Early this past summer, Matthew Vines published an article on the NY Times Opinion page entitled “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” It was a reveal of the “cultural epistemology” at work among the evangelicals/progressive ex-vangelicals when it comes to sexuality and gender. Now before you stop reading - because I used the word “epistemology” - allow me a few paragraphs to explain?

Vines’ NY Times article provoked a media firestorm. Evangelicals, post-evangelicals, progressives and non-Christians alike reacted in protest of the piece. Such firestorms are good for revealing cultural forces at work because they reveal unrecognized assumptions that are being disrupted by the event. Grand assumptions, rarely examined, come to the surface. In fact, the media eruption happens because baseline assumptions are being offended. In this case, Vines’ piece revealed the evangelical/postevangelical assumptions about how culture works in shaping the knowledge of our selves and the world, i.e. the “cultural epistemology.” Vines is a product of the evangelical/post-evangelical cultural epistemology. He lives within the evangelical/postevangelical worlds. And so this firestorm provides a rare opportunity to look deeper at what is going on in our assumptions (of the evangelical/pos-evangelicals) and clear some space to rethink discipleship for sexuality and gender. So let’s take a look.

Essentialism Lies At The Core

For decades, the gender/sexuality debate has begun with the question: is gender/sexuality essential or is it socially constructed?

Essentialists say there is an essence at the core of gender that does not change. It is tied to biology. Male and female - it is the way things are. Constructivists, on the other hand, say that, even though female and male bodies are different, the meanings, the way see and understand gender, what it means to be male and female, how we move in the world as male/female, is socially constructed, varies from culture to culture, is a construction of language and culture. In the words of Simone Beauvoir, “One is not born (a woman), but rather becomes, a woman.”

By and large, evangelicals are essentialists to the core.

The predominant approach here is: God created male and female (Gen 1:27), in His image, this is who we are, we were born/created this way, and God hath declared His creation good. Therefore we affirm, we are male and female. Included in this logic is the fact that the way we are male and female is self-evident, not a cultural construction, and this too is how God created us, and He has declared this good. This cultural epistemology, that drives evangelicals, is essentialism.

This logic however is not secluded to traditional, conservative evangelicals. It extends to other kinds of evangelicals/ex or post evangelicals. It goes for both Non-Affirming and Affirming evangelicals and progressive evangelicals who live in the shadow of their fundamentalist evangelical upbringing. Amid progressive evangelicalism/protestantism, the logic remains: God hath created us as we are, whether heterosexual or LGBTQIA, straight or gay. This is who we are as created good by God, and as such, we affirm. Go and be true to thy-self. Or, in the words of recently deceased Dolly Parton, “we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”

In both cases then, whether Affirming or Not Affirming, the logic of essentialism permeates the cultural epistemology. In their own ways, they are logics born of Christendom (I’d love to unwind this point in afuture article).

You can see this essentialism at work in Mathew Vine’s article when he writes, “Being gay is neither chosen nor changeable…” For Vines, a person’s sexual orientation is a fixed, innate, essential reality. He worries about the “queer” label because “(b)eing gay begins to look less like an inborn trait and more like a chosen ideology or aesthetic.” For Vines, “Subsuming the fixed reality of gayness under the much more malleable banner of queerness undermines a core premise behind gay rights: that sexual orientation isn’t chosen.”

Over the last twenty years, both the mainstream conservative evangelical and the progressive evangelical positions on gender and sexuality have been grounded in this kind of essentialism. Whether conservative or post-evangelical, I was born this way, created by God this way, and therefore loved and affirmed in God’s sight. This is who I am and therefore I must be freed to be myself, express myself, flourish in all God has created me to be.

The Disruption That is Queer Theory

Queer Theory, and the various accompanying post-structuralist understandings of the self, disrupts this cultural epistemology that flows through modern evangelicalism, especially mega church evangelicalism, as well as progressive evangelicalism. It is what I call, for lack of a better term, the “cultural epistemology.”

Judith Butler, one of the founders of queer theory (sometimes included within third wave feminism),^[i] in her first book Gender Trouble (1990) argued that gender is not fixed biologically. Rather gender is learned within a culture through “performativity,” meaning gender is scripted through iteration, repeated actions, ways of speaking, language and gestures, and the cultural discourses in which we live. Over time, as gender is performed, it becomes naturalized. It becomes so much a part of us that we accept that this is the way things are (i.e. essentialism). We assume whatever gender construct we are inhabiting is stable, essential and inherent.

For Butler we are all being formed within a discourse, a heterosexual matrix, an invisible social framework of cultural rules, and power structures that (re)enforce various regimes that connect biological sex to gender identity and sexual desire. It is within this world that power is ensconced, hierarchy, patriarchy, commoditization of bodies, misogyny, all become part of the way things are, normative, indeed natural.

And so queer theory reveals the way culture works to shape our sexuality and gender identities (often called “subjectivity”). For me, I see this around me, have experienced it, but also see it as a mystery as to how individuals become ensconced in one discourse over another. It is complex, and regularly requires we deconstruct the cultural powers over our lives.

For Butler, we must find ways to disrupt the status quo, the heterosexual matrix, unravel the discourses of power, misogyny and patriarchy that drive gender and sexuality, if we are to escape their hold on us. There’s an anti-normative verve to Butler’s agenda. Vines finds this aspect of queer problematic. He describes it as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” “anti-normative,” “oppositional.” It even becomes political, ideological, attacking all normative traditional worlds. In the words of queer theorist Ana Jargose, queers don’t want marriage because marriage is the heterosexual cage that imprisons. It is this part of queer theory that Vines rejects, and obviously most traditionalists and evangelicals do as well.

Desirability Regimes

It is not only gender that falls within the essentialist/constructivist debates for evangelicals/post-evangelicals. It is sexual orientation and the structures of attraction. Most evangelicals/post evangelicals essentialize attractions just as they do gender. If I am attracted to such and such, this is part of the way I am, the way I was born, it’s in my biology.

For conservative non-affirming evangelicals this essentialism (what is “natural”) means that if one’s attractions veer off the heterosexual matrix, they are deemed un-natural. “Un-natural” implies this is not the way you were created (Rom 1:26-27 is used like this). For progressive affirming post/ex-vangelicals, this essentialism views my given attractions and desires as natural/essential to who I am, the way I was born/created. They are to be affirmed as from God. Essentialism pretty much reigns supreme here as well.

But queer theory, and third wave feminism complicate these logics. Judith Butler, starting with her first book Subjects of Desire, explores how desire and desirability become produced within social power and cultural norms. “Regimes of desire” decide which bodies and loves are seen as normal or valuable, and which ones are pushed to the margins as strange or undesirable. And our desires get drawn in and shaped within these cultural powers. For Butler, this all enforces the heterosexual matrix.

I experienced “regimes” like this within large evangelical mega-churches in the 90’s. It was also palpable as I walked the halls of financial firms where I worked in the 90’s. Sadley, there was not much difference between the two. Someday I’ll record my observations on the desirability regimes of mega-churches.

These themes have become much more prominent in the literature in the last decade or two. It’s hard to keep up with all that is being written on how attraction is different from biological desire (starting way back in the 50’s with the Hegelian Kojeve), and how different layers of attraction are shaped within cultural scripting, or against cultural scripting. These authors explore the complexity, the layers, of how power, anger, abuse, coercion, capitalism, the significance of being desired by someone, or groups of someones, how one becomes/or desires to be an object of desire, and it goes on and on. As a result, there is an acknowledged complexity around desire and its enmeshment with power, years after Foucault wrote about bio-power, and Rosemary Hennessy, wrote ‘Profit and pleasure: sexual identities in late capitalism.’

