Rules Without Reasons: Why the Culture Is Eating Evangelicals for Lunch || The Culture always eats Evangelicals for lunch

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

The Bible - how should it be read, how seriously should it be taken, and so on - is a hot topic among evangelicals. (Lots of atheists seem to be pretty confused about the subject, too, but that's for another day...    )

Here are two articles worth reading....

Rules Without Reasons: Why the Culture Is Eating Evangelicals for Lunch

A conservative evangelical author was recently quoted in the Washington Post as saying that “Christ was God come to Earth, and for whatever reason He chose to come as a man.” I couldn’t help but cringe. “For whatever reason”? This seems to imply that the reason God became incarnate as a male is either a mystery we can never hope to solve, or even that the male incarnation was arbitrary. Perhaps Jesus could have accomplished His salvific work just as well as a woman! Statements like this one get to the heart of the evangelical crisis of authority—a crisis we could boil down to one question: Is there a discernible moral and social order built into creation, as the old Christian theologians thought—an order which Christ came to this world to restore and glorify—or do the graces of salvation and special revelation abolish the natural order in favor of something unprecedented? Is our journey toward the New Jerusalem to some extent a return to Eden, as John implies in the closing chapters of Revelation, or is it a journey to a different world entirely alien to Eden, and to this? Put more simply and less wordily, what are the ultimate reasons for God’s rules and revelation?

The implications of how we answer this are far-reaching. For instance, do we need explicit statements from Scripture to reach certain moral conclusions, or are these conclusions evident in nature and accessible via reason? Do we need chapters and verses condemning women in military combat roles, LGBT “spiritual friendships,” masturbation, or surrogacy, or can we reach conclusions about these things by reasoning from the created order? Catholics have historically said “yes,” producing a rich body of natural theology that gives moral guidance (however imperfectly followed) to members of that communion. I suggest most evangelicals, by contrast, can’t answer this question, or else they will answer it in the negative, believing that the doctrine of Sola Scriptura requires them to “remain silent where Scripture is silent.”

To offer a more controversial example, evangelicals who see my social media posts about intentionally childless couples often reply that not everyone is “called to parenthood.” There is a superstructure of philosophy and assumptions buried beneath that sentence. It implies a theology of marriage as an essentially companionate institution which is fulfilled without even the intention of being fruitful. It also implies that parenthood is a supernatural, rather than a natural calling. Instead of being a major part of the telos or purpose of marriage, it is an optional side-quest to which God may summon a couple via new revelation. For many evangelicals today, there is no prior mandate evident in creation to reproduce, or for that matter, to do or refrain from doing much of anything. Roles, duties, and moral facts which generations of Christians before us would have seen as self-evident now puzzle evangelicals, who take the view that whatever the Bible doesn’t forbid is allowed.

This puts them in awkward postures when it comes to arguing against things like same-sex marriage. After all, if we have already embraced the companionate model of marriage, what is the difference between two intentionally childless heterosexuals and two necessarily childless homosexuals? It’s hard to make the case that marriage, shorn of its procreative telos , is something of which complementary sexes are uniquely and exclusively capable. This is one of the main reasons we evangelicals have lost the cultural and legal wars on this issue. We already accept many of the culture’s premises, and have little besides special revelatory fiat with which to answer the inexorable chant of “marriage equality!” Even those feeble quips about two male electrical plugs not functioning which I used to hear from Christians so often growing up—crass-sounding but unintentionally shrewd natural law arguments that they were—are all but absent in evangelical discourse today.

