Whatever Happened to The Gospel of Grace? E-Book

James Montgomery Boice

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 352

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Combines a serious examination of the state of today's church and a powerful solution: reclaiming the gospel of grace found in the confessional truths of the Reformation. Though the Christian church has achieved a worldly sort of success-big numbers, big budgets, big outreaches-these are not good days for evangelicalism. Attendance is down, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish so-called "believers" from their non-Christian neighbors-all because the gospel of grace has been neglected. In this work, now in paperback, the late James Montgomery Boice identifies what's happened within evangelicalism and suggests how the confessional statements of the Reformation-Scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and glory to God alone-can ignite full-scale revival. "A church without these convictions has ceased to be a true church, whatever else it may be," he wrote, but "if we hold to these doctrines, our churches and those we influence will grow strong."

Leseprobe

Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace?

Original edition copyright © 2001 by Linda McNamara Boice

Published by Crossway Booksa publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, 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 by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Chris Tobias

First printing, trade paper, 2009

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture references are from The Holy Bible:New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-4335-1129-5 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-0962-9 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-0963-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBoice, James Montgomery, 1938-2000Whatever happened to the gospel of grace?: recovering the doctrines that shook the world / James Montgomery Boice; foreword byEric J. Alexander.p.    cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 13: 978-1-58134-237-6 ISBN 10: 1-58134-237-3 1. Grace (Theology) I. Title.BT761.2.B655    2001 230'.04624—dc21

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To HIMwho loves us and has freed usfrom our sins by his blood,and has made us to bea kingdom and prieststo serve his God and Father—to him be glory and powerfor ever and ever! Amen.

Revelation 1:5-6

Contents

Publisher’s Foreword

Foreword by Eric J. Alexander

Preface

Part One: Our Dying Culture

1 The New Pragmatism

2 The Pattern of This Age

Part Two: Doctrines That Shook the World

3 Scripture Alone

4 Christ Alone

5 Grace Alone

6 Faith Alone

7 Glory to God Alone

Part Three: The Shape of Renewal

8 Reforming Our Worship

9 Reforming Our Lives

Notes

Publisher’s Foreword

This is an extraordinary kind of book. It is in fact the last written message of an extraordinary, perceptive, and godly man, Dr. James Montgomery Boice. As such it has a timeliness and urgency that the evangelical church today so critically needs to hear and heed. Stated simply as his last word, Jim Boice has given us a three-fold message, calling us as Christians: 1) to repent of our worldliness; 2) to recover the great salvation doctrines of the Bible as the Reformers did five hundred years ago; and 3) to live a life trans-formed by the essential truths of the gospel.

The urgency of our situation is seen especially in the first section of the book, where Dr. Boice shows how deeply evangelical Christians have been compromised by a thoroughgoing worldliness. In a manner remarkably parallel to the liberal church a generation ago, evangelicals today have embraced the world’s wisdom, the world’s theology, the world’s agenda, and the world’s methods. The result is an evangelical church that has lost the power and the real-ity of the gospel.

Though it is essential that we understand the urgency of our situation, the heart of Dr. Boice’s message is a call to the recovery of the gospel (as found especially in the “doctrines that shook the world” five centuries ago) and a call to live out the gospel in every area of life. Thus Dr. Boice asks, “Can we have that power again in our day? We can. But only if we hold to the full-orbed Reformation gospel and do not compromise with the culture around us. . . . How does it happen? It happens by the renewing of our minds, . . . by study of the life-giving and renewing Word of God . . . empowered by the Holy Spirit [so that] we will begin to take on something of the glorious luster of the Lord Jesus Christ and will become increasingly like him.”

We would do well then to hear and to heed this last message from Dr. Boice—a prophetic word to us, but equally a message of confident hope in the power of the gospel. As Dr. Boice wrote in the closing words of the book, “There are times in history when it takes a thousand voices to be heard as one voice. But there are other times, like our own, when one voice can ring forth as a thousand. So let’s get on with our calling, and let those who say they know God show they actually do—for his glory and for the good of all.”