One of the more recently published books I use in my class “Christian Sexuality and American culture” (at Northern Seminary) is Amia Srinivasan’s ‘The Right to Sex,’ a blockbuster of a book. Written in the late third wave genre, it is brutally crass about the realities of sexuality and formation on the campuses of Britain and the U.S. She explores how sexual preference/sexual attraction is conditioned by patriarchal norms, racism, ableism, and “desirability regimes” within capitalism. She explores the hierarchies of attraction, often related to race, that script what and who is desirable for sex. The book is disturbing, but it is a needed reality check on how our attractions get scripted within regimes of power, privilege, as well as repulsion and exclusion from these same roles and hierarchies.

So You’re Saying Orientation/Gender is A Choice?

It is the knee-jerk reaction - of Christians caught within the cultural epistemologies of evangelicalism/progressive post-evangelicalism –to immediately think: if sexuality orientation is not essentialist, i.e. “if we’re not born this way,” well then it automatically must mean that sexuality and orientation is a personal choice? This binary is in the logics – of what I’m calling the cultural epistemology – of both evangelicals/post-evangelicals. The centering of the autonomous essentialist self (able to make a choice!!) is in the water that the evangelical/protestant mainliners swim in.

As a result, the evangelical/post-evangelical/progressive moral logics - when it comes to sex - all start first with the individual, and only then move to the culture. It is either I, as an individual, was born this way (essentialist) and therefore affirm (both traditional male/female or LGTBQ), or gender/sexuality is socially constructed, and therefore I, as an individual, have a choice to obey God, or not. The ways of queer theory work in reverse. Queer theory pushes us start with how culture/society shapes the subjectivity of the individual into power structures, hierarchies, social economics, and then, and only then, ask what needs to change, and how can we as individuals engage for the change. And despite the cultural constructivism, simple cognitive choice is not a simple option.

When Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble 1990, argued “gender is a performance,” a “stylized repetition of acts,” that gender is learned within social norms and then naturalized into our being, people mistook her for saying gender/sexuality is a choice. Butler likened gender/sexuality to a “costume” you put on in a theatrical performance (influenced by her analysis of ‘drag performance’ in the book). As a result, people mistook her to be saying gender/sexuality, like clothing or style, is a choice. They were caught in the same binary as evangelicals/or progressive protestants. Gender/sexuality is either essentialist or a personal choice.

But Butler in her 1993 book Bodies That Matter said a flat out “no” to this way of seeing gender/sexuality. She in essence showed us that “selves” are “subjectivities” formed within cultural forces. Gender and sexual orientation are woven deeply into our psyches, our sense of who we are, our very identities, the way we feel, see and experience our selves in the culture. Once the person is interpellated (google that word- it’s important) into these constructs, there is no simple choosing our identities. These identities are already locked in. They cannot simply be discarded or radically altered at will. There’s a shaping effect that is not conscious. And if there is to be any change that happens – and she surely argued for change in the “heterosexual matrix”- it will be with resistance to the culture, in constellations of cultural resistance, social spaces that can disrupt the cultural normative structures that shape selves.

Where I’m at on All This

I believe there is much to learn in all this for Christians. Matthew Vines helps us see the cultural epistemology at work in both evangelical and post evangelical worlds regarding sexuality and gender. Queer theory, and its variants, disrupts this cultural epistemology. I find Butler’s socio-cultural analysis compelling. For Christians, I believe there’s an opening here to think clearly and discern a discipleship process for the church in relation to the sexuality and gender upheaval in our times. Queer theory drives us to see how important culture is to discipleship regarding sexuality/gender, and how indispensable rich and self reflective Christian social spaces are to that discipleship.

Here’s a few thoughts that come to mind.

First, Queer theory opens our eyes to the complexities of how essentialist biological realities interplay with the cultural formations shaping us. Understanding how gender/sexuality are constructed culturally does not mean we throw out all essentialist realities. But now we can no longer discard the role cultural formations play in gender and sexuality. For me, I strongly believe churches have to examine our own cultural formations for the way they shape the lives of Christian in regard to sexuality and gender. Then, let us understand the same in relation to the cultures we live in. Then let us provide a discipleship that shapes Christians to navigate these cultural realities in Jesus Christ for our children, for ourselves, and our witness in the world.

In his 1982 study on ‘Gender,’ renowned Catholic sociologist Ivan Illich argued, across many time periods and cultures, that almost all cultures have the gender distinctions between male and female. But each culture shapes gender distinctions in ways as various as the number of cultures. He focused on the economic dimension of these social distinctions. But of course there are more social dimensions than this. But what we see here is that every culture constructs the meaning, ways and expressions of its gender distinctions differently Even so, one cannot help but acknowledge that almost every culture, every society, still has a gender binary tied to biological essential realities. Viewed in these terms, gender is both essentialist and constructed. And so we can’t ignore both dimensions in our Christian discipleship.

I believe anyone reaching puberty has already been initiated and shaped by a gender/sexuality cultural formation. As we engage these formations, wherever they come from, Christians must submit, unravel, unwind, deconstruct, and allow the transforming of Christ to shape that gender/sexuality formation into wholeness, healing, and calling. There will be no one static Christian gender/sexuality across all times and cultures, but there will be distinctly Christian versions of all gender/sexuality constructs. And these will be the product of Christian discipleship.

I know there will be those who revolt against queer theory’s constructivism, but if you’ve traveled at all, and dwelt within multiple cultures, you cannot mistake that gender and sexuality are lived, and experienced, differently across cultures. And that Christian discipleship must shape gender and sexuality in whatever culture we live in, by the power, presence, reconciliation, mutuality, refusal to objectify, and love of Jesus Christ. We must be able to delve into the abuse, sexual objectifications, misogynies, and sin resident in any culture of sexuality and gender, and let Jesus work. Queer theory can help with this diagnosis, although it will not provide the remedy.

If we are to get anywhere on Christian discipleship in the areas of sexuality and gender in our world today, we need tools to know and understand the social constructions at work around us and among us shaping our sexuality and gender in our own churches, our children, and the cultures around our churches. Before we even speak to what the Christian faith believes about sexuality, how the person and work, and Lordship of Jesus Christ shapes our sexuality and gender, how the gospel is proclaimed in relation to sexuality and gender, we need to understand the meanings, constructions, the layers, the antagonisms, the brokenness, the places of hurt and pain, etc. etc. within the sexuality and gender constructs at work in people’s lives. We can assume nothing. Deconstructing these formations in our lives is the first step towards a discipleship process.

Second, Queer theory helps us see that sin is deeply interwoven within the social constructions of sex and gender. And we are being woven daily into these sins. The sins Butler calls out (she obviously doesn’t use the Christian term ‘sin’) are the misogyny, abuse of power, hierarchy, sordid abuse, objectification/commodification of women’s bodies within the structures of capitalism, Euro-colonialism, etc. etc. The sins actually become part of ideological forces in sexuality, gender, as well as politics, racism, money, and even our own Christian gatherings. Unwinding all this starts with the “heterosexual matrix,” a favorite Butler phrase. We must see the sins, as woven into the way we live and construct meaning as heterosexuals, before we can confess, reconcile, and submit to a process of transformation in the Spirit. Queer theory can help us with that.

Across America, we see instances of clergy sexual abuse, and other sexual abuse, in churches across denominations. Western Americans, evangelicals and protestants, regularly treat these instances as the problem and sin of a singular individuals, leaders or pastors, to be treated as such. But no, these are also the symptoms of a diseased sexualized culture that has crept into our churches and been baptized as “natural” – in the words of Judith Butler. We must do the work to deconstruct, expose, reconcile, proclaim a new reality in Christ, and be healed in our church cultures. This is one of, if not the first step, in addressing the discipleship vacuum that exists in the American church when it comes to sex and gender.