This failure to take the created order seriously also puts even conservative theologians in awkward spots. I think of the posture struck by Reformed theologian Carl Trueman , who defines “complementarianism” as the belief that men should lead in the home and the church. Because Trueman believes Scripture is inerrant, he can’t get around the positive laws laid down in the New Testament about female pastors and marital authority. So, he grants the traditional view on these because of Scriptural authority. But everywhere else, he has argued for an egalitarian interchangeability of men and women, most notably in a dustup with John Piper over female police officers , and in the recent controversy surrounding his “Mortification of Spin” co-host, Aimee Byrd, who has just written a book calling for closer friendships between men and women, contra practices like the “Mike Pence Rule.” To put it bluntly, Trueman’s and Byrd’s view is retrofitted orthodoxy. When describing the roles of authority and submission in the church and the home, the Apostle Paul appeals to the created order to back up his theological conclusions (“Does not nature itself teach…” – 1 Corinthians 11:14). Trueman and Byrd, along with a huge number of evangelicals, cannot do this, precisely because they maintain that male leadership is a divinely-imposed exception restricted to the home and church, rather than the created rule all throughout nature.

Byrd in particular has appealed to our glorified state in the New Heavens and New Earth as the pattern for earthly friendships between sexes now. She contrasts this with marriage, which she points out will not exist in the resurrection life. One wonders why she doesn’t proceed to the obvious conclusion that if our lives now should mimic the life to come, then we ought not to marry.

Everywhere we turn, evangelicals seem to be floundering to come up with good reasons to oppose secular culture on issues pertaining to nature—sexuality, marriage, reproduction, gender, and the like. On some issues, we have simply capitulated to the culture with little fight. The unquestioning acceptance of cremation ( and creative and even less reverent alternatives for body disposal ), birth control, IVF and surrogacy , and now “LGBT” terminology and the “gay Christian” identification are all prominent examples.

In particular, the willingness of participants in the upcoming Revoice Conference in St. Louis and advocates of so-called “ spiritual friendship ” to simply lift the sexual identarian framework from the secular culture and retrofit it with a celibacy requirement (because, apparently, the Bible) are playing a dangerous game. They have surrendered centuries of Christian heritage on understanding homosexual desires as intrinsically disordered, and replaced them with an anthropology invented yesterday and biblical fiat. “Okay,” they seem to be saying, “you can be gay. Just don’t take your clothes off.” The foolhardiness of this is evident in the way advocates of “spiritual friendship” between same-sex-attracted Christians speak of their relationships.

In a critique of Wesley Hill’s book on the subject, Steven Wedgeworth points out how the author refers to the end of a same-sex friendship as a “breakup.” Ron Belgau, who runs the Spiritual Friendship blog, describes his longing for a relationship with a man who understands him, whom he can love more than anyone else, whom he can introduce to his parents, whom he can dance with (!), buy a house with, and adopt kids with—just not have sex with. Wedgeworth draws the obvious conclusion: This really doesn’t sound like friendship, not even a very intense form of it. “It sounds like the establishment of a home. Belgau’s “friend” sounds like a helpmeet.”

Anyone with two eyes can see that these men—who claim to be upholding the historic, orthodox view of sex and marriage—are importing the entire secular framework with virtually no changes and expecting to be able to halt just shy of the consummation forbidden by special revelation. Not to be glib, but if self-identified gay men are living together, dancing together, and adopting together, good luck stopping short of the finish line.

The common thread running through all of these examples is the evangelical abandonment of natural theology, accompanied by a biblicist approach to morality, and an over-realized eschatology that expects the grace of salvation to abrogate human nature. Put simply, evangelicals have largely abandoned the categories that would allow them to take moral stands on issues not explicitly discussed in Scripture. So, instead of appealing to creation, as the authors of Scripture themselves do, modern evangelicals are left with deracinated special revelation—isolated commands mostly found in the Pauline epistles about how marriage, the church, and sexuality should work. And instead of receiving these as restorations of a this-worldly natural order, the average Christian reads them as other-worldly restrictions on an otherwise unregulated state of nature.