Lane T. Dennis, President Crossway Books

Foreword

At one o’clock on Friday, June 23, 2000, a vast company of people filled Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. They had come from all over the world to honor the memory of Dr. James Montgomery Boice, pastor of the church for more than thirty years. The keynote of the service was heartfelt thanksgiving to God for such a remarkably fruitful life and ministry.

Eight weeks previously, the church was also crowded—for the opening service of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology (PCRT). During that conference, Dr. Boice shared with me the medical report he had received on Good Friday: He was suffering from cancer of the liver and the prognosis was very bad. He was planning to tell the congregation the following Sunday. This he did, with astonishing calmness, courage, and selflessness. Many said it was the most moving occasion they had ever shared in.

From his earliest days, Jim Boice was a leader among men. He distinguished himself at Harvard University, Princeton Seminary, and the University of Basel in Switzerland. His academic ability and scholarly nature were to become the foundation for a life dedicated to preaching, teaching, and defending the gospel.

His passion for reformed theology led him to found the PCRT in 1974. Similarly his concern for the Reformation principle of “sola Scriptura” lay behind his crucial influence in planning and convening the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, from 1978 to 1988. In 1996 he was instrumental in forming the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Yet I do not think he would wish to be remembered mainly for these landmark conferences and their widespread influence. More than once he said to seminary students, to whom he frequently spoke, “I am first and foremost the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church. That’s where my heart is.”

Consistent with this, he spent more than thirty years as Tenth’s senior minister, to its eternal benefit. Early in his ministry he wrote of the Puritans, “They were steeped in the Word of God. They were diligent. No work was too great or mountain too high for them to tackle. They were pious men who spent long hours in study and on their knees. They were not looking for promotion to positions of greater and greater prominence. Rather, they were willing to stay in one place, so the work of bringing the Word fully to that place might be completed.” 1

Theologically and personally, James Boice was himself in that true Puritan tradition. No man I have known has more fully than he exhibited and expounded in his life and ministry the five “solas” of which he writes in this book. They were the foundation stones of his thinking and the substance of his preaching.

Writing in these pages of the sufficiency of Christ for the believer, he says, “We need no other prophets to reveal God’s word or will. We need no other priests to mediate God’s salvation and blessing. We need no other kings to control the thinking and lives of believers. Jesus is everything to us and for us in the gospel.”

So it was in Jim Boice’s life. The more you got to know him, the more apparent that became. Quite simply, he lived to know Christ better; he lived to preach Christ more effectively; and he lived to exalt Christ with every faculty of his being.

His death brings great gain to him but great loss to the Christian church. Many of us miss him acutely, but we thank God that through such books as the one you now hold in your hand, and by many other means, “he, being dead, yet speaks.”

Soli Deo gloria.

Eric J. Alexander St. Andrews, Scotland

Preface

Do we still believe in the gospel of grace? Consider Os Guinness’s perceptive observation of contemporary church life. In a recent book he offers several telling examples of how some evangelicals have come to trust technology rather than the gospel and the power of God for winning the lost and achieving church growth. A Florida pastor with a 7,000-member church observed, “I must be doing right or things wouldn’t be going so well.” A Christian advertising agent, who has represented Coca-Cola as well as having developed the “I Found It” evangelistic campaign, expressed his “faith” in even more shocking terms:

Back in Jerusalem where the church started, God performed a miracle there on the day of Pentecost. They didn’t have the benefits of buttons and media, so God had to do a little super-natural work there. But today, with our technology, we have available to us the opportunity to create the same kind of interest in a secular society.

Another church growth consultant claims that “five to ten million baby boomers would be back in the fold within a month” if churches would only adopt three simple changes: 1) “Advertise,” 2) Let people know about “product benefits,” and 3) Be “nice to people.”1

Has it come to that?

Apparently it has for some people, while others who would not express their trust in secular tools to accomplish spiritual work so brazenly nevertheless flirt with the world and its methods because the old ways no longer seem adequate to “get the job done.” Really? Doesn’t the gospel work anymore? Is the power of God really impotent in dealing with the particular challenges of our modern and postmodern age?

