If your church is following the three year lectionary, Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10.  Officially, the pericope begins, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:20b–5:21, ESV) In light of the fact that he is addressing established Christians, what Paul is obviously driving at here is the ongoing need for even the most committed Christians to realign their lives with the will of God.  “Be reconciled” implies that these already-converted Christian believers are not in a conciliar state with God; in fact, Paul is addressing them for a third time precisely because while claiming Christian identity, they are behaving in ways inimical to God.

At a recent gathering of primarily conservative clergy, I got some hostility but engendered much more fantastic conversation when I brought up the danger of Christianity being coopted by conservative politics. In the end, everyone agreed that Christians need to be on God’s agenda first, offering critique as well as necessarily-conditional support to any ideology, political party or strategy. This is what it means to be “the light of the world” and the “salt of the earth.”

A wise mentor once told me that people’s politics are always influencing their theology, but that the great conversation that is the inner life of the church over time corrects—and when necessary, excises—the errors that people of any given time and place incorporate.  Because of the fractured nature of the Church’s communion and witness, amplified by social media, there is a real danger of these much-needed course corrections being significantly delayed or not even engaged in.

The solution to this is to heed Paul’s words to “be reconciled to God,” which is of course, what the season of Lent is all about. The difference between the orthodox Christian construal of these words and the progressive Christian one is that for the orthodox Christian, the Bible provides the content of what being reconciled to God looks like—a detailed road map for discerning where one’s life is out of sync with the life of the triune God.  Conversely, for the progressive Christian, the Bible provides abstract theological principles, but the content comes from elsewhere, sources deemed more relevant because they are more contemporary, scientific, progressive, or whatever.

The outcome of these two approaches is what yields at least some of the divisions observable in contemporary Christianity, where people united by confessional traditions like Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, etc. have radically different ideas of what makes for faithful Christian living.  While both agree for the need to reconcile ourselves to God, one group sees God as telling us what would constitute alignment with God, the other believes that God is “just” or “forgiving” or “love,” but asserts that what those words mean is not what Christians have traditionally thought they mean, based on the witness of Scripture.

What this means in practice is that the progressive Christian lacks any tool whereby to critique their own politically-influenced positions, for they have no data by which to evaluate them.  As long as the principles they have gleaned from Scripture seem to be met by the ideologies and morays acceptable within their own narrow cultural conditioning, they are living as God intends and no reconciliation is necessary. Conversely, for the orthodox Christian, while perceiving one’s own biases is always notoriously hard, the Scriptures provide actual canons against which to measure cultural assumptions and political prescriptions… and the exhortation to do so.

Paul goes on, “Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” It is important that we not consign the persistent warnings of the New Testament about spiritual disqualification to the dustbin based on our theological principles, no matter how venerable or new. We can receive the grace of God in vain, and only the lifetime of persistent Christian repentance (realignment) that Luther called for in the first article of the 95 Theses can stave off that terrifying reality. So, since we cannot hope to be perfected in theology, holiness, or piety, let us be perfected in repentance, and let the Scriptures dictate to us what that should look like… furthermore, let us start today. “For [God] says, ‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’ Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor 6:1–2, ESV)

 

In my last article I detailed a way you could tell that “Progressive Christianity” was in fact an alternative to Christianity, namely that it held different things sacrosanct and considered other things blasphemous than Christians have since Apostolic times.  This month I will note another way in which we can see this truth demonstrated—to whom and for whom progressive Christians feel responsible.

In a recent Core Christianity podcast, Pr. Adriel Sanchez detailed an encounter he had with a “progressive Christian” pastor.  According to Pr. Sanchez, this pastor (who goes unnamed in the broadcast) was the author of a book arguing that the Bible does not proscribe homosexual behavior and that the Church had used the classic prooftexts in this regard to abuse same-sex attracted people since its inception.  Since the pastor was a neighbor, Pr. Sanchez had acquired and read the book.  His critical evaluation was that the “way in which he was approaching the Scriptures was incorrect; that rather than just letting them speak for themselves and understanding them in their context, he was twisting them and allowing—essentially—the current cultural social ethic to drive his interpretation of the Bible.”

Nothing too radical here.  This kind of critique of another theologian has characterized necessary dialogue within the Church in every era, from Irenaeus to the present day, on issues as diverse as whether Christians can ethically serve in the military to the nature of Christ’s Deity.  Indeed, though Pr. Sanchez has the advantage of time since the incident and not being engaged in a debate while presenting his story, he shows no non-verbal animosity while presenting his critique.

When he happened to have a chance meeting with this author in a local coffee shop, it seems that the conversation he engaged was handled civilly, if coolly, until Pr. Sanchez challenged the author on an issue core to their identity as pastors rather than mere theologians, pastoral rebuke as an expression of spiritual care.  Pr. Sanchez asked him, “As a pastor, when you have someone in your church whom you believe is doing something that you do think is sinful—maybe they’re abusive to their spouse or maybe they’re stealing or whatever it might be—how do you confront them lovingly as a pastor while challenging the sinful behavior?”  At that point his interlocutor after a moment of apparent shock said, “I can’t believe you asked me that question.  That was an offensive question to ask me, and [essentially] you should be ashamed of yourself.”  When Pr. Sanchez then tried to explain that he really did want to understand the other pastor’s position, the supercilious author declaimed, “No; you need to understand that you are offensive, and you need to accept that… and this conversation is over.”  Upon which he stood up and left.

I do an extensive treatment of this episode in my own podcast, but to summarize my observations, the pastor who walked away from the conversation with Pr. Sanchez clearly did not feel accountable to him as a fellow clergyman or Christian, a member of the “One Holy Catholic [Universal] and Apostolic Church.”  The issue of how to deal with these texts is a lively issue throughout the worldwide Church with most Christians (read: non-Western Christians) siding with Pr. Sanchez, but the other pastor still presumed to speak to him as a person possessing authority over him; “you need to understand… you need to accept.”

In what hierarchy did the author of the book possess more authority than Pr. Sanchez?  Clearly not the hierarchy of the Church. To what community standards did this pastor feel accountable? Whose good opinion did he crave or perhaps fear losing? Again, not those of a Church whose existence preceded him and that will endure until Christ “comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”  Did he by walking away from a conversation with a fellow bearer of the name of Christ show love for him, reason together with him, or even engage him in the sort of loving rebuke Pr. Sanchez queried him about to such great offense?  Did he even from his own point of view show love for the same-sex attracted individuals whom Pr. Sanchez might encounter in the course of his ministry?

No, the community to which and for which this pastor felt accountable was clearly not the “beloved community” of those baptized into Christ, but rather defined in some other way.

Though they were heretics, Arius, Valentinus, and Pelagius knew that their primary accountability was to the Church of Jesus Christ.  Though history has judged them to be in error, they fought for what they seem to have sincerely believed was its good and perhaps even what was necessary for the salvation of its members.  Indeed, they garner the appellation “heretic” only because they so earnestly fought for and remain accountable to the life of the Church Herself—because they are at least erstwhile Christians.

I believe that Progressive Christianity functionally (if not formally) quickly ceases to be Christian in any historically recognizable way precisely because of what this pastor’s behavior demonstrated, that it considers itself—and more importantly, the Church’s proclamation—accountable to standards that originate outside the Church and people whose lives are lived beyond its bounds.

 

As a friendly commenter noted, my last article needed some serious editing. It is never good for me to find myself writing too close to a deadline; the result is always technically correct but dense, jargon-heavy prose that obscures what it seeks to clarify.  My apologies to all.

To restate succinctly what I was driving at in my last installment, in contrast to what any group might claim, we can tell what that group truly holds sacred on the one hand by what things, actions, and speech they extol and prescribe, and on the other, those at which they take offense.  Sacredness is defined for a group by what they revere and what they revile.  That which is prescribed constitutes the group’s dogmas or orthodoxy.  That which is proscribed or treated as blasphemous is like a photographic negative of the same thing, defining the sacred by contrasting it to its inverse, the profane.  This is a sociological and functional, not theological, definition of the sacred.

I ended my last article by saying, “Progressive Christianity quickly ceases to be formally Christian precisely because it holds different things to be sacred than does the Biblical, Apostolic faith … it represents a different religion, not a different way to be Christian.”