But if Butler provokes us to see and unwind the deep sins within our culture’s heterosexual matrix, does not this go for all sexualities and gender constructs? Does this not also go for the LGBTQ matrix as well? One thing I learned from Luce Irigaray’s writings as far back as the 1970’s (see THIS for instance), is that gay/lesbian constructs are built often in reflection/reaction to and defined within dependence to heterosexuality. They are built on the constructs of heterosexuality. I can only assume therefore, that cultural sins that lie within heterosexualities lie within alternative sexualities as well? And so any discipleship in the church must address, unwind, the formations at work in our all of our sexualities and gender constructs. But by all means heterosexuals go first!

We Don’t Need Policy Statements: We Need Discipleship

I have many suggestions for where this takes us in shaping discipleship practices for sexuality and gender in our churches. I offer just a few thoughts.

First, let all churches avoid pronouncing universalizing policy statements governing sexuality/gender over our churches. Let us avoid Not Affirming LGBTQ and/or Affirming LGBTQ labels within church policy statements.

Enforcing policy statements, that categorize people’s lives regarding their sexuality and gender, kills discipleship. When we extract our sexual lives and sort them into categories of heterosexual/LGBTQ etc., we in essence universalize these sexual categories, submit/ensconce our lives into them, losing the particulars of our lives into these universalizing categories, and lose the space for discipleship. We in essence bypass the stories and the complexities of our lives that are shaping us, the cultural formations which may have been abusive, may have been patriarchal, may have been coercive and power driven, may even objectify, commodify bodies.

The policy statements themselves might offer people on both sides some comfort, some safety, the feeling of being affirmed, less fear. But these benefits come at a cost. We must nevertheless persistently address these issues in churches. But not with policy statements, but with real live interpersonal presence. These policy statements, I contend, are nothing more than bandaides over a metastasizing cancer that is the hidden sexualized cultures of our churches and the culture at large.

When we install a Not Affirming/Affirming statement, we lock in the status quo of the persons in our church and those entering in. For heterosexual and LGBTQ persons alike, no further discipleship is possible. Conversations, even the smaller ones, are shut down. The power constellations, the objectifying, the toxic masculinity, whatever brokenness or maladies or abuse that lies deep within our cultural formations, gets locked in. Or the effects of all those cultural sins get locked in. This is the way coercive “power over” works – when implementing a positional policy from above. It works against God’s power, released in Jesus, by the Spirit, who works among us in the discipleship processes of daily life around the table.

Perhaps there will come a time for clarifying statements in each church, after living long in the caregiving discipleship practices of the church. But these policy statements at large must be avoided as a first step in engaging the issues of sexuality discipleship in our churches.

Of course, today in our churches, we have little imagination for such discipleship processes. No one wants to talk about sex. We do not know how to ask the questions, seek the Spirit, guide through discerning with someone. And so we rush to a policy statement. It is easier, faster, less complicated, and locks in the status quo.

Lastly, the Not Affirming/Affirming statement, when installed as policy for a church, sets the conditions for the ideologizing of the congregation, which again, shuts down all discipleship in these most important areas of our lives. Most often, it splits the congregation. All complexities within the conversations are lost. One side will leave for sure, but this leaves the other side still there, armed and loaded, reinforced, as against the other side, defined by their allegiance to this position on sexuality. The church becomes defined by the moniker. Conversation is lost. Diversity is lost. Discipleship is lost. Sexuality then turns to activism, often a form of political activism. Or the congregation becomes passive, content that the issue has been “dealt with.” With a sigh of relief, we no longer need to talk about it. Discipleship on all levels of sexuality and gender is shut down.

All this to say, what is needed in the place of an Affirming/Not Affirming Policy statement is a discipleship process. Or else the congregation, the parents, the children, the many among us, heterosexual/LBTQ and other, who are desperately seeking to know where they fit, shall be left to wander with the cultures at large, the only place left to go for direction and care in the areas of sexuality and gender.

Final Thoughts For Now

So in the next several months I hope to drop some posts on what sexuality and gender discipleship might look in the new cultural landscapes we are living in. I do not have the answers. This whole area is so raw and untested. There is so much to address. I do hope to offer some suggestions as to where to start in leading in this area.

But before I end, I do not hide that I personally, as a church leader, and a seminary professor, sign the traditional statement on sexuality of my denomination (and my seminary), and I’m ok with that. It says basically that marriage is between a woman and a man. It lays out the basics. Despite the consternation I am sure to receive for that, I believe we who are Christians inherit a history whether we admit it or not. It shapes us. No one is born who is not already ensconced in a history, a formation around sexuality and gender, and this goes for everyone who has never darkened the door of a church building, and for Christians. There is no way to make up sexuality, for by the time you reach puberty, you’re already formed by various cultural forces. To not admit I’ve been born into a history is dishonest.

As Christians, we are born into a history. This history ain’t perfect, but it teaches us. It’s wisdom should not be quickly dismissed. The history of Christian sexuality has much to teach us. But in the fields of mission, amidst new questions and powerful cultural forces, simply affirming some traditional teachings does not get us very far. As I have said to many before, saying that God ordains marriage between a male and female, does not answer the many questions about what it means to be a male and female, or what to do about the many ways sin and cultural formation has distorted our sexual lives and gender relations. How we extend this history, connect it with Jesus Christ, his reconciliation and healing, correct this history’s failures, be faithful to its wisdom and the new realities God has made possible in Jesus Christ, these are the questions of formation, discipleship, and they are complex. This is the task of discipleship that lies before us.

I hope to talk more about it all, in the months to come. Subscribe if you wish to join in on this conversation.

This post is open to comments. I’ll try to respond as best I can (I have a day job). Any comments which demean anyone else’s personhood, including my own, will be erased. Thanks much for reading. Blessings.

^[i] The deciphering of the 3 or 4 waves of feminism, as used across various discourses, varies often in confusing ways.

Can the gospel be too big?

When the missional church movement was a thing, twenty years ago, this question bordered on heresy. We, in the movement, regularly cautioned that the gospel was not only about what Jesus can do “for me.” It is about the transformation of our very way of life into God’s Mission for the world. We therefore regularly resisted any temptation to reduce the gospel to anything that might be “user-friendly,” transactional, or consumerist. The gospel must be big, and people must be invited into it. The Mission of God (Missio Dei), so we proclaimed, must be all encompassing and all believers (new and old) must be welcomed as participants in it. For a lot of us, this holds true today.

Yet for all the good in this, there is a danger in this approach. In protecting the bigness of the gospel, we risk making the life we have in Christ inaccessible to those outside of it. We don’t provide an entry point related to their particular circumstances that enables them to enter the gospel that, granted, is this grand story of what God has done, and where He is taking the world, in Christ. And so we unintentionally make the gospel too big with no connection point to the day-to-day life of the people we seek to invite into the gospel.

The Traversing Back and Forth Between Small and Big

These are bold and easily misunderstood words. Yet to say the gospel can get too big reminds us of the balance we need in presenting the gospel to the world. We certainly endanger the gospel when we move too fast to make the gospel compact and easy to understand. Yet we can also endanger it when we try to protect its cosmic dimension at all costs making it incomprehensible to those who are in need. Being the gospel in the world therefore demands a continual traveling back and forth from the grand scope of all that God is doing in Christ to the simple offer of salvation to the stranger. And then of course, we must return (hopefully with the new convert) back again into His grand Mission all over again.

Noted missional theologian Darrel Guder addressed this subject when he asserted that the church is always in the process of reducing the gospel, in order to translate it into a given culture. In translating, or contextualizing, the gospel, we inevitably emphasize certain aspects of it over others. In the process sometimes we devolve into absolutizing this one particular version of the gospel that we have located ourselves in. This is prompted by the instinct to control the gospel. Make sure it is right! But, and this is a big “but,” giving into this instinct leads us to reduce the gospel instead of leading people into the whole of the gospel. Guder calls this the “challenge of reductionism.” This is why Guder calls for the ‘continual conversion” of the church, where the church must always reinhabit each new context with the gospel that takes shape for its particular time and place.^[i]

The Other Error

Guder’s “challenge of reductionism” can also work in reverse. We refuse to reduce the gospel, to locate that entry point into the whole of the gospel for a given context and person. Instead, we pound away at the grand story of what God has done, is doing and where God is taking the whole world, never connecting to the existential crisis of the person or the context we’re connecting with.