The leaders who have banded together as the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals believe that the problem is not our failure to use secular tools but ignorance of God and neglect of the gospel of salvation through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ alone. We have achieved success—in a worldly sort of way. We have large churches with large budgets. We have immense commercial enter-prises. But overall, church attendance in America has declined markedly in recent years (from a weekly high of about forty-six per-cent of the population to less than thirty-six percent today), and allegedly “born-again” people do not differ statistically in their beliefs and practices from their unbelieving neighbors. “We are living in a fool’s paradise,” said David Wells to a gathering of the National Association of Evangelicals several years ago.

The Alliance would like the evangelical church to recover its rich spiritual heritage by repenting of its rampant worldliness and by rediscovering the gospel of grace that meant so much to the Protestant Reformers. The Alliance purpose statement reads:

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life.2

This book follows the outline of the Alliance purpose statement, unfolding in three parts: 1) Our Dying Culture, 2) Doctrines That Shook the World, and 3) The Shape of Renewal. The heart of the book is part 2, in which the five great Reformation “solas” are explained: sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”), solus Christus (“Christ alone”), sola gratia (“grace alone”), sola fide (“faith alone”), and soli Deo gloria (“glory to God alone”).

This book is an expansion of a smaller booklet written for the Alliance, What Makes a Church Evangelical?3 Those who have read that booklet will find some of its content here. Material has also been drawn from a few of my other writings, particularly the mate- rial on the world and its ways of thinking in chapter 2. That chapter has been adapted, though with substantial changes, from parts of Mind Renewal in a Mindless Age: Preparing to Think and Act Biblically.4

Some readers may be interested in the poetry that is printed at the start of each of these nine chapters. The lines are from new hymns (words and music) written for the worship services of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia,5which I have served as senior minister for more than thirty years. Instead of merely complaining about the sad lack of biblical and doctrinal content in most contemporary Christian music, we decided to do something positive by producing new hymns. They are based on Bible texts and focus on the doctrines unfolded in these pages.

We need a modern reformation—to recover the gospel of grace. May God Almighty be pleased to grant it. For his glory alone. Amen.

James Montgomery Boice Philadelphia

Part One

OUR DYINGCULTURE

ONE

The New Pragmatism

’Round the throne in radiant glory All creation loudly sings Praise to God, to God Almighty—Day and night the anthem rings:“Holy, holy, holy, holy Is our God, the King of kings.”

These are not good days for the evangelical church, and anyone who takes a moment to evaluate the life and outlook of evangelical churches will understand that.

In recent years a number of books have been published in an effort to understand what is happening, and they are saying much the same thing even though their authors come from different backgrounds and are doing different work. I was struck by three studies that appeared within a year or two of each other. The first was No Place for Truth, by David F. Wells,1 professor of historical and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. The second was Power Religion, by Michael Scott Horton,2 vice president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The third volume was Ashamed of the Gospel, by John MacArthur,3 pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. Each of these authors was writing about the evangelical church, and one can get an idea of what each is saying just from the titles alone.

Yet the subtitles are even more revealing. The subtitle of Wells’s book is Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? The subtitle of Horton’s book is The Selling Out of the Evangelical Church. The subtitle of MacArthur’s work proclaims When the Church Becomes Like the World.

When we put them together we realize that these careful observers of the current scene perceive that evangelicalism is seriously off-base today because it has abandoned its evangelical truth-heritage. The thesis of Wells’s book is that the evangelical church is either dead or dying as a significant religious force because it has forgotten what it stands for. Instead of trying to do God’s work in God’s way, it is trying to build a prosperous earthly kingdom with secular tools. Thus, as we have noted, Wells declared that, in spite of our apparent success, we have been “living in a fool’s paradise.”

John H. Armstrong, founder and president of Reformation and Revival Ministries, edited a volume titled The Coming Evangelical Crisis.4 When I asked him whether he thought the crisis was still coming or is actually here, he admitted that in his judgment the crisis is already upon us.

“And why is that?” I continued.

He answered, “It is because evangelicals have forgotten their theology.”

