely tethered to the hopeful realism necessary for living with true joy in a fallen world. This book is tailor-made for every follower of Jesus who desires to embrace an integral and influential gospel-centered faith lived out and embodied in every nook and cranny of life. I highly recommend it.”

Tom Nelson, Senior Pastor, Christ Community Church, Leawood, Kansas; author, Work Matters

Cultural Renewal

Edited by Timothy J. Keller and Collin Hansen

Joy for the Word: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It

Copyright © 2014 by Greg Forster

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Dual Identity, inc.

Cover image: Getty Images

First printing 2014

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3800-1 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3801-8 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3802-5 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3803-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Forster, Greg, 1973–

Joy for the world : how Christianity lost its cultural influence and can begin rebuilding it / Greg Forster ; edited by Timothy J. Keller and Collin Hansen ; foreword by Tim Keller.

1 online resource. – (Cultural renewal)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4335-3801-8 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3802-5 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3803-2 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3800-1 (tp)

1. Christianity—United States. 2. United States—Church history. 3. Christianity—Influence. 4. Joy—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

BR515

277.3—dc23

2013036686

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To Mike Smith and Dan Kelly

Orestes:

Don’t stay here to die. I no longer have a city, but you do.

Bring your body home alive to your father’s house, and the safety of his great wealth.

You’ll never marry my sister, as we had hoped; our bond of kinship is dissolved.

Go and marry another; have children. You must be happy for us, greatest friend,

Since we who are dead have no happiness.

Pylades:

How far apart your thinking is from mine!

If I abandon you now, may the bright air no longer give me breath,

And the green earth refuse to cover my bones!

I joined with you in all those plans you’re paying for now; you can’t deny it. . . .

What would my story be, when I came back to Delphi? What would I tell the Phocians?

That I was your steadfast friend so long as all was well,

But our friendship ended as soon as you were in danger?

For shame! I could never do that. . . .

Orestes:

Nothing in the world is more valuable than a friend.

For one true friend I would not take the wealth and power of a king

Nor the favor of multitudes of men.

Euripides, Orestes

He rules the world with truth and grace

And makes the nations prove

The glories of his righteousness

And wonders of his love!

And wonders of his love!

And wonders . . . wonders . . . of his love!

“Joy to the World,” Isaac Watts (1719)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Timothy J. Keller

Introduction: Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room

Part 1

Let Men Their Songs Employ

 1Christianity and the Great American Experiment 2The Church and the World

Part 2

Let Earth Receive Her King

 3Doctrine: Teaching and Preaching 4Devotion: Worship and Spiritual Formation 5Stewardship: Calling and Discipleship

Part 3

He Comes to Make His Blessings Flow

 6Sex and Family 7Work and the Economy 8Citizenship and Community

Conclusion: He Rules the World with Truth and Grace

Recommended Reading

Notes

Acknowledgments

You paid good money for this book, so let me begin by thanking you. It’s your willingness to trust me and invest in my work—to put your money where my mouth is—that provides me with the opportunity to write books. And if I didn’t have that, I’d be in major trouble. “Writing is like a lust, or like scratching when you itch,” said C. S. Lewis in the last interview he ever gave. “Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I for one must get it out.”1 So thank you for giving me the opportunity to scratch my itch in a socially acceptable way. I have done my best to deliver your money’s worth.

As always, my deepest appreciation goes to Crossway and my editors Justin Taylor and Collin Hansen for helping make this book the book it is, and for putting it between covers and on shelves.

I am honored beyond expression that Tim Keller has contributed a foreword to something I wrote. It’s a particularly gratifying honor since I’ve learned so much from him, as the following pages will show.

An author is always deeply indebted to those who read his work before publication. A special place goes to Dan Kelly, who talked through every chapter with me. This book is dedicated to Dan and to our friend Mike Smith, who went into the church triumphant with an extraordinary display of faith, hope, and love, but too soon. I also got extensive feedback from David VanDrunen, Amy Sherman, and Karen Wilken; thanks additionally to Kyle Ferguson and Frank Marsh.

I owe a special debt to my colleagues at the Kern Family Foundation and particularly to our benefactors, Robert and Patricia Kern. This book is my own project and represents only my own views, but I have learned so much from my coworkers over the years about how human culture works and how the church fits into that equation that it would be a scandal if I didn’t record my debt. To the direct, personal influence of the Kerns especially I owe my awakening from the dogmatic slumbers of fundamentalism. I used to divide human activities into a church sphere (loyal to God’s Word and transformed by his Spirit) and a world sphere (morally ordered and licit, but irrelevant to the Bible and the Spirit). I drank in that dualism with some of my earliest theological influences, and this book is the victory feast of my liberation. “The heresies that men do leave / are hated most of those they did deceive.”2

As always, I could do nothing without the colabor of my wife, Beth, who truly gives her all to make my work possible. And my daughter, Anya, continues to bless my writing with the encouragement she brings to so many good things she encounters.

Above all I attribute all success in any endeavor to God. As a pastor of mine once said, the worldly man is puffed up by success but the spiritual man is humbled by it. The joy of the Lord is my strength.

