Protestant subtraction

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” of secularism. A subtraction account describes secularism as simply removing, say, belief in God from the equation; hence, a secular age is the same world minus outmoded ideas about an all-powerful man in the sky. Against this, Taylor argues that secularism is in fact the proposal of something positive, something new and substantive that was not there before—regardless of its truth.

Now apply the concept of subtraction to the story of Christian division over the centuries. I first thought of the following exercise as “playing the Protestant game.” Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who believe, usually explicitly, that most of what the church did and taught from the apostolic fathers through the eighteenth or nineteenth century was erroneous. Here in west Texas, that’s still true. Sometimes this view is made out to be allied to the reformations of the sixteenth century, though typically in ignorance of the fact that, for example, the magisterial reformers did not abolish creeds or infant baptism or ordination or Christian government or other phenomena low-church American evangelicals take for granted as capital-C “Catholic” (and therefore bad).

At the same time, there seems to be a creeping openness among these very people to more and more of “the tradition”: to the church calendar, to saints and monks, to sacramental practice, to creeds and councils, to patristic and even medieval wisdom. This is part of the “loosening” I’ve identified before, which is non-ideological and thus works in every which direction—sometimes toward reclaiming sacred tradition, sometimes toward pursuing charismatic gifts, sometimes toward relaxing social conventions (regarding alcohol or gambling, for example), sometimes toward liberalizing long-standing teachings (regarding sex or male ordination, for example). There’s no one way this loosening is happening. Much is being shaken at the moment; how things will settle won’t be clear for decades, or so it seems to me.

But return to the notion of subtraction. Below I have formulated a list of fifty doctrines or practices that were more or less universally accepted and established by the time of the late middle ages. Many of them underwent serious development in the medieval period; most of them have roots in the church fathers; some of them are basically present in toto before Nicaea. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that the list is just “whatever the church believed from 100 to 1500”—though parts of the list do fit that bill. It would be fair to say that all, or nearly all, of these things described the church just before the Great Schism, and that all, or nearly all, of them continue to describe the faith and piety of two-thirds of the global church today.

So here is the exercise. Ask yourself: When do you hop off the train? When do you say, Yes, I reject items x through y, but no more from here on out? And what is the logic that informs your decision? Is that logic disciplined? arbitrary? a matter of preference? a matter of upbringing? of local social convention? Are there concrete, nonnegotiable biblical or theological reasons to hold back your Christian neighbor from striking through the next item on the list—or the next ten?

Let’s say that the Orthodox have questions about the first three items and that the Anglicans, at least the higher-church among them, have modest questions about a handful (but no more) in the first twenty. Say that, depending on whom you ask, Lutherans and Calvinists want to reject the first twenty to thirty (maybe thirty-five) items on the list. Say that American evangelicals are uncomfortable with every item through forty-five. Say that primitivists and restorationists have more than occasionally set a question mark next to forty-six and forty-seven, and that Protestant liberals have done the same for the final three items.

Where do you stand? Where does your church? Where does your tradition? Why? And, perhaps most important, what is the doctrine of divine providence, wedded to what doctrine of the church, that makes sense of God’s people having gotten so much so wrong for so long? What else have Christians gotten wrong over the millennia? How can we know? Is there a limit?

And if, as I’m less than subtly wanting to suggest, this sort of indefinite unrolling logic of subtraction is neither wise nor defensible; and if, as I mentioned earlier, there is a spiritual hunger behind the “loosening” we are witnessing, a hunger for unwinding these subtractions in favor of reclaiming what was lost—then what should be reclaimed, and on what basis? Call this last query an exercise in addition, even in restoration.

But I digress. Here’s the list. See what you make of it.

1. Papal supremacy

2. Roman primacy

3. Purgatory

4. Intercession of saints

5. Canonization of saints

6. Intercession of Mary

7. Veneration of Mary

8. Mary as Theotokos

9. Icons

10. Relics

11. Holy sites

12. Monasticism

13. Vowed celibacy

14. Vowed poverty

15. Masses for the dead

16. Private masses

17. The Mass

18. Eucharistic transubstantiation

19. Eucharistic adoration

20. Eucharistic change

21. Eucharistic real presence

22. “Deutero-canonical” books

23. Priestly absolution

24. Priests

25. Bishops

26. The sacrament of holy orders

27. The sacrament of marriage

28. The magisterium

29. Dogma

30. Signs and wonders

31. Miraculous healings

32. Exorcisms

33. Baptismal regeneration

34. Confirmation/chrismation

35. Infant baptism

36. Sacred tradition

37. Liturgical calendar

38. Creeds

39. Extra-congregational polity

40. Ordination

41. Liturgical order

42. Baptismal efficacy

43. Eucharistic presence

44. Regular observance of the Eucharist

45. The necessity of baptism

46. The doctrine of the Trinity

47. The divinity of Jesus

48. The inerrancy of Scripture

49. The infallibility of Scripture

50. The indissolubility of marriage

Jenson on catechesis for our time

I’ve done my best to read everything Robert Jenson ever wrote, but he was so prolific that I regularly stumble onto something I’ve never seen before (or, at least, have no memory of reading). The latest is an essay on catechesis.

It comes from a 1999 volume that Jenson and Carl Braaten co-edited, titled Marks of the Body of Christ. It consists of essays by a wide range of ecumenical scholars on Luther’s so-called seven marks of the church: the word of God, the sacraments, the office of the keys, the pastoral office, the holy cross, and the liturgy. The volume interprets the cross as discipleship and the liturgy as catechesis, since Luther uses the latter term to pick out the Creed, the Decalogue, and the Lord’s Prayer as central to the church’s public worship of God.

Jenson’s essay is called “Catechesis for Our Time.” It’s a barnburner. If I could, I would republish the entirety below. Since I can’t, I’ll limit myself to quoting some of the juiciest excerpts.

Jenson, for readers unfamiliar with him, was born in 1930 and died in 2017. He was a polymath, a Midwesterner, a Lutheran, and German-trained. He was deeply involved in international ecumenical dialogues throughout his career and taught at a variety of institutions. He remained an ordained Lutheran all his life, but was deeply catholic in piety, liturgy, doctrine, and ecclesial sensibility. He was an astute observer of late modern culture in all its permutations and depredations.

Here’s how the essay begins:

I began teaching in 1955, in a liberal arts college of the church. My students were mostly fresh from active participation in their home town Protestant congregations. In those days, I and others like me re­garded it as our duty, precisely for the sake of students’ faith, to loosen them up a bit. They had been drilled in standard doctrine — Jesus is the Son of God, God is triune but what that means is a mystery, heaven is the reward of a good life — to the point of insensibility to the gospel itself.

In 1966 I left undergraduate teaching. Then just 23 years later, I re­turned to teach at a similar churchly liberal arts college. My students were again mostly fresh from active participation in Protestant congre­gations — though now with more Catholics mixed in. During those years, the situation exactly reversed itself.

It is now my duty to inform these young Christians that, e.g., there once was a man named Abraham who had an interesting life, that then there was Moses and that he came before Jesus, that Jesus was a Jew who is thought by some to be risen from the dead, that there are command­ments claiming to be from God, and that they frown on fornication and such, and other like matters.

Well hello there, shock of recognition. It’s always good to be reminded that Protestant liberalism comes for everyone; evangelicals are not immune, they just lag the mainline by a couple generations.

Jenson comments on the development of the catechumenate and the logic that lay behind it. He writes:

[Following the initial apostolic generations] the church needed and was granted institutions that could sustain her faithfulness within continuing history. So the canon of Scripture emerged, and the episcopate in local succession, and creeds and rules of faith. And so also an instructional institution arose, situated between conversion and baptism.

For it was the experience of the church, after a bit of time had passed in which to have experience, that baptism and subsequent life in the litur­gical and moral life of the church, if granted immediately upon hearing and affirming the gospel, were too great a shock for spiritual health. Life in the church was just too different from life out of the church, for people to tolerate the transfer without some preparation.

Converts were used to religious cults that had little moral content, that centered often on bloody sacrifice, and that were oriented — as we might now put it — to the “religious needs” of the worshiper. They were entering a cult oriented not to their religious needs but to the mandates of a particular and highly opinionated God. They were entering a cult cen­tered around an unbloody and therefore nearly incomprehensible sacri­fice. And most disorienting of all, they were entering a cult that made ex­plicit moral demands. They needed to be coached and rehearsed in all that, if their conversion was to be sustainable.

Catechesis therefore involves a comprehensive instruction in three areas of life: worship, ethics, and doctrine. Here’s how Jenson puts it:

Thus they needed to study, for a first thing, liturgics, that is, how to do these Christian things, so different from what could appeal to their exist­ing habits and tastes. And they needed to be instructed in how to under­stand what they were doing.

And then there were those moral demands. Christian heads of household were not supposed to treat their wives as subjects, and both husband and wife were supposed to be sexually faithful — for converts from late-antique society such puritanism was a shocking violation of nature. More amazingly yet, Christian parents did not get rid of inconvenient children, not even of unborn ones. The list went on and on of things that converts’ previous society regarded as rights, that the church regarded as sins. If converts were to stand up under all these infringements on their personal pursuits of happiness, they needed some time under the care of moral instructors and indeed of watchful moral disciplinarians.

And then there were those creeds and doctrines. New converts were used to religions with little specificity, and so with little intellectual con­tent. You were expected to worship Osiris in Egypt and the Great Mother in Asia Minor and Dionysus in Greece, and all of them and a hundred oth­ers simultaneously in Rome, and if the theologies of these deities could not all be simultaneously true, no matter, since you were not anyway expected to take their myths seriously as knowledge. For a relatively trivial but historically pivotal case: Did you have to think that the notorious lunatic Caligula was in fact divine? Not really, just so long as you burnt the pinch of incense.

But with the Lord, the Father of Jesus, things were different. He in­sisted that you worship him exclusively or not at all. And that imposed a cognitive task: if you were to worship the Lord exclusively, you had to know who he is, you had to make identifying statements about him and intend these as statements of fact. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Caesar or Alexander, the Lord had led Israel from Egypt and what that meant for the world. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Tiberius one of his deputies had crucified an Israelite named Jesus and what that in sheer bloody fact meant for the world. You had to learn that this Jesus was raised from the dead, and try to figure out where he might now be located. It was a terrible shock for the religious inclusivists and expressivists recruited from declining antiquity. There was a whole li­brary of texts to be studied and conceptual distinctions to be made, if new converts were in the long run to resist their culturally ingrained inclusivism and relativism.

Catechesis was born as the instruction needed to bring people from their normal religious communities to an abnormal one. That is, it was born as liturgical rehearsal and interpretation, moral correction, and in­struction in a specific theology. Apart from need for these things, it is not apparent that the church would have had to instruct at all.

One more excerpt, this time about what it means for the church to catechize the baptized for liturgical participation in a post-Christendom cultural context, in light of the temptation to water down or eliminate what makes her worship unique, which is to say, Christian:

Instead of perverting her essential rites, the church must catechize. She must rehearse her would-be members in the liturgies, fake them through them step by step, showing how the bits hang together, and teach­ing them how to say or sing or dance them. And she must show them wherein these rites are blessings and not legal impositions.

Nor does it stop with the minimal mandates of Scripture. The church, like every living community, has her own interior culture, built up during the centuries of her history. That is, the acts of proclamation and baptism and eucharist are in fact embedded in a continuous tradition of ritual and diction and music and iconography and interpretation, which constitutes a churchly culture in fact thicker and more specific than any national or ethnic culture.