Though I differ with his work on many points, one thing that the enormously popular psychologist Jordan Peterson has helped me understand is that human thought is intrinsically and inescapably hierarchical.  Believing that we can actually think in a truly egalitarian manner is not merely logically, but neurologically incorrect; our brains could literally not handle the amount of incoming sensory data presented to it by the rest of our nervous system if it did not prioritize some information over others.  Thinking hierarchically is identical to thinking at all.

In a hierarchy, whatever occupies a higher position determines the relative value of everything beneath it.  Why in CPR training do they use the acronym “ABC”—airway, breathing, circulation—to anchor the care provider in the moment of crisis?  Because while the heart is needed to pump oxygen to the rest of the body, the lungs must be filled with oxygen before it can get to the heart, and the lungs can only be filled by artificial respiration if the airway is in turn clear.  The operation of that which is lower in the hierarchy is contingent upon the proper function of that which is higher.

What is true in an operational hierarchy is equally true in a conceptual hierarchy.  In fact, you can determine an idea’s place in a conceptual hierarchy precisely by identifying whether another idea is dependent upon or foundational to it.  Within a religious schema, this translates to what is holy, holier, or holiest.

While in seminary, one of my professors quoted one of his own graduate school mentors, lauding to us the sage wisdom that “your theology can never be any better than your anthropology.”  I made a phone call that afternoon to a mentor of my own, a double Ph.D. whose own generous but well-defined orthodoxy had catapulted him to a position of great responsibility in his own Christian tradition as an ecumenical theologian, to check whether my response was too reactionary.  “That,” he said, confirming my intuition in the carefully measured tone of voice I had come to associate with him at his scholarly best, “seems to me to be precisely backward.”

The sentiment commended by my professor placed humanity (or humanity’s assertions about God) above God’s revelatory self-disclosure.  In fact, its effect was to negate any possibility of the latter by placing humanity above God epistemologically.  This professor’s spouse, when presiding at the Eucharist during the final worship service I attended at that school, began the Lord’s Prayer with the unbiblical and self-congratulatory phrase, “Our father and mother in heaven.”  I refused to receive Communion that day not because her ego was out of control (the sins of the presider do not invalidate the grace of God) but because I was no longer sure it actually was the Eucharist, and that was because I was no longer sure the Christian God, the God that commanded His people to “have no other gods before Him,” was in fact being worshiped in that space.

If Christ is not “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), if it is not true that “if we have seen [Jesus], we have seen the Father” (John 14:9), and the Bible is not in fact a revelatory portrait of that Christ to us, something—in this case humanity—must replace the Triune God in the highest position within the religious hierarchy, whether historically Christian vocabulary is used to describe it or not.

By definition, that is some other religion than Christianity.

 

Although the appellation “woke”—used by Ricky Gervais to the Hollywood establishment at the Oscars as “insider” language just a few years ago—is eschewed by progressives now that cultural conservatives have fastened onto it and redeployed it as a demeaning epithet, its inception in progressive circles originally indicated a true stance of religious conversion that Christians should recognize.  As the Church year winds to its eschatologically focused close and begins the new year in Advent, both Jesus and John the Baptist exhort us to “wake” up to the reality of our spiritual situation. Such an awakening is at once a combination of intellectual recognition and a posture of preparation for incipient action. “Woke” originally meant to the true believer in progressive ideals much the same thing that “newly illumined” meant to the just baptized in the early Church; it signaled the passing of a liminal threshold and the adoption of such a substantially new interpretation of age-old data points and orientation to the challenges of life as to be only capturable in the proclamation of a new identity.

It is by now not particularly provocative or insightful to interpret the constellation of ideological commitments that goes variously by the names woke, postmodern, poststructuralism, or social justice as a religion, but it is helpful to explore why this is formally rather than merely experientially the case. If religion is defined sociologically as a set of communal behaviors rather than as a set of metaphysical beliefs or commitments (a hopelessly Western definition in any case), this progressive set of beliefs above-labeled clearly functions as a religion for its adherents.

Channeling the work of Émile Durkheim, Jonathan Haidt helpfully identifies the sociological characteristics of a religion. By designating something as “sacred” a group of disparate people can have a sense of unified identity. You know you are in the presence of a thing (or value system) that has been designated by a group as “sacred” when that thing must be defended at all costs from even ridiculous or accidental insults. “Jokes, insults, and utilitarian trade-offs” cannot be tolerated if they impugn the honor of the thing held sacred because they threaten the fundamental social cohesion of the group’s acolytes. When what is at stake is the sacred, blasphemy codes dictate the range of acceptable expression, and such cannot be challenged by rational objections.

In a lecture at Duke University,[1] Haidt identified six groups that are now identified as sacred in the social justice milieu: the “big three” of blacks, women, and LGBTQIA+ along with a secondary group deemed slightly less sacred consisting of Latinos, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and more recently, Muslims.  Comments or ideas that are deemed less than laudatory of people in these groups or their behavior are met not only with outrage but disgust, an emotional response whose purpose is to get us to avoid things that are potentially poisonous to us—contagions and pathogens.

I spoke in last issue’s article of not permitting the pain of a student in my care—very real pain for which I had genuine empathy and wanted to see healed—to colonize my theology, coming to exercise a controlling influence over it. Viruses colonize their host by hijacking the cell’s DNA reproduction system, turning its very system of replication and renewal to its own purposes. The reason why progressive Christianity quickly ceases to be Christianity at all is that the Church’s ministries of renewal and replication—catechesis and evangelism—are necessarily reemployed in service of the new objects that are, in fact, now deemed sacred.

In the case of progressive Christianity, the aforementioned victim groups replace the orthodox objects of worship (the Triune God, revealed by the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ) as the center around which the group’s identity revolves.  In the same way, the holy tasks of pursuing an amorphously defined and ever-mutating sense of justice for these sacred victims replaces the orthodox tasks of preaching the stories of Scripture and celebrating the Sacraments commanded by God’s Sacred Victim, as well as the repentance, conversion, and amendment of life according to the revealed will of God to which these lead. Progressive Christianity quickly ceases to be formally Christian precisely because it holds different things to be sacred than does the Biblical, Apostolic faith. I will have more to say on this in the next issue, but for now it is enough to note that it represents a different religion, not a different way to be Christian.

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[1] https://youtu.be/Gatn5ameRr8?si=5elvFmZJAPTJyapK

 

“What’s all this ‘Father’ stuff about in the Lord’s Prayer?  Why should we call God ‘Father,’ anyway?” she intoned petulantly, fixing me with a stare that clearly thought no reasonable answer was possible.  It was my first year in ministry.  I had converted to Christ but a year before and now found myself teaching Luther’s Small Catechism as part of my youth minister duties at a largish program-style Lutheran church.  From my undergraduate background in the arts and my wife’s current graduate school studies, I was utterly familiar with the post-structuralism that informed her question, but despite the self-consciously progressive, university-dominated atmosphere of the town I served, I was still shocked to hear the sentiment from the mouth of a seventh grader.

I would not be shocked today… not anywhere in the United States, let alone a college town.  “How do we know God is ‘Father?’” challenged the former PASTOR of one of my parishioners in an adult Sunday School forum.  Such pugnacious personalities litter the Christian landscape of the modern West, pseudo-intellectuals who, because they came across the concept of apophatic theology in seminary, now feel they can use it to undermine Scriptural authority and thence refashion the Christian faith in a manner more congenial to their modern WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) presuppositions and biases. 

In my last article I made the case that a specific, seemingly innocuous use of inclusive language for human beings had unexpected but potentially devastating side effects in the realm of pastoral care and Christian self-understanding.  Tinkering with Christ’s chosen address of God may have similar side effects.  Progressives like Rosemary Radford Reuther and Sally McFague purport to give us reasons we need not address God as Father.  Conservatives like Dennis Prager give us reasons we must. Still, it may well be that the question “Why should we call God ‘Father?’” may be like Job addressing God on the question of suffering, to which God responds in a way that lets Job know that he has no possible idea of full import of what he is asking—that Job lacks the capacity for God to respond in a meaningful way to such a question.  “Stop clucking in such a self-important way. You cannot possibly understand what is at play here.  Consider yourself blessed to know Me at all,” might be an apt summary of God’s speech in Job 38-41.  To address God in any other way than that revealed by God may have ripples that redound to the harm or even damnation of others and should so be avoided.