When you approach the typical evangelical with an affirmation the Puritans, the Protestant Reformers, the Council of Trent, the Medieval Scholastics, the Church Fathers, and the Apostles would all have taken for granted (example: “an intentionally childless marriage is sinful”), they will probably find you a charming oddity. If you challenge birth control or many of the assisted reproductive technologies commonly employed once intentionally childless couples have spent their fertile years on furbabies, they will probably look at you as if you’ve grown a third nostril. Evangelicals, on the whole, simply lack the categories necessary to make moral judgments on these issues. The idea that nature tells us things about morality, about the intended function of our bodies, about the roles of the sexes, or about the purposes of our institutions is alien to the evangelical mind. If the Bible doesn’t expressly forbid something, it is permitted. If the Bible doesn’t expressly require something, it is optional. Sola Scriptura teaches that Scripture is in a class by itself as normative special revelation. Evangelical biblicism teaches (contrary to the Reformation) that there is no revelation outside of Scripture.

Combined with their notorious tendency to prioritize emotion and subjective experience, this leaves evangelicals uniquely vulnerable to revisionist theology and progressive positions on matters about which Christians historically agreed. Ironically, in their effort to remain faithful solely to the Bible, evangelicals have adopted a fundamentally different moral hermeneutic than that of the Bible’s authors, who rarely appealed only to their credentials as inspired writers, but repeatedly told their readers to look to creation—to the discernible order built by God into nature—to the telos which Christ intends to restore by making us more , not less human.

In the end, this tendency to affirm Scriptural fiats “for whatever reason” while isolating them from the natural theology employed by the human authors of Scripture is an attempt to be—as C. S. Lewis called it—“more spiritual than God.” But it will result—and already has resulted—in dramatic concessions to the anti-Christian culture. If left unchecked, this evangelical loss-of-touch with creation and the natural framework within which revealed truths make sense will quickly erode confidence in the Bible itself. Because as any parent can tell you, rules without reasons soon go unheeded.

The Culture always eats Evangelicals for lunch

Normally here on Schaeffer’s Ghost, we stick to reviews of books and movies. But today we’re presenting something a bit different: a ‘review’ of—or, more accurately, a ‘response to’—G. Shane Morris’s recent piece over on  Troubler of Israel called “ Rules without Reasons: Why the Culture is Eating Evangelicals for Lunch .”

If you’ve not read it, I’d encourage you to do so now. It is well-written and thoughtful, and at least partially right. But it is also partially wrong, hence this response.

For those of you too lazy to go read the article, shame on you. But here’s a brief summary anyway: Evangelical Christians lose cultural debate after cultural debate because they have abandoned the long Christian tradition of ‘Natural Law’ thinking in favor of a shallow (or even of a deep) biblicism based on  Sola Scriptura that cedes far too much ground:

“Everywhere we turn, evangelicals seem to be floundering to come up with good reasons to oppose secular culture on issues pertaining to nature—sexuality, marriage, reproduction, gender, and the like. On some issues, we have simply capitulated to the culture with little fight. The unquestioning acceptance of cremation ( and creative and even less reverent alternatives for body disposal ), birth control,  IVF and surrogacy , and now “LGBT” terminology and the “gay Christian” identification are all prominent examples.

The common thread running through all of these examples is the evangelical abandonment of natural theology, accompanied by a biblicist approach to morality, and an over-realized eschatology that expects the grace of salvation to abrogate human nature. Put simply, evangelicals have largely abandoned the categories that would allow them to take moral stands on issues not explicitly discussed in Scripture. So, instead of appealing to creation, as the authors of Scripture themselves do, modern evangelicals are left with deracinated special revelation—isolated commands mostly found in the Pauline epistles about how marriage, the church, and sexuality should work. And instead of receiving these as restorations of a this-worldly natural order, the average Christian reads them as other-worldly restrictions on an otherwise unregulated state of nature.”

Even more thoughtful Protestants like Carl Trueman, Morris argues, fall into this trap when they grant only the explicit Biblical gender categories (women can’t be elders in a church, e.g.), but then cede everything else to the cultural narrative.

