After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. They forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. Judges 2:10-12 (NIV)
The days described in the Old Testament book of Judges have lessons for us today. The generation following Joshua had not been taught by their fathers about the works of the LORD and therefore the Israelites were easily seduced by the surrounding cultures into worshiping foreign gods. They appeased these pagan fertility gods through, among other things, cultic sexual practices and child sacrifice.
God intended the Church to be salt and light in transforming the culture. Instead, today the culture is pressing its values in on the church as it did in the Old Testament. In some denominations like the PC(USA) there is little distinction between the General Assembly governing body’s actions and the surrounding culture. In other more conservative denominations and independent churches, while their public pronouncements remain strong, individual believers are often influenced more by the culture around them than by the pronouncements of their church.
In the Old Testament, it was not the strength of the surrounding pagan nations that caused Israel to turn from the LORD. It was because the believers no longer knew the One in whom they believed. The cultural manifestations we’re seeing today like abortion, sexual immorality, and euthanasia are the result of a loss of knowledge of the LORD in the Church. Fewer and fewer church members have sufficient knowledge of the doctrines of faith, derived from Scripture, which identify this LORD and what he has done. Instead, the doctrines that are taught, sometimes in the Church, often in the media, point to a counterfeit Christianity that denies the atonement and encourages people to reimagine their own personal god.
Few Church members have been taught a Christian worldview as the framework of their decision-making. Thus many of them fall prey to the unbelieving cultural values around them.
Few church-goers are able to defend the “hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15) in the face of the caricatures made by a hostile media. This lack of faithful response undermines the faith of believers and prevents unbelievers from coming to a living faith.
Yet God has promised that when his people repent, he will bring healing to the land:
If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (2 Chronicles 7:14)
The Mission of Theology Matters
The mission of Theology Matters is to challenge, equip and support Christians as they renew the Church’s witness to Jesus Christ as the only Lord and Savior. The focus of the mission is to restore the teaching of the doctrines of Christian faith from a Reformed perspective that describe who Jesus is and what he has done; to relate those doctrines to a Christian worldview; and to respond to the questions and caricatures of Christian faith raised by the culture and the false gospels arising inside the Church. As the Church’s witness is renewed and strengthened, individual lives will be transformed and those lives will be salt and light to restore the culture.
The Vision of Theology Matters
Theology Matters will provide printed, online, and video materials enabling Christians and congregations to understand Christian doctrine, to make decisions from a Christian worldview perspective, and to respond to false gospels and cultural values. Christians will be equipped to give a thoughtful, credible, winsome reaffirmation of Reformed Christian teachings as true and redemptive for all individuals and for every society.
Theology Matters’ Objectives in Addressing the Problem
Doctrine
Equip and encourage leaders of local congregations to understand and teach Christian doctrine effectively and persuasively and contrast it with the false gospels. Doctrine is drawn from Scripture and explained in the tradition of the great Reformed confessions of faith.
Apologetics
Equip and encourage local congregational leaders to practice and teach Christian apologetics, defending the truth of Christian claims and answering the questions that spiritual seekers, especially young adults, have about the Christian faith.
Christian Worldview
Equip and encourage local congregational leaders to apply a Christian worldview to public or controversial questions. Such questions include biblical authority, universalism, the atonement, the value of human life, the significance and practice of baptism in the Church, environmental stewardship, religious freedom, and the importance of the Christian tradition in western civilization.
Marriage
We discern a particular priority at this time to present and defend biblical teaching on marriage—a central institution of human society that is the target of attacks in both society and the Church. A biblical response to the culture’s confusion about marriage depends upon sound doctrine and a Christian worldview In this and other questions, we point people toward both the special revelation in the Bible and the general revelation that we see in human history and contemporary social science.
Specific Examples of Counterfeit Teachings
Many parts of the Church today are abandoning their calling to proclaim God’s Good News to all people. Instead they put forth truncated gospels, or false gospels, that lack the power to transform and give new life to individuals and communities. In some cases, these false gospels even encourage the beliefs and trends that leave so many people lost and broken by sin.
These false gospels are characterized by:
- Interpreting the Scriptures as expressing merely personal, subjective, culturally conditioned perceptions of God, rather than as constituting God’s authoritative Word to the Church and for all humankind;
- Reducing God to an object of human imagination, rather than the Sovereign who created and redeemed humans according to his own plan;
- Construing all truth as personal, subjective, and relative—“you have your truths, and I have mine”—rather than accepting the reality of the truth found in the general and special revelation of God that is available to all people;
- Minimizing the sinfulness of humankind, in favor of a message of self-esteem based on a contorted view of God’s love, rather than giving full weight to biblical laws and admonitions exposing the pervasive corruption of the human heart;
- Being uncomfortable with the notion of Christ’s death as an atonement for sin, dismissing that doctrine as an unworthy “child sacrifice” that God would never require and humans would never need, rather than recognizing the necessity of God becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ to fulfill Old Testament sacrificial imagery in his once-for-all atoning death on the cross;
- Affirming people’s self-defined identities, rather than a call to repentance and transformation into a new identity in Christ;
- Promoting universalism, the assumption that all religious or ethical systems are equally valid paths to God, rather than acknowledging the uniqueness of Christ’s saving work;
- Accepting a limited role for the Church, in which it imparts mainly private truths to its own members, rather than taking up the Church’s responsibility to present public truths to the whole society;
- Offering a therapeutic emphasis on helping Church members fulfill their aspirations to live happy lives in a just society, rather than new lives in Christ’s kingdom;
- Minimizing the conflict between Church and society by communicating messages intended to accommodate the Church to society and avoiding messages that might offend its elites, rather than proclaiming the whole counsel of God for all people to honor God in all spheres of life.
Specific Means to Achieve These Objectives
The 16-page publication, Theology Matters, is mailed five times a year to more than 15,000 individuals and churches in the United States and an additional 70 leaders around the world in places like Pakistan, India, Australia, China and Zimbabwe. Recent topics have included the five solas of the Reformation, Paul’s teaching on sexuality in 1 Corinthians, two views of marriage, Reformed preaching, euthanasia, Christians in the Middle East, the Westminster Confession, the trustworthiness of Scripture and The Confessions of St. Augustine.
Emails on important issues of doctrine, apologetics, worldview, and marriage are sent out biweekly to more than 3600 Christian leaders. Recent emails have addressed topics such as a Christian view of history, the “progressive” myth of inevitability, the Supreme Court decisions on marriage, a proposed retranslation of the Heidelberg Catechism, and the movie God’s Not Dead.
We are identifying or creating resources on issues of concern. We have produced a DVD series on “What’s the Big Deal about Marriage?” and “The Best of Luke.” We also offer DVDs by Dr. James Edwards, “Is Jesus the Only Savior” and “Jesus Christ: The Fulfillment of God’s Promises.” We would like to produce and/or identify other DVDs on a variety of topics and make them available to our readers.
Past Accomplishments
Theology Matters has been in print for 19 years. During those years we related primarily to people inside the Presbyterian Church (USA), although our mailings have included Presbyterians of other affiliations, as well as some Lutherans and Methodists.
Our vision has been to respond theologically to issues before the church as well as issues facing individual Presbyterians. We have published outstanding articles on male versus female language for God, sexuality, marriage, abortion, euthanasia, intelligent design, the nature of the church, postmodernism, church discipline, preaching, the sacraments, tolerance, the Trinity, the World Council of Churches, and attitudes toward other world religions, to cite some examples.
In the past, the PC(USA) was the focus of our efforts to bring reform and the majority of readers were members of the PC(USA). Yet even as we worked, we knew that the issues facing the PC(USA) were typical of many other churches, as our country moved from a Christian foundation to a more secular and postmodern one.
In the past 19 years, we successfully helped PC(USA) members reject ordination for those engaged in homosexual practice in 1996, 1997, and 2001. We played a major role in fending off attempts in 2008, 2010, and 2012 to have the PC(USA) redefine marriage as between any “two people.” We were instrumental in helping to produce and pass a minority report in 2010 that affirmed that marriage could only be between a man and a woman.
In 2010-2011, we also successfully equipped PC(USA) members to reject the proposed addition of the liberation theology-infused Belhar Confession to the PC(USA) Book of Confessions.
Theology Matters helped PC(USA) commissioners at their 2006 General Assembly avoid “adopting” a policy paper on the Trinity that likened the triune God to “an ark, a rainbow and a dove” or various other triads of invented names.
We have participated in the Association for Church Renewal (ACR), which brings together orthodox/conservative renewal groups in almost all the major “mainline” Protestant denominations. We are involved in the formation of a new ecumenical group that will include conservative evangelical denominations. The ACR and the new group represent significant parts of the expanded audience that Theology Matters hopes to reach.
Future Plans and New Directions
Theology Matters is now intentionally broadening its mission to reach leaders in all Reformed churches as well as leaders in other Christian traditions.
Our early ministry sought to renew the PC(USA). Articles in Theology Matters focused on issues being debated and decided in the PC(USA). We measured our success in ministry often by the outcomes achieved at the General Assembly (GA) and through presbytery votes. These GA actions were important because they spoke the truth to church members and to the culture. Every time the PC(USA) General Assembly voted in accordance with the clear word of Scripture, because of its size with more than two million members, the news media reported the action and the culture heard a faithful word.
Yet even as we attempted to renew the PC(USA), we knew that the national level GA decisions would be only temporary and easily changed if the hearts of the majority of people in the PC(USA) were not strengthened in doctrine, apologetics, and worldview. We knew, even as we provided resources to GA commissioners, that issues before them were a reflection of the culture. Sadly, too often the culture was far better at persuading people to accept its secular positions than the church was at teaching biblical truth. Statistics bear out that the percentage of Christians who now support same-sex marriage has risen sharply in recent years.
In the future we will select articles for Theology Matters based on issues arising from the culture that affect all Christians. So quotes in articles will likely not come from PC(USA) leaders but cultural leaders. Writers will no longer be limited to PC(USA) pastors and scholars. We will search out authors who are thinking most clearly about issues regardless of their denominational affiliation. We have already begun including articles by professors and pastors in other denominations. While we will continue to write from a Reformed perspective, some issues like marriage, religious liberty, and euthanasia transcend the Reformed perspective and deal with the fundamentals of Christian faith common to all traditions.
We are no longer as concerned about national level decisions by denominational bodies as we are about equipping Christians to understand the doctrines of their faith, to be able to defend their faith at the kitchen table, in the public square, and in an adult Sunday School class, and then to make thoughtful decisions from a Christian worldview.
To do this, we need to expand our readership; make Theology Matters available on CD and MP3 formats; create or identify good study tools for doctrine, apologetics and worldview; create a speakers bureau for conferences and congregations; aggressively seek to put articles in secular and Christian publications; provide teaching through social media; make Theology Matters available in the library of every Christian college and seminary.
The success we are seeking is to strengthen the whole Church of Jesus Christ and change the culture. That is a huge task and one that won’t be accomplished quickly. We realize we are not the only instrument that God is using to accomplish his purposes. But we are one of the tools. A unique tool. Unique in that we offer our resources free to those who request them. Unique in that we dig deeper into the heart of issues from a theological perspective. Unique in that our focus is doctrine, apologetics and worldview. Unique in that it is the whole Church of Jesus Christ we seek to strengthen as its members are strengthened.
The culture can change. We should not assume the inevitability of any view that is contrary to Scripture. Theology Matters played a part in changing the culture’s view of abortion and the sanctity of life. Certainly, many pro-life efforts and organizations played major roles in reversing the culture’s attitude toward abortion. But we played our part in careful teaching of doctrine. Now a majority of people in the U.S. reject abortion and that percentage continues to grow among young people.
Right now there are states considering legalizing euthanasia. In the Netherlands it is now legal for a child to ask to be euthanized. That movement will soon reach the United States. Religious Freedom is facing significant challenges in this country. Environmentalism has become almost a religion.
Western civilization itself is threatened as the foundation of Western civilization, Christianity, is intentionally denounced in the public square. Marriage is in decline with 41 percent of children in this country being born without a married mother and father. That number soars to 70 percent in the African American community. The results of not being raised by a mother and father are increased poverty, unsuccessful outcomes in school, more mental health issues. Theology Matters!
Let us be clear. We are not abandoning the PC(USA). Every congregation, regardless of denominational affiliation, is facing challenges from the culture. We are expanding our vision to resource, encourage, and equip all Christians.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 20, No. 3 (May/Jun 2014).