A THIRTY-YEAR PERSPECTIVE

Let me put my thoughts in historical perspective. When I returned to the United States from theological studies in Europe in 1966 to work at Christianity Today, I found that the 1960s were a time of rising influence for evangelicals. Christianity Today was part of the resurgence. Under the leadership of founding editor Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine was mounting an effective challenge to the liberal churches and especially to the liberal theological journal The Christian Century. The largest seminaries in the country were evangelical, some with thousands of students. Evangelical churches also were growing, and they were emerging from their comfortable sub-urban ghettos to engage selected aspects of the secular culture. Observing this trend exactly a decade later, Newsweek magazine would call 1976 “the year of the evangelical.”

It was also a time of decline for the mainline churches. I was part of one of those denominations from 1968 to 1980, and I came to the conclusion that the mainline churches were trying to do God’s work in a secular way and that they were declining as a result. The older churches were pursuing the world’s wisdom, embracing the world’s theology, following the world’s agenda, and employing the world’s methods.

1. The world’s wisdom. In earlier ages of the church, Christians stood before their Bibles and confessed their ignorance of spiritual things. They even confessed their inability to understand what was written in the Bible except for the grace of God through the ministry of the Holy Spirit to unfold the Bible’s wisdom to them. They sought the wisdom of God in Scripture. But this ancient wisdom had been set aside by the liberal church, with the result that the reforming voice of God in the church through the Scriptures was forgotten. The liberal denominations had been undermined by rationalism, and they were no longer able to receive the Bible as God’s Word to man, only as man’s word about God. The Bible might still be true overall or in places, they believed, but it could no longer be regarded as authoritative.

This had three sad consequences for these churches. First, it produced a state of uncertainty about what to believe. This was usually disguised, often by increasingly elaborate liturgies or by social programs. But it was the true case, and it explained why so many people were beginning to desert these churches and turn to conservative churches instead. Unable to redirect the bureaucracies by personal participation or by democratic vote, people began voting with their feet and either dropped out entirely or turned to those churches that still retained a biblical message.

About this time a churchman named Dean Kelley wrote a book titled Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.5 He said it was because they knew what they believed. He was right. People are not attracted to churches that do not know where they stand theologically.

Second, the liberal churches were embracing the outlook and moral values of the world. Since there was nothing to make them distinct, they ended up being merely a pale reflection of the culture in which they were functioning.

Third, they made decisions based not on the teachings of the Bible but as a response to the prevailing opinions of the time, what Francis Schaeffer called the wisdom of the fifty-one percent vote. Business was done by consensus. Issues would be discussed (usually with very little reference to the Bible or its principles), a vote would be taken, a majority carried the day, and the moderator would usually declare, “The Holy Spirit has spoken.” For the most part, I thought that the Holy Spirit had very little to do with what happened. But I also learned that if Christians throw out a transcendent authority, another authority will always come in to take the Bible’s place.

2. The world’s theology. The mainline churches had also adopted the world’s theology. The world’s theology is easy to define. It is the view that human beings are basically good, that no one is really lost, and that belief in Jesus Christ is not necessary for anyone’s salvation—though it may be helpful for some people. In popular terms it is the “I’m OK, you’re OK” philosophy.

In adopting this theology the liberal churches did not entirely abandon the traditional biblical terminology, of course. They could hardly have done that and still have pretended to be Christian. Many of the old biblical terms were retained, but they were given different meanings. Sin became not rebellion against God and his righteous law, for which we are held accountable, but ignorance or the oppression found in social structures. It was what the young people were shouting about in the 1960s. The way to overcome was by social change, new laws, or revolution. Jesus became not the incarnate God who died for our salvation but rather a pattern for creative living. We were to look to Jesus as an example, but not as a divine Savior. Some looked to him as a model revolutionary. Salvation was defined as liberation from oppressive social structures. Faith was becoming aware of oppression and beginning to do something about it. Evangelism did not mean carrying the gospel of Jesus Christ to a perishing world but rather working through or against the world’s power centers to over-throw entrenched injustice.