Now, I think in one sense Morris is exactly right. There are good historical arguments from creation/Natural Law to be made concerning marriage, the family, morality, etc. Evangelicals since the mid 19th century have been increasingly lazy when it comes to using or even being conscious of the great tradition that we are a part of. That is surely to be repented of and corrected—and the sooner the better.

But in another sense, I think Morris is wrong on two counts. First, I’m not convinced that a growth of “natural theology” among Evangelicals will be as helpful as its proponents seem to think. I do think that Evangelicals need to have more of a sense of the Natural Law—though I would also want us to remember that it has largely been a tool of Rome, rather than a useful tool for Bible-believing Christians. More importantly, even a solidly Protestant development of Natural Law would only be of limited use. I think (and I’m not scholar of Natural Law, so take this with a grain of salt) that the problem is with the fallenness of creation and, as a result, of Natural Law itself.

To take an example from Abraham Kuyper—someone who, while not exactly a natural theologian himself certainly lays an appealing groundwork for a Protestant Natural Law approach—let’s assume as an example from the sphere of science the ‘Natural Law’ that distance equals rate times time, or d=rt (the famous ‘dirt’ formula that we learn in high school and that our parents learned in middle school). That law, within its proper limits, is pretty well established. I think I’m even comfortable saying that it is a bit of natural revelation about the regularity with which God rules the world.

And yet, we also see that these sorts of Natural Laws are fluid and evolving as well. The old Newtonian view of the universe has given way to the Relativity of an Einstein—just as Newton himself supplanted the older understanding of the world. d no longer always = rt, and we find that we’ve got to re-evaluate our view of the scientific sphere.

What we see in science is true as well in Natural Law. It is both flexible and non-binding in the exactly the same way that Morris accuses Evangelicals of being when they are driven by emotion and cultural pressures. (And that’s another point where he’s correct: Evangelicals  are driven too much by our emotions and cultural pressures. But Natural Law isn’t the solution—a more robust Biblical Theology is.) There is no reason to suppose that Natural Law thinkers won’t ‘evolve’ and reach the same cultural accommodations that so many Evangelicals are sadly making. Traditionally this approach has of necessity underplayed original sin and usually ended in a progressive relativism. Not always, of course, but often enough to make me hesitant about using it to fill in perceived deficiencies in Scripture.

Second, and much more importantly, Christians will  always lose the cultural battles, because it’s the culture’s game, rules, tools, and umpires—and it’s a game Christians are no longer playing anyway. Morris’s complaint seems to be that in the game of golf (to pick a sport… well, a ‘sport’), Evangelicals are using a balsa wood club, when what they need to do is pick up a Honma titanium head Five Star driver  while taking lessons from a Scotsman.

The problem is that the Christian is someone who sees that the golf course is on fire and that the players are all deaf, dumb, and blind. While the world is busy sinking putts and stacking the rules against God’s people, we are busy keeping our eyes on the Exit and shouting to others to warn them about their danger and about the only Person who can save them.

To give up the golf image before I torture it completely to death, the world is concerned with things like personal autonomy, self-indulgence, physical prosperity, and what is trending right now on Twitter. The Christian is (or should be) concerned with repentance and faith, the life of the church (as in: the faithful preaching of God’s Word, the proper administration of the sacraments, and the legitimate exercise of good membership practices), personal and corporate holiness, and what was written in a Book two millennia ago. In any given battle of the moment we shouldn’t expect to ‘win’ by the world’s standards. Instead, we should remember that the game that matters has already been won and that our concerns are now fundamentally different.

Again, that’s not to say that Morris is completely wrong about Evangelicals and Natural Law. We  should give our best arguments to the world on these kinds of matters, and maybe that does mean digging into the tradition of natural theology. But we should also remember that these kinds of arguments are at best going to be a sideshow compared to what we’re really concerned with. They’re a part of a game we’re no longer playing, and as such it is going to look like we lose time after time. We know the truth, however, and so we should chug along faithfully warning the world and keeping our eyes on the hope we have in the founder and perfecter of our faith .