Now of course this tradition might have been different than it is. If the church’s first missionary successes had taken her more south than west, her music and architecture and diction and so on would surely have devel­oped differently. And in the next century, when the center of the church’s life will probably indeed be south of its original concentration, the church’s culture will continue to develop, and in ways that cannot now be predicted. But within Christianity, what might have been is beside the point; contingency is for Christianity the very principle of meaning; it is what in fact has happened — that might not have happened — that is God’s history with us, and so the very reality of God and of us.

We are not, therefore, permitted simply to shuck off chant and cho­rale, or the crucifix, or architecture that encloses us in biblical story, or ministerial clothing that recalls that of ancient Rome and Constantino­ple, or so on and on. Would-be participants will indeed find some of this off-putting; people will indeed drift into our services, not grasp the pro­ceedings, and drift out again. We will be tempted to respond by dressing in t-shirts and hiring an almost-rock group — not, of course, a real one — and getting rid of the grim crucifixes. Then we will indeed need less catechesis to adapt would-be participants to the church, because we will be much less church. If instead we are aware of the mission, and of the mission’s situation in our particular time, we will not try to adapt the church’s culture to seekers, but seekers to the church’s culture.

So, for an only apparently trivial example, it is almost universally thought that children must be taught childish songs, with which occasion­ally to interrupt the service and serenade their parents. They are not, it is supposed, up to the church’s hymns and chants. The exact opposite is the truth, and in any case the necessity. In my dim youth rash congregational officials once hired me to supervise the music program of a summer church school. I taught the children the ditties supplied me, but also some plain chant. When in the last days, I asked the children what they wanted to sing, it was always the plain chant.

Catechesis for our time, as the culture of the world and the culture of the church go separate ways, will be music training and art appreciation and language instruction, for the church’s music and art and in the lan­guage of Canaan. If we do not do such things, and with passionate inten­tion, the church will be ever more bereft of her own interior culture and just so become ever more the mere chaplaincy of the world’s culture. The recommendations of the “church growth” movement will indeed produce growth, but not of the church.

Coda: what is a CoC?

Based on feedback, a few more “family marks” to add to the original list of ten:

11. Anti-clericalism, i.e., no priestly caste set apart by holy orders or a white collar who alone can administer the Word and Supper of the Lord. (This is the obverse of egalitarianism, but more apt to historic CoC self-understanding, given egalitarianism’s range of meanings).

12. Cessationism, i.e., no charismatic gifts of the Spirit such as tongues, healings, visions, and exorcisms.

13. Amillennialism, i.e., no end-times speculation, no grand theories of Revelation, no in-case-of-Rapture church basements, no geopolitical dominoes to line up before the Parousia, no wedding of church and state to facilitate the time, times, and half a time.

14. Apoliticism, i.e., no stump speeches from the pulpit, no “how to vote” cards in the pews, no flags in the sanctuary, no mention of hot social topics in sermons, no sense that “America” is a “Christian nation” (after all, aren’t Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics running the show?), no sense that government or military or elite institutions are where the highest Christian vocations are found.

15. Arminianism, i.e., an absolute principled rejection of Calvinism in all its forms, an allergy to predestination, a maximal commitment to and reiteration of personal individual free will and its necessity for salvation—so that a person past the age of accountability must choose Christ for him- or herself; absent this free choice, salvation is impossible.

Now take these in reverse order, as I did in the previous post:

15. Like congregationalism and weekly celebration of Communion, Arminianism is here to stay. In this Churches of Christ are most like their American evangelical cousins, and have been from the beginning. The difference is that, historically at least, one’s choice of Christ found public and saving expression in baptism; the choice itself was a prelude, a necessary condition for the salvation found in baptism’s waters, whereas for wider evangelicalism the choice that is faith is itself both necessary and sufficient condition for salvation. Having said that, evangelicalism’s influence on CoC practice can be found in (a) de-emphasizing baptism’s salvific efficacy, (b) lowering the age at which children can be baptized (from, say, mid-teens to mid-elementary), and (c) emphasizing the importance of children’s faith at very young ages.

14. From anecdotal conversations with elders and ministers, the newfound presence of politicization in Churches of Christ is a shock to the system. Whether that means Trumpism in the pews, saying Black Lives Matter from the podium, the polarization around masking and church closures, or hot-button topics like abortion, gender, and sexuality rising to the surface, politics are present in CoC-dom in a way they’ve never been before. It turns out that Facebook and Fox News have been running their own parallel catechesis programs this whole time. They work.

13. The elements of CoC life that my evangelical friends have always found most bewildering are these: high sacraments, low politics, and no end times. From what I can tell, the amillennialism is still present, aside from the occasional lay member who claims to have cracked Revelation’s nut. As a distinguishing mark, though, this one’s pretty weak; there are plenty of churches out there (low church and high) that lack Rapture basements and dispensation-charts and hell houses. Plus, I’m always surprised by the obvious latent interest in “end times” questions that students and peers pose to me, sotto voce, after a class or before service. Millennialism we will always have with us.

12. On one hand, there aren’t exactly hundreds of hyper-charismatic Churches of Christ out there, with flags and dancing and Spirit-slain tongues-speakers running in between the pews. On the other hand, the doctrine of cessationism is quite weak among CoC-ers under 50, in terms of its “givenness” as biblical teaching, and most folks my age and younger are either outright charismatic or at least spooky-curious. I predict that, in another generation, this one’ll be a dead letter.

11. Stone-Campbellite egalitarianism is an odd duck. In its ideal form it radicalizes the priesthood of all believers to include, quite literally, any and every baptized adult. In practice it has usually meant that the church should be led by well-spoken, biblically literate, and gainfully employed married fathers—a station in life to which all young boys without exception should aspire. (No shade; I’m a product of “Timothy Class.”) Some of these men would be preachers and evangelists and teachers; more would be elders; all would, or could, preside at the Lord’s Supper. Every one of the baptized, though, stood on an “equal footing” before the Lord, and was equally capable of reading the clear word of God in Scripture. No special class of seminary-trained priests could tell you what God would tell you himself; as in Luther’s day, the schoolmen were the enemy, sent to complicate and obstruct the sound doctrine of the apostles, unlettered men that they were.
–So where do things stand on this front today? Strangely, in my view.
–Some churches have unfolded the egalitarian impulse to its logical conclusion: not just men but women, not just adults but children, not just the baptized but any and all who report faith in Christ are full members and participants and may, given the occasion, lead, preach, teach, or preside. This is of a piece with wider cultural trends, a one-by-one relaxation or elimination of obstacles and conditions meant to exclude some from what is seen to be the prerogative of all.
–At the same time, there has been a concurrent professionalization of formal ministry, church leadership, and public worship that belies the apparent democratizating trends just outlined. Anyone at all can “preside” at the Supper—but music is in the hands of the professionals. Churches tend to prefer ministry hires to have degrees in Bible or related disciplines and often an MDiv as well. And while Churches of Christ have always placed a premium on preaching, they have not been immune from the impact of the internet. Podcasts, YouTube, and social media have made the best preaching in the world immediately accessible to anyone with a smartphone, even as they have shaped the sermon’s form into something less like proclamation and more like a TED Talk, delivered by well-coiffed preachers in skinny jeans and replete with slickly produced slides and reams of asides and jokes and stories. (All, naturally, live-streamed to the world. And, if you’ve got someone on staff to do it, quickly re-packaged into bite-size videos and disseminated onto social media platforms, fingers crossed for the next viral hit. I call this the tech-church show.)
–In a word, Churches of Christ are simultaneously highly professionalized and extremely egalitarian. So while the anti-clericalism persists at the doctrinal level—no one stands between me and my Bible—it’s far less powerful at the ecclesial level. This trend is exacerbated by the fact that, while most churches are small and getting smaller, the few big churches that remain are only getting bigger. The result is an optical illusion. “Successful” churches look huge, and with huge-ness comes a fleet of well-trained staff members. The message is clear: If you build it, the professionals will come. And when they come, they will run the show. Accordingly, churches we would be tempted to call “mid-size” (I believe, for example, that a church with 350 members is in the ninetieth percentile for congregational size in America) spy this trend and feel the need to professionalize themselves, too, lest they be left behind (like that 90-member church around the block). In this way a certain egalitarianism works in tandem to produce more, not less, professionalization—which is itself a kind of clericalism, albeit in the guise of a kind of corporate management expertise.
–I trust the irony is clear enough: Historically, both Catholic and Protestant traditions ordained pastors who alone could administer the sacraments and proclaim God’s word. The anti-clerical American evangelical genius is to repudiate ordination in light of the priesthood of all believers. So anyone can baptize; anyone can preside. But there arises a new priesthood in the wake of the old: charismatic speakers and talented musicians. Yet such a priesthood appears to be marked by native talent, which in turn comes to function like nothing so much as ordination by genetic lottery. So we have holy orders by other means, rather than its elimination, even as the celebration of the sacraments is moved farther and farther from center stage. (Its nadir being Covid-era at-home self-serve with “whatever’s in the pantry.” This, not from lack of catechesis, but from successful catechesis.)

So. Taking stock. The point of these descriptions, following the previous post, is to wonder (a) how Churches of Christ have changed over the last three or four generations, especially since the turn of the century; and in light of those changes, to ask (b) what if anything continues to mark Churches of Christ as distinct from American evangelicalism. It seems clear to me that the additional five historic “family marks” above do not alter my original verdict. Either they have evolved into alignment with evangelicals or they never distinguished Churches of Christ from evangelicalism in the first place. The absorption, in other words, continues unabated—if it isn’t already complete.

What is a Church of Christ?

Historically, Churches of Christ have been known by a range of formal and informal marks:

1. The name on the building.

2. Congregational autonomy, i.e., governance of a local church by a group of elders; this has entailed (or been entailed by) rejection of any and all supra-local governance, institutional centralization, and denominational hierarchy.

3. Some kind of genetic and/or genealogical and/or self-conscious and/or affiliative connection to the Stone-Campbell Movement.

4. Weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

5. Adult baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins.

6. The absence of any creed.

7. A cappella worship.

8. The rejection of sacred tradition.

9. Biblicist primitivism, i.e., a Bible-alone approach to doctrine, ethics, worship, and polity with the aim of restoring, discovering, or approximating the original pattern of the church’s organization, proclamation, and mission. (Call this “the restorationist vision.”)

10. A yoked sectarian ecclesiology and soteriology, in other words, salvation through faithful membership in the one true church founded by Jesus Christ—and not in “denominations,” such as the Baptists or Lutherans or what have you.

You could add other marks (strong cessationism, say, or the absence of ordained pastors alongside the lack of a scripted “high” liturgy), but these ten are strong candidates for the most important family of marks, granting that they never were or could have been etched in stone—given the nature of the movement and the tradition’s polity.

Given the lack of formal organization beyond the local, however, the movement was always bound to change and develop, mutate or evolve. After all, there aren’t any hard controls in place to keep such change from occurring. The question then becomes: Which of these is either necessary or sufficient to identity a Church of Christ today?

Run back through the marks in reverse order:

10. While a hardline soteriology is still present in certain Churches of Christ, over the last few generations a once-severe sectarianism has yielded in various ways to a bigger-tent (evangelical) ecumenism.

9. The same is true here: while a general biblicism is present, it’s more evangelical than primitivist. You can recognize true primitivism by the kinds of arguments it generates, and those arguments are largely a feature of the past.

8. So far as I can tell, many Churches of Christ today are quite open toward sacred tradition, whether liturgical (Ash Wednesday, Advent, the lectionary) or doctrinal (reading Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Calvin or Barth) or linguistic (words like “Trinity” and “incarnation” and “catechesis”). Tradition of this sort is no longer self-evidently anathema.

7. A cappella is still dominant, but more and more churches are introducing instruments into public worship.

6. I know more than a few Churches of Christ that recite, affirm, or endorse either the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. And among those that do not, I don’t find many pastors who are theologically anti-creedal on principle, even if they wouldn’t impose a creed on their congregations.