Which is why I believe that the answer that I gave the young lady mentioned above in my theological naivete is still the correct one; we call God “Father” because we are disciples—followers—of Christ, not His instructors.  If we think of Jesus as someone who merely cracked open a door on God that we can now wedge open a little wider by our own enlightened efforts, we misunderstand Him utterly as “the Word become flesh” who “dwelt” (in the Greek, skenoō or “tabernacled”) among us, who in my favorite modern translation “is in the bosom of the Father” and hence alone has the capacity to “make Him known.”

As time went on, I discovered that this young woman had good reason for negative associations with the word “father;” her own dad was an addict who had been emotionally and often physically absent until two years before when he had cleaned up and was endeavoring to “make good” in his role in her life, an effort she perceived as “pushy” and presumptuous.  What a privilege it was to teach her—as I hope I have taught my own daughter—that she has a Father in heaven who we earthly fathers can only hope to palely imitate as providers, nurturers, and self-sacrificing protectors. (Ephesians 3:14)

Had I let her indubitably real pain colonize—exercise a controlling influence—over my theology, she could never have found what I would later hear theologian Marva Dawn refer to as “the true liberation of being a woman who can without reservation call God ‘Father.’”

Grappling with Scripture as the revealed Word of God and the Apostolic faith that has informed that encounter has preserved such liberation—true liberation—for us all.

In my office hangs my ordination certificate.  Across it is emblazoned the name of the ordaining body, the body whose confessional commitments I pledged to uphold on the day I knelt and made my vows.  An adult convert to the Christian faith who settled in Lutheranism as the place where I would live out my “mere Christianity” after reading a church library copy of the Augsburg Confession, in the spring of 2016 I had served that denomination in various roles for twenty years.

This spring marks the eighth year since I called my bishop and informed him that I would be serving in a new church body.  Even as an adult convert, I know how painful the process is of leaving a church body you have called home; to cause further fracture to the Body of Christ, to disappoint My Lord by ensuring that His prayer that all His disciples might be one as I will become yet one more piece of living evidence of how little the truth of the gospel seems to change the lives of those who believe it, to serve at least in part as another stumbling block for people who—as did I at one point—hold the Christian faith in contempt, was an exquisite pain… I can only imagine how hard it is for a cradle member of a communion to make a similar choice.

In his classic study of what causes massive shifts in a mindset, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn details how it takes a superabundance of contrary evidence to get people to rethink their fundamental commitments, coining the terms paradigm and paradigm shift.  A paradigm shift, when it occurs, is more than a reordering of the furniture in one’s mental office or even changing offices due to corporate restructuring; it amounts to moving out of the building, watching that edifice be razed, and having a new foundation poured upon which you must tentatively build a new place from which to conduct your business.

It is for this reason that I am uncertain whether my decision to leave the ELCA represents a true paradigm shift or not.  In the words of a Roman Catholic mentor whose specialty was ecumenical theology, with whom I shared the pain of my process, “You aren’t leaving your church; your church is leaving you.”  Though hopefully my thinking has become more refined and nuanced, my fundamental commitments in some ways have not changed since I first knew myself to be a Christian in 1995 and a conscientious son of the Lutheran reformation by early 1996.

Yet once such a choice is made—the choice to leave the home that has nurtured you during your most formative years—once the evidence piles up so high that you cannot ignore it, you begin to rethink many things.  Aspects of your identity you thought unassailable become things you question.  Commitments you thought unshakable bedrock you begin to recognize as issues of secondary and sometimes tertiary importance… sometimes you come to know them as even detrimental to keeping the most fundamental commitments of all.

Such for me has been the issue of inclusive language in ministry, whether for God or people.  The sine qua non of both my undergraduate and graduate education, I have come to question not just its utility, but its very ability to communicate the Word of God, which in turn means its very ability to foster human flourishing… especially for women.

By the time I was being formed in seminary, the use of inclusive language for human beings was a matter of basic politeness and the use of such language for God became mandated as a “justice issue” while I was away from campus on internship.  My early training conditioned me to be okay with the former; indeed I had chosen to pursue ordination in the ELCA over the LCMS because of a precommitment to women’s ordination, a commitment I still hold but should not have then, before I could possibly know the Biblical or theological issues at stake.

My conviction in Christianity as a revealed religion prevented me from embracing inclusive language for God.  Because of an encounter with a cult in my early twenties, I have a sensitivity to when I am only being told one side of an argument, so the aggressive insistence on the agenda second-cum-third wave feminism and the lack of critical presentation of any other perspective set off a voice in my head: “Danger, Will Robinson… Danger!”  The special prominence of this in my liturgics class, where we failed to learn the rudiments of using The Minister’s Desk Edition, made me begin researching the best arguments on the other side.

I was surprised to often find these arguments to be robust rather than reactionary.  An honest reader could disagree with these arguments, but not accuse the writer of bad faith or barely disguised animus against women.  Particularly compelling was an article by Jesuit Paul Mankowski (who often wrote under the pen name Diogenes) entitled Jesus, Son of Humankind? The Necessary Failure of Inclusive-Language Translations, which I found in a now out-of-print journal.  (It is still available on the Touchstone magazine website for subscribers.[1])

There is one issue central to our salvation that inclusive language translations of the Bible obscure—even those translations that only use inclusive language for human beings, like the NRSV—that I have never seen referenced in any scholarly work, so I would like to address it briefly here.

“No one comes to the Father but by me,” says Jesus in one of our most beloved funeral readings (John 14:6), but how exactly does Jesus get us to the Father?  “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” joyously declares St. Paul. (Galatians 3:27)  Elsewhere he adds, “For if we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5)  We have been united with Jesus.

A robust Sacramental theology teaches us that as regards our eternal inheritance, this means that when the Father regards us, He sees Christ, with whom we have been united, and whom we have donned like a mantle.  In other words, He sees not Joe or Sally, merely created in the image of God however pious or penitent, but Jesus, His Son, God Himself, for Whom the entire realm of created reality and uncreated glory is the rightful inheritance.

What this means in contradiction to the polite niceties of post-Christian American cultural religion, each of us is, properly speaking, a child of God only when we share in the sonship of Jesus Christ through Baptism.  It is for this reason—not the misogynistic cultural baggage assumed by feminists of whatever wave—that St. Paul in his letters addresses both the male and female objects of his correspondence as “brothers.”  We are all brothers because we all through Holy Baptism share in the sonship of Jesus Christ.

Inclusive language translations that render St. Paul’s address as “brothers and sisters” obscure this important salvific truth, esteeming the demands of feminist-defined justice as greater than the actual Biblically depicted mechanism of salvation.  Further, it propagates its own fundamentally irreconcilable war between the sexes into the very “beloved community” that is to be the home of “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18), fomenting disunity in the Body of Christ. Under such conditions, the uniqueness of Christ as the way to God is necessarily veiled and universalism will proliferate to the loss of the evangelistic impulse.

I count this as a very serious way that the very inclusive language that is purported to be a justice issue for women actually does worse than underserve them; it may fail to call them to Christ and so be positively opposed to their ultimate interests.

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[1] https://touchstonemag.com/archives//article.php?id=14-08-033-f

As we entered 2022, and I faced the deadline for this article, I found myself struggling with what to write; what topic did I find compelling enough to spend time seriously reflecting upon?  What in the Church’s life was I passionate enough about at the moment that I thought I could add something substantive to Her discussion and deliberation?

Surprisingly for me, I had trouble identifying that thing.  Oh, sure, there was plenty that concerned me, problems around which my thoughts tend to eddy and swirl as I seek some pastoral, theological, philosophical, or practical understanding, strategy, or stance, but what was lacking was the passion that typically makes me put pen to paper — or hands to keyboard.