For me, in the Chicago suburbs over twenty years ago, this is the error that happened to me. My refusal to reduce the gospel, particularize the gospel, resulted in a refusal to meet people where they were at with the gospel. Being upset with the mega-church’s accommodation to consumerism (this was my rage in the late 90’s) I was refusing to condescend (lower myself) and speak a gospel that could be heard by the ones afflicted by the cultural ills of consumerism? By insisting on keeping the gospel big, I refused to translate to the level where it could be met in the particulars of daily life in the suburbs.

My wife and I moved to the northwest suburbs of Chicago over 25 years ago to plant a church. The northwest suburbs of Chicago sprawl across hundreds of square miles with highways, tollways, subdivisions, monster shopping malls, gated communities and corporate offices. Thousands of cars move manically along the expressways with people trying to get to their respective homes, work or children’s sport programs. It is a life of busyness, consumerism and user-friendly relationships. Its break-neck pace pulsates so heavily that it is difficult for any one person living there not to be swallowed up into it.

These same forces pull on churches as well. There is the constant seduction to fall in line and make the gospel as convenient as possible for people on the move. As we planted the first seeds of our church in this place, I was repulsed by the expectations to frame the gospel into something that could fit into people’s schedules or provide immediate spiritual benefits to anyone struggling with the suburban lifestyle.

In response to the sins of suburbia, I went to the other extreme. I got almost phobic over our church becoming a supermarket-like pseudo community providing spiritual goods and services to all comers? With too much self-assurance, I preached sermons on how the church must define its very existence as the extension of God’s Mission in the world. In the great formulations of missional thinkers Newbigin and Bosch, I proudly taught that the church was an extension of the Trinity gathering the world into Himself. The Mission of God will be our very identity and source of resistance to the consumerism of the suburbs. Its cosmic scope will dwarf the forces that seek to shrink our vital gospel into some banal conformity with the suburbs.

My intentions were good, and of course Bosch and Newbigin still sound as good to me as ever. But how does a gospel this big become comprehensible for the lost persons of the suburbs? How does this incredible vision of God’s work meet those of us caught up in consumerism, poor on time, devoid of relationships, with little energy left after 6 p.m. to attend to the Mission of God?

The Back and Forth

In those first few years of ministry at Life on the Vine Community, a couple named Jack and Suzanne (not their real names) came to us with divorce papers in hand asking for help. They knew little of the gospel. They had no time for church. Their art careers were the center of their lives and they couldn’t imagine it any other way.

I offered Jesus. The whole gospel. I warned that Jesus would demand everything. Jesus the Lord of the world must become Lord of their marriage, Lord of their art, Lord of everything. That if you give up art as being the center of your life, your very identity, your art can in turn become the blessing God can use for His Mission. Give up your life to Christ, to find your life in Christ. Though I still hold dear every one of these truths, this message did not meet the moment. It was too big for these folk who knew nothing of the majesty of the risen and reigning Christ.

Nonetheless, Jack somehow managed to hang out with a group of us meeting for confession and prayer every Monday night. One ugly sin after another would come up in Jack’s life (as for us all). Together, we would deal with each sin working out the repentance and forgiveness of Christ into this man’s life. There were some holy moments. Jack saw some progress in his life. Jack had been caught up into an entry ramp of knowing Jesus as the savior and sanctifier of his soul.

But months went by, and the sins would come back. One night as Jack’s marijuana addiction was being dealt with for what seemed like the hundredth time, two of the men lashed out. They let go of some anger and asked him if he was serious about Christ. If not, they said, he should excuse himself from the group. Jack soon wandered away.

Some might be quick to say that Jack rejected the gospel. I hesitate to make that judgement. From my purview, Jack couldn’t get the bigness of the gospel he was invited into. Our discipleship had failed.

Jack thought he was doing what he was supposed to do – confess sin, repent and receive forgiveness, go home and try harder. Yet each time the forgiveness and repentance would somehow become the means to the same old ends. The sanctifying deliverance offered in the gospel of Jesus couldn’t take root because Jack was still doing it all for some immediate benefit to himself. It was a transaction. Jack never made the connection to the big Gospel, that God has come in Christ and made Him Lord, and He now rules over the world, restoring all things, and must rule over all things until the completion of the Mission (1 Cor 15:25). Jack needed a gospel that met him in addiction, but also needed a gospel that led him to the whole Gospel, that led him from knowing Jesus as the manager of his-self to the total transformation of his-self in Christ’s rule. Jack could not grasp the bigness of the gospel.

For me, Jack illustrated the central problem: the bigness of the gospel was inaccessible to someone caught up in the consumerist structures of suburban life. He needed a smaller gospel to meet him in his moment. But this gospel that can meet him where he’s at, must eventually lead him to the big Gospel or it will become stuck. Without the big Gospel, the smaller version of the gospel always becomes reduced to what the gospel could do “for me.” This back and forth must become part of a discipleship that starts with the small but always leads to the big, that offers a specific entry point to the Gospel that can then lead to entire journey of the whole Gospel, what God is doing in Jesus Christ to transform the world.

Missional Conversions and the Need for a New Way

I used to regularly be asked about the numbers of conversions in missional churches, churches founded on God’s mission, missional communities, presence in neighborhoods for the gospel. I hesitated to even answer the question, because I believe conversions in missional settings take longer, and they often happen outside the church ‘program’ per se. I’ve experienced this.

Missional churches by definition tend to go to so-called “post-Christendom” settings where people have no initiation to the Christian faith at all. For any new convert there must be a journey. It starts in an existential moment of crisis, loneliness, emptiness., etc., etc. These moments take many different shapes and sizes depending upon context. But this starting point, enabling an entry point to the gospel, must not become the ending point. It must lead to knowing Jesus as Lord of the world bringing the whole world to Himself. This kind of conversion happens over time. It often happens as strangers spend daily life with Christians learning the story of our lives in Christ. It must start at the point of context in someone’s life, and only then lead eventually to the whole.

For this reason I have suspected that missional churches need a different kind of evangelistic tool that balances the hugeness of God’s Mission we live in while still inviting people into personal conversion at that existential moment of need in their lives.

It would be a tool that would start with understanding the way God works through His presence in us, among us, and between us. People would learn how God is present in all our interactions with people, social situations, even social injustice. This tool would then move towards learning how to be present in a place of hurt, pain and lostness. Learning how to listen. Then, maybe the hardest of all, this tool would teach how to wait patiently for the reveal of God’s work. All this leading to an entry point.

When God reveals what he is already at work doing (us Holiness people call this ‘prevenient grace), when someone or some thing happens that reveals the Holy Spirit’s work, the next part is being a witness to what God is doing. This includes proclaiming the gospel, the good news, inviting someone in to the making of Jesus their Lord and deliverer. Here is where the gospel gets small, specific, particular, an enrty point to the whole Gospel. There are many entry points. This tool would teach this as well. But this entrance experience to knowing Jesus must always lead to Jesus, the whole Gospel, of what God has done, is doing and where God is taking the whole world (1 Cor 15:1-16).

Such an approach to evangelism will always start out by listening, learning discerning the Spirit, what God is doing in a place, in a person’s life, in a social situation. The gospel becomes “small” as it engages the smallest places, every experience of brokenness, every nightmare of social injustice in our neighborhoods, but over time, it will lead to the whole Gospel, the big big big Gospel of God reconciling the whole world to Himself in Jesus Christ (2 Cor 5:19).