5. Baptism is interesting. It retains its significance in many ways. Yet in two respects matters have changed (if only beneath the surface, as it were). On one hand, the age of children who are baptized has been moving “downward.” On the other, emphasis on immersion-baptism being necessary for salvation—that is, the very moment of being saved, apart from which one would be certainly damned—has likewise declined. “Emphasis” here is the key word: it’s about what is said and left unsaid. Baptism’s still a big deal. But CoC folks from a century ago would be shocked by what they would surely perceive as a lessening of emphasis on what matters most.

4. So far as I can tell, pretty much everyone still celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly. Someone, though, will be the first to change: perhaps through the now-popular “optional communion in the back, self-serve as you please” approach, perhaps through moving to (an occasional) monthly observance. Having said that, across all ten of these marks, including the next three, I’ll go on record to predict that, at the macro level, this is the last one to go for most congregations.

3. Connection to the Stone-Campbell Movement is a tricky question. Many Churches of Christ today have simply forgotten their connection to the SCM; by the same token, many congregations that have dropped the “of Christ” from their name retain a clear genetic influence from the Movement. In either case, though, neither elders nor pastors are reading Stone and Campbell; and in terms of contemporary authors, they’re just as likely to be reading prominent evangelicals as they are to be reading CoC scholars. The once-tight networks of ecclesial kinship that prevailed among Churches of Christ have been laid waste over the last twenty-five years, with the demolition showing no signs of abating. Not a few Churches of Christ today are led by elders and ministers who have no investment in perpetuating something called “the Church of Christ,” and wouldn’t hesitate to tell you.

2. Congregational autonomy hasn’t gone and isn’t going anywhere—though one now sees, and can imagine, semi-formal relationships with parachurch organizations that once (even in the recent past) would have been unthinkable, organizations whose doctrine and practice depart widely from historic CoC doctrine and practice.

1. Plenty of CoCs have, as I’ve said, dropped the genitive modifier; those that remain, by definition, have kept it. Tautologically, the name endures with congregations that have chosen to retain it, and it does not with those that have not.

Now. Suppose I’m broadly right about all this. I’ll ask again: What are the necessary and/or sufficient marks of a Church of Christ today? How should they be identified?

Marks six through ten appear not to be necessary, since there are Churches of Christ one can point to that lack them. In addition, the fifth and third marks, on baptism and SCM-heritage respectively, are tenuous. Plenty of traditions practice immersive believers baptism; in itself that’s not a distinguishing feature of Churches of Christ.

What we’re left with, it seems to me, are marks one, two, and four. Including some other marks in revised form, I think it’s fair to say that we have a Church of Christ today if:

(a) it calls itself a “Church of Christ,”

(b) its polity is congregationalist,

(c) it celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly,

(d) it baptizes by immersion (but not babies), and

(e) it belongs in some way to informal or affiliative CoC networks.

At the descriptive or sociological level, this appears accurate to me. But it raises some problems, or at least some questions.

First, apart from the name, aren’t there churches today that this definition describes that are manifestly not Churches of Christ? I know countless congregationalist churches that practice believers’ baptism and weekly communion. Typically they are “Bible churches” or “community churches” or non-denominational. Some of them even fall into (e), because for one reason or another they participate in CoC networks. They just don’t call themselves a Church of Christ.

Second, suppose a congregation drops the name but meets all the other criteria—including some of the others in the earlier list of ten marks. In other words, an ex–CoC that, for all intents and purposes, still looks and sounds and feels like a CoC. How should we think of such a church?

Third, are there today any material theological teachings or normative doctrinal claims that distinguish a Church of Christ from a non-denom evangelical church? It appears not—and this is in line with biblicism, not a contravention of it, since each believer as well as congregation is free to read the Bible for him/her/itself, minus the interposition of sacred tradition. And all the more if such folks opt to learn from concrete Christian traditions, whether Thomism or Eastern Orthodoxy or Calvinism or what have you. (Thus you have the irony of a biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist anti-tradition drinking deeply from the well of catholic tradition, and changing doctrine and liturgy accordingly.)

Fourth, what happens to contemporary Churches of Christ while, all around them, the informal networks that once sustained a thick CoC identity continue rapidly to decline? It’s not a secret that many Churches of Christ are on hospice care right now. The tight boundaries once drawn by editors, journals, preaching schools, the preaching circuit, famous ministers, widely read authors, colleges and universities, and other unofficial “denominational” organizations either no longer exist or possess a fraction of the power and influence they once exercised. In their absence, what holds the movement together, as a discrete, identifiable movement?

Fifth and finally, are the “family marks” that endure—(a) through (e) above—substantial enough to “pick out” congregations that a sociologist would agree form, or belong to, the same tradition/movement? Consider all the differences that mark Churches of Christ today: some worship with instruments, some don’t; some ordain, some don’t; some have women preachers, some don’t; some have women elders, some don’t; some are LGBT-affirming, some aren’t; some follow the lectionary, some don’t; some observe liturgical seasons, some don’t; some baptize Kindergarteners, some don’t; some “get political” (on Trump or race or gender or sex), some don’t; some say the Creed, some don’t; some “re-baptize” Catholics, some don’t; some practice open communion (i.e., inviting the unbaptized to partake), some don’t; some affirm the restorationist vision, some don’t; some affirm charismatic spiritual gifts, some don’t; some affirm military service, some don’t; some are biblicist, some aren’t; some reject eucharistic real presence, some don’t; some sing CCM “worship songs,” some don’t; some use a single cup, some don’t; some have statements of faith, some don’t; some affirm the doctrine of the Trinity, some don’t.

The list could go on. Interestingly enough, different items here that might appear to outsiders as coded “progressive” versus “conservative” are sometimes joined together. The results are fascinating. Very nearly all Churches of Christ are trending evangelical, but sometimes that very trend is a sign of a move in a politically progressive or theologically liberal direction, just as, sometimes, it’s the opposite. It’s case be case, congregation by congregation. Quite often a congregation is moving in two or more directions at once, and its own members don’t realize it until very late in the process.

I’ve written about all this at length elsewhere (and, I should add, I’ve drawn together and expanded those posts on Churches of Christ as catholic/evangelical/neither/both into an article that will be published soon in Restoration Quarterly). All that I want to say here is this. In the American context, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is well nigh impossible to know what “makes” a Church of Christ a Church of Christ beyond a given congregation’s self-definition. Any further necessary features—not to mention sufficient marks—will either immediately carve off a sizeable chunk of existing Churches of Christ or inadvertently include, as a Church of Christ, all kinds of “normie” American evangelical churches that the definition is meant to exclude.

Put it this way. If you learn that a neighbor or stranger or friend attends a Church of Christ, it’s not different in kind from learning that he or she attends a local evangelical or non-denominational church. You haven’t yet learned the relevant theological or moral or social or political information. What matters, what tells you something significant, is what comes next in the conversation, in answer to the following question: Well, what kind? Tell me about your church.

That’s how it is today, and only more so as each year passes. The transformation is happening, has happened, before our very eyes. It’s undeniable. But it has to be noticed, observed, commented on, to be seen for what it is. For it was not ever thus.

My latest: the ends of theological education

Sapientia is the online periodical of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, housed at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They regularly publish series organized around themes or questions, and the latest is on theological education. You can read Joshua Jipp’s introduction to the series here. My entry is the first to be published; it’s called “The Ends of Theological Education.” Here’s how it starts:

The first and final end of theological education is the knowledge of God. The God in question is not just any deity, much less generic divinity, at least if the theological education in view is Christian. Christian theological education is instruction in the Christian God, which is to say, the triune God of Israel. Theological education is about him, namely, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ revealed by his own Holy Spirit. Whatever else it may be, whatever other ends it may have, theological education aims at the Holy Trinity or it misses the mark entirely.

There are many genres and locations for theological education. The modern research university is only one among many institutional habitats for it, the latest and perhaps the most expansive home, if not the snuggest fit. The monastery is one ancient and abiding institution for instruction in divine knowledge. Sunday school is another. Sometimes theological education happens within the Church, sometimes not; sometimes taught by the ordained, sometimes not; sometimes in a catechetical or devotional spirit, sometimes not. There is no one right way to do it.

Read the rest here.

A loosening

Churches of Christ are evangelical-adjacent; sometimes trends in the CoC world reflect wider evangelical trends, sometimes not. In the following case I think they do.

It seems to me there has been, in the past twenty years, what I’m going to call a “loosening” in low-church American Protestant contexts. And the phenomenon appears to be widespread, not limited regionally or denominationally. Here’s what I mean.

For multiple generations—I’d say at least five, probably more—the following things were true of the sort of churches (I like to call them “baptist” with a lower-case “b”) I have in mind:

1. Alcohol was off limits.

2. Ditto for tattoos.

3. Ditto for gambling of any kind.

4. Cessationism was a given.

5. Salvation was sectarian.

6. Feast days were suspicious.

7. Sacraments were epiphenomenal at best, optional at worst.

8. Sunday morning worship was only one of many weekly congregational gatherings.

In my observation, most or all of these features have been forgotten, reversed, or weakened in recent years. Moreover, this loosening has occurred not only among Millennials and Gen Z believers; it has occurred also among Gen X and Boomer believers at the same time. In other words, the very same people who once shared in the “old way” have transitioned along with their children and grandchildren into the “new way.” The divide is not between parents and children; to the extent that the divide still exists, it’s located elsewhere.

This is important to note for two reasons. First, the battle is not cross-generational so much as cross-epochal. Second, the battle isn’t perennial, since this profound social, moral, and liturgical transformation hasn’t happened with each new generation of low-church believers. The old faith was handed down, generation to generation, until the last two decades or so. And then all at once “everybody” changed. (Not everybody—but a lot of them.)

Here’s how those eight markers play out today, in my experience:

1. Most low-church Protestants I know (from twentysomethings to grandparents) now drink alcohol, including those who for decades did not. In fact, all of a sudden it seems taken for granted that alcohol is not even a question for Christians to consider.

2. Tattoos abound in this Christian sub-culture!

3. Gambling gambling is still off limits. But every church I’ve been a part of as an adult has had men’s poker groups or similar gatherings where money is bet and exchanged. And nobody seems to talk about gambling online or on sporting events as a serious or pressing moral question.

4. Whether at church (with folks from their 30s to their 70s) or in the classroom, the Christians I talk to are either outright spooky, meaning unapologetically affirming of charismatic gifts, or agnostic. I regularly poll both crowds, and just about no one wants to defend cessationism as a doctrine. I actually can’t recall the last time I met someone who was willing, even casually, to argue the view that signs and wonders (“miracles”) no longer occur. This shift may be the most seismic on the list!

5. By “sectarian salvation” I mean, minimally, confessional-doctrinal-ecclesial boundaries on who can and cannot be saved. Historically capital-B Baptists in this country have readily admitted that, for example, Catholics are not Christians, or at least usually lack saving faith. For a century Baptists and CoC-ers did fierce battle over the necessity and efficacy of baptism for this very reason: it drew lines around who would and would not be saved! And yet today I find in almost every corner an enormous ecumenical tent beneath which just about any self-identified Christian is counted as “in.” Certainly nothing so archaic as a denominational line would count somebody out.

6. Until recently, Churches of Christ wouldn’t even acknowledge Christmas or Easter. Other churches would celebrate those, but not Advent or Epiphany or Pentecost or Lent. Those were for Catholics. And yet now Advent and Lent and the liturgical calendar are all the rage.