3. The world’s agenda. In the liberal churches the words “the world must set the agenda” were quite popular. That had been the theme of the 1964 gathering of the World Council of Churches, and it meant that the church’s concerns should be the concerns of the world, even to the exclusion of the gospel. If the world’s main priority was world hunger, that should be the church’s priority too. Racism? Ecology? Aging? Whatever it was, it was to be first in the concerns of Christian people.

4. The world’s methods. The final accommodation of the mainline churches to the world was in the realm of methods. The methods God has given for us to do his work are participation, persuasion, and prayer. But these three methods, particularly persuasion and prayer, were being jettisoned by the mainline churches as hopelessly inadequate, and what was proposed in their place was a gospel of power politics and money. I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker at about that time that I thought got it exactly right. Two Pilgrims were coming over on the Mayflower and one was saying to the other, “Religious freedom is my immediate goal, but my long-range plan is to go into real estate.”

I was reminded of that cartoon years later when I heard the Reverend Phillip Jensen, the evangelical senior minister of St. Mathias Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia, say that in his opinion the major denominations are nothing more than real estate holding companies.

THE WORLDLY (EVANGELICAL) CHURCHES

But here is the important thing. What has hit me like a thunderbolt in recent years is the discovery that what I had been saying about the liberal churches at the end of the 1960s and in the ’70s now needs to be said about evangelical churches too.

Can it be that evangelicals, who have always opposed liberal-ism and its methods, have now also fixed their eyes on a worldly kingdom and have made politics and money their weapons of choice for winning it? I think they have. About ten years ago Martin Marty, always a shrewd observer of the American church, said in a magazine interview that, in his judgment, by the end of the century evangelicals would be “the most worldly people in America.” He was exactly on target when he said that, except that he was probably a bit too cautious. Evangelicals fulfilled his prophecy before the turn of the millennium.

1. The world’s wisdom. Evangelicals are not heretics, at least not consciously. If we ask whether the Bible is the authoritative and inerrant Word of God, most will answer affirmatively, at least if the question is asked in traditional ways. Is the Bible God’s Word? Of course! All evangelicals know that. Is it authoritative? Yes, that too. Inerrant? Most evangelicals will affirm inerrancy. But many evangelicals have abandoned the Bible all the same simply because they do not think it is adequate for the challenges we face today. They do not think it is sufficient for winning people to Christ in this age, so they turn to felt-need sermons or entertainment or “signs and wonders” instead. They do not think the Bible is sufficient for achieving Christian growth, so they turn to therapy groups or Christian counseling. They do not think it is sufficient for making God’s will known, so they look for external signs or revelations. They do not think it is adequate for changing our society, so they establish evangelical lobby groups in Washington and work to elect “Christian” congressmen, senators, presidents, and other officials. They seek change by power politics and money.

2. The world’s theology. Like the liberals before us, evangelicals use the Bible’s words but give them new meaning, pouring bad secular content into spiritual terminology. But differently, of course. We live in a therapeutic age now. So evangelicals have recast their theology in psychiatric terms. Sin has become dysfunctional behavior. Salvation is self-esteem or wholeness. Jesus is more of an example for right living than our Savior from sin and God’s wrath. Sunday by Sunday people are told how to have happy marriages and raise nice children, but not how to get right with God.

The problem here is that sin is not dysfunction, though it may contribute to it. “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Answer to Question 14), and our major problem is not a lack of wholeness or a lack of integration of personalities but the peril of God’s wrath toward us for our sin. What we need from God in Christ is not an example for living but an atonement. Even preaching about happy marriages and raising nice children is wrong if it leads people to suppose that, if they succeed in these areas, every-thing is well with them whether or not they have repented of their sin, trusted Jesus Christ as their Savior, and are following him as their Lord.