Foreword

Timothy J. Keller

Greg Forster’s important and practical new book helps Christians think out how to engage culture. Many would say this is not a proper goal for believers, but that is a mistake.

Acts 17 records Paul’s famous visit to Athens, the academic center of the Roman Empire of the day. One commenter likened the intellectual power of Athens at the time to all the Ivy League schools as well as Oxford and Cambridge universities all rolled into one. Though Paul was repulsed by the idolatry he saw there, he did not turn away from the city in disgust. Instead, he plunged into the marketplace, the agora, where we are told he daily “reasoned” with those he found there about the gospel. Now when you or I think of a “marketplace,” we think of shopping and retail. Of course the agoras of ancient cities contained that, but they were much more. The agora was the media center—the only place to learn the news at a time before newspapers and other technological media. It was also the financial center where investors connected with businesses. It was the art center as well, the place where so much art was performed. It was the place where new political and philosophical ideas were debated. In short, the agora was the cultural center of any city. And since this was Athens—which along with Rome had the most influence of all cities—it could be said to be part of the cultural center of the Greco-Roman world. The ideas forged and accepted here flowed out and shaped the way the rest of society thought and lived.

It is instructive, then, to see that Paul takes the gospel literally into the public square. It means that he did not see the Christian faith as only able to change individual hearts. He believed that the gospel had what it took to engage the thinking public, the cultural elites, and to challenge the dominant cultural ideas of the day. He was after converts of course—he was first and foremost a church planter, not a theologian or Christian philosopher. But he wouldn’t have been able to engage the hearts of cultural leaders unless he also engaged the ideas of the culture itself. He did not shrink from that challenge. He did not merely try to find individual philosophers to evangelize in a corner. He addressed them as a culture, a public community.

It is often missed that, although later Paul was invited to give an address, he did not start by preaching in the agora. He did not get up on a soapbox and merely declare what the Bible said. It says Paul “reasoned” (Acts 17:17) in the marketplace, using a word—dialegomai—that sounds like “dialogue.” However, as John Stott says in his commentary on Acts, this term probably denoted something more specific than we would think of today when we hear it. Stott says it was something closer to what we might call the Socratic method. This was not a “debate” as we see debates today, where two parties read off talking points at one another. It required lots of careful listening, and in particular it meant asking questions that showed that your opponents were self-contradictory, that is, they were wrong on the basis of their own premises. And indeed, when we actually hear Paul’s address to the philosophers in Acts 17:22–31, we can’t help but notice that he does the Socratic method even here. He does not expound or even quote Scripture, but rather quotes their own thinkers (v. 28) and then shows them that, on the basis of their own intuitions and statements about God, idolatry is absolutely wrong (v. 29). Many have pointed out how Paul’s address lays the foundation for a doctrine of God, contrasting the contemporary culture’s beliefs in multiple, fallible, powerful beings who must be appeased with the idea of one supreme Creator, sovereign God who is worthy of awe-filled adoration and worship. Every part of what Paul says is deeply biblical, but he never quotes the Bible; instead he shows them the weakness and inadequacies of their own views of the divine and lifts up the true God for their admiration. He appeals as much to their rationality and their imaginations as to their will and hearts.

The term “cultural engagement” is so often used by Christians today without a great deal of definition. This account of Paul and Athens gets us a bit closer to understanding what it is by showing us what it is not. Christians are to enter the various public spheres—working in finance, the media, the arts. But there we are neither to simply preach at people nor are we to hide our faith, keeping it private and safe from contradiction. Rather, we are as believers to both listen to and also challenge dominant cultural ideas, respectfully yet pointedly, in both our speech and our example.

When Paul addresses the Areopagus, a body of the elite philosophers and aristocrats of Athens, he was, quite literally, speaking to the cultural elites. Their response to him was cool to say the least. They “mocked” him (Acts 17:32) and called him a “babbler” (v. 18), and only one member of that august body converted (v. 34). The elites laughed at him, wondering how Paul expected anyone to believe such rubbish. The irony of the situation is evident as we look back at this incident from the vantage point of the present day. We know that a couple of centuries later the older pagan consensus was falling apart and Christianity was growing rapidly. All the ideas that the philosophers thought so incredible were adopted by growing masses of people. Finally those sneering cultural elites were gone, and many Christian truths became dominant cultural ideas.

Why? Historians look back and perceive that the seemingly impregnable ancient pagan consensus had a soft underbelly. For example, the approach to suffering taken by the Stoics—its call to detach your heart from things here and thereby control your emotions—was harsh and did not work for much of the populace. The Epicureans’ call to live life for pleasure and happiness left people empty and lonely. The Stoics’ insistence that the Logos—the order of meaning behind the universe—could be perceived through philosophic contemplation was elitist, only for the highly educated. The revolutionary Christian teaching was, however, that there was indeed a meaning and moral order behind the universe that must be discovered, but this Logos was not a set of abstract principles. Rather it was a person, the Creator and Savior Jesus Christ, who could be known personally. This salvation and consolation was available to all, and it was available in a way that did not just engage the reason but also the heart and the whole person. The crazy Christian gospel, so sneered at by the cultural elites that day, eventually showed forth its spiritual power to change lives and its cultural power to shape societies. Christianity met the populace’s needs and answered their questions. The dominant culture could not. And so the gospel multiplied.