7. In my normie evangelical students, I spy sacramental minimalism as a default setting, but the moment we start talking and reading, their innate charismatic spookiness starts nudging them up the sacramental ladder. They see both the importance of the sacraments and the lack of any self-evident reason why sacraments must be purely symbolic, cordoned off from the grace they mediate as signs thereof. The more liturgical and charismatic this generation gets, the more sacramental they seem to become. They’re certainly far more open to it; they don’t share previous generations’ firm biblical and doctrinal priors on communion and baptism as non-efficacious.

8. Once upon a time, what it meant to be faithful in churches of Christ was to attend Sunday morning Bible class, followed by public worship, followed by Sunday evening worship, followed by Wednesday evening Bible class. Other churches have had similar arrangements. From what I can tell, both Sunday and Wednesday evening gatherings are dying. The trend lines are all pointing down. Some congregations, especially larger ones, and especially more conservative ones, are maintaining the meetings. But across the board they are less and less frequent; the social norm that this is what it means to be a member in good standing is no longer widespread. Naturally, this is of a piece with, and in turn creates a feedback loop with, decreasing biblical literacy and biblical study. The less “being a knowledgeable Bible reader” is convertible with “being a serious disciple of Christ,” the less “additional meetings” will seem necessary to the Christian life.

This is all anecdotal, I admit. Am I wrong? Do others see the same trends? Am I missing some? Is it right to call this a kind of “loosening”? I’m not looking for causes, only the effects (or symptoms) themselves. I welcome correction and addition.

Church leadership by generation

A friend of mine has a pet theory about church leadership—in this case, leadership within southern/Bible Belt low-church or evangelical settings. Nothing ground-breaking, but useful as a rule of thumb, especially for folks in ministry, I think.

It depends on generational markers, so let’s say these are roughly the four main groups that make up the church today, whether pastors or laity:

• Baby Boomers (60+)

• Gen X (mid-4os to late 50s)

• Millennial (late 20s to early 40s)

• Gen Z (under 25yo)

Southern Christian Boomers are different than the popular image of American Boomers in general. They weren’t at Woodstock. They weren’t hippies. They weren’t even disenchanted by Nixon and Watergate and public institutions of authority the way “the culture” was.

Instead, they were upstanding family men with jobs, wives, and kids. They went to church, and the churches they attended were theologically conservative, doctrinally firm, and morally rigorous. They knew what they believed, and what they believed was the truth. That’s the sort of household and spiritual environment their children, belonging to Gen X, were raised in.

Something happened to both these Boomers and their adult children. What happened was a sort of delayed social and spiritual shock. The Gen X kids found themselves beset by doubts that called into question the certainty of their fathers. Their fathers, in turn, unlearned their once certain confidence. Both, together, began to undertake the journey of faith less as a roadmap with all the landmarks known in advance and more as an open-ended wandering. Doubt became a virtue, not a vice. Wrestling with the unknown was an invitation and a compliment. Living with unanswered questions named the reality of Christian faith for everyone, whether or not they wanted to admit it. “We don’t know” was the pastoral watchword: an admission of humility before the great mystery of God.

There was good reason for this. The unquestioned certainties of the 1970s and ’80s turned out to be all too questionable, and an environment in which everything was known in advance and nothing was open to discussion was stifling, cramped, suffocating. A lot of people got hurt. Those Gen X–ers who remained in the church needed to avoid the mistakes of their fathers, lest their own children fall away from the faith. Crippling conformity was not the way.

So once Gen X began to assumed leadership in the church, around two decades ago, the two generations have largely worked in tandem: Boomers unlearning their hard-edged sectarian self-assurance, Gen X helping them toward a kinder, gentler pastoral presence. Both leading the church toward “accompaniment,” self-critique, theological modesty, and a well-developed allergy toward dogmatism and legalism both.

So far, so descriptive. I’m thinking of folks from about 45 years old to about 75 years old. I hope my portrait sounds sympathetic. It’s meant to be! There’s a reason why these folks are where they are.

Here’s the catch. Where the church is today is not where the church was in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s. Neither Millennials nor (especially) Gen Z grew up in sweltering swamps of dogmatic certitude. They certainly don’t—for the most part; I’m generalizing—inhabit those spaces at the moment. On the contrary. Granted, some older Millennials may be caught up in deconstruction. But most are treading water. They’re not firmly planted in gospel soil, however arid. They’re floating, tossed to and fro by the slightest of waves, the smallest of breezes.

And what do they see in their Gen X and Boomer leaders? What they see is people—men, mostly—fighting the last generation’s battle. They see church leaders who still spy fundamentalists around every corner. But that’s not what’s threatening young believers today. It’s an absolute lack of anything solid or firm to hold onto. It’s shifting sand beneath their feet. It’s nothing at all worth living for, much less dying for.

Gen Z and Millennial Christians aren’t leaving church because there’s too much. They’re leaving because there’s too little. Too little doctrine, too little dogma, too little firm and unbending teaching about the essential matters of God and faith, Christ and gospel, Spirit and Scripture, word and sacrament. What then shall we do? and How now shall we live? are the driving questions. “We don’t know” doesn’t cut it. “We don’t know” means they’re headed for the exits.

At any rate, that’s my friend’s theory. Boomer and Gen X church leaders are stuck in the past. The problems they battled and conquered in their younger days drive how they approach the problems facing believers today. But the problems are different. Millennial and especially Gen Z pastors understand this. They know young Christians are drowning. They know they need to throw them a lifeline. That lifeline must be sturdy enough to save; must be built to float, no matter how choppy the seas.

My latest: no to AI in the pulpit

I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a piece called “AI Has No Place in the Pulpit.” It’s in partial response to a CT piece from a few weeks ago about the benefits of using AI in pastoral work. A couple sample paragraphs from the middle of the article:

Pastors are students of God’s Word. They are learners in the school of Christ. He teaches them by the mouths of his servants, the prophets and apostles, who speak through Holy Scripture. There is no shortcut to sitting at their feet. The point—the entire business—of pastoral ministry is this calm, still, patient sitting, waiting, and listening. Every pastor lives according to the model of Mary of Bethany. Strictly speaking, only one thing is necessary for the work of ministry: reclining at the feet Jesus and hanging on his every word (Luke 10:38–42).

In this sense, no one can do your studying for you. I’ll say more below about appropriate forms of learning from professional scholars and commentaries, but that’s not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that studying God’s Word is part of what God has called you to do; it’s more than a means to an end. After all, one of its ends is your own transformation, your own awesome encounter with the living God. That’s why no one can listen to Jesus in your stead. You must listen to Jesus. You must search the Scriptures. This is what it means to serve the church.

Read the whole thing! And thanks to Bonnie Kristian, among others, for commissioning and sharpening the piece in editing.

Four tiers in preaching, denominations, other…

Two brief reflections on my post a month back about four tiers or levels in Christian/theological publishing.

First: I think the tiers/levels I identify there apply to preaching as well. But because preaching is different from writing and especially from the genres and audiences each publishing tier has in view, the levels apply differently. Put another way, it is appropriate and good that there is a scholarly level of writing that very few can or ever will read. It is neither appropriate nor good for there to be preaching like that. Perhaps, I suppose, a chapel connected to Oxford or Harvard could justify that sort of preaching—but even then, it should drop down to a level 3 or even a pinch lower.

The exception proves the rule, in any case. Preaching, in my view, should never be above level 2; and the best preaching hovers between levels 1 and 2. Preaching should not assume a college degree; should not assume much, if any, background knowledge; should not assume much, if any, familiarity with popular culture; should avoid jargon; should avoid mention of ancient languages; should not name drop authors; should not make erudite allusions to great literature. Instead, it should be intelligible, accessible, and immediately relevant to a high school dropout in her 60s who never reads and doesn’t watch much TV, whether Netflix or the news.

Does that mean such a sermon will lack substance, heft, weight, meat, sustenance? No. But it does mean faithful preaching, week in week out, is very difficult indeed.

Second: A friend sent me a link to someone on Twitter—his name is Patrick K. Miller—riffing on my four tiers in relation to both church conferences and church traditions/denominations. I don’t have a Twitter account so I’m not able to look at the whole thread, but (a) the conference tiers seemed both apt and funny, while (b) I don’t think the ecclesial analogues quite worked. Here’s why.

It’s true, in 2023, that American Christians self-sort into churches based on education, class, wealth, and culture. That’s a sad fact. Protestants with graduate degrees like high liturgy; whereas evangelicals on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to attend charismatic, storefront, or prosperity churches. Granted.

The author’s implication, however, is flawed. I take Miller to be suggesting that the market comes for us all, churches included, and it’s best we accept this self-sorting and (for eggheads like me) avoid condescension. Agreed on the latter, less so on the former. Why?

Because this self-selection by class is neither inevitable nor universal. It’s contingent. It’s a product of a very particular moment in a very parochial ecclesial subculture. Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism are all flies in the ointment here (I often group these together as “catholic” traditions). Both past and present, these traditions encompass high and low, rich and poor, over- and under-educated. Nothing could be “higher” liturgically than these communities, yet the type of person who regularly attends them is not indexed by income or number of diplomas.

It isn’t natural, in other words, it isn’t just the way of the world for well-off folks to go “high” and less-well-off folks to “low.” In fact, this very distinction doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Go to Catholic Mass or Anglican liturgy in Africa and you’ll see charismatic gifts alongside smells and bells. Eucharistic liturgy is the common inheritance of all God’s people down through the centuries, not just the sniffy or effete. We err when we take our current passing moment as a kind of timeless law. Infinite sectarian fracturing, by doctrine and stye and personal preference, is not the rule in Christian history. Religious liberty plus capitalism plus consumerism plus the automobile plus evangelicalism plus populism plus seeker-sensitivity-ism plus so many other factors—all contingent, all mutable, all evitable—brought this situation to pass. We need not accept those factors. We can reject and oppose them, seek to overturn them.

We are not fated to the present crisis of Christian division. Our churches should not cater to it as a given, but fight it as an enemy. Self-sorting by class is only one way this enemy manifests itself. Let’s not pretend it’s a friend. Expel the evil from among your midst.

My latest: on holy orders

I’ve got an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Christian Studies. The theme of the issue is “Ministry and Ordination.” The editor, Keith Stanglin (a mensch, if you don’t know him), commissioned pieces from scholars that represent or argue for a position not found in, or at least exemplified by, their own tradition. So, for example, the article after mine is by a Roman Catholic on the priesthood of all believers. Whereas mine is called “The Fittingness of Holy Orders.” It presents just that.

The article was a pleasure to write. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Its guiding lights are Robert Jenson and Michael Ramsey. And it opens with twenty theses—I call them “escalating propositions”— on the sacrament of holy orders that ramp up from the basic notion of some formal leadership in the church all the way to full episcopal-dogmatic-eucharistic-apostolic succession.

Subscribe to the journal (or ask your library to). If you want a PDF of my article, email me and I’ll send you a copy.

Reasons people stay, or leave, their church

• The preaching

• The music

• The leadership

• The politics

• The children’s ministry

• The youth ministry

• The college ministry

• The young marrieds ministry

• The singles ministry

• The senior ministry

• The education programming

• The weekday programming

• The small groups

• The community

• The sacraments

• The production quality

• The liturgy

• The location

• Family ties

• Family history

• Friends

• Children’s friends

• Denominational membership

• Lethargy

• Loyalty

• Class

• Education

• Money

• Feuds

• Ambition

• Employment

• Relative quality of other local churches

• Whimsy

• Personal history

• Hurt

• Social standing

• Peer pressure

• Theology

• Tribal affiliation

• Regional culture

• Looking for a mate

• A single memorable experience

• Inertia

• Childhood memories

• Muscle memory

• Need for God

• Love for God

• Spiritual paralysis

• Spiritual despair

• Spousal pressure

• Parental pressure

• Boredom

• No reason at all

A decision tree for dealing with digital tech

Start with this question:

Do you believe that our, and especially young people’s, relationship to digital technology (=smartphones, screens, the internet, streaming, social media) is healthy, functional, and therefore good as is? Or unhealthy, dysfunctional, and therefore in need of immediate and drastic help?