Passion… it is a word with a storied history in the Church.  In my first ecclesial job as a youth minister, our church’s youth ministry decorated the youth room wall with the words “Faith, Passion, Service.”  Upon visiting, a colleague commented, “Passion is something I think my youth already have plenty of… I’d think more about discouraging that.”

But the Church Fathers — the pastors during the Church’s greatest period of missionary expansion did not feel that way.  C. S. Lewis has introduced many modern Christians to the distinctions between the four Greek words for love through his book The Four Loves, and as a result, many Christians think of storge (affection), philos (friendship), and eros (infatuation with the beloved, not necessarily sexual) as immature or degenerate in comparison to the New Testament standard of agape, Christ’s own self-sacrificial love.

But this is not the way the Church Fathers spoke.  They spoke of God’s divine eros that burned for lost humanity so completely it agape’d the world enough to give His only Son… to give Himself.  Far from fearing passion, a Church whose largely convert members had drunk deeply of the wine of Roman success, who had tasted fruits imported from every corner of the conquered empire (now redubbed “the civilized world”), who had participated fully in the “good life,” the Pax Romana for which so many had given their lives in labor or battle, had come to realize that far from their passion being too great, it was too small.  This was a Church quite literally world-weary, who would have agreed whole-heartedly with Lewis when he preached in war time,

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”[1]

They would have agreed with this because they made a distinction that we post-enlightenment, postmodern, post-truth people, whatever our religious convictions, fail to make.  It has been noted by some that we represent “psychological man,” products of what Charles Taylor terms in his eponymous book A Secular Age.  We are people who, however we think of ourselves — straight or gay, cis-gendered or trans, conservative or progressive, believing or unbelieving, a sack of meat directed by selfish genes or made in the image of God — we are a people who almost ineluctably conceive of our identities as emerging from a murky subconscious that is fundamentally comprised of appetites. 

For us, love is almost always conceived of as downstream from appetites in which we are not fundamentally different from animals.  I have 1600 hours of C.P.E. to my credit, and I can tell you that while theological conversation is by no means absent from my cohort groups, it must always be respectfully conditional (to make room for disparate, even conflicting convictions), but the psychological theories that form the substance of our didactics are not so much deferred to as referenced in ways that establish their authority.  These theories, whether Freudian, Behavioral, Object-Relations, or of some other school, all stipulate appetite (conceived of as need) as fundamental and love as an experience later articulated on the basis of such.  Appetite is the water within which we swim, the air we breathe to nourish our sense of self.

This was forcibly brought home to me by my daughter when at age nine she ebulliently showed me one of her bug-eyed Beanie Baby stuffed animals.  After waxing eloquent about how much she loved it, she paused then thoughtfully added, “but you know, I’m pretty much programmed to feel this way about it because it has big eyes.  All mammals are programmed to respond to their babies that way.”  As she skipped back merrily to her play, I not only celebrated inwardly that somehow the brute biological “fact” had not diminished her childish joy, but marveled that this Christian homeschooled, thoroughly-churched girl without social media or unsupervised internet access had somehow been catechized so thoroughly by our culture’s tacit view of humanity… I hoped she would not later be seduced by its reductionism, the storge of a mother for her child diminished to mere genetic necessity.

The Great Tradition of the Church views humanity very differently, in a way that should not sit as peacefully alongside our modern biological and psychological conceptions, as it too often does. If we are truly made in the image of God, the template of our souls is not the paltry desire that modernity stipulates and Kierkegaard lamented.  Rather, what is fundamental to our identities is love — a divine eros that burns hotter than we can imagine, for “our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:29)

The ascetic tradition of the Church cautions us about passion, but in this, it does not mean the passion of love — any of the four loves about which Greek is so articulate in comparison to English.  Our elder brothers and sisters in the faith knew well from personal experience that appetite could easily obscure love as the prime mover of the soul, for it offered easier and immediate (albeit temporary and incomplete) satiation of the desire that is one of the many aspects of love.  Love desires the beloved, not as a possession but as simply its object, the sun around which it orbits.  A robustly Christian anthropology would see appetite as parasitically imitating love, seeking to consume or possess the thing or person desired, not as the foundation upon which rarified “conceptions” of love would later be built.

The seeds of ascetic Christian spirituality are already evident in 1 Corinthians. There the Apostle Paul states:

²⁴ Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. ²⁵ Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. ²⁶ So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. ²⁷ But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.[2]

We must not let the force of the Apostle’s words here be softened as I have heard too many well-meaning preachers do into weak-kneed warnings, back-handed reassurances that we might not “finish well.”  The salvation that is by grace through faith may be lost — we may be disqualified — if our appetites convince us that their satiation is the face God’s love takes for us, if our trust in them slowly but decisively supplants our faith in Christ.

The sexuality debates that have riven the Church of late should put a recognizable face on the process, at least for readers of this periodical, but I do not wish to direct this warning toward those who have appetites with which I do not struggle; I need this strong medicine myself, as the consumerism of our unbelieving culture’s annual Christmas bacchanal has brought into sharp focus for me.  I say, “brought into sharp focus,” because what I am seeing as I write this reflection is true of me all year around; though I call myself a Christian, though I believe I have faith, the shape of my life (which reflects the shape of my soul) is still largely formed by the unsanctified narratives of our cultural moment.  My life is far more driven by appetite than I would care to admit on most days.  I too often shop for new theological books rather than re-read those in my library whose arguments I have digested but whose wisdom eludes me in the daily practice of Christian discipleship.  I too often tune-in to pedagogic YouTube videos rather than practice my guitar.  I too often numb the pain of a day in which I have dealt with the tragic consequences of life in a world ruled by the power of death and the devil or the sinful choices of people who know better with a scotch or a mindless movie than with prayer and time with the Great Physician who alone can heal my infirmities.  Too often, my appetites direct my activity rather than my faith.

In that last sentence, I nearly wrote, “my appetites dictate my activity.”  The great hope we have — the promise of discipleship and evangelical freedom — is that I used the proper verb, and that with the help of the Holy Spirit, our history need not be our destiny.  To be sure, “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” but while we are bound, Christ is not and He may direct us differently.

I am coming to believe we focus so much on what we are saved from that we too often neglect what we are saved for.  The 2007 film Amazing Grace about the life of William Wilberforce begins with his motion to abolish slavery being defeated on the floor of the British Parliament because some of those who had promised to vote for it were given tickets to the Comic Opera by his opposition.  The modern equivalent would be binge-watching a Netflix series when, led by the Spirit through our faith, we should be praying, consoling someone, enjoying time with a friend, reading Scripture or similarly engaged.  How many key moments have each of us missed when, through Jesus Christ, God had a Spirit-led motion upon the floor of our lives?  Appetites distract, dim, and partially satisfy, making us forget — and so fail to enjoy — the promise of the freedom for which we were saved.

The acedia, the sloth, the deadly sin of passionless-ness with which I began this little reflection is a sign to me that I have been too much with my appetites, that they have been directing me in spiritually unhealthy ways, leading me to seek satisfaction too often on the penultimate rather than the ultimate.  I generally love the Christmas season, but this year for the first time I found myself discontent and eager for Twelfth Night to arrive so we could begin the process of undecorating.  This year, for the first time I understood in my bones the words of the twentieth century theologian who said, “the only time I don’t feel like a hypocrite is when I am in liturgy.”

The feast of Christmas is over, and I am ready for the fasting of Lent to begin, not because I cannot bear to feast, but so that the joy of feasting — dining with Our Lord — may return.

 

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

[2] 1 Corinthians 9:24–27 (ESV)

Sin, Justification, and Salvation: Critical Theory as Christ-less Christianity

Secular Christian Heresy

One of the more perplexing questions I received after writing my last article was, “Why do you call critical theory a secular Christian heresy?”  It was perplexing to me because I thought that was the burden of my whole article; I could see someone disagreeing with me and objecting, but not simply misunderstanding. 

To be clear in this article, let me say what I mean by secularized Christian heresy.  A heresy is simply unbalanced or incorrect teaching.  The word heresy means to pick and choose, so rather than accepting the full, robust teaching of the Holy Scriptures regarding this or that topic, they embrace some aspects of it and neglect others. 