Do we have Paul’s courage, wisdom, skill, balance, and love to do the same thing today in the face of many sneering cultural leaders? It won’t be the same journey, because we live in a post-Christian Western society that has smuggled in many values gotten from the Bible but now unacknowledged as such. Late modern culture is not nearly as brutal as pagan culture. So the challenges are different, but we must still, I think, plunge into the agora as Paul did.

Greg Forster’s new book does a marvelous job of showing us a way forward that fits in with Paul’s basic stance—not just preaching at people, but not hiding or withdrawing either. Within these pages, believers will get lots of ideas about how to “reason” with people in the public square about the faith and how to engage culture in a way that avoids triumphalism, accommodation, or withdrawal. Paul felt real revulsion at the idolatry of Athens—yet that didn’t prevent him from responding to the pagan philosophers with love and respect, plus a steely insistence on being heard. This book will help you respond to our cultural moment in the same way.

Introduction

Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room

You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.

Ps. 63:7

As far back as history shows us, Christians have always been anxious about what role Christianity ought to play in the social order of human civilization. However, I would venture to say that since the founding of this country, we American Christians have been more worried about this question than any others before or since. And at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the question has become especially acute.

In 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life gathered survey data on the roughly 4,500 evangelical delegates attending the Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization. Lausanne is by far the largest and most important evangelical gathering in the world; its delegates make up a pretty fair representation of evangelical leadership across the globe. Pew found that 71 percent of delegates from the Global South—mainly Asia, Africa, and South America—are optimistic about the prospects for evangelicalism in their countries, but only 44 percent of delegates from the Global North—mainly North America and Europe—said the same. That makes sense. Evangelical Christianity is spreading like wildfire in the South, but in the North it is plateaued or declining.

The Lausanne findings on cultural impact may be more surprising. Christianity is heavily persecuted in much of the Global South, and is often merely tolerated even where it isn’t persecuted. In most places it is (or seems to be) a new and radically alien force compared to longstanding traditional culture. By contrast, North American and European civilizations have historical roots in Christianity stretching back almost two millennia. Yet fully 58 percent of delegates from the South said evangelicals were having an increasing influence on the way of life in their societies, compared to only 31 percent in the North.1 Peter Berger, perhaps the most important sociologist of religion in the past fifty years, comments: “These opinions strike me as empirically realistic in both regions.”2 And the pessimism in Europe and North America isn’t just a pessimism about evangelicalism; those regions aren’t exactly exploding with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox revivals. This is a pessimism about whether Christianity itself has a place in civilization.

Christianity’s lack of social influence is easy to explain in Europe; there aren’t a lot of Christians around anymore. In America, however, it’s a puzzle. Depending on how strictly you define it, something like a quarter to a third of the population is evangelical. While the role of Christianity in America’s history and civilizational institutions is a complex subject (we’ll look at it in chap. 1), at the very least Christianity has always been one of the more important components of the story. And a substantial number of evangelicals are present in the power elite of American institutions—from universities to businesses to entertainment to politics.3

So how is it that Christianity has so dramatically lost its impact on American civilization? And how can it begin the process of rebuilding that impact? Should we even try, or is cultural impact more dangerous than it is desirable?

In this book I’m going to propose some answers to those questions. The centerpiece of my answers is the joy of God. If Christianity is going to have a distinct impact, it needs to rely on what truly makes it distinct—the work of the Spirit in our minds, hearts, and lives. That’s what makes Christians unique, and it gives us a unique opportunity to bless our unbelieving neighbors through the way we participate in the civilization we share with them.

To show what I mean, let’s start with something simple: Christmas.

Explosions of Joy

Christmas was always a very big deal in our family when I was growing up. We kept all the traditions, we went through all the motions. Christmas was sacred in our family.

But Christmas never had anything to do with the birth of Jesus. I was raised outside the church, and in contemporary America that means we didn’t even think about Christmas having something to do with Jesus. If we had, the idea would have seemed silly—all that was in the past. You might just as well expect us to cook an authentic seventeenth-century figgy pudding and feed it to carolers as expect us to think about Jesus on Christmas. The advertisements that said “Keep Christ in Christmas” and all the rest of that stuff was invisible to us. We didn’t ignore them; we didn’t have to. We had so completely tuned them out that we didn’t even become aware of them long enough to ignore them.

Officially, Christmas in our family was about all the things the TV specials these days say it’s about: love, family, peace, being a good person. In other words, you were supposed to spend the whole time wallowing in feelings of moral goodness. If anyone had a nagging sense that there was something phony about it all, that had to be suppressed. Letting that show would have been a repulsive blasphemy.