If your answer is “healthy, functional, and good as is,” then worry yourself no more; the status quo is A-OK. If you answered otherwise, read on.

Now ask yourself this question:

Do the practices, policies, norms, and official statements of my institution—whether a family, a business, a university, or a church—(a) contribute to the technological problem, (b) maintain the digital status quo, or (c) interrupt, subvert, and cut against the dysfunctional relationship of the members of my institution to their devices and screens?

If your answer is (a) or (b) and yet you answered earlier that you believe our relationship to digital technology is in serious need of help, then you’ve got a problem on your hands. If your answer is (c), then well done.

Finally, ask yourself this:

How does my own life—the whole suite of my daily habits when no one’s looking, or rather, when everyone is looking (my spouse, my roommate, my children, my coworkers, my neighbors, my pastors, and so on)—reflect, model, and/or communicate my most basic beliefs about the digital status quo? Does the way I live show others that (a) I am aware of the problem (b) chiefly within myself and (c) am tirelessly laboring to respond to it, to amend my ways and solve the problem? Or does it evince the very opposite? So that my life and my words are unaligned and even contradictory?

At both the institutional and the personal level, it seems to me that answering these questions honestly and following them to their logical conclusions—not just in our minds or with our words but in concrete actions—would clarify much about the nature of our duties, demands, and decisions in this area of life.

How the world sees the church

I’ve joked more than once on here that this blog is little more than an exercise in drafting off better blogs, particularly Richard Beck’s, Alan Jacobs’, and Jake Meador’s. Here’s another draft.

Last month Richard wrote a short post reflecting on a famous quote by Lesslie Newbigin. How, Newbigin asks, are people supposed to believe that the first and final truth of all reality and human existence is a victim nailed to a tree, abandoned and left for dead? He answers that “the only hermeneutic of the gospel,” the only interpretation of the good news about Jesus that makes any sense of him, “is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”

Richard then writes:

In a lecture this last semester I shared with my students, “I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’”

I pray for the day when our presence is proclaimed “Good News.” And this isn't just some vague aspiration, it's personal for me. Wherever I show up, I want that to be Good News, unconditionally, no matter who is in the space. And I push my church to have the same impact. This is the work, and really the only work, that should be occupying Christians and the church right now.

There’s a sense in which I couldn’t agree more with this aspiration. The body of Christ should strive to be, to incarnate, to offer the good news in the liberating power of Christ’s Spirit to any and all we encounter—first of all our neighbors and those with whom we interact daily. Yes and amen.

But there’s a reason Richard’s little post has been nagging at me from the back of my brain for the last six weeks. Here’s why.

It isn’t clear to me that the world should see the church and love, welcome, and celebrate her presence. It certainly isn’t clear to me that we should expect or hope that they do. The reason why is fourfold.

First, the only people who genuinely and reasonably see the church as a cause for celebration are believers. Think about it. Why would anyone unconvinced by the gospel be glad that the church exists? That she keeps hanging around? The only people plausibly happy about the church’s existence are Christians—and even many Christians are pretty ambivalent about it. Someone who loves and adores and honors and celebrates the church sounds a lot like someone who believes that Jesus is risen from the dead.

Second, what qualifies as “good news”? If I’m not a believer, I’m liable to find it pretty annoying to be surrounded by weirdos who worship an invisible Someone, follow strict rules about money and sex and power, and believe with all their heart that I should drop everything in my own life and sign up for their beliefs and way of life. Live and let live, you know? You mind your own and I’ll do the same. Yet Christian evangelism is a nonnegotiable, so a nonbelieving neighbor is sure (and right) to be perpetually low-key bored or bothered or both by the fact that the church “has the answer” for his life.

Third, the church is full of sinners. It’s a field hospital for sinsick folk, in the image of Pope Francis. The one thing about which we can be sure, then, is that the church is going to be monumentally, even fantastically dysfunctional. She’s going to cause a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration. That doesn’t mean we excuse in advance our failure to be Christlike to our neighbors. What it does mean is that the church’s appeal to her neighbors is likely going to be a lot less “What a beautiful community of Christ-followers—I love it when they’re around, even though they’re dead wrong about everything important!” and a lot more “What a motley crew of unimpressive failures—I guess they might even tolerate my own humiliating baggage, given what I can see about theirs even from the outside.”

Fourth and finally, Jesus wasn’t exactly “good news” to everyone he met. Now that claim requires some clarification. Jesus was the gospel incarnate. To meet Jesus was to come face to face with God’s good news. And yet if Jesus did anything it was turn off a whole lot of people. He elicited modest approval alongside a metric ton of opposition and murderous hostility. Not everyone saw Jesus coming and said, “Yes! Hooray! I love that guy!” Some did—and they were his followers. Plenty others said the opposite. We know why. Jesus confronted people with the truth: the truth about God and the truth about themselves. He forced on them a decision. And when they declined his invitation to follow him, he let them walk away, sad or sorrowful or resentful or angry or bitter. In short, Jesus was a sign of contradiction.

Pope Saint John Paul II borrowed that phrase, taken from Saint Luke, to describe the church. Like Christ, the church is a sign of contradiction in the world. We shouldn’t expect anyone to be happy about us—up until the point at which they join us. We should expect instead for them to ignore and resent us, at best; to reject and hate us, at worst. Not because of anything wrong with them. But because that’s how they treated Jesus, and he told us to expect the same treatment. They’re only being reasonable. If the gospel isn’t true, the church is a self-contradiction; of all people we should be most pitied. We should be mocked and scorned and excused from respectable society.

We’re only Christians, those of us who are, because we believe the gospel is true. I’m shocked when anyone has anything nice to say about the faith who isn’t already a fellow believer. As I see it, that’s the exception to the rule. So while we should strive to be faithful to Christ’s commission, to embody and enact the good news of his kingdom in this world, I don’t think we should hope or even try to be seen as good news. To be seen as good news amounts to conversion on the part of those doing the seeing. Let’s aim for conversion. Short of that, in terms of how we’re perceived I don’t know that we can expect much from our neighbors who don’t already believe.

The tech-church show

A week or two ago a clip went viral of a prominent pastor lecturing his listeners, during his sermon, about treating Sunday morning worship like a show. I didn’t watch it, and I’m not going to comment about the pastor in question, whom I know nothing about. Here’s one write-up about it. The clip launched a thousand online Christian thinkpieces. A lot of hand-wringing about churches that put on worship as a show simultaneously wanting congregants not to see worship as a show.

Any reader of my work knows I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t want to pile on. I want to use the occasion to think more deeply about two issues it raises for the larger landscape of churches, public worship, and digital technology.

First: Should churches understand themselves to be sites of resistance against the digital status quo? That is, given their context, are churches in America called by God to be a “force for good” in relation to digital technology? And thus are they called to be a “force opposed” to the dominance of our lives—which means the lives of congregants as well as their nonbelieving neighbors—by digital devices, screens, and social media?

It seems to me that churches and church leaders are not clear about their answer to this question. In practice, their answer appears to be No. The digital status quo obtains outside the walls of the church and inside them. There is no “digital difference” when you walk inside a church—at least a standard, run-of-the-mill low-church, evangelical, or Protestant congregation. (The Orthodox have not yet been colonized by Digital, so far as I can tell. For Catholics it depends on the parish.)

In and of itself, this isn’t a problem, certainly not of consistency. If a church doesn’t think Digital’s dominion is a problem, then it’s only natural for Digital to reign within the church and not only without. You’d never expect such a church to be different on this score.

The problem arises when churches say they want to oppose believers’ digital habits, dysfunctions, and addictions while reproducing those very habits within the life of the church, above all in the liturgy. That’s a case of extreme cognitive dissonance. How could church leaders ever expect ordinary believers to learn from the church how to amend their digital lives when church leaders themselves, and the church’s public worship itself, merely model for believers their own bad habits? When, in other words, church members’ digital lives, disordered as they are, are simply mirrored back to them by the church and her pastors?

To be clear, I know more than a few Christians, including ministers, who don’t share my alarm at the reign of Digital in our common life. They wouldn’t exactly endorse spending four to eight hours (or more) per day staring at screens; they don’t deny the ills and errors of pornography and loss of attention span via social media and other platforms. But they see bigger fish to fry. And besides (as they are wont to say), “It’s here to stay. It’s a part of life. We can live in denial or incorporate its conveniences into church life. It’s inevitable either way.”

Personally, I think that’s a steaming pile of you-know-what. But at least it’s consistent. For anyone, however, who shares my alarm at the role of Digital in our common life—our own, our neighbors’, our children’s, our students’—then the inconsistency of the church on this topic is not only ludicrous but dangerous. It’s actively aiding and abetting the most significant problem facing us today while pretending otherwise. And you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a problem and you face it head on; or it’s not, and you don’t.

Second: Here’s an exercise that’s useful in the classroom. It helps to get students thinking about the role of technology in the liturgy.

Ask yourself this question: Which forms and types of technology, and how much of them, could I remove from Sunday morning worship before it would become unworkable?

Another way to think about it would be to ask: What makes my church’s liturgy different, technologically speaking, than an instance of the church’s liturgy five hundred years ago?

Certain kinds of technology become evident immediately: electricity and HVAC, for starters. In my area, many church buildings would be impossible to worship in during a west Texas summer: no air and no light. They’d be little more than pitch-black ovens on the inside.

Start on the other end, though. Compare Sunday morning worship in your church today to just a few decades ago. Here are some concrete questions.

• Could you go (could it “work”) without the use of smartphones?

• What about video cameras?

• What about spotlights and/or dimmers?

• What about the internet?

• What about screens?

• What about computers?

• What about a sound board?

• What about electric amplification for musical instruments?

• What about wireless mics?

• What about microphones as such?

This list isn’t meant to prejudge whether any or all of these are “bad” or to be avoided in the liturgy. I’m happy to worship inside a building (technology) with A/C (technology) and electricity (technology)—not to mention with indoor plumbing available (also technology). Microphones make preaching audible to everyone, including those hard of hearing. And I’ve not even mentioned the most consequential technological invention for the church’s practice of worship: the automobile! Over the last century cars revolutionized the who and where and how and why of church membership and attendance. (In this Luddite’s opinion, clearly for the worse. Come at me.)

In any case, whatever one makes of these and similar developments, the foregoing exercise is meant to force us to reckon with technology’s presence in worship as both contingent and chosen. It is contingent because worship is possible without any/all of them. I’ve worshiped on a Sunday morning beneath a tree in rural east Africa. The people walked to get there. No A/C. No mics. No screens. No internet. Certainly no plumbing. Not that long ago in this very country, most of the technology taken for granted today in many churches did not even exist. So contingency is crucial to recognize here.

And because it is contingent, it is also chosen. No one imposed digital technology, or any other kind, on American churches. Their leaders implemented it. It does not matter whether they understood themselves to be making a decision or exercising authority. They were, whether they knew it or not and whether they liked it or not. It does not matter whether they even had a conversation about it. The choice was theirs, and they made it. The choice remains theirs. What has been done can be undone. No church has to stream, for example. Some never started. Others have stopped. It’s a choice, as I’ve written elsewhere. Church leaders should own it and take responsibility for it rather than assume it’s “out of their hands.”

Because the use and presence of digital technology in the church’s liturgy is neither necessary nor imposed—it is contingent and chosen—then the logical upshot is this: Church leaders who believe that digital technology is a clear and present danger to the well-being and faithfulness of disciples of Christ should act like it. They should identify, recognize, and articulate the threats and temptations of digital dysfunction in their lives and ours; they should formulate a vision for how the church can oppose this dysfunction, forcefully and explicitly; and they should find ways to enact this opposition, both negatively (by removing said dysfunction from within the church) and positively (by proposing and modeling alternative forms of life available to believers who want relief from their digital addictions).