I’ve written a small book, with Gino Curcuruto, on what such an approach might look like, and how to train congregations into it. (you can find it HERE). I also have a book coming the end of next year dealing with the theology and practice of ‘The Many Gospels.’ Such a process is needed for a renewal of gospel witness in our time. And in such a process, not only will the gospel reach new places, but every church involved will undergo itself a “continual conversion,” and new embodiment of the gospel for each time and place.

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^[i] This paragragh is drawing from Guder’s classic The Continuing Conversion of the Church Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Pub, 2000)

When it comes to Christian Nationalism, I prefer a good Protestant Liberal Christian Nationalist to an Evangelical Fundamentalist one. I know, this is an odd thing for an Anabaptist to say. Generally we Neo-Anabaptist types abhor all Christian Nationalism of any kind. But this little exercise is forced upon me by the candidacy of James Talarico for senate in Texas. Allow me a few paragraphs to explain.

I’m a Holiness Pentecostal NeoAnabaptist, not an evangelical fundamentalist (EF), nor a protestant liberal (PL). One of the things that distinguishes EF and the PL from the Neo-Anabaptist is the understanding of the church/state relation (I’m generalizing here).The Anabaptist sees a difference between worldly power/coercion - at work in the state, and God’s power – the non-coercive force of the Spirit, under the Lordship of Christ, at work among the church and in the world. The PL and the EF (for the most part) don’t make that same differentiation. As a result, Anabaptists differ with PL and EF on how we differentiate what the state can accomplish, and cannot accomplish, from what the church can accomplish under the one Lord Jesus Christ.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we Anabaptist types don’t work for a good government (like many assume). There are things the state can do that align with God’s purposes, including (key word here) ‘preserving’ justice. But this must be done with care, because once we affirm the state acts on God’s behalf, a lot can happen, most of it bad.

More specifically, both PL and EF see the government as a potential (maybe the best) instrument of God’s justice in the world, although each one, again, sees that justice differently. The Anabaptist sees that certain goods of society can be preserved by the state’s coercive power, certain evils can be held at bay, and this is a part of justice. But true healing, transformation, and God’s restorative justice in society can only come via God’s power at work and cooperated with by God’s church. The government therefore should not be used to impose Christian morals upon a nation. The government should not be used to disciple children in public schools via Scripture. Certainly Christian people, can help run the government within its lanes out of who they are as Christians. But the Anabaptist says, let us not ask the government to do what only God can do. The ignoring of this distinction, I suggest, is what leads both PL and EF people to be susceptible to Christian Nationalism, albeit very different versions thereof.

With that said, I think there are reasons to prefer a PL Christian Nationalist to an EF Christian Nationalist. And it all has to do with each one’s understanding of the church/world relation.

The EF Version of Church-World Relation

For the EF, the world outside the church, is not where the Holy Spirit works (again I’m generalizing here, but this is where the EF church-state habits come from). The world is where the powers of sin are loose. For some, it is territory of Satan, where the devil roams. And for some EF, the world is heading towards an Armageddon where all of sin, and its sinners, shall meet its judgement in a fiery conclusion. Some people in this camp might be labeled dispensationalist pre-millenialists. And so the church’s job is to save as many as possible via the gospel of Jesus, snatch them out of the world, keep them safe in the church, and live in faithfulness until the rapture, when God will rapture his own out of the world, and the final judgement shall take place.

Admittedly, many evangelicals do not have this extreme of an eschatology, at least not explicitly. But it still lies in the background. And so the EF tend to see the government’s job as primarily restraining the evil in the world through the power of the sword, to hold back the immoral chaos, so as to provide time and space for the church to do its work of bringing people to faith in Jesus Christ.

For many EF then, this means the nation state is an instrument that must use coercive force (whatever is necessary) to hold back sin. And this work is the work of God in restraining evil. And therefore the state can turn authoritarian. Why not? In fact, towards this end, the character of the leader doesn’t really matter. If the leader is perceived to be restraining sin in the culture then he/she deserves our ultimate allegiance. This kind of EF church state relation can go awry. It can lead to an abusive violent Christian Nationalism where all good values are pushed aside, and the state can turn vicious, dehumanizing, and in fact evil.

If you take this logic to its ultimate expression, EF’s can see the home country as a whole called to play the function of the church, this Christian island amidst the world bringing salvation to the world. God has chosen this nation to be “a city on the hill” to the nations. And now the very state becomes aligned with the church and the God becomes the endorser of the state. The state becomes divinized, God’s chosen instrument to protect Christians (and Israel) and help bring as many people to Christ before the ending of all time. (notice how all of this is different from Catholic integralism, or illiberal forms of church state relation)

When this happens all hell breaks loose. In my view it is a fundamental denial of the way God works, not through worldly coercive power, but the power in Jesus Christ. It is a denial of the power of Christ to bring social transformation, not only personal transformation. These people have discarded the true Jesus who has suffered to take on all violence, sin and death on the cross. The man who knew no sin, who refused the sword, is made to authorize the sin and violence of the state regime. And because no one can question God, the ruler of the state turns into a tyrant, drunk with worldly power, who can wield it without anyone questioning (because he acts on behalf of God), and this always ends in the abuse of the weak, the diminishing of people groups, and catastrophic destruction (I go into some detail on these various theologies of power in my book found HERE)

All of this, I reject, unequivocally. As I explained in THIS BOOK, this kind of Christian nationalism should be an anathema to every Christian. It is a thorough rejection of the way power works in the Kingdom of God. Such an alignment always historically sets the conditions for excusing a megalomaniac in the office which then sets the stage for enormous destruction of a society, all in the name of God.

The PL Version of the Church-World Relation

The PL Christian Nationalist has a more optimistic view of culture, society and the world, indeed, in my view, an over optimistic view. Again, I’m generalizing here. It is an over-realized view aligned with what some have labeled postmillenianilism, For some, like the Baptist Walter Rauschenbush, the Kingdom is already here. It must be implemented, and this kingdom equals democracy. And so Rauschenbush was quite at home pushing for the Christianizing the Social Order (published 19212). It is truly another form of Christian Nationalism.

For PL Christian nationalists in this vein the state is more about seeking the common good together, than it is about restraining evil, even though that too is necessary work. When evil people do evil works however, instead of it being about restraining the evil, say in prisons, more often the people can be changed through education and better economics. The “arc of the moral universe is long and it bends toward justice” and Christians should join in the work of this progress, the Kingdom of God coming into being in the culture, following the words of their master, Jesus, “seek ye first the kingdom of God.”

There is a respect for persons, mutual dependence, but also a caution towards the abusive use of power among PL Christian Nationalists. It’s all part of a better democracy, that reflects the Kingdom, that can disappear from view among the EF Christian Nationalists. Rauschenbusch argued for the inherent dignity of each person within the participatory practices of democracy. This was one of the reasons democracy was a sign of the Kingdom for Rauschenbusch.

Some PL Christian Nationalists side with Reinhold Niebuhr and argue that Rauschenbush PL is too optimistic. We need to be soberminded about the raging forces of sin in culture, its propensity to abuse persons for selfish aggrandizement, especially one people align in groups. Niebuhr argued for the balancing of power within democracy on theological (Christian realist) grounds. And so some PL Christian Nationalists, blending the best of Rauschenbusch with the best of Niebuhr, are more prone to rein in abusive power, much more prone to respect and argue for the protection of persons from abuse of power. Democracy, in this way, is a massive shift towards progress from the corrupt imperialisms of the medieval ages.

And so despite the fact that most Protestant liberal mainline members (and their adjacent post-evangelical progressive cousins) seek to employ a state government (through elections of course) that aligns with their set of Christian values, as a Christian Nationalist would do, the PL Christian nationalism is a system that tends toward the respecting of the dignity of persons, the restraint of abuse of power, and the implementation of common values of justice viewed as Christian for the common good. To me, given the choice between the two versions of Christian Nationalism, I choose this version of Christian Nationalism over the EF version every time, for all the reasons described above.