For me, though, Christmas was really about getting presents. It was an annual greed factory. I’m sure my parents tried to counteract this, and it’s not their fault if they didn’t succeed. It was an impossible task. All the rituals of moral affirmation (“peace on earth,” “be with family”) made everything associated with Christmas seem morally legitimate.

As I got older, I noticed that Christmas was also about something else: excruciating stress, exhaustion, and emotional trauma. First all the wearisome toil of buying, selling, and sending; then on the day itself, bickering, tears, and jealousy. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it . . . to see that the thing is a nightmare. . . . They are in no trim for merry-making . . . they look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.”4 In retrospect, this seems inevitable. What else would happen when you take a spiritually dead holiday and force everyone to treat it like it’s the center of their lives?

And yet . . . every year, from time to time, there were the moments of joy. And I mean a really unique joy—a special kind of joy that nothing else in our whole lives ever compared with. It was a transcendent experience. The explosive moment might come at any time, in any place.

This unexplained phenomenon is something I never actually noticed at the time. I didn’t notice the difference between this kind of joy and the rest of the whole Christmas package. To me, the greedy pleasure of getting presents, the feeling of uplift from the rituals of moral affirmation, and the moments of explosive joy were all one thing. In retrospect, however, I can clearly see how different they were.

Here’s the key: the moments of special joy all had one thing in common. They were always prompted by cultural artifacts associated with Christmas that expressed a truly Christian, Jesus-centered spiritual celebration. Songs, cards, stories, images; strictly formal or loosely casual; old standbys and recent creations—it was always something that some Christian had made by taking the joy of God in Christ that he had personally experienced in the power of the Holy Spirit and then embodying it in a cultural form.

I have an especially vivid memory of one year. I must have been something like ten. I ran around the house, leaping from room to room, belting out “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World” at the very top of my lungs. All the stanzas. I was transported; I was soaring.

Nobody ever sang “Frosty the Snowman” that way.

Formed by Joy, Even before Faith

These experiences did not create, or result from, a real faith in Christ on my part. Believe it or not, I wasn’t thinking at all about Jesus, even as I was singing carols about Jesus! He remained implausible and irrelevant in my consciousness.

I got little tastes of the joy of God without getting God himself. I was washed for a moment by the spray from the breaking wave, without actually going into the ocean—without even knowing the ocean was there. This is actually a common phenomenon. If you really get to know what life outside the church is like, you can see it happening in all kinds of places. I wonder if people who have grown up inside the church all their lives might not realize how much influence Christianity has on the world outside the church through these indirect tastes of joy.

That special experience of joy did change me as a person, even though it didn’t bring me to faith. In fact, I think it was very important to my formation; I am who I am partly because of it.

I don’t just mean that I was more receptive to the Christian message later on, so these Christian cultural artifacts were valuable as pre-evangelistic “seed-sowing.” That’s true, but these tastes of joy made me a better person even apart from the role they played in helping prepare me for faith. If I had never heard the gospel, I would have died in my sins, but they would have been much less terrible sins; I’d have been a much worse sinner if I had never been shaped by the influence of Christian participation in my civilization.

The joy of God changed my mind. I fell in love with philosophy at an early age, but I was never even remotely tempted by atheism. It was just so obviously illogical. I wasn’t even much interested in the philosophers who acknowledged God but didn’t have much to say about him. Nor did I have much time for philosophies that were purely speculative or morally liberalizing. To me, philosophy was pointless unless it was an all-consuming quest to know and understand God and the moral life. Even if the Lord had never converted me, I would still have been a lot less far away from him like this than I would have been if I’d never known real joy.

Not only did the joy of God lead me to love philosophy, but the love of philosophy led me to more experiences of the joy of God. I read the works of great Christians who had fallen in love with philosophy the same way I had. In one sense, philosophy was the same thing for them that it was for me: the quest to know God and the moral life. That’s why I listened to them about philosophy even when I dismissed Christian writers in every other context. And for them, philosophy was explosively joyful on a whole different level from any of the pagan philosophers. To contemplate God was an infinitely deeper joy for Augustine and Locke than it ever was for Plato and Rousseau. For the Christians, philosophy was a chance to glorify the God who had transformed their lives through the Spirit. It took a long time for me to notice the difference and understand why it was there, but just as with those Christmas carols, that doesn’t mean it didn’t change me in some ways.

The joy of God changed my heart. Because of those moments of joy, I sought God not only in philosophy, but in emotional experience. That didn’t lead me to Christ, but on the whole, it still did me a lot more good than harm. For some antinomian types, emotionalism in religion is a cover for sin. But I was no antinomian. Before my conversion, I was a very strict legalist—a real Pharisee’s Pharisee. So how much worse, how much more demonic, would I have been if I had never even learned that there was more to God than just the law?

Following the path of these emotional experiences, I found more tastes of the joy of God. The cultural artifacts that gave me the kinds of emotional experiences I was looking for—from music to church architecture—were disproportionately made by Christians. Even the super-cheesy, early 1990s “Christian Contemporary Music” that sophisticated people all laugh at was sometimes the only thing in my life that would make me feel like I was living in a meaningful universe where good things might really be hoped for. Again, I didn’t realize at the time what was really happening, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t change me.