3. The world’s agenda. The world’s major agenda—forget world hunger, racism, or ecology—is to be happy—happiness being understood, as Francis Schaeffer put it in several of his books, as the maximum amount of personal peace and sufficient affluence to enjoy it. But is that not the bottom line of much evangelical preaching today? To be happy? To be contented? To be satisfied? Some of the worst forms of this particularly Western form of worldliness are seen in the health, wealth, and prosperity preachers, who claim that it is God’s desire that his people be rich and feel satisfied. But it is also seen in preaching that extols the good life as a valid Christian goal while failing to address the sins of those who are living for themselves rather than for others. Far be it from many Christians today to preach a gospel that would expose sin and drive men and women to the Savior—or demand a hard following after Jesus Christ as the only true discipleship.

4. The world’s methods. Evangelicals have become like liberals in this area too. How else are we to explain the emphasis so many place on numerical growth, large physical plants, and money? Or so many bizarre approaches to evangelism? Or that so many pas-tors tone down the hard edges of biblical truth in order to attract greater numbers to their services? Or that we major in entertainment? Or that so many support a National Association of Evangelicals lobby in Washington? Or that we have created social action groups to advance specific legislation?

Not long ago I came across a newspaper story about a church that is trying to attract worshipers by imitating radio news pro-grams that promise: “Give us twenty-two minutes, and we’ll give you the world.” Their 9:00 A.M. Sunday service is called “Express Worship,” and the hook is that parishioners can come in and be out in twenty-two minutes. In one service described by the newspaper, the pastor began with a greeting and a short prayer, followed by a reading from Luke 7:1-10. He then asked the worshipers to write down their thoughts on what constitutes authority in their lives. Finally, they sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and went out. The pastor described it as “a restructuring of the way we think of the service. Not one person delivering the truth to you, but a shared experience.”

The newspaper said, “Give him twenty-two minutes, and he’ll give you the Lord.”

Here is another example. An evangelical church in Philadelphia recently distributed a brochure giving “ten reasons” to visit their Sunday evening service:

1. The air conditioning feels great.

2. Coffee and goodies for everyone after every service.

3. The music is upbeat and easy to sing.

4. You get to meet some really neat people.

5. The sermon is always relevant to everyday life.

6. You can sleep in on Sundays and still make it to church on time.

7. Child care and children’s church are provided.

8. Free parking!

9. You can go to the shore for the weekend and still make it to church on Sunday night.

10. You will discover an awesome God who cares about you.

When I saw that I was reminded of an advertising brochure I had come across some years before. See if you can guess what is being described. This brochure was printed in full color with pictures of attractive people, and the cover read: “This Is Where It’s At.” Inside it had headings like these:

It’s about family.

It’s about style.

It’s about giving.

It’s about fun.

It’s about the best way to please everybody.

It’s about caring.

Actually, the brochure was an advertisement for the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, Massachusetts. But its appeal is virtually undistinguishable from that of the churches I am describing.

Or, to follow a different line, consider evangelical rhetoric. Evangelicals speak of “taking back America,” “fighting for the country’s soul,” “reclaiming the United States for Christ.” How? By electing Christian presidents, congressmen, and senators, lobbying for conservative judges, taking over power structures, and imposing our Christian standard of morality on the rest of the nation by law. But we ought to ask: Was America ever really a Christian nation? Was any nation ever really Christian? Does law produce morality? What about Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities—the city of man and the city of God—which meant so much to the Reformers? Will any country ever be anything other than man’s city? And what about America’s soul? Is there really an American soul to be redeemed or fought over?

Recently a book appeared written by two people who had been active in the Moral Majority movement in the first half of the 1980s. It is titled Blinded by Might, and its authors are Cal Thomas, now a syndicated religion columnist appearing in more than 475 newspapers nationwide, and Ed Dobson, pastor of Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Thomas and Dobson saw the years 1980–1985 as a period of tremendous opportunity for Christians, and they believe there were significant achievements. The Moral Majority focused public discussion on moral issues. It drew attention to the role of religion and religious people in the political process. It awakened millions of formerly dormant Christians to their civic responsibility. Still, Thomas and Dobson judge the movement to have been a failure, because they believe they were trying to achieve the renewal of the country through a political process, which does not and cannot happen, rather than from the bottom up through lives that have been changed by God. “We failed because we were unable to redirect a nation from the top down,” they concluded. “Real change must come from the bottom up or, better yet, from the inside out.”6