What they should not do is say it’s a problem while avoiding dealing with it. What they should not do is leave the status quo as it is. What they should not do is accept Digital’s domination as inevitable—as somehow lying outside the sphere of the reign and power of Christ.

What they should not do is look the other way.

East/West Christianity: an unfinished love story

My brother texted this to me the other day, and he gave me permission to share it here. It’s about the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, i.e., Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (or: Catholicism East and West). I’ve made a few modest edits. Enjoy.

*

Been reading lots on history of East–West divide lately, so here’s me thinking out loud and writing down my thoughts. My analogy that helps me think about the stormy relationship between East and West (obviously from my Orthodox-sympathetic viewpoint, though one that yearns for union!):

100-850 – Honeymoon period. East nods to “headship” of West; they have their differences, but nothing that love doesn’t cover; as Christ died for the church, the West leads through service and love

850-1050 – First big fight. Starting to grow apart; realizing they meant different things by “headship”; East losing trust in West

1054 – West files divorce papers. East says “so be it,” but doesn’t really mean it in her heart

1100-1400 – Trial separation. Ignore each other to avoid fighting; when they interact, it’s only words spoken in anger; in 1204 the West does something the East might one day forgive, but will never forget.

1400s – Marriage counseling. The East needs the West more than the West needs the East; while the East wants an apology and compromise, the West expects submission; the Easts grants it on paper, but doesn’t mean it and takes it back as soon as the West is out of earshot.

1450-1869 – Diverging paths. The West prospers; the East goes through hell.

1870 – Divorce finalized. Irrevocable words and actions taken by the West, followed by the East.

1870-1965 – Fallout. East descends deeper into hell; West also suffers while flourishing in other ways; whether fast-evolving changes count as maturation or backsliding remains to be seen.

1965-present – Second thoughts. Both lovers have regrets; the West realizes it may at times have overstepped its bounds and misses terribly the beauty of the East; the East realizes she’s really missed the West’s leadership of and organization for the family; they rip up the original divorce papers; they exchange meaningful gifts; they go back to counseling; could they make this work again?—they realize that in really important ways, the same candle has always burned in both their hearts; they’re even aligned more than ever in their worldview and beliefs; but they also discover their personalities and eccentricities make each of them feel foreign to the other; the East has had a really rough go of it since they separated and feels that the West sometimes took advantage of her weakness instead of reaching out to help; some words spoken by the West can’t be unspoken; can the East live with them? can the West soften them? can the East forgive and forget? can the West remember and reclaim its first vows? can the West compromise? can the East submit?

Local church bans smartphones

Just kidding. But why not? The headline of the latest Atlantic piece by Jonathan Haidt reads: “Ban Phones From All Schools.” The updated version now says: “Get Phones Out of School Now.” (Another one, from earlier: “Phones at School Are a Disaster.” Indeed they are. But why all these different titles for the same piece?)

My question: If smartphones are so bad for school-aged kids, K–12, isn’t it likely they’re just as bad, if not worse, for kids in churches? And not only for 18-year-olds and younger, but for everyone?

What if churches took the lead here, instead of serving once again as a lagging indicator for the wider culture? What if the one place in America where screens and devices, smartphones and social media were not ubiquitous—were not even present at all—was your neighborhood congregation? Humble and out of fashion and perhaps deplorable, that congregation, but not, adamantly and openly and unapologetically not, part of the technological crisis afflicting our society?

Granted, no church is going to ask for your phone at the door. No church is going to frisk you for an iPhone. No church is going to require handing over your Android as a condition of entering the building.

Short of that, churches could do a lot to discourage parishioners from using phones in their buildings or even bringing them inside.

They could begin by not making it a requirement. For parents of young children, having a phone has become a nonnegotiable; you’re expected to be reachable at any moment, given your child’s behavior or needs during worship or Sunday school.

They could begin by not making smartphones an assumption. For example, by placing physical Bibles in (ahem) Bible classes as well as the sanctuary. By not using QR codes. By not inviting people to “get your phones and open your Bible app” in order to read along with the passage from Scripture.

They could begin by not featuring smartphones within worship. For example, by reading from physical books or programs or print-outs rather than from one’s personal device. By not texting during worship—ever, at all, for any reason. (If you’re someone who is on call, a physician or police officer or what have you, you’re an exception here; at the same time, if you get a call, then step out and take it!) By not, God help me, letting your child play games on your phone during the liturgy. By not, God grant me strength, playing them yourself.

They could begin by communicating, clearly, gently, but directly, that the church has a vision for the role of digital technology within the life of Christian discipleship and that it is the job of the church to form and educate the faithful in accordance with that vision. Not in the service of scrupulosity or works righteousness. In the service, rather, of equipping followers of Jesus to be strong and resilient believers in the face of the greatest challenge facing this generation—especially its young people. And given that vision and formation, it follows that within this community digital technology in general, and screens and smartphones in particular, are not “anything goes.” Not “no holds barred” or “live and let live.” That would be irresponsible. Instead, the church is to be on the vanguard of resisting billion- and trillion-dollar corporations’ bald-faced attempts to suck our souls, our wallets, and our attentions dry. How, after all, can we disciples be wise and patient and alert and unanxious women and men of prayer, who dwell in the word of God, who know how to be still, who listen for the voice of Christ’s Spirit—how can we be any of these things if every second of our lives is fixated on our screens, eyes scrolling indefinitely and infinitely for the latest image, the latest scandal, the latest outrage? How can we be different from anybody else if here, in the midst of God’s people, on the Lord’s Day, gathered to worship in the Spirit, we can’t let go of our digital addictions for even one hour?

Ban devices, I say, from all churches. Beat the schools to it. Show the world we see the problem. Show the world we want to fix it in ourselves before fixing it in others. Show the world we mean business. Get smartphones out of churches now. Show Prof. Haidt proof of concept. Leave Apple and Google and Meta in the car. Be blessedly free for ninety minutes (or more!). Give God your all. Model it for your kids. Demonstrate that it’s possible.

Is it? Could it happen? In your church and mine?

All I can say is, the Lord has done stranger things before…

Decline and its possibilities

Is society in decline? Is our culture getting worse? Is the West less Christian by comparison to the past? And are these things a cause for lament?

Your answers to these questions do a lot of work in locating you in debates among Christians about the state of things today. I’m thinking in particular of anti-declinists, who resist and reject declension narratives as hysterical, overwrought, incomplete, or even unchristian. It occurred to me recently that anti-declinists confuse a number of concepts—which is not their fault, since their opponents often confuse them as well—that are distinct from one another.

First is decline. In what sense decline? In what area(s) of life? Religious in particular? Social, moral, aesthetic, political, economic? Or is the question a matter of net gain/loss? Claims about net loss are always going to be inordinately subjective. Countering a sense of loss in, say, church attendance with an equivalent gain in household wealth is a textbook instance of changing the subject. To be frank, Christians concerned about whether people have left church for good don’t care about the economy. It’s apples and oranges.

The second issue is blame. It’s often assumed that, if things have in some sense gotten worse (over the years, decades, or centuries), then those responsible are them, out there, the Bad Guys. But this doesn’t follow. It may well be the case that things have gotten worse because of us. The culprit, in other words, is Christians. Christians are on the hook for the things they bemoan. The church is culpable for social, moral, or religious decline. The proper response to recognition of genuine decline, then, is not pointing fingers at the world but donning sackcloth and ashes; fasting and prayer; contrition and repentance. (Next is figuring out a faithful path forward, but doing so is still an in-house affair.)

The third issue is judgment. Christians believe that God is Judge. And within history, God’s mysterious providence does not withhold all consequences of the actions of individuals, communities, and nations until the End, but enacts them, in part, in time, as anticipations of the Final Judgment. Our chickens do not always come home to roost. But sometimes they do. And when they do, it is the work of God. In the realm of social or cultural decline, then, Christians are inclined to see the hand of God. And often as not, it is against the church that his hand works. Judgment begins at the house of God. Nor is divine judgment a sneaky way of outsourcing blame back onto the culture. Well, this is God’s work—guess y’all will acknowledge him now! On the contrary, sometimes divine judgment works for the world to the detriment of God’s people. Assyria wins and Israel loses; Babylon wins and Judah loses. Not ultimately, but for quite a while. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. But Caesar made thousands of martyrs for a full three centuries before the bloodletting stopped.

The fourth issue is suffering. Not all suffering on the part of Christians is God’s judgment on our sins. But all of it is an opportunity to imitate Christ. That is, to unite out sufferings to his in patient endurance as a witness to the power of his resurrection. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Let us say, even, that the sweat of the saints—the smallest of pains in the mundane challenges of daily discipleship—is likewise the seed of God’s word scattered on the soil of our culture. It is God who gives the increase. All we can do is witness. We are not to seek after suffering. But when it comes, as it always will, in whatever form, our calling is to persevere. Not to whine. Not to complain. Not to eschew martyrdom for a martyr complex. Not, certainly, to feign bemusement at this strange disruption of how things should be, namely, life running smoothly. Life running smoothly is a blessed temporary relief from the ordinary run of things in a fallen world. So even and especially when society is in process of some kind of decline, even and especially if it is religious in nature, the task of the church is the same: faithful witness in suffering.

The fifth issue is hope. To spy decline is not to deny grounds for hope. Hope is in God alone. His promise is sure: the gates of hell will not prevail against the people whose God is the Lord. Nevertheless they will claim victories along the way: provisional victories, but victories all the same. Christian hope lies neither in the absence of decline nor in renewal following decline but in the ultimate victory of Christ above and beyond the waxing and waning of human civilizations. Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket. For the Lord, that is, and therefore for the church. A whole political theology is contained in that single verse. The peoples are like grass, which wither under the Lord’s breath; he makes nations rise and fall, but his word stands forever. Decline is both real and inevitable. It is also subordinate to the mission and worship of the church.

If I’ve been training my sights on the errors of the declinists, a few implications follow for anti-declinists as well.

First, decline is possible. To read some anti-declinists, you’d imagine they’ve sincerely bought into the myth of progress. They’re like film critics who tell you, every year, that the movies have never been better. Novels and music and all the other arts, too. Did I mention epic poetry and its public performance and memorization by children? Nothing ever changes, except when it does, and it’s for the better. That’s a mighty dollop of silliness no serious person should countenance. But it’s ruled out a priori for Christians. So for any Christian writer or thinker not driven by pessimism about our age, he or she must at least admit the possibility that decline may happen and perhaps even is happening.

Second, Christian decline is possible. Some anti-declinists read as though, even if a civilization might get worse, the state of the church within that civilization can never get worse. But we’ve already seen that this, also, is a red herring. I often think, in this respect, of Alan Jacobs’ marvelous review of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which opens with a description of the extraordinary Christian culture of fifth-century Cappadocia created and fostered by saints like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet no such culture exists there today. Here’s Alan:

If the complete destruction of a powerful and beautiful Christian culture could happen in Cappadocia, it can happen anywhere, and to acknowledge that possibility is mere realism, not a refusal of Christian hope. One refuses Christian hope by denying that Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, not by saying that Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time.

Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time. When I read non-declinists, I wish they would begin every paragraph with an affirmation of this possibility. Because most of the time, it sounds as though they do not believe it is possible. Yet we know it is possible, because it has happened time and again throughout history. Which means that people worried about it happening here are not fantasists; they are not hysterical just because they worry about it. Their worry may take the form of hysteria. They may be foolish in their response or ungodly in their lament or wicked in their prescriptions, not to mention their treatment of others. But the worry is valid in principle. The only question, ever, is whether it is a plausible worry given our time and place, and thence whether it is likely. It becomes a cultural question, a hermeneutical question, even in a sense an empirical question. That’s the arena for debate. Not its sheer possibility.