So, to claim that Jesus was an inspired but perfectly human moral teacher is a heresy, not because Jesus is not an inspired, perfectly human moral teacher, but because teaching that alone neglects the other Biblical teaching that He is also the Word of God that “became flesh and dwelt among us,” (John 1:14) the eternal only-begotten Son of the Father, “the only God, who is at the Father’s side, [who] has made [God] known” because “No one has ever seen God.” (John 1:18) Both Jesus’ full humanity and absolute divinity must be proclaimed together for the Church to correctly articulate the Biblical teaching about who Jesus is.  Anything other, less, or partial is heresy.

Christian theology has many subcategories.  In addition to Christology (who Jesus is) just a few are soteriology (how we are saved), pneumatology (who the Holy Spirit is and how He functions), and the most difficult of all, Trinitarian theology (how we articulate who God is in Himself).  In each of these areas it is possible to fall into error by getting the doctrine wrong through omission, addition, or innovation; though some people would reserve the term heresy to errors in Christology and Trinitarian theology alone, the principle of heresy remains the same across all the theological categories, and I will use the term in that sense throughout this article.

Such theological categories are the common inheritance of everyone in the West, even those who forthrightly reject orthodox (correct) Christian teaching — though they may lament it being so, it is the inescapable cultural air a Westerner breathes.  A category of meaning like the fall from primordial human perfection was a controlling idea for philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas are experiencing a resurgence of influence today.  Though he explicitly rejected Christianity — especially its sexual ethics — Rousseau’s thought world was a distorted reflection of the Judeo-Christian story he was rejecting.  First, he gets the story wrong by claiming we can return to primordial perfection (Eden) without the ministrations of a divine Savior, as though an impassible flaming sword does not bar our way.  That makes his story heresy.  Then, he goes on to posit that there is no God at the root of our existence … at least not one of the personal, tendentious, interfering, judgmental sort depicted in the Bible.  That makes his story secular.  Rousseau’s view of the human predicament is a secular Christian heresy.

Critical theory too adopts categories of meaning from the Christian thought world that it sees as its opponent, makes key errors in the doctrines and then secularizes them in the same way Rousseau did, failing to recognize its debt to Christianity.

Sin

In classical Christianity, sin is not a problem for humanity, it is the problem.  “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” (Romans 5:12)  Sin separates eternally from God and as Genesis 3:7 makes plain, even before humanity becomes aware of the wedge sin drives between us and the divine, we are excruciatingly aware of the wedge it drives between us and the ones we love — Adam and Eve are no longer comfortable naked and vulnerable before one another and so begin to hide aspects of themselves from one another, the deeper and more ominous meaning of their crafting of makeshift loincloths.  Sin thus becomes the common inheritance of all humanity, for as psychologist Eric Berne noted, all people “play games” with one another, seeking to manipulate others for their own benefit; “all sin and fall short of the glory of God.” (Rom 3:23)

In critical theory, sin is not the common inheritance of all humanity, but the special purview of the oppressors.  Indeed, the oppressed is proclaimed to have a moral superiority over the oppressor, especially if the oppressor is unaware of their oppressive status.  Oppression in this case is not simply defined as an immoral, illegitimate exercise of power by one party over another, but rather any exercise of power by such a party, for all structures of authority (what sociologists refer to as dominance hierarchies) are defined as immoral because the goal is absolute equity.  Indeed, preferential attention is paid to language structures that make some people feel oppressed, even if legally and/or culturally they are not.  Thus, the married homosexual continues to be oppressed if people are permitted to express disagreement with their life choices because this may trigger doubt of some sort in them even though legally their marriage enjoys the same protections as a heterosexual one and the majority of people in the United States support gay marriage (at least civilly) and the great majority of all entertainment media lionizes their position. 

Support for and understanding of the political importance of the First Amendment is falling precipitously among Millennials precisely because they see free speech as a tool of oppression, for nobody should have to defend their choices and/or identity.  The political good of liberty, which presupposes that all people will have to live by the consequences of and when necessary defend their choices and sense of identity to people who disagree with them, has been demoted to a good of the second or third order if indeed it is a good; after all, why should anyone have to bear consequences — even natural ones — for their choices?  Aren’t consequences merely another form of limitation and potential chastisement and hence, oppression?

And so, for the critical theorist, just as sin is the problem for a Christian, so oppression is not a problem … it is the problem.  The division between oppressor and oppressed defines the sinner from the saint; in every interaction, it is the purview of the saint to speak, and the privilege of the sinner to listen.  Justice means the oppressed are properly the tutors, and the oppressors only rightly their students — willingly or unwillingly.

Justification

Having just passed Reformation Sunday, it must be acknowledged that from a generically Protestant perspective, the key doctrine of Christianity apart from the Hypostatic Union (Christology) and the Holy Trinity is the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith.  Martin Luther famously referred to it as the teaching whereby “the Church stands or falls.”

In its most simple terms, this doctrine might be summarized as follows; because human beings afford the infinitely high cost of sinning against the infinitely holy God  — “the wages of sin are death” (Rom 6:23) — Jesus picked up humanity’s paycheck when as a true human being He died without sin on the cross.  Because He was also true God, death could not hold Him, so He rose up alive again beyond the reach of death ever again — that is why the Church’s proclamation on Easter is not “Jesus has risen,” but rather “Jesus is risen;” he remains to this day beyond the reach of death.

Because of His unique status as the God-Man, Jesus alone could have accomplished this mission.  Since we cannot pick up the wages of our sin without perishing eternally, God offers us Jesus’ work to take care of our predicament as a gift; we call that grace.  Because we are not yet at the final judgment when God will proclaim us justified (upright in His presence or righteous) on account of Jesus’ saving work for us, we must accept Jesus’ work at this point in time as a pledge or promise in which we trust … a promise in which we have faith.  We are saved by grace through faith.

Thus, our uprightness in God’s presence is something of a legal fiction; we are not actually without sin and so deserving of eternal life, God just counts us as sinless because of Jesus, who is truly sinless.  Protestant theologians have classically referred to this as forensic (legal) justification.

Justification — being just — works similarly for the critical theorist.  While the oppressor-sinner can never be truly just (non-oppressive), she, he or zhe (gender neutral) can be declared just by renouncing their identity as oppressor and proclaiming themselves an ally.  If you have heard of undergraduates renouncing a seemingly immutable characteristic (their ethnicity, sex, family of origin, etc.) in order to claim the status of “ally” or their wholesale adoption of a new identity in a group who has garnered the social capital of “oppressed,” you have seen people proclaiming their religious conversion.  They have been “justified” as a gift from the group designated as oppressed, and although they can never be truly other than oppressor, they can accept the gift (grace) of their new “woke” or “ally” status by trusting — having faith in — the social contract that conferred it upon them.  Their persistent pleas for mercy as they seek further wokeness are direct parallels to the Christian life of continual repentance and pursuit of holiness, but they prostrate themselves not before God, but before the capricious, constantly-shifting social categories that new discoveries and definitions of “oppression” dictate.

Salvation

For the Christian, the fullness of salvation is a matter for an undetermined future date and can only be sketched in the loosest outlines, but what they know of it seems promising; Jesus spoke of it as being “like a wedding banquet” and apocalyptic and prophetic texts, beginning with the oldest book of the Bible, Job, refer to it as a time when “after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God,” (Job 19:26) and “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev 21:3–4)  When this shall happen is totally in God’s hands — “concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matt 24:36) — but that it shall happen is the fundamental hope of Christianity.

Equally so, for the adherent of critical theory, precisely when the hoped-for day of perfect inclusivity, equity, and diversity will arrive is unclear, for since oppression is defined by subjective experience rather than objectively-verifiable metrics, new “inequities” are always being “discovered.”  However, that it shall indeed come and that its coming will be glorious is a truth not to be questioned, for it is the prime motivator for all the efforts Herculean and pedestrian that give their day-to-day life shape and meaning.  Indeed, their participation in the process of ushering in this new age is reflective of not only the classical Christian struggle for sanctification, it is reflective of a peculiarly modern form of Evangelical Christianity which believes that God will not or cannot act until we “do our part” to usher in the longed-for future, such as learning how to harness our spiritual power in the Word of Faith movement or the building of a third temple in Jerusalem for many dispensationalists.