Is James Talarico a Christian Nationalist?

I think an argument can be made, despite his best protestations that James Talarico is a version of this PL brand of Christian Nationalism? He is a compelling orator of the liberal protestant tradition. His sermons are the very best of it. To all of us tired of the judgmentalism, coercive legalism, sectarian exclusivism, of the Evangelical Fundamentalists, Talarico is a breath of fresh. To all of us tired of the abuse of power, the brutality of ICE, the greed and corruption, and the blatent preferential treatment of the rich of the Trump administration, Talarico is a God-send.

But Talarico still seeks to put into law a set of values, principles that derive from a protestant mainline liberal Christianity. His Christian Nationalism will eventually do some of the things the EF Christian nationalists do: become dictatorial with its version of Christian morality, treat anyone who disagrees with these values as the enemy, ideologize these values, and marginalize anyone who wishes to have a conversation about them. Maybe Talarico won’t do this personally. But joining Christianity with the state apparatus creates the conditions that make this kind of coercion, ideological and otherwise, inevitable. It is what MAGA rebells against so furiously.

Positions on sexuality, gender and abortion seem to be the obvious culprits in this regard. Imposing sexuality/gender curriculum in public schools, imposing government sorting systems through a DEI calculations that may end up skewing things could be other examples.

All of these values implemented in a culture might be good in themselves, but when imposed, coercively, rarely if ever achieve social change. Even worse, when imposed on those who disagree with them, they always produce a backlash. The Trump fiasco can be read as one such backlash. The inevitable backlask against Trumpian SCOTUS enforced evangelical Christian values will be another. The Quietist Revolution in Quebec, against the Catholic imposition in that society is another good example. There have been many.

This is the lesson of history. Government can preserve a moral consensus, and should do so with legislation, but government can’t transform a moral consensus. This work must be done on the ground, via community organizing, ground level movements, and most importantly the church. See in my book (HERE) how the great movements of social change, including abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, national health care in Canada, the civil rights movement, etc., all arose from the ground up as local movements of the church (we could call them ‘movements of the Holy Spirit’), which the government codifeid via structures and legislation.

Some Things I Wish Talarico Would Change

I think Talarico oversteps when he argues that pro-choice, or pro LGBTQ sexuality, same-sexmarriage, or pro-transgender healthcare policies, are Christian values, blessed by Jesus, and therefore he supports them in legislation. I think among Christians these are legitimate disputable matters. There are legitimate issues, scientific evidence, etc., to be considered among Christian communities on these matters. There are significant conversations, discernments, disagreements to be had among Christians on all these matters. To impose Talarico’s Christian values on other Christians in these matters feels like an overreach of government. It is Christian nationalism accompanied by the ills of Christian Nationalism.

Talarico should refrain from arguing that Christianity supports the right to abortion, or LGBTQ marriage, or the offering of transgender medical care under age 18. Instead, let him acknowledge we have legitimate disagreement on these issues in the state of Texas. Nonetheless, as a secular democracy, not because this is a Christian position, we must provide protections of freedoms for persons in need of abortion according to their own conscience, and for LGBTQ people wishing to be married. But at the same time, we do this always making space for people, in their spaces, their churches, and their parochial schools to work out their own convictions, live their own convictions, have open conversations, and we must respect those people, and ask and require of those people that they respect those who disagree with them.

Talarico, in my view, could improve the current state of politics, take the sting out of his Christian Nationalism by actively promoting local spaces as the places for legitimate disagreement over moral issues, allowing churches, even protecting churches, and other local socialities from legal intrusion or ideological mistreatment and be explicit about this. Promote local town halls in cities, towns, boroughs, aldermanic districts, as places for discussing legitimate matters of disagreement. Make this part of every campaign speech. This is what we might call a better democracy, a democracy from the ground up, a so-called radical democracy.

Sexuality and gender are just a few positions that require this kind of treatment. The how’s and why’s of DEI programs is another (Just so you know, I am an advocate for CRT. I think it reveals the ideological force of racism woven into systems of law etc. But once it gets imposed upon people, institutions, via the state, versus it being discussed with people and unwound in social spaces, it will be reacted to with coercion. This has been proven out. These are moral issues where the consensus of the masses is not sufficient to ensconce in legislation. In all of this, nonetheless, minority peoples must be protected in order that they too might have their rightful spaces of life, liberty and conversation. Issues like these need to be worked out in the local commons first before they go to state or even national legislatures. This I suggest is what democracy can look like, a more radical form of democracy than the one we have now.

Having said all this, as a Neo-Anabaptist, Holiness, Pentecostal (and yes some might even accuse me of being an evangelical), I still prefer PL Christian Nationalism over EF Christian Nationalism. If I was a Texan, I’d vote for Talarico.

As always this substack post is open to your comments. I shall try to respond as time allows. If you benefit and enjoy these kinds of engagements of Christian convictions with cultural issues, I encourage you to subscribe, and share or restack this post, pass it along to others that might be interested. Thanks for reading.

Misusing the Term ‘Orthodox’?

Back in 2017, there was a dust-up conversation on the internet about how we use the term “orthodox.” On his personal blog, James K. A. Smith bemoaned that Christians were misusing the term ‘orthodox’ (you can still find that article here). More specifically, Smith disapproved of the increasing numbers of Christians who use the “o” word to declare another Christian out of bounds when it comes to sexual morality. He said that ‘orthodox’ historically refers to the councils, the creeds, and the fundamental doctrines of the faith therein. We shouldn’t therefore use this term to declare a sexual practice unChristian. Instead, Smith suggested we use the word ‘traditional’ when discerning such matters lest we rule people who are still sorting out these issues out of the conversation (because they aren’t ‘orthodox’ Christians) before it even starts. This way we allow orthodox Christians to disagree and discern together on disputable matters of faith and practice.

There were a host of replies to Smith (I couldn’t find the old links). Alastair Roberts complained that Smith separated theology and ethics. Good point. Derek Rishmawry argued in Christianity Today similarly saying sexual matters are tied inextricably to creedal doctrines like Creation and Christology. Interesting. Alan Jacobs came to Smith’s defense clarifying the positives of keeping first and second order issues separate. OK. Rod Dreher and a host of others on both conservative and progressive sides of Christianity argued Smith has just made his first step into affirming same-sex sexual relations. This appears to have come true?

At a time when denominations are wrestling with these same questions, I think this is a discussion worth revisiting. Several important questions emerge out of it such as: How does theology work in cases of discerning disputable matters (matters not explicitly stated in the creeds)? Do we merely have credentialed experts rule on such matters based on the past traditions/creeds? Or do we discern these matters together as local bodies of people making space for God to extend gospel into new territories. How do the dynamics of mission and discipleship change the way we engage disputable matters in the guidance of Christian living, when we find ourselves in a decidedly new/post Christian context?. How does moving matters of discipleship and discernment to the status of orthodoxy/confessional status change the ability of a church to engage in mission?

‘Biblical’ as the Evangelical ‘Orthodox’

Regarding these questions, I think we can learn from how evangelicals of my youth would often use the word ‘Biblical.’ In my church growing up, it was common to assert orthodoxy on a given matter by claiming a belief to be ‘biblical.’ It was the way to gain the higher ground on any issue that was in dispute. Sometimes, without even working through the hermeneutics of the particular text, they’d recite a Biblical text, and simply declare their position ‘Biblical.’ Then a bunch of people in the pews would nod their head, say ‘of course!’ and that side would gain leverage in the debate. ‘Biblical’ was the power word. And it was used to cut short a conversation and exert one position over another by the so-called expert in the Bible who alone had the authority to interpret the Bible.