Third, non-declinists have to distinguish not just the mode of pessimism from its judgments but also the judgments from their implications. Bemoaning some particular religious or social loss is not ipso facto an endorsement of everything in the past (whether that past be the 1980s or ’50s or ’20s or 1770s or 1530s or 1250s or whenever the ostensible golden age is said to have occurred). Nor is it a denial that anything has improved. Declinists are on the hook for their rhetoric, which should be nuanced and accurate rather than generic and overblown. But anti-declinists are on the hook, too. They often write like to give an inch is to lose a mile. Any decline means total decline. Perhaps also despair. None of which follows.

The Christian theology of providence is an extraordinary analytical tool. It allows the soberest of diagnoses and the most confident of hopes. It’s always a delicate balancing act. Any Christian who writes about the state of society is going to fail in some way. But we can fail a little less, it seems to me, not least by being mindful of the distinctions I’ve elaborated above.

Young Christians (not) reading, 2

I received some really useful feedback in response to my previous post about the reading habits, such as they are, of high school and college Christians today. By way of reminder, the group I’m thinking about consists of (a) Christians who are (b) spiritually committed and (c) intellectually serious (d) between the ages of 15 and 25. In other words, in terms of GPA or intelligence or aptitude or career prospects, the top 5-10% Christian students in high school and college. Future professionals, even elites, who are likely to pursue graduate degrees in top-100 schools followed by jobs in law, medicine, journalism, the arts, academia, and politics. What are they reading right now—if anything?

(I trust my qualifiers and modifiers ensure in advance that I’m not equating spiritual maturity with intellectual aptitude, on one hand, or intellectual aptitude with careerist elitism, on the other.)

Here are some responses I received as well as a bunch of further reflections on my part.

1. One comment across the board: None of these kids are reading anything, whether they are cream of the crop or nothing of the kind. And they’re certainly not reading bona fide theology or intellectually demanding spiritual writing. All of them, including the smartest and most ambitious, are online, all the time, full stop. What “content” they get is found there: podcasts, videos, bloggers, and influencers, plus pastors with a “brand” and an extensive online presence (which, these days, amount to the same thing). To be fair, some of these online sources aren’t half bad. Some are substantive. Some have expertise or credentials or wide learning (if, often, of the autodidact sort). But to whatever extent any of these kids are acquiring knowledge, it’s not literate knowledge. It’s mediated by the internet, not by books.

2. If someone in this age range is reading a living Christian author, then I was right to think of John Mark Comer. A few more names mentioned: David Platt, Francis Chan, Dane Ortlund, Timothy Keller. I also had The Gospel Coalition mentioned as a group of authors read by some of these folks. In terms of dead authors, in addition to what I called “the usual suspects” (Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, et al), I also heard Eugene Peterson, Dallas Willard, and Henri Nouwen. Which makes sense, since all of them have passed in recent memory, and professors as well as youth pastors would be likely to recommend their work. (I’m going to go ahead and assume John Piper is among those names, too, though he is still with us.)

3. An addendum: Some young believers are reading books, but the books they’re reading are mostly fiction. Typically YA fare; sometimes older stuff, like Tolkien or Jane Austen; occasionally scattered past or present highbrow fiction like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy or Susanna Clarke. But still, not a lot of fiction reading overall, and the majority is page-turning lowbrow stuff, with occasional English-major nerdballs (hello) opting for the top-rack vintage.

4. A second addendum: It isn’t clear to me how to count or to contextualize kids who are home-schooled or taught in classical Christian academies. What percentage of the total student population are they? And what percentage of this small sub-population is being taught Homer and Virgil and Saint Augustine and Calvin and so on? Or, if we’re thinking of living authors, which if any of them are they reading? I simply have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions. Nor do I know what the difference is between such students being assigned these texts and their actual personal reading habits outside of class.

5. Back to the brief list of living authors above: Comer, Platt, Chan, Ortlund, Keller, et al. The question arises: Are young Christians who report these names in fact reading their books? Or are they “digesting” their message via sermons, podcasts, and video recordings available on the internet? The same goes for megachurch pastors with an online audience, like Jonathan Pokluda, who preaches outside of Waco; or Andy Stanley in Atlanta, or Matt Chandler in Dallas. There’s a lot of daylight between reading an author’s books and knowing the basic gist of a public figure.

6. To be even more granular: If a young Christian says that she has read Comer’s latest book, what is likeliest? That she used her eyes to scan a codex whose pages she turned with her hands? or that she read it on an e-reader/tablet? or that she listened to the audio version? After all, Comer—like other popular nonfiction authors today—reads his books himself for the audio edition. And since he’s a preacher for a living, it’s very effective, not to mention personalizing; which is part of the appeal for so many young people today.

7. In a word, is it true to say that even the readers among young believers today are often not “reading” in the classical manner many of us presuppose? So that, whether it’s a podcast or a TikTok or an IG Reel or a YouTube channel or a “book,” the manner of reception/intake/ingestion is more or less the same? So that “reading” names not an alternative mode of acquiring knowledge or engaging a source but simply a difference in type of source? In which case, it seems to me, young people formed in this way will not, would not, think of “books” as different in kind from other social media that make for their daily digital diet, but merely a difference in degree. Books being one point on a spectrum that includes pods, videos, and the like.

8. So much for technologies of knowledge production and consumption. Another question: What counts as a “serious” Christian author? That was part of my original question, recall. Not just intellectually serious young Christian readers, but serious Christian books by serious Christian authors. Not fluff. Not spiritual candy bars. Not the ghost-written memoirs of influencers. Not, in short, the “inspirational” shelf at Barnes & Noble. If one-half of the presenting question of the original post concerned a certain type of young Christian reader, the other half concerns a certain type of Christian author. Here’s what I have in mind, at least. The author doesn’t have to meet a credentials requirement; doesn’t have to have a doctorate. Nor does he have to write in an academic, jargon-laden, or impenetrable style. That would defeat the point. To be popular, you have to be readable. And “being popular” can’t be a defeater here, or else no one, however rich or good in substance, could ever sell books: they’d be disqualified by their own success.

As I’ve said, Lewis and Chesterton are the gold standard. Other names that come to mind from the twentieth century (beyond Bonhoeffer, Nouwen, Peterson, and Willard) include Karl Barth, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Madeleine L’Engle, John Stott, J. I. Packer, Robert Farrar Capon, Frederick Buechner, Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas, and Marilynne Robinson. That’s a very short list; it could be doubled or tripled quickly. As it stands, what do the names on it have in common?

Here’s how I’d put it. Each author’s writing draws from a rich, clear, and deep reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, a reservoir that funds their work but does not overwhelm it. Put differently, what a normie reader encounters is the tip of the iceberg. If that’s all she can handle, so be it. But to anyone in the know, it’s as clear as day that there’s a mountain of ice beneath the surface.

Furthermore, one of the consistent effects of reading any of these authors is not only sticking with them but moving beyond them into the vast tradition that so evidently informs their writing. This could be the Thomistic tradition, or the patristic, or the Homeric, or the Antiochene, or the Kantian, or the Reformed, or whatever—but what the author offers the reader is so beautiful that the reader wants more of whatever it is. And so she moves from Piper to Edwards to Calvin to Augustine in the course of weeks, months, and years. From there, who knows what will be next?

That is the kind of book, the sort of author, I have in mind. My original interlocutor was asking about such work in the present tense. Who fits the bill? And who are young people reading? I’m willing to say that Keller fits the bill. Comer does too, in my judgment, though that is a status he graduated into with his last two books. His earlier work was far too primitivist-evangelical, far too dismissive of tradition, to qualify. But to his credit, he has clearly read himself into the tradition and now invites his readers to do the same.

I can certainly name others, like Tish Harrison Warren, who are doing the work and who are selling books. But are they having a widespread discernible influence across a vast slice of 15-25-year olds today? It’s probably too early to tell.

9. Let me think about my own trajectory for a moment. Here are authors whose books I read cover-to-cover across three different age ranges:

• 15-18: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Tolkien

• 18-22: Lee Camp, Douglas John Hall, Richard Foster, Nouwen, John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas, Berry, Walter Brueggemann, N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington

• 22-25: William Cavanaugh, Terry Eagleton, Robert Bellah, Augustine, Charles Taylor, Barth, Robert Jenson, John Webster, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, Kathryn Tanner

These aren’t all the authors I was reading at these ages, but rather the kinds of names I was introduced to that made an impact on me—so much so that I remember, in most cases, the first book I read by each, and when and where I was, and what my first impression of them was.

I’m sure I’m leaving off some important names. But the list is representative. I was a precocious, brainy young Christian who loved talking about God and reading the Bible, and these were the authors that youth ministers, mentors, and professors put in my hands. Not a bad list! Pretty much all living authors, or from the previous century, so not a lot of historical or cultural diversity on offer. But substantive, provocative, stimulating, and accessible nonetheless. The kinds of authors who might change your life. The kind who might convert you, or de-convert you. Who might shadow you for years to come.

And so, once again, the question is: Is the 2023 version of me (a) reading at all and, if so, (b) which authors, living or dead, is he reading? which is he being poked and prodded by? which stimulated and provoked by? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. This exercise has made me take a second look at my own teaching. Which authors do I assign? If you are a student who enrolls in my class, who will you read? A rough summary off the top of my head:

• Dead: Barth, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Athanasius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Saint Augustine, Saint Oscar Romero, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Paul VI, Henri Nouwen, James Cone, Gerhard Lohfink, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Alive: Tish Harrison Warren, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Joseph White, N. T. Wright, Beth Felker Jones, Martin Mosebach, Tara Isabella Burton, Ross Douthat, Andy Crouch, Andrew Davison, Andrew Wilson, Peter Leithart, Jemar Tisby, Victor Lee Austin, Michael Banner, James Mumford

Those are just authors of books I’ve assigned (and do assign). The list would be far larger if I included authors of chapters and articles and online essays. In any case, I’m pretty happy with this list, granting that I teach upper-level gen-ed elective courses to undergraduate students who have never taken theology before.

11. What lessons do I draw from all of the above? First, that people like me have a lot of power and influence and therefore enormous responsibility toward the young people who enter our classrooms. I cannot control whether my students fall in love with the books I assign them. But if I choose wisely, I make it far more likely that they might fall in love. That might in turn set off a chain reaction of reading and learning that lasts a lifetime.

12. Second lesson: Don’t assign “textbooks.” That is, don’t assign purely academic or fake authors. Don’t assign books dumbed down for teenagers. Avoid books that do not look like any sane person would ever cozy up with them in a comfy chair and read leisurely for a whole afternoon. Instead, assign books whose authors are known for befriending their readers. Assign authors who have fanatical followings. Assign authors who have the power to convert readers to their cause. Assign poets and rhetors and masters of the word. Assign stylish writing. Assign passionate writing, writing with stakes. Assign texts with teeth. Don’t be surprised when they bite students. That’s the point.

13. Third, the express aim of Christian liberal arts education and certainly of every humanities class within such institutions ought to be for students to learn to read, thence to learn to love to read, thence to learn to desire to be (that is, to become) a lifelong reader. Every assignment should be measured by whether it conduces to this end. If it does not, it should be scrapped.

14. It follows, fourth, that professors should shy away from assigning online content, whether that be links, videos, podcasts, or even texts on e-readers. That’s not quite an outright ban, but it is a strong nudge against the inclination. Give your students books: physical books they can hold in their hands. Reading a book is an activity different from scrolling a website, watching a video, or listening to a podcast. Young people already know how to do those things. They do not know how to sit still for ninety minutes without a screen in sight, in utter silence, and turn pages, lost in a book, for pure pleasure or simple edification. They have to be taught how to do that. And it takes time. What better time than college?