As Patrick Deneen has noted, progress toward a brighter, more glorious future is the great myth — the grand metanarrative — of Western secular Liberalism, a 300+ year project of which both modern conservatism and liberalism are a part.  When President Obama quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, saying, “the arc of history bends toward justice,” he was not expressing Dr. King’s Christ-based hope in the eschaton, but rather the conviction of secular Progressivism, which is the intellectual superstructure of Christianity wrenched from its historic and metaphysical foundations; it is Christ-less Christianity, and heretical Christ-less Christianity at that.

The Heretical Moves

How is it heretical?  First of all, it is so in its understanding of sin.  Just as some misguided forms of Evangelical Protestantism confuse sanctification with the claim that a relatively or completely sin-free life is possible following one’s conversion to Christ, so critical theory believes that through strenuous efforts at “wokeness” and externally-measurable equity that people can become relatively free of the sins of exclusivity and inequity as denominated in the more familiar constellation of sins like sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, white supremacy, etc.

Or perhaps such sinfulness may be conquered completely in a world where the education of the masses from womb to tomb is rigorously controlled by politicians, teachers, and CEO’s of multi-national communication and commerce companies who effectively operate beyond the regulatory bounds of sovereign nation states … if such leaders are catechized properly — and exclusively — by critical theorists, who have in true Enlightenment fashion, defined an intellectual space wherein they can operate free of the “sin” that haunts the great wash of humanity.

Orthodox Christian doctrine allows no such bifurcation of humanity into the (perhaps relatively) sin-free and the sinful.  There is a bifurcation inherent in Christianity, but it is between the redeemed and the unredeemed — those who trust in Christ’s work of salvation and those who do not.  Such trust includes both salvation and whatever holiness of life proceeds from faith, which are ultimately the work of the Triune God who creates, redeems, and makes us holy. 

People, believer and unbeliever alike, not only fail to, but are incapable of becoming sin-free by their own efforts.  “We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” go the familiar words of the Lutheran Book of Worship’s Brief Order of Confession and Forgiveness.  All human beings are both oppressed because they live under the yoke of sin and oppressor because they regularly and willingly collaborate with sin in the oppression of others around them for personal gain. 

The Orthodox Christian Alternative

There is literally no option for human beings to be radically free in Christian theology, something that the atheist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre understood far better than many self-identified Christian theologies, which are heretical on this point.  Redemption through faith in the gracious gift of God in Christ Jesus means moving from unwilling servility to sin (oppression) to willing servanthood to the Lord.  The self-aware and active disciple of Jesus is to be a “slave to righteousness:”

¹⁵ What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶ Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves,^[a] you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷ But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, ¹⁸ and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. ¹⁹ I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

²⁰ For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. ²¹ But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. ²² But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Romans 6:15-23)

Because this is reality, the actors who seek for themselves radical libertarian freedom will find themselves in the end to be merely a slave to sin, receiving as the reward for their quixotic quest unbeneficial fruits whose culmination (end) is death. 

Conversely, the Christian who willingly lays down his erstwhile “freedom,” which is really bondage to sin, chiefly taking the form of futilely trying to fulfill his disordered desires, finds in the end that every desire is in fact fulfilled as he learns to love the things that God loves, pursues the things God would have him pursue, and in the end receive for it “the unfading crown of glory.”(1 Peter 5:4) 

All this proceeds from the justification we have in Christ Jesus; it is “not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For [Christians] are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Eph 2:9–10)  Christians continue to be servants, but no longer of a cruel taskmaster who will in the end take everything from them, but rather for a gracious Lord who will in the end bestow everything upon them.

You see, sin is not just a problem — the problem — for human beings in the Christian telling of history, it is also a problem for God, for God’s great desire is for restored communion with His fallen creatures. (cf. John 3:16, Ezekiel 18:23, Mark 5:15, etc.)  In Jesus of Nazareth, “Christ crucified,” we are not to see a God so demanding and bloodthirsty that He required the death of His Son before He would allow errant sinners into the kingdom of heaven.  Rather, with a full and robust Christology, in the cross of Jesus Christ, we are to know God as the One who is so loving that He was willing to sacrifice Himself — experience the annihilation of death, which is utterly foreign to Him as the One whose deep and first revealed name is “I AM” — that we might have eternal life and restored communion with Him.

Evangelical Hope

In every critical respect — its understandings of sin, justification, and salvation — critical theory is a secularized form of Christian heresy.  While this means we must be on our guard not to drift into false teaching when dialoguing with its proponents as the Church of Jesus Christ, it is also a cause for hope.  Since our thought worlds are not so far apart, we may be able to give a winsome and persuasive witness to the gospel by doing what orthodox Christians do; we can confess the sins of which we are guilty, including our own slides into heresy.  We can help them understand the fatuousness of their account of sin and justification and point out that the categories of meaning they employ are quickly resulting in the opposite of paradise wherever they are or have been employed, that “the end of those things is death.”  Most importantly, we can tell them a far better story of sin, justification in Christ, and redemption, a story whose end is eternal life for those who will, in the immortal words of the Lutheran Reformers, through faith “grasp on to it.”

Editor’s Note: The first half of an article by Pr. Brett Jenkins was published as a single post in Lutheran CORE’s September 2020 newsletter. It can be viewed here. The new post below completes his full article, Part 1. However, stay tuned since Pr. Jenkins intends to write a series of articles on this vitally important topic.

One of my children’s favorite stories about St. Nicholas doesn’t involve reindeer, elves who want to be dentists, or even the notes “he” left them as children (in my wife’s handwriting since mine is illegible), but rather the story of his slapping the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea.  What could inspire this iconically irenic and generous personality to an act of personal violence that would get him thrown into the Emperor’s jail?

The answer: Arius’ loquacious, persistent, and falsely evangelical heresy.  Arius spilled much ink and preached many influential sermons to promote his false Christology.  He persistently lobbied other clerics to align with his innovative views and used all the ploys of “marketing” current in his day—including snappy jingles—to promote popular support for them.  His ideas were falsely evangelical precisely because far from being good news for fallen humanity—the news that in Christ God had truly become a human being and taken up humanity’s burden of restoring the communion with God lost in the fall—it was the proclamation that if human beings were really good like Jesus, God might deem to adopt them like He did Jesus.  Arius offered yet another moralistic prescription for an already hopelessly over-burdened humanity.  Nicholas slapped Arius not only because he loved Jesus, but precisely because he loved the world for which Christ died and more specifically the people to whom he preached and he would not see them bereft of the hope—and quite possibly the eternal life—that only the true gospel of Jesus Christ can confer.

The eschatological arc of Critical Theory (CT) is from oppression to liberation, but in CT liberation is defined very specifically as measurable equity between identifiable social groups.  (In its current iteration, the complete identification of the individual with their various identity groups is married uncomfortably and illogically to an atomistic view of the sovereign individual, but this is foreign to CT proper.)  According to CT, the equity that defines the “promised land” is always out of reach, because existence is defined by the struggle of oppressed against their oppressors; this is the fundamental social binary in Critical Theory.  According to CT, each new generation needs to battle afresh through the oppressive structures as they encounter them, and each identity group is locked into a Hobbesian war of all-against-all as they seek to define themselves as oppressed rather than oppressor, victim rather than villain.

Why define yourself as the oppressed victim?  Because, in the moral landscape of CT, the oppressed victim has more moral authority than the oppressor by virtue of their oppressed condition.  Because this is conferred by group membership apart from one’s personal volition, the only way for someone in a group identified as the oppressor to be “redeemed” is to self-consciously and publicly embrace the identification as oppressor and persistently reject the perceived values of that group.  This stance is called “wokeness,” because the postulant is “awake” enough to be aware of how they oppress others simply by their existence as a member of the oppressive group, whose values are only properly interpreted as nothing more than a veiled attempt to keep or grab power.

This is a false eschatology and it produces a false anthropology, the anthropology of the human being as nothing more than members of tribes locked in a never-ending battle—rhetorical and often physical—for an equity made unattainable by human nature and the very nature of life, which, as author Jared Diamond demonstrated years ago in his history Guns, Germs, and Steel, is always promoting new groups into the dominant “oppressor” role.