My point here is that ‘orthodox’ can function in theological circles in the same way that “Biblical” functioned in my old evangelical circles. The one who gets to claim ‘orthodoxy,’ in a very real sense, is an act of asserting power over a conversation that shuts down the conversation. I think therefore that Smith accurately questioned the way some use the term ‘orthodox.’ Is there another way to orthodoxy that seeks to extend the gospel faithfully into new and disputable matters that opens space for conversation instead of closing it?

Faithfulness versus Orthodoxy

Towards this end, I (like Smith) suggest we dump the term ‘orthodox’ when discerning disputable matters. Instead, I suggest ‘faithfulness’ as an alternative way of ‘orthodoxy.’ I define ‘faithfulness’ as taking “what we have heard” from the apostles “in the presence of many witnesses” and entrusting it “to men and women who are faithful” who can extend faithfully the teaching to others as well (2 Tim 2:2).

Paul was the apostle to the gentiles. He confronted new cultural dilemmas the original apostles had not yet encountered. So he did not just enter these new situations and repeat the teachings of the original apostles in the original Aramaic. He translated them, extended them to where they had not yet been applied. He did so among (“in the presence of”) a community who affirmed these teachings as “witnesses” (who discerned what they were hearing/seeing). I suggest this idea of faithfully ‘extending’ the truth of the apostles is essential to understanding how orthodoxy works in the context of mission.

In terms of power dynamics, ‘faithfulness’ takes the emphasis off of truth as a hardened formula found in a creed to be enforced over someone or a group. Instead it moves truth towards a working out what these teachings mean in each new context. Faithfulness moves the emphasis off of universal statements of truths made across cultures to local discernments of truths made within cultures.

The Nicene Creed as a Local Theology

The Nicene Creed was written in the Greek language in a Greco-Roman context (the Greco-Roman empire) as the outworking of the issues of Christology that had been raised amidst the gospel entering this broad new context. Even though it was hundreds of bishops gathering, it was still a “local theology” of sorts, in the words of Robert Schreiter. Schreiter tells us ‘orthodoxy’ is the history of many local theologies strung together one after another. And so for each people (community of witnesses) we learn to believe the gospel, trust Jesus as Lord and Savior, make space for the Kingdom, in our given languages via the issues and questions presented by our culture today. To do this in continuity with the apostles is to be faithful. It is orthodoxy.

But of course, that creed became the orthodoxy for the whole Roman church. It became much more than a local theology. It became the theological instrument to enforce orthodoxy over already existing Christian churches. This ‘church’ is a completely different dynamic than the church in mission.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Creeds (Roman Catholic)—and confessions (Euro Reformation orthodoxy) still have authority in and over our lives for churches in mission. It is an inextricable part of our history even as we extend these truths into new contexts. But it must be a dynamic authority as opposed to a static one.

The gospel can never enter a context ex nihilo: starting all over again from nothing. We need the creeds. The high Christology of the Nicene Creed cannot be lost as this truth is carried forth into new places even though the homoousian may not make sense in the new language/culture we find ourselves in.

And yet equally so, we must learn and deepen our theology every time we work out how our inherited beliefs translate and make sense within new cultures (Lamin Sanneh and Bo Lim are good places to start in reading on this).

If one cultural articulation of the gospel, however, portends to speak for all future times and place, we have a recipe for the coercive imposition of power into a culture. This is how the term ‘orthodox’ can function at its worst. I contend in Christendom, the creedal formulas, as worked out amidst the Constantinian power alignments of the 4^th century, often did function just like that. It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose that we have articulated (or are going to articulate) our key beliefs and answers to questions once and for all for everybody. To do so is to shut down the translation/extending of the gospel into new places, new languages and new questions we hitherto have not yet known. To do so is to be tempted to impose our ready-made solutions on these new cultures. And this is a ready-made recipe for colonialization all over again.

Extending Faithfully What Has Been Handed On

So I suggest we not enter the sexuality debates and the other disputable matters among us, as if we are going to declare the orthodox position and then impose it. Let us first begin a vigorous discussion on what it means once again to be faithful to the gospel and the full history of what has gone on before.

In regard to sexuality, let us not exert power in the name of orthodoxy. This goes for the defensive conservatives as well as for the accommodative progressives. Instead let us enter our contexts, listen to the questions, understand the language, open space for unwinding the ideological antagonisms that drives our debates and let God work. Then, let us together articulate what we have learned, what is good, what is sin, propose discipleship, and seek a new faithfulness to who God is, what he is doing in restoring all creation to Himself. This is the way the gospel will be proclaimed. This is contextual theology.

Indeed, let us start with the discipleship question. What does it mean to follow Jesus in the attractions, sexual identities, gender conflicts we find ourselves in. Heterosexuals go first! Let us call one another into the sexual/gender reconciliation, healing and renewal God is doing among us all over again in and through Jesus Christ. Let us ask what difference Jesus makes in our sexuality. Let us ask what a discipleship into Jesus’ powers of salvation, healing, reconciliation and transformation would look like. Again, heterosexuals go first. Let us be faithful. As Christians, we do not get to make sex up, just like we don’t get to make Christianity up. Instead let us extend the richness of the sexual theology of historic Christianity into the new questions and situations we find ourselves in.

Let us resist separating behavior from belief. It is through Christians engaging the questions of our context faithfully, and working out a discipleship for all people, that we give witness to the saving power of Jesus, and extend the gospel visually via our actual way of life that bears witness to the life, death, and resurrection, and rule of Jesus as Lord Christ. The proclamation of the gospel as worked out in our daily lives becomes manifest in power. This, too, is contextual theology.

Two Kinds of ‘Orthodoxy’

What emerges from these thoughts, and indeed from the lessons of two thousand years of Christian history, is that there are two ways to think about orthodoxy. One is the way of rational “scientific” reasoning that has been so dominant in the modern world since the enlightenment. Exegete the correct forensic meaning/truths of the Creeds/Confessions and/or the Bible and dictate that meaning over a church. The second way is of historicized discourse where truth is worked out within a tradition and a community of memory. Discern the meaning of these texts and truths within a context faithfully, through the language yes, but also through listening and discerning what is actually going on in the context so as to extend the meaning into a church and its mission.

The first is a discourse of control. It is exercised in the name of objectivity. People already in power are comfortable here. The second is a discourse of extending the story. Here the question is not only what is right or wrong, who is in and who is out, but what is faithful and what is unfaithful to the Story. I consider the first approach to orthodoxy to be Christendom, the second to be the approach of mission.

As always I welcome comments and will try to respond. Tell me what you think? If you appreciate this kind of cultural theological commentary, and would appreciate more of it, then by all means subscribe (it’s free) and restack it or pass it along on social media. Thanks to all my readers.

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Must denominations end? I don’t think so. But we are in a time of immense disruption as denominations grapple with the massive shifts among the cultures of North America that have seen the shift from a majority Christian North America turning to one that is now a mission field. As a result, I suggest, denominations must move from being preservers of a history to engagers of the cultures, extenders of a history into new cultures for the gospel of Jesus Christ. A couple years ago I addressed this on this substack HERE.

By cultural engagement, I do not mean cultural accommodation. I’m much too anabaptist in my theology for this. In my opinion, accommodation has already proved to be another form of non-engagement. And although the prototype protestant liberalism of the last century served to maintain a church, preserve its relevancy, as long as the society was by and large ‘Christian,’ those days are over. We need a church capable of extending the gospel into mission, not make the gospel amenable to the society’s modern social developments.

This will be no small task. It will take a leadership of a different kind. We are seeing the Southern Baptists, the C&MA in Canada, and many other denominations in massive disruption. The leaders are caught in between preserving what is and becoming what must be. Many denominations are shrinking. Some are a few short years from dying. Many are losing their best and brightest leaders of the younger generations, a sure sign of crisis and diminishment of the future. It’s obvious we need transformational change.