And the joy of God changed my way of living. Like I said, I was a legalist—a hypocrite and a prig. But at least I did know that moral goodness was a true and beautiful thing. I wasn’t much tempted by either cynicism or naiveté about moral law. I never found it remotely plausible that all goodness in the world was just a phony pretense, but I also never thought that behavioral standards could be relatively relaxed because people are basically good. I believe the connection between those moments of Christmas joy and the Christmas rituals of moral affirmation laid an important foundation for that love of morality in my character.

Bringing the Joy of God Back to Our Civilization

My personal journey is different from everyone else’s, of course. But I don’t think it’s unusual for people outside the church to be powerfully changed by the way they encounter the joy of God through Christians’ participation in their civilization. I found it in places like philosophy, but other people find it in everything from works of art to the way their Christian coworkers do their work.

In this book, when I talk about the joy of God, I’m not talking about an emotion. I mean the state of flourishing in mind, heart, and life that Christians experience by the Holy Spirit. The joy of God makes us happier, but also wiser, humbler, more patient, and so forth. The joy of God is all the fruits of the Spirit.

Paul describes the joy of God as something that we live out and grow into, not something we just passively feel: “The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). God’s kingdom is active, not passive; it is something embodied and manifested in human life. The gospel answer to pharisaical rules and regulations is not mere emotional experiences; it’s a human life that’s lived in the right way for the right reasons, because we are being transformed in our minds, hearts, and lives by the Spirit.

The joy of God—this Spirit-powered flourishing of human beings—can be experienced in a secondhand way by those who don’t have it themselves. It can be tasted. That’s what happened to me when I sang those Christmas carols.

I think Christianity is losing its influence in contemporary America because people outside the church just don’t encounter the joy of God as much as they used to. Christmas provides a perfect example. Look how Christmas specials on television have changed. You may have seen 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, with its famous recitation of Luke 2:8–14 (“That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”). Not every Christmas special had a climactic Jesus moment like that, but it was at least normal for them to do so. By the time I was old enough to be watching Christmas specials in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they still had the Jesus moments, but they had started reassuring their audiences that this doesn’t imply anything unpleasant for those who don’t believe. For example, 1979’s John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together concludes with a puppet retelling of the nativity, but it also features two songs (one sung by Kermit, one by Denver) that emphasize it doesn’t really make that much difference whether you believe in, or have even heard of, Jesus Christ. And now, of course, on mainstream television it’s rare for Jesus even to be mentioned. If there are no unpleasant consequences to not having Jesus in your life, why bother shoehorning Jesus into your Christmas special? Obviously, Christmas specials are just one example, and not necessarily a deeply profound one, but I think it’s very telling. How many explosive encounters with the joy of God have unchurched Americans been denied because the media feed them a steady diet of Jesus-free, sentimental mush every December?

This book lays out the reasons why I think this is happening, and how I think we Christians can help our neighbors encounter the joy of God through the way we behave in society. Maybe you’re not a person who can write songs that will go on the radio, but whoever you are, there is some sector of American culture—your family, your workplace, your neighborhood—within which you have standing to bring the joy of God to people.

Every day, we participate in the structures of human civilization. Our participation ought to manifest the miraculous work the Spirit has done in our hearts. Impacting our civilization is only one of many reasons it ought to do so. Evangelism depends on it; if we preach the gospel but don’t live in a way that reflects it, our neighbors won’t believe it. Our own discipleship and spiritual formation also depend on it; our “civilizational lives” take up almost all of our waking hours, and we’re not disciples if we glorify God only inside the church walls.

So what do you know? It turns out that evangelism, discipleship, and impacting our civilization all require the same thing. It’s almost like it was all designed by someone who knew what he was doing.

Joy for the World

Did you know that “Joy to the World” was not written as a Christmas carol? In its original form, it had nothing to do with Christmas. It wasn’t even written to be a song.

Isaac Watts was one of the great hymn writers in church history, and I guess nothing shows that better than the fact that he wrote one of his most famous hymns by accident. In 1719, Watts published a book of poems in which each poem was based on a psalm. But rather than just translate the original Old Testament texts, he adjusted them to refer more explicitly to the work of Jesus as it had been revealed in the New Testament.

One of those poems was an adaptation of Psalm 98. Watts interpreted this psalm as a celebration of Jesus’s role as King of both his church and the whole world. More than a century later, the second half of this poem was slightly adapted and set to music to give us what has become one of the most famous of all Christmas carols:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come;

Let earth receive her King!

Let every heart prepare him room

And heaven and nature sing!

And heaven and nature sing!

And heaven . . . and heaven . . . and nature sing.

Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!

Let men their songs employ

While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains,

Repeat the sounding joy!

Repeat the sounding joy!

Repeat . . . repeat . . . the sounding joy!

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make his blessings flow

Far as the curse is found!

Far as the curse is found!

Far as . . . far as . . . the curse is found!