15. All this applies twice-over for seminaries. What is a pastor who cannot read? The principal job of a pastor, alongside administering the sacraments, is to teach and preach God’s word, which means to interpret the scriptures for God’s people. You cannot interpret without reading, which means you cannot teach and preach without being able to read. Are we raising a generation of illiterate ministers? Is the time already upon us? Are our seminaries aiding and abetting this process, or actively opposing and redirecting it?

16. If professors have some measure of influence, youth pastors (in person) and pastors with a public platform (online) have much greater influence. What we need, then, is for pastors to see it as part of their job description to find ways to encourage and induce literacy in the young people at their churches and, further, to suggest authors and books that are more than candy bars and happy meals, spiritually speaking. For this to happen—allow me to repeat myself—pastors must themselves be readers. They must be voracious bookworms who understand that their vocation necessarily and essentially entails wide and deep and sustained reading. Their churches (above all their elders and vestries and bishops) must understand this, too. If you walk into a pastor’s office and he is reading, he is doing his job. If you never see him reading, something’s amiss. The same is true, by the way, if you do see him reading, but he’s only ever reading a book written in the last five years.

17. Returning to the academy, what happens in the classroom is not all that happens on a college campus. Much, perhaps most, learning happens elsewhere. To be sure, it happens in library stacks and dorm rooms and coffee shops and Bible studies. But it also happens at Christian study centers. The importance of these cannot be overstated. Their presence on public and non-religious campuses is a refuge and a haven for young believers. They can’t be only that, however. They have to be the kind of place that fosters learning, reflection, discussion, and—yes—reading. Reading groups on the church fathers, or the magisterial reformers, or the Lutheran scholastics, or the ecumenical councils: these should be the bread and butter of Christian study centers. Hubs of vibrant intellectual life woven into and inseparable from the spiritual.

18. I’ll go one step further (borrowing the tongue-in-cheek suggestion from a friend): What we need is Christian study centers on Christian college campuses. Sad to say, far too many Christian universities today have bought into credentialing, gate-keeping, and careerism. They do not exist to further the Christian vision of the liberal arts. They exist to stay alive by selling students a product that will in turn secure them a job. None of these things is bad in themselves—enduring institutions, diplomas, gainful employment—but they are not the reason why Christian higher education exists. The presence of Christian study centers on Christian campuses would signal a commitment to the telos of such institutions by carving out space for the kinds of activity that students and professors are, lamentably, sometimes kept from devoting themselves to within the classroom itself. Perhaps this could be done explicitly on some campuses, whereas on others you would have to do it on the sly. Either way, it’s a worthy endeavor.

19. Let me close on two notes, one negative and one positive. The negative: As I have written about before, we have entered a time of double literacy loss in the church. Christians, especially the young, are at once biblically illiterate and literally illiterate. They do not read or know the Bible, and this is of a piece with their larger habits, for they do not read anything much at all. That is a fact. It would be foolish to deny it and naive to pretend it will change in some seismic shift in the span of a few years.

The period in which we find ourselves, then, is a sort of return to premodern times: Granting a kind of minimal mass literacy, in terms of widespread active reading habits, there is now (or will soon be) a very small minority of readers—and everyone else. What will this mean for the church? For daily spirituality and personal devotion? For catechesis, Sunday school, and preaching? For lay and voluntary leaders in the church? For ordained ministers themselves? We shall see.

20. I am biased, obviously, in favor of literacy and habits of reading. I want my students to be readers. I want pastors to be readers. I want more, not less, reading; and better, not worse, reading. But not everyone is meant to be a reader. Not everyone should major in English. Not everyone’s evenings are best spent with Proust in the French and a glass of wine. God forgive me for implying so, if I have.

Here’s the upshot. If young people (and, as they age, all people) are going to learn about the Christian faith through means other than reading, and for the time being those means will largely be mediated by the internet, then what we need is (a) high-quality content (b) accessible to normies (c) funded by a reservoir of knowledge rooted in the great tradition, together with (d) ease of access and widespread knowledge of how to get it. We need, in other words, networks of writers, pastors, teachers, scholars, speakers, podcasters, and others who have resources, audiences, support, technology, and platforms by which and through which to communicate the gospel, build up God’s people, and educate the faithful in ways the latter can access and understand, with content we would call “meat,” not “milk.”

I know one such endeavor. There are others. I don’t want to give up on literacy. I never will. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Time and past time to get moving on these projects. I’m entirely in favor of them, so long as we do not see them as a substitute but instead as a supplement to the habits of reading they thereby encourage rather than block. What we need, though, is the right people, adequately resourced, finding the young, hungry and seeking Christ and open to learning as they are. If this is the way to reach them, and it can be done well, count me in.

Who are young Christians reading today?

The question above was posed to me recently. What the speaker meant was: What living authors are brainy/serious/mature 15-25-year olds reading today?

I’m not sure I have an answer.

My first answer: They aren’t reading. At least, most Christians in this age range aren’t reading anything at all, much less thoughtful theology or rich spiritual writing.

My second answer: They aren’t reading, because if they are “consuming content” along these lines, it’s via YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify. They’re listening, watching, and scrolling, no doubt. The question then becomes: To whom? To what? Is any of it good? Or is it all drivel? But that’s a question for another day.

My third answer: A few of them—the ones actually reading real books, good books, cover to cover—are just reading the old classics many of us were fed at the same age: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Barth. Maybe Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Saint Athanasius or Julian of Norwich. Maybe, at the outer limits, Simone Weil or Saint John Henry Newman or Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Maybe Ratzinger! Or John Stott or J. I. Packer. Not sure, to be honest. But those of my students who do walk in the door having read something have usually read Lewis or one of the other usual suspects.

Having said all this, the original question remains unanswered. Are there living authors that have genuine influence on this crowd, minute and dwindling as the crowd may be?

The only name that came to mind as a surefire answer was John Mark Comer. Beyond him, I’m simply not sure. It seems to me there is not a John Piper of this generation (granting that Piper is still with us, and still exerting some measure of influence)—someone who is read widely, loved and hated, discussed constantly, an ever-present “voice” mediating a determine set of doctrines or ideas or practices or what have you.

Maybe Tim Keller. But the pastors and laity I know who read Keller are all my age or (typically) older. I don’t know if his name makes waves among the youth; maybe, but I doubt it.

So who else? Note that I’m not asking about which “names” make waves—there are plenty of popular influencers and pastors and speakers and YouTubers and podcasters. I’m talking about authors whose books are read by 15-25-year old American Christians with a head on their shoulders, who are serious about their faith in an intellectually curious way.

Other names: Tish Harrison Warren? Esau McCaulley? Dane Ortlund? Robert Barron? Jemar Tisby? Nadia Bolz-Weber? Carl Trueman? Peter Leithart?

I don’t know, y’all. I should add, I suppose, that I don’t mean which books have sold the most from the “Christian inspirational” genre. I’m talking about heady, demanding, theologically rigorous works addressed to a popular audience but not silly, superficial, or dumbed down.

I’m open to the answer being that what I have in mind—namely, books written by bona fide authors possessed of expertise, style, and substance—is not how Christian high schoolers and college students today are being reached or even growing in their faith. Though I will admit to my skepticism that it is possible for us to raise a generation of intellectually, spiritually, and theologically mature Christians who do not, at some point, deepen their faith and understanding in this way.

Time will tell, I suppose. But I do invite additional suggestions. I teach college students, after all, but the sample size is small; I only have one classroom for anecdotal observation, and the students who walk in don’t represent everyone. What are others seeing?

Defining “culture”

I’ve been grateful for the responses I’ve seen to my Mere O essay “Once More, Church and Culture.” Andrew Wilson was particularly kind in a post about the piece.

I’ve especially appreciated folks understanding what I was (and was not) trying to do in it. Not to suggest Hunter’s typology is bad or discreditable. Certainly not to suggest an alternative singular image or approach. Rather, to suggest that the very search for one dominant or defining posture is a fool’s errand, not to mention historically and culturally parochial. I was worried the length and wending nature of the essay would mislead readers. I was wrong!

Alan Jacobs also liked the essay, but was left with one big question: What is “culture,” and why did I—why does anyone, in writing on the topic—leave it undefined? More to the point, “there is no form of Christian belief or practice that is not cultural through-and-through.” In which case it sounds rather odd to pit the church against something the church herself includes and which, in turn, includes the church.

Alan’s criticism is a legitimate one, and I don’t have any full-bodied defense of my unspecified use of the term. I do have a few quick thoughts about what I had in mind and why folks use the word generically in essays like this one.

First, “culture” is one of those words (as Alan agrees) that is nigh impossible to pin down. You know it when you see it. You discover the sense of what a person is referring to through their use. The term itself could call forth an entire lifetime’s worth of study (and has done so). In that case, it’s reasonable simply to get on with the discussion and trust we’ll figure out what we’re saying in the process.

And yet—this intuition may well be wrong, and its wrongness may be evidenced in the very interminability of the post-Niebuhrian conversation. Granted! I’m honestly having trouble, however, imagining everyone offering a hyper-specific definition of “culture” or avoiding the term altogether.

In any case, second, it may be true that Niebuhr made various errors in his lectures that became Christ and Culture, but I’m surprised that Alan thinks—if his tongue is not too far in cheek—that the book should be dismissed. My surprise notwithstanding, I engage Niebuhr in the essay not to defend him but to take up the ideas he put into circulation through his typology; or rather, to display the pattern in his approach, which became the template for so many who followed him.

Third, I would like to point out how I actually use the word “culture” in the essay. I do in fact mention it in the opening sentence, along with similar items in a grab-bag list meant to suggest a kind of comprehensive civic repertoire: “Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority.” After that, I use the term exclusively in four ways: in scare quotes, in actual quotations, in paraphrase of an author’s thought, or in generic reference to “church and culture” writing—until the final few paragraphs. Here they are:

• “…Niebuhr, Hunter, and Jenson are right to see a dialectic at work in the church’s encounter with various cultures.”

• “As I see it, there is no one ‘correct’ type, posture, or model. Instead, the church has four primary modes of faithful engagement with culture.”

• “God is the universal Creator; the world he created is good; and he alone is Lord of all peoples and thus of all cultures.”

• “When and where the time is right, when and where the Spirit moves, the proclamation of the gospel cuts a culture to the bone, and the culture is never the same.”

• “…[my approach] does not prioritize work as the primary sphere in which the church encounters a culture or makes its presence known.”

• “The mission of the church is one and the same wherever the church finds itself; the same goes for its engagement with culture.”

• “Sometimes … the Spirit beckons believers, like the Macedonian man in the vision of St. Paul, to cross over, to enter in, to settle down, to build houses and plant vineyards. In other words, to inhabit a culture from the inside. Sometimes, however, the Spirit issues a different call…”

In my humble opinion, these uses of the term are clear. Either they are callbacks to the genre of “church and culture”/“engage the culture”/“church–culture encounter” writing, which I am in turn riffing on or deploying for rhetorical purposes (without any need for a determinate sense of the word). Or they are referring to a society or civilization in all its discrete particularity, as distinct from some other society or civilization.

Had Alan been the last editorial eye to read my essay before I handed it in, I would have cut “culture” from the first sentence and replaced most or all of these final mentions with “society” or “civilization.” I don’t think I would have defined “culture” from the outset, though I might have included a line about the term being at once inevitably underdetermined and unavoidable in writing on the topic, that is, on the church’s presence within and mission to the nations.

At the very least, I’ll be mindful of future uses of the term. It’s a slippery one, “culture” is, and I’m grateful to Alan for reminding me of the fact.