And failure was not the only problem. Along the way evangelicals were seduced by the allure of worldly power. Quoting 2 Corinthians 10:3-6, which says that the Christian’s true weapons are not the weapons of this world but the weapons of truth, per-suasion, and character, the authors write, “The strongholds and pretensions [of this world] can only be demolished under two conditions: one, that we don’t fight with the world’s weapons, but with divine ones; and two, that our obedience is complete. We have been trying to use the world’s weapons of political power, and we have not been sufficiently obedient to the call of Jesus to care as he cares and do as he did.”7Their summary:

We don’t have a shortage of leaders, but a shortage of followers of the one Leader who can transform lives and nations. We don’t need to enlarge our vision, but make it smaller and more focused. We don’t need more numbers, but more quality and consistency among the numbers we already have. We need more people who will do things God’s way and fewer people doing things man’s way.8

These are strong words. But they come from people who have walked the path of political power and have found it to lead nowhere.

When you put these contemporary evangelical characteristics together—pursuit of the world’s wisdom, acceptance of the world’s theology, adoption of the world’s agenda, and utilization of the world’s methods—it is hard to escape the feeling that today’s evangelicals have fallen into the trap of the liberals before them. Much of the time they sound like the liberal journal The Christian Century that Christianity Today was founded to oppose. And as for Christianity Today itself, it has become a lot like The Christian Century was, though with far less theological content.

THE ONSLAUGHT OF THE MODERN

A major part of the problem is the onslaught of the modern age. The dominant philosophy of today’s generation is relativism, the rejection of absolutes (as described by Allan Bloom in his best-selling book on higher education, The Closing of the American Mind 9), and the substitution of pragmatism for truth. Moreover, hard on the heels of philosophical relativism came the militant attack on beliefs or values of any kind known popularly as postmodernity.

Evangelicals seem to have succumbed to this spirit.

If truth is relative, as the majority of people living in our age believe, then one idea is as good as another, and the only criteria for choosing one course of action rather than another are: 1) pragmatism (does it accomplish what we want?) and 2) pleasure (do we feel good after we have done it?). Instead of people saying that they agree or disagree with a statement, they respond that they either “like” or “dislike” it. We no longer ask people, “What do you think about this?” We ask them, “How do you feel about it?” Few are guided by principle any longer, only by what they prefer. “You have to decide what’s right for you,” we are told. In such a climate, the only remaining virtue is tolerance, and the only philosophies that are wrong are those that believe in truth.

Evangelicals deny that they also think this way, but the facts undermine their denials. Recent polls by sociologists such as George Gallup, Jr., and George Barna show that the majority of evangelicals no longer believe in absolute truth. Seventy-six percent believe that human beings are, by nature, basically good. Eighty-six percent believe that, in salvation, “God helps those who help themselves.” Evangelicals used to be defined by their theology. But today they are increasingly defined by their style. They used to seek pastors who knew the Bible. Today they search for ministers with entertainment and management skills. They flock to dynamic pulpit personalities rather than to those who exhibit godly character.

In a recent article Gene E. Veith describes the impact of our postmodern times on two things: 1) the content of preaching and 2) the church growth movement:

In a “mega-shift” away from classic Protestant theology, many evangelicals are proclaiming a touchy-feely, therapeutic god who is light years away from the Holy One of Israel. This is a god of tolerance, who condemns no one and who can be reached by many different paths. Instead of the forgiveness of sins, the mega-shift preachers offer the gospel of a good self-image and earthly success through positive thinking.

Often accompanying mega-shift theology is the church growth movement, which seeks to build mega-churches by adjusting Christianity to the desires of the culture. Doctrine does not go over well in an age of relativism, so in order to attract new members, theological content must be minimized. Nor do people wish to hear about sin, so the church must cultivate an atmosphere of moral tolerance. Since people choose their religious beliefs not so much on the basis of whether they are true but whether they “like” the particular church, the life of the congregation must be made as pleasant and undemanding as possible. The exaltation of the pleasure-principle means that worship services above all must be entertaining. The exaltation of the will means that the customers must be given what they want.10

Some of these changes are unconscious, of course. But they are nonetheless serious and may eventually be fatal for those who have embraced them uncritically. How can we who are evangelicals decry the world when we are seemingly so hell-bent on imitating it? How can we denounce humanism when we are so blatantly man-centered ourselves?