I believe denominations must make spaces for young leaders to develop in conversational think-tanks where mature leadership can dialogue with young leaders and skillfully, prayerfully, mutually, discern the times. I believe denominations must move from preservatory authority, that exerts power over issues of conflict in order to preserve, to transforming authority that allows Christ to move among a Spirit-filled mutuality that engages the new worlds with the gospel. It carries much risk. But denominations, once birthed out of renewals, should return to those renewal impulses. These denominations must now take their histories, with all the distinctives learned, and develop/extend them further for a church in mission to meet the challenge of our time.

I’ll have more to propose in future posts, but for now I offer the following piece to spur us on. It’s an afterword I wrote for a book that Jon Coutts and Heather Renee Morgan edited entitled ‘Looking Back, Leaning Forward: Wrestling With a Church’s Story’ (found HERE) The book attempted to wrestle with my own denomination’s (C&MA) challenges in the midst of the changing culture of Canada. I’ll have more to say on all this in future posts (this won’t be a series). Subscribe to this substack if you’re interested (it’s free).

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Extending the Four-Fold Gospel for the Mission of God Into the Places Where We Live

The time for denominations has come to an end. At least that’s the opinion of Peter Leithart in his 2016 book The End of Protestantism [i]. Denominations divide the church, he said, and they no longer serve a useful purpose. But I am not so sure. Many denominations birthed new doctrinal insights, what we call distinctives, and have lived them with wisdom through many bumps along the way. This wisdom may be worth preserving and extending into new worlds. I believe the “four-fold gospel” is one such distinctive, and I am encouraged by the work done in this collection of essays to deepen our understanding of it and extend it into new challenges and contexts.

Birthed from within Christendom, denominations were sources of sustenance and revival for churches in North America. Whether it be justification by faith alone, entire sanctification, the filling of the Spirit, practices of discipleship, divine healing, or yes the fourfold gospel, denominations elevated these beliefs that reinvigorated the Christian faith. These convictions became distinctives that spurred renewal across the Christian body as a whole. Denominations of course did other things like sustain immigrant populations in their churches of their origins across the ocean. And they organized missions to extend the gospel to unreached peoples around the world. All of this happened within the so-called Christianized world of North America. But today, as this world grows secular, denominations find themselves in a new cultural situation. Denominations must shift. They must now become mission organizations to very cultures they find themselves in.

This does not mean however, that denominations should leave behind the distinctives of their origins. Each denomination is a stream of tradition containing much learned wisdom over time distilled in its distinctives. Denominations, I contend, must take these most treasured distinctives and carry them forward, extend them into the cultures in which we find ourselves. This is what mission churches do.

And so, it is into this moment that the writers of Revisiting the Gospel speak. Canada, an increasingly secularized country in the West, is a field of mission. The writers of Revisiting are extending the four-fold gospel of the Christian and Missionary Alliance into the changing contexts of Canada.

I thank God that He has been at work in the Christian and Missionary Alliance of my heritage in Canada for over a century. And so we don’t simply leave all of this behind. We bring it forward into dialogue with the many challenges that the current cultures present us with. We take our treasured distinctives, that have shaped our lives, and extend them. We listen to the challenges of our cultures, and in an act of dialogue we seek to faithfully extend these beliefs, deepen them, translate them in a way that expands them into the places we find ourselves in.

We do this work faithfully, out of Scripture, in much prayer, after much listening, in submission to the Lordship of Christ as lived in a church. Our new cultures may challenge a belief that has borne so much fruit in our history, but in response we listen, we dialogue, we learn and grow, deepen our understanding, and extend this belief among new people, languages and contexts. This is what a people in mission do. This is what I take Revisiting to be doing and it is so important for our churches, our children, the future of the renewal of Christian life in post Christendom for the witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Christian and Missionary Alliance must do this or die.

It is amazing to see the compelling impact of the four-fold gospel around the world since the turn of the last century. Donald W. Dayton, historian of evangelicalism, described the four-fold gospel as “the organizing principle,” the “internal logic,” that permeated” evangelicalism and set into motion the various Holiness and Pentecostal movements of the 20^th century.[ii] The fourfold gospel has been an exposition of the gospel that has impacted the spread of Christian churches world wide. It is essential that we the inheritors of this gospel, the people of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, do this work of extending its message into new territories, engage, and learn from new contexts, gain an understanding of place, language, time, so that Christ the savior, the sanctifier, healer and coming king be revealed and known in the places where we live that have emerged beyond the colonialist monolith culture of Christendom.

When Ray Aldred helps us see in Jesus, the creator who restores creation by entering creation, who by his presence, in the meal, enables us to remember the traumas, injustices of our past differently, not forget them, but in and through them move us toward life and healing, Dr. Aldred is extending Jesus as savior into the world of sin, trauma, and pain that we are so desperate for. When Heather Morgan engages Simpson’s understandings of divine healing via a disability-informed lens, she enables us to see both the weaknesses of past formulations, malformed ways of seeing the body that inhabit our churches as well as see divine healing in new and deeper ways that not only open new pathways for physical healings but also pathways for church communities to be transformed by the ways of mutual interdependence made possible through Jesus Christ. Pastor Morgan is doing more than simply acknowledging a problem, or a misstep in prior articulations of divine healing. She is extending the doctrine of divine healing into our new contexts. In this way, the whole volume of Revisiting broadens, deepens the four fold gospel into new places and contexts.

Denominations come and go. History shows that many will shrink and die as they defend the past at all costs. But some will take the deep learnings of its founding, listen and discern the movement of the Spirit anew, and extend these learnings into new times, new places, new contexts, new struggles, for the mission of God.

I see God using this volume to these ends. May these explorations of the four-fold gospel extend it into new territories, but with new lens, igniting the flame of His Spirit among us to proclaim the gospel of the risen Jesus into new places, new times all across the country of Canada and beyond. We pray may it be so!! In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

[i] Peter J. Leithart, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Grand Rapids MI: Brazos Press, 2016)

[ii] Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987). 173-74.

This is my last post exploring the thesis, put forth originally HERE on ‘Fitch’s provocations,’ that the theology of the Reformation has not aged well as a theology that could shape the North American church for mission. The theology of the Reformation (in which I include both Luther and Calvin) emphasized certain truths to the de-emphasis of other truths, and then expanded on them for the crisis of European Catholicism at the time. This theology proved powerful as an expression of the gospel and theology for the church of Europe 16^th century. It was contextual theology at its best. But, when transported across the ocean, uprooted from its Christendom context, this theology does not translate well into the North American multi-cultural post-Christianized world we live in today. I argue it actually works against the church in mission in many ways.

In the previous posts, I talked about the way the Reformation’s ecclesiology – the visible-invisible church distinction doctrine that emerged from Sola Christus emphasis of the Reformers, and the doctrine of Sola scriptura, did not transfer well for the times of mission we’re living in. In this post I explore how the signature doctrine of the Reformation –“justification by faith alone,” or Sola fide, works against mission today in the fields of post Christendom in North America.

The Split: What Luther Did

The Reformation pushed the individual’s justification before God to the forefront of the European Christian consciousness. Salvation now would no longer be mediated via the Roman church by works (according to the Reformers) but directly to each believer by faith in Christ alone. This overcame the immediate problem of a corrupt church, a church which sold indulgences, but it also opened the door to malforming Christians for mission 500 years later in North America.

Martin Luther pronounced at the first Proceedings at Augsburg “no one can be justified except by faith . . . through no works will you be prepared for the sacrament, but through faith alone, for only faith in the word of Christ justifies, makes a person alive, worthy and well prepared.”[i] This flipped the Medieval Roman view of salvation, which was once something to be received as a reward at the end of life. Now salvation was received as something to begin life with in Christ.[ii] The Christian is now liberated from the impossibility of meeