Reprinted with Permission from World July 15/22, 1995 and Frederica Mathewes-Green.
SCRIPTURE REFERS TO “THE SPRING OF THE year, the time when kings go forth to war.” Summer is the time when Christians go off to church conventions. For some of us, going to these gatherings is uncomfortably like going forth to war.
In some denominations, those who should be our dearest colleagues in the faith seem like bizarre strangers. Not long ago, one mainline group actually voted on whether to require clergy to abstain from sex outside marriage—and the resolution failed. Another sought to affirm women’s spirituality by recovering worship of Ashtoreth, in a program for laity titled “Baking Cakes for the Queen of Heaven.” A friend of mine asked his bishop, “Do you believe in the Resurrection?” and received this hesitant reply: “I have great respect for the historic traditions of the church.” Much of this and you have to grip your ears to keep your head from spinning around.
It’s tough enough when we are clearly divided. But sometimes the division isn’t clear, and we’re using the same words to mean different things; “The Cross” can signify salvation by Jesus’s blood, or the psychological woundedness humans share. It’s “the barrier of a common language.”
The foundational assumption of modernist theology is that people are basically good: We are born good, loved and affirmed by God, but the trials of life damage us. In our pain God keeps caring for and healing us, calling us to be our true selves, with a love that is unconditional and beyond understanding. Very simply, people are good, then are hurt, then are healed.
CLASSIC CHRISTIAN BELIEVERS, however, hold that we are essentially fallen; we take to sin like ducks to water. Our unhappiness is caused less by external damage than by our interior impulse to be each a petty emperor, our selfishness spinning us into a pit of estrangement from each other and God. The depth of our sin proves the height of God’s love, for only the great sacrifice of the Cross could rescue us; we accept it with humble gratitude, resolving to obey God’s will though it often runs counter to our own. This “dying to self,” because it conforms human will to God’s will, has the side-effect of healing and self-fulfillment. In short, people are fallen, then rescued, then obedient, then healed.
But fog lies over the battlefield. For example, modernists will refer to their own emotions as authoritative factors in the dialogue, to general confusion. A theological or moral assertion is disqualified— “true for you but not for me”—if it produces in them feelings of rejection or oppression.
Call this notion “Feelings trump truth.” Believers expect that God’s will is seldom our natural own; it is holy and challenging, and bound to make humans uncomfortable at certain points. Emotions may be useful guides to insight, but they may also be deceptive, leading us back into selfish willfulness; we need to heed the objective authority of Scripture and the church’s historic witness to the unchangeable core of the faith (what Chesterton called “giving our ancestors a vote”).
Modernists project their emotional framework onto orthodox believers, presuming that we are driven by our feelings, particularly fear. They believe that we are fearful of change, fearful of unfamiliar people and practices, and fearful of the Holy Spirit doing a new thing. They think that if they treat us with loving patience, these fears will gradually ease, and we’ll no longer be so rigid. Unsurprisingly, orthodox believers find this treatment condescending and frustrating. The objective events of a Friday and Sunday two thousand years ago are not projections of emotion.
NOT ONLY IS DIALOGUE trapped in a bog of vague, double-handled words; those who protest that confusion and seek clarity often get labeled “divisive.” We are victims of what has been called “repressive tolerance”: the ruling elite will permit us to be wrong-headed and backward, as long [as] we grant their right to be open-minded and progressive.
If you’re going forth to battle during the remainder of this summer, do what you can to dispel the fog. Flush out honest disagreement in the name of actual, not feigned, progress; a useful tool is the single word “repentance,” for it will disclose basic differences in the view of God and man. And don’t buy the progressives’ “Yeah, we’re cool” strut. The modernist worldview is shallow, lonely, and impotent, warmed only by the circular movements of a petty self. It lacks what the adherents of “mere Christianity” know: the stunning passion of the Cross, that drama ranging from knowledge of our desperate lostness to our plunge into grace through submission to God’s will. This is not a battle where we seek to defeat our enemies. When we pull them over the battle line, everybody wins.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 1, No. 5 (Sep/Oct 1995).