He rules the world with truth and grace

And makes the nations prove

The glories of his righteousness

And wonders of his love!

And wonders of his love!

And wonders . . . wonders . . . of his love!

Borrowing a few lyrics from this wonderful hymn, which I ran around the house singing as a boy, here’s how I think the joy of God flows out from our hearts into civilization.

Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room: The Holy Spirit miraculously transforms us through our relationship with Jesus, giving us the joy of God in mind, heart, and life.

Let Men Their Songs Employ: Because God made human beings as social creatures, this joy of God is not locked up in an isolated heart; it flows among us and transforms how we relate to one another.

Let Earth Receive Her King: The church is the special community of people who are undergoing this transformative work, and the Spirit uses the distinct life of the church to further that work by means of doctrine, devotion, and stewardship.

He Comes to Make His Blessings Flow: We live most of our lives out in the world, among people who are not (yet) being transformed in this special way. How we live in the world should manifest the change the Spirit is working in us, carrying the impact of the joy of God “far as the curse is found.”

He Rules the World with Truth and Grace: As we learn to manifest the Spirit’s work in our hearts through the ways we live in the world, the portions of the world that are under our stewardship start to flourish more fully—not in a way that directly redeems people, because only personal regeneration can save a human being, but in a way that makes the world more like it should be and delivers intense experiences of God’s joy to our neighbors.

My prayer is that you find this book helpful in thinking through the exciting opportunities and perplexing challenges we face as we answer God’s call to develop godly ways of life within our civilization.

Part 1

Let Men Their Songs Employ

What Is the Church? What Is Society?

This book asks the question, how can Christianity begin the process of rebuilding its influence in American society? Many people will answer that question with a question: What do you mean by Christianity?

It’s a good question. One of the most difficult issues in theology is how we understand the concept of the church—ecclesiology, in theological jargon. And our understanding of the church has special relevance for this book. Differences over ecclesiology are probably the most common stumbling blocks in discussions of the church and society. People can’t reach much agreement on how the church relates to human civilization—they can’t even have much of a meaningful disagreement about it—if they mean different things by “the church.” I’m not going to get into technical theology here, but since I’m writing a book about Christianity and the church, I think I owe you at least a brief, simple statement of what I mean by these terms.

When I talk about Christianity and the church in this book, I mean here and now. The “church triumphant,” made up of redeemed saints who have gone to their reward, is an important part of ecclesiology. And people who are going to be saved in the future are also, from God’s eternal perspective, part of the church. But neither of those is relevant when we talk about the church and society.

When I talk about Christianity and the church, I’m talking about a community. All individuals who come to saving faith are part of the “invisible church.” But those who never publicly identify as Christians, live visibly as believers, and join the faith community aren’t relevant when we talk about the church and society.

We need to consider two main things when we think about Christianity in relation to human civilization.1 One is the organizational or institutional embodiment of Christianity. This is centered on the institutional church: the clergy, the church building, and Sunday worship, which play a unique and indispensable role in the faith community. Jesus made special provision for the ordination of officers to lead and steward the institutional church, and he located his people’s corporate worship of God within it. That gives it a unique status. However, the institutional church is not the only organizational manifestation of Christianity. Because our faith is meant to be practiced in community, Christians are constantly forming organizations to carry it out beyond the walls of the church building. This includes weekly small groups, accountability partnerships, and Christian schools, hospitals, and service organizations. These other organizations can never substitute for the institutional church; they do not and cannot play its special role. But they represent other ways in which Christianity manifests itself in organizational form.

The other thing we need to think about is the organic or informal embodiment of Christianity. This is the whole dynamic social interplay of all the ways in which Christians relate to one another and support one another in building up godly lives together. For example, I am currently employed by two different organizations (my full-time employer and a consulting job on the side) that are not officially committed, as institutions, to Christianity. Yet in both organizations, some of my coworkers are Christians. We don’t take off our “Christian hats” and put on our “secular hats” when we’re at work; we talk about things like how doing our jobs is part of our faith. That’s organic Christianity.

A robust, institutionally strong, well-equipped organizational Christianity is critically needed to support every aspect of Christian life, and our engagement with society is no exception. However, while organizational Christianity is necessary, it’s not enough. When we step outside the church building, we don’t cease to be Christians, and we don’t cease to be social creatures who depend on relationships and community to sustain us. We need to maintain an active, intentional life of discipleship in informal fellowship with organic Christianity.

The structure of this book reflects my conviction that it’s essential to discuss both organizational and organic Christianity if we’re going to talk about Christianity and society. Organizational Chris­tianity will be the main focus of part 2, although organic Christianity will make some appearances there. Then, organic Christianity will be the main focus of part 3, although organizational Christianity will make some appearances.