The True Social Binary

According to orthodox Biblical Christianity, there is a social binary to be found in humanity, but it is not fundamentally oppressor versus oppressed, though that may be found in human relations, and when it is, it is to be rectified, to which the Old Testament prophets persistently witnessed.  According to the New Testament, the human condition is defined by servitude.  All human beings are douloi—servants or slaves, depending on how you translate the word.  They are either slaves of sin, which is the natural condition into which human beings are born, or they are slaves of righteousness, which is a condition only brought about by God’s grace given in Jesus Christ.

The burden of Paul’s teaching in Romans 6 is that servitude is not an escapable condition through any amount of personal or political struggle.  Building upon the Sacramental union with Christ wrought for us in Holy Baptism and the attendant death of our necessary slavery to sin, St. Paul continues:

¹⁵ What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶ Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷ But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, ¹⁸ and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. ¹⁹ I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

²⁰ For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. ²¹ But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. ²² But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:15–23, ESV)

Verse 6:15 makes it clear that there is a continuing possibility that we can fail to live as though our Master is God, even though He has redeemed us (quite literally bought us back) from sin and is now the proper Master for us to serve.  Accordingly, we who have received the light of the gospel (the recently baptized were referred to as “the newly illumined” in the early Church) are in a position to know that we are ineluctably servants, “either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience [to God], which leads to righteousness.” (6:16)

Therefore, every human effort—the exercise of our best strength, power, and insight—will do nothing more than reveal to which power we are in thrall, establishing new injustices for ourselves and our descendants to deal with.  This insight is the source of the Lutheran Book of Worship’s beautiful prayer, “We confess that are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”  Our persistent sin, which the prayer is meant to unveil to us, is itself the evidence that while we have been claimed by God’s grace in Jesus Christ so that we might “present our members as slaves to righteousness” (6:19), we prefer our old master sin, and keep returning to his service, despite the fact that we know the wages of doing so are death. (6:23)

According to the Biblical account, human effort not self-consciously springing from obedience “from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed” (Romans 6:17)—the standard of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels and exposited further in the canonical New Testament—can hope to do nothing more than redistribute sinful inequity and injustice, not eliminate it.  For any ideas, communication, or deeds that do not spring directly from our slavery to God necessarily come from our slavery to sin, “which leads to death.” (6:16)

Slave to God and His righteousness or slave to sin and its attendant, death?  That is the only true social binary recognized in Scripture.

Syncretism Breeds Heresy

Nicholas hated heresy because it immediately threatened the world and his flock with hopelessness and in time threatened them with damnation.  But where did such heresy come from?  Largely, the heresies that wracked the early Church came from trying to use philosophical and metaphysical constructs endemic to the Mediterranean basin to understand Who Christ was or apply Christ’s teachings in that cultural context—constructs whose unexamined assumptions were in whole or in part incompatible with those of the gospel.  It took the work of great theologians like Irenaeus and the Cappadocian Fathers Gregory, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus as well as the campaigning of churchmen like Athanasius to uncover and help others understand the violence these foreign ideologies did to the gospel of God.

The rough worldview provided by Critical Theory is as follows: our origin is that we are the product of millions of years of merciless “survival of the fittest” wherein our participation in “nature red in tooth and claw” left our ancestors standing as the bloodstained victors with the dead piled around their feet.  Some groups were more bloodstained than others, however, and they can be distinguished by the fact they are privileged by the power structures of contemporary society; like it or not, their heels are upon the necks of those whom their ancestors didn’t outright kill.  The greater guilt of the dominant group means that those of less privilege and power are by definition possessed of more moral authority.  It is the destiny of humanity to fight an endless battle between oppressed and oppressor until equity is achieved, and consequently it is the moral obligation of all people to either rise against their oppressors or renounce their power until equity—the only morally acceptable condition for human society—is achieved.  This is the meaning of human life.

By contrast, Christianity says that the origin of humanity is the creative activity of the good and sovereign God, who makes humanity in His own image.  Because of sin, humanity finds itself in a condition fundamentally different from that for which they were created.  Now all of humanity live as slaves under the foreign master of sin rather than under the dominion of their good Creator.  To relieve this intolerable situation, God married divinity to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ so that Jesus could collect the wages of our sin (death) and so buy us back to be servants in His own kingdom once again.  The destiny of humanity is hence to live eternally under the dominion of sin or the dominion of God.  This means that what is moral is defined as living as an obedient servant of our proper, legal master God rather than returning to our slavery under sin, which brings us and those around us death.  The meaning of human life hence is becoming fully alive by truly leaving the service of the sin whose fruit is death and being restored to the life of willing obedience to God for which we were created; in the memorable phraseology of the Westminster Catechism, “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

It is unlikely that a single high-profile legal trial will bring our culture to focus on the differences between secular and Christian accounts of human destiny in the same way that the Scopes’ Monkey Trial made us do so for human origins, however, lots of smaller trials are already doing so.  The Supreme Court decisions that have wrought such rapid, monumental, and, for orthodox Christians, challenging cultural changes in our society around the issues of human sexuality have had everything to do with the loss of this sense of human destiny.  They point to the eclipse or deliberate abandonment of a sense that there is an inherent point to the human creature.  That a culture possessed of more (and more widespread) wealth and leisure than any other in history should come to construe marriage as primarily one more means to personal self-fulfillment is perhaps not surprising.  That a great number of people cannot even perceive what generations of both religious and non-religious people took as obvious—the obvious physical complementarity of the sexes as a clue to the meaning of marriage—means we are terrifyingly untethered from reality.  Recent SCOTUS rulings even declare that objectively verifiable biological sex is less “real” in a legal sense than one’s self-ascribed “gender.”  This is the instantiation in law of the idea that nothing should define humanity but human will—that there is biologically and metaphysically no essentially human destiny—theologically speaking, no eschatology.

The origin, destiny, meaning, and morality of humanity proposed by Critical Theory—its anthropology—is wholly at variance with that of orthodox, Biblical Christianity.  Any attempt to syncretize CT with the gospel of Jesus Christ within the Church will necessarily result in the corruption of one or more of the non-negotiables of the Biblical story, producing heresy that will endanger the very souls it purports to serve, breeding the lawlessness that sin always does, and obscuring, if not obliterating completely, the gospel of the only Son of God, whose is the only name under heaven whereby we must be saved.  In the final analysis, Critical Theory and its daughter Critical Race Theory must be rejected by Christians as a possible path to justice because they hopelessly compromise the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ and the world She is called to be for though She can never be of it.

To view the first post in Pr. Jenkin’s two-post article, click on the button below.

Editor’s Note: The conclusion of this article will be published in a second post on or about September 18, 2020.

Critical Theory—in particular, Critical Race Theory—has recently captured the Church’s attention, and in some corners of the Lord’s vineyard it seems, more significantly, Her imagination.  (For those unfamiliar with Critical Theory, this article will serve as a necessarily incomplete introduction.)  Springing from the same philosophers and theorists (Foucault, Derrida, etc.) who brought us postmodernism, Critical Theory seems to be suddenly taking the whole Western world by storm.

This is an illusion.  Though all but Liberal Arts majors would likely be unfamiliar with the Frankfurt School or even the phrase “Critical Theory,” everyone who has received an undergraduate education in the last thirty years has been familiarized with (and in many cases, indoctrinated into) its basic terminology and the categories of meaning by which it makes sense of the world.  For instance, for every one of my acquaintance at my own undergraduate alma mater of Penn State, the obligatory “professional writing” requirement for non-English majors was used by the professors as an opportunity to force-feed undergraduates Critical Theory.  As an example, a business writing class for music majors taught participants to write personal reflections on books like Stone Butch Blues, a lesbian coming of age story, instead of memos, letters to parents, and departmental requisitions.  Even if you think the exposure salutary, it demonstrates the tactics of Critical Theory, which, as its exponents readily affirm, “contains an activist dimension. It tries to not only understand our social situation but to change it, setting out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies but to transform it for the better.”[1]

Solid introductions to Critical Theory by both its proponents and opponents are now widely available, and I encourage the reader to consult at least one of each to familiarize themselves with its outlines; otherwise, as commentator Phil Blair demonstrated in his response to a recent Christianity Today article, we may find ourselves employing it unbeknownst to ourselves.