The central reality for evangelicals, as for all others who name the name of Christ, is that Christianity is a religion of truth. It is based on certain facts of history that concern the revelation of God to his people and his salvation of those people by the work of his Son. Wherever that is forgotten or lost, as it is being lost in our day, Christianity ceases to remain truly Christian and becomes only another religiously oriented self-help program. Veith says rightly that Christianity thrives “not by trying to offer people what they already have, but by offering them what they desperately lack—namely, the Word of God and salvation through Jesus Christ.”11

THE ALLIANCE OF CONFESSING EVANGELICALS

Is the situation hopeless? Is there really any hope that the church will return to the gospel of grace? Some would say so. But nothing can ever be hopeless where God and his gospel are concerned. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is one organization that has been formed to address the situation. It began in 1994 when a group of leaders met to discuss the decline they were seeing in evangelicalism and to ask whether something might be done to revive the evangelical churches. After an informal meeting in Philadelphia in February of that year, a larger group of fifteen leaders met in September for a strategic planning conference in Orlando, Florida, where discussion of common concerns gave birth to this new effort. As noted in the preface to this book, the Alliance adopted the following mission statement:

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life.

The next step was to gather one hundred and twenty evangelical pastors, teachers, and leaders of parachurch organizations in Cambridge, Massachusetts (April 1996) to produce the “Cambridge Declaration.”12This declaration was the product of four days of meetings in which papers were presented on four subjects: “Our Dying Culture,” “The Truths of God’s Word,” “Repentance, Recovery and Confession,” and “The Reformation of the Church in Doctrine, Worship and Life.” The declaration, which flowed from the papers, argued that chief among the truths evangelicals need to recover are the great Reformation doctrines summarized by the well-known solas (Latin for “only” or “alone”): sola Scriptura, which means “Scripture alone”; solus Christus, which means “Christ alone”; sola gratia, which means “grace alone”; sola fide, which means “faith alone”; and soli Deo gloria, which means “glory to God alone.”

Some matters of theology and church government are debatable and will undoubtedly be so until Jesus comes again. This will be true even among the most biblical theologians and the most sincere believers. Moreover, most leaders recognize that not every-thing that is desirable for the church, including these debatable matters, however important some of them may be, is essential for the church’s survival. But these qualifications do not apply here. Without these five confessional statements—Scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and glory to God alone—we do not have a true church, and certainly not one that will survive for very long. For how can any church be a true and faithful church if it does not stand for Scripture alone, is not committed to a biblical gospel, and does not exist for God’s glory? A church without these convictions has ceased to be a true church, whatever else it may be.

1. Scripture alone. When the Reformers used the words sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”) they were expressing their concern for the Bible’s authority, and what they meant to say by those words is that the Bible alone is our ultimate authority—not the pope, not the church, not the traditions of the church or church councils, still less personal intimations or subjective feelings, but Scripture only. Other sources of authority may have an important role to play. Some are even established by God—such as the authority of church elders, the authority of the state, or the authority of parents over children. But Scripture alone is truly ultimate. Therefore, if any of these other authorities depart from Bible teaching, they are to be judged by the Bible and rejected.

Sola Scriptura has been called the formal principle of the Reformation, meaning that it stands at the very beginning and thus gives form or direction to all that Christians affirm as Christians. Evangelicals abandon sola Scriptura when they reinterpret the Bible to fit modern notions of reality or ignore it on the basis of supposed private divine revelations or leadings.

At the beginning of 1978, I became chairman of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, an organization that made an important contribution to evangelical thought. The inerrancy of the Bible is a critical doctrine. We were right to defend it and had some important successes in doing so. However, important as that matter was, I do not think the inerrancy of the Bible is the most important Scripture issue facing the church as we move into the early years of the third millennium. The issue I would pin-point today is the sufficiency