These two faces of Christianity are distinct but closely related. On the one hand, it’s important not to collapse the distinction and talk about only one of them, as though the institutions of organizational Christianity should barge in where they don’t belong and do things that only organic Christianity can really do, or as if organic Christianity were capable of getting along just fine without needing organizational Christianity to teach and support it. On the other hand, it’s important not to distinguish the two so much that you effectively separate them. In fact, they’re closely intertwined—so much so that the boundaries between the two are often hard to draw in practice. Suppose your small group meets for Bible study, then goes out and does a service project, then goes out for pizza and ice cream. Where does organizational Christianity end and organic Christianity begin? The distinction matters, but trying to draw the line exactly would be impossible.

Now here’s another question, one you might not have expected when you picked up this book. When someone asks how Christianity can begin the process of rebuilding its influence in American society, it’s very common for another person to reply, “What do you mean by Christianity?” But it’s rare for anyone to reply, “What do you mean by ‘American society’?” Yet that question is just as interesting.

Here in part 1, we’re going to tackle that question in two pieces. First, we’re going to ask about the “American” piece. How did America get where it is now, and where is it going? Second we’re going to ask about the “society” piece. What is a society, and how are we as human beings related to it? Once we’ve got a better idea of what we’re trying to influence, we’ll be ready to move on to how we influence it.

1

Christianity and the Great American Experiment

Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then they said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.”

Ps. 126:2

If we want to understand the question of this book—how can Christianity begin the process of rebuilding its influence in American society?—first we need to know our history. As Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously put it, life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards. And what’s true of individuals is also true of societies.

So we should start by asking, how did Christianity lose its influence in American society? Our efforts to rebuild its influence can’t succeed unless we understand why it declined. Unfortunately, this history isn’t well known, so we often end up fighting the wrong battles with the wrong weapons.

Quick quiz: Who said the following, and when? “The Christian people of America are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters. I believe we can hold the balance of power.”

Jerry Falwell in 1980? Pat Robertson in 2000? No, it was Billy Graham—in 1951.1 That a man as intelligent as Graham could be so naive about how the world works points to a deep problem in American evangelicalism. Many evangelical leaders were saying similar things for most of the twentieth century. When we look into the history of Christianity and American society, we start to realize the problem is not what we may have thought it was.

We want to pull a lever and see the world change. Political involvement is not the issue; the joy of God is the issue. Remember, the joy of God is the state of flourishing in mind, heart, and life that Christians experience by the Holy Spirit. We’ve been so anxious to influence society in the past century that we’ve ended up going after a lot of shortcuts. For some it’s politics, for some it’s education, for some it’s evangelism. We’ve been pulling a lot of levers. The common thread is that we’re pulling these levers so hard, we leave no space for people to encounter the joy of God.

Christianity and America: Three Stories

American evangelicals tell themselves three different stories about Christianity’s influence in America. Each of these stories comes from a particular approach to American history. So getting American history right is going to be the key to sorting out the various stories we tell ourselves about Christianity’s place in America.

The first story is the “Christian founding” narrative. This is essentially a tale of stolen glory. According to this telling, the American founding was an essentially Christian act. The people who tell this story today might no longer use the phrase “Christian nation,” because it can create misunderstandings. But they do depict the American founding as, at bottom, the enactment of a new model of society more in line with Christian teaching than any before. This Christian social order was the culmination of the Reformation. Thanks to Martin Luther, true Christian teaching had been unleashed from its medieval captivity, and eventually it found social expression (however imperfectly) in the American founding. Responsible people will of course be faithful to the facts; the deism of a few founders, and the shaky theology of many more, will be duly acknowledged. However, after all the caveats and nuances are accounted for, this story depicts Christianity—Christian doctrine and practice—as the foundation of America.

The villains in this story are the major anti-Christian intellectual movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: biological and psychological reductionism in science; narcissistic subjectivism in the arts; materialism and dualism in philosophy; pragmatism in ethics. While these movements found great success in Europe, at first they were contained to a minority in America. But they continued to grow and develop, hatching ever more hideous progeny to torment a vulnerable world: Nihilism, socialism, Fascism, Communism, Nazism. Time and again, in the fight against these evils, the only nation that embodied an essentially Christian form of social organization—America—took its natural place as leader and captain. And America triumphed, because its ideas and institutions were better, having been formed by Christianity.

And then the other side got smart. It organized to infiltrate America’s leading institutions from within, especially its schools. In the space of a generation, the secularism that had long been a festering sore on America’s cultural life became a cancerous tumor. Christianity’s rightful place as the source of America’s guiding ideas was usurped. At home, disorder in all forms was on the rise; abroad, we lost our ability to fight our enemies.

In stark contrast to this “Christian founding” narrative, the second story about Christianity and America is the “secular founding” narrative. This is a tale of disillusionment. According to this telling, true Christianity never had much influence on American society. The true church is at enmity with the powers that control the world; it flourishes spiritually only when it refuses the temptation to flourish culturally. The world is ruled by evil, so cultural flourishing means selling out to the world. Again, responsible people will be faithful to the facts; the genuine Christian faith of many of the founders and some influence of ideas borrowed from Christianity are too obvious to be denied. But in this story, the American founding was most importantly a product of “the Enlightenment,” which is depicted as an implicitly anti-Christian movement. Some of its ideas were good as far as they went (freedom of religion, civil equality, the rule of law) and may be historically connected with Christianity in some ways, while other ideas were bad (Deism, perfectionism). What they had in common was that they were joined together as components of a larger thought system that was antithetical to Christianity. This mixed bag of essentially non-Christian ideas was dressed up in a cloak of theological language for the sake of maintaining respectability and attracting votes in a country with large numbers of believing Christians.