Heresy

Though articles abound that are critical of Critical Theory (hereafter referred to as CT) from a Christian perspective, as mine is, I hope to explore the topic from an at least slightly different perspective; I propose that while CT may properly diagnose some elements of our cultural ills, it necessarily misaddresses these maladies because it is in fact a secularized Christian heresy.

The Critic Is Often Right About What Is Wrong, But He Is Nearly Always Wrong About What Would Be Right.

I want to start by acknowledging what CT—and progressive ideologies more generally—often get right.  One of the functions of the people in a society that are typically deemed “liberal,” “left,” or “progressive” is to point out injustices when they accumulate.  Any meritocracy (where achievement or talent is rewarded with social and/or economic upward mobility) periodically and predictably accumulates inequity and unfairness at its margins.  At a biological level, talent and giftedness are inborn traits that often run in families.  Sociologically, families pass on habits and knowledge that maximize (or minimize) inherent capacities for greater achievement and reward.  The greatest patrimony that a family passes on in a meritocracy is not their wealth—though that certainly has undeniable advantages—but rather their knowledge and skills in accessing or leveraging the power structures of the meritocracy.

This does not mean that a meritocracy is inherently immoral. (What would we want, a system where lack of talent, industry, and skill is rewarded?) But it does mean that for all the good it may produce, it is a system that can put real people at a real disadvantage in accessing the social and economic rewards deemed legitimate by the value system at its foundation; it is a system that needs a watchdog that calls for course corrections when the process whereby “the rising tide that lifts all boats” creates eddies and riptides that prevent people from weighing anchor and setting sail.

In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt contends that in the same way all the complex flavors of the world’s cuisines are composed of the tongue’s four basic tasting capacities—sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—the great diversity of moralities to which people ascribe are woven from the five basic “cognitive modules” with which we define and evaluate morality and justice.  Defined in terms of their antipodes, these modules are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  Haidt names this Moral Foundations Theory.

One need not agree with Haidt’s thesis about the origins of these cognitive modules to see their utility as an interpretive grid.  In analyzing the political application of the theory, Haidt, who identifies himself as a liberal, discovered that those who measured as the most “liberal” registered highly in the care/harm and fairness/cheating categories but little to not at all in the other three.  Though caring and fairness were also the dominant categories for those who registered as the most “conservative,” people with these political leanings showed a near convergence with the other three concerns of loyalty, authority, and sanctity:

What this means is that if it seems that the proponents of Critical Theory are “tone deaf” to some of the moral concerns expressed by other, more “conservative” people, it is because they are.  For the “liberal” adherent of CT, the mere presence of inequity is all the proof needed that injustice is occurring.  Questions of whether people have demonstrated the social virtues of developing skills (that is, demonstrating loyalty to the system’s values) are largely not considered, or if they are, the need to do so is defined as part of the oppression inherent in “the system.”  Likewise, the need to “pay one’s dues,” which recognizes the system’s authority, is construed as more evidence of injustice rather than a period of necessary apprenticeship during which there is predicted inequity between those who have acquired the sought-after skills and resources and those currently acquiring them.  Finally, the need to exhibit sustained effort with or without immediate reward—the most sanctified value in a meritocracy—is despised most of all as the mechanism of systemic injustice because, although such effort generally yields overall improvement in the socio-economic position of a given class of people, there is no guarantee in any particular instance that the effort so exerted will result necessarily in equity.  The moral concerns of three of the five moral cognitive modules are not only temporarily bracketed to focus analysis on the issue of fairness, for the “liberal,” they quite literally do not register as things worthy of assessment and for the critical theorist, they are merely attempts to obfuscate the real issue, which is measurable equity.

Moreover, the proponent of Critical Theory does not need to provide measurable criteria whereby to evaluate the claims of their analysis.  The existence of the inequity natural to and predicted by a system that rewards merit is the prima facie evidence that revolution is needed.  Whether the proposed system could actually create the desired equity and whether that equity would be balanced with other moral concerns  (everyone living in social and/or economic squalor is, after all, a type of equality) need not be seriously contemplated, because the only value in view is equity, which is defined as fairness that provides the necessary care for everybody.

This is how these critics can be right about what is wrong (that is, in Critical Race Theory, the form of CT most affecting the life of the Church at present, racial inequities), but so wrong about what would put these wrongs right; their theories are not based upon a morality with a complex enough palate, capable of fine enough distinctions.

Eschatology and Anthropology

This is also in part why Critical Theory is a comprehensive worldview; in merely noting inequity, it believes that it has accounted for all the most significant moral variables—the only ones that count.  It must then flatten all human experience into the narrow interpretive grid it deems the only valid one.

Four Fundamental Questions

The late Ravi Zacharias helpfully delineated at least four fundamental questions of human life to which any worldview must propose an answer: human origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.  Because of the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” the issue of origins has dominated the intellectual landscape of the Western Church for the last 100 or so years.  First, it dominated the popular imagination as “yet another case” of backward religionists resisting reason’s inevitable march of progress in accord with the Enlightenment’s self-narration.  (Yes, this was first. Scopes deliberately implicated himself so that a trial would need to be held and Darrow deliberately had the trial played out by a sympathetic urbane media in the court of public opinion as part of his legal strategy.)  The attempts to condemn Intelligent Design as veiled religious dogma are the intellectual descendants of that controversy.  Secondly, it precipitated a growing crisis within the Church between Fundamentalists and Modernists, who believed a dating of the age of the earth to greater than 7,000 years was congruent with orthodox Biblical interpretation.  The inheritors of that dispute are the Young Earth versus Old Earth Creationist debates of today.[2] 

“Your theology can never be better than your anthropology,” was one of the favorite axioms my Prophets professor in seminary passed on to us from his mentor.  Of course, being self-consciously orthodox, I thought that axiom got it exactly backward; our theology—specifically our Christology and soteriology—necessarily defines our understanding of human nature, so our anthropology can never be better than our theology.

Unfortunately, the Western Church’s obsession with origins has led to a relative neglect of the way our understanding of who Jesus is and what salvation fully entails informs our understanding of what human beings are (our meaning), how we should live (our morality), and our purpose or telos (our destiny).  The preaching of Jesus predominantly as life coach, social activist, friend of sinners, prophetic preacher, social reformer or even atoning sacrifice for sinners, has led to the neglect of the consistent preaching of Jesus as the God-Man or Theanthropos, a new species in God’s economy of salvation.[3]  “God became man that man might become [like] God,” exulted Irenaeus of Lyons in his second century classic Against Heresies, going on to declare as the soteriological significance of that teaching that “the glory of God is a [hu]man fully alive.”

Great Tradition Christianity proclaims that the ultimate destiny of redeemed humanity is not merely to avoid hell (Jesus as the cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card) or to emulate Jesus as the finest example of a fully self-realized or perfectly moral human person, but rather to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).  Through our Sacramental union with Jesus, who was fully God and fully human, by faith in His promises, we are drawn into the perichoretic inner life of the Godhead, the most Holy Trinity.  As the Theanthropos, Jesus is the “firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29), not the only-born to be admired and worshipped, but whose life remains fundamentally distant from our own.

This teaching about the implications of salvation through Christ for our destiny as human beings thoroughly conditions and shapes all other elements of our theology.  In other words, remembering the fullness of our destiny as human beings in Christ has far more impact on our understanding of what is the meaning of human life and the morality by which it is to be lived than our understanding of our origins.

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[1] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. (New York: New York University Press, 2017), page 8.

[2] If you speak the first article of the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed without crossing your fingers, you are a creationist of one stripe or the other; it is important that non-fundamentalist Christians be absolutely clear on this point and think through the consequences of that position as distinct from a functional Deism.

[3] Justification by grace through faith—forensic justification—may indeed be the doctrine upon which the Church stands or falls as Martin Luther declared, but it was never meant to be preached denuded of the very Christology that makes it so powerful and poignant.