So in this story, the central organizing dynamic of politics in America has always been a process of cloaking non-Christian ideas (good ones and bad ones) in Christian language. The rise of explicitly anti-Christian ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was only the natural development of the earlier rise of non-Christian Enlightenment ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These ideas reached their logical conclusions sooner in Europe, where the churches were dying so there was less and less need for the pretense of Christianity. (And the European churches were dying because they had sold out their theological integrity in order to influence society!) The final blossoming of explicitly non-Christian social organization in America in the 1970s was really just the revealing of something that had always been there. Now, the competition is between politicians who appeal explicitly to secularists and those who continue to dress up their agendas as Christian to manipulate churches and voters.

This is a story of disillusionment in both the good and bad sense. In the good sense, it is disillusionment because an illusion has been removed. Since the turn away from “Christianity” in the organization of American life in the 1970s, the true nature of the social order has been revealed. American culture has not necessarily become worse than it always was; it has just become more honest about its non-Christian character. In the bad sense, it is disillusionment because it stems from, and teaches, a cynical attitude about society and Christianity’s role in it. Politicians—and for that matter any other socially prominent people—are almost always manipulators who want to get something from the church.

The third story is not really much of a story at all. It’s more of an attitude of indifference. Let’s call it the “it doesn’t matter” narrative. The church doesn’t need to wrestle with the questions of history and American society. That’s not our department. Our job is just to preach a message of repentance, faith, personal regeneration, and justification; make as many converts as we can; and leave it up to individual Christians to fit into society in whatever ways seem best to them. If the church invests a lot of effort taking positions on the questions of history and society, that will distract us from our real job: maximizing the number of people who convert.

This doesn’t mean that the great questions of history and society are removed from the life of the church. These questions still matter to people, so the church will still talk about them, even if it has nothing distinctive to say about them. Aid to Africa, recycling, civility—the church will endorse whatever causes, ideas, and positions happen to be prominent in the culture, as far as it can do so without betraying its core message. That way the gospel will be situated within the cultural views that people outside the church already hold, so the decision to believe in Christ will seem more plausible to those people. In effect, it becomes part of the church’s job to support and reinforce whatever views are already predominant in the population it wishes to reach.

True Facts, False Stories

History is not just facts, it’s a story. The facts are important; fidelity to the facts is essential to good history. But it takes a story to turn facts into history.2

You can get all your facts right, and still get the story wrong. Here’s how a pastor of mine once illustrated this point. Suppose I told you that I once saw a group of masked men strap someone down to a table, rip his chest open, and cut out his heart while it was still beating. Now suppose I told you that I once witnessed a life-saving heart transplant operation. Same set of facts, but two totally different stories.

Unfortunately, all three of the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about American history are inadequate. They can point to true facts, but they don’t quite arrange those facts into a true story. And, as will become clear later, these false stories have been undermining our engagement with American society for a century.

The inadequacy of the “it doesn’t matter” narrative becomes clear as soon as we identify its real implications. Where this story predominates, churches take the facts about Jesus and insert them into whatever sociocultural story the world is already telling itself. Thus the church becomes, in practice, captive to the world’s story. Functionally, the church reinforces everything the world says about human life exceptfor the relatively narrow set of facts that the church identifies as the gospel message.

That brings us to the two substantive stories. Both of these stories highlight true and important facts in the historical record. However, both of them are false as stories. They string the facts together into a larger structure of meaning that misleads.

The Christian founding story highlights—accurately—that the ideas of the American founding were importantly influenced by Christianity in numerous ways and were better aligned with biblical principles than the aristocratic and confessional political systems of the old regime. It also pushes back against the tendency to treat anything associated with the Enlightenment as necessarily anti-Christian. The Enlightenment was not a single movement but was manifested very differently in different parts of Europe, and in some places Christian ideas were an important part of it. You cannot prove that an idea is non-Christian merely by connecting it in some way with something called “the Enlightenment.”

The secular founding story highlights—accurately—that the American founding was not a Christian movement as such and was importantly influenced by anti-Christian thinking on several fronts; that the American social order is not a Christian social order as such (not even “unofficially”); and that the founders all called themselves Christians but were very uneven in their doctrinal orthodoxy. In that environment, all sorts of ideas were plausibly labeled as “Christian”—sometimes in manipulative ways.

While both stories highlight facts that are true, neither story is true as a story. The quickest way to see this is to notice that neither story is able to explain the facts that are highlighted by the other. If a story not only contains true facts but is true as a story, it ought to be able to account for the key facts that might be brought to challenge it. Significant unexplained facts are good reasons to doubt a story; too many unexplained facts of too great a significance will undermine our belief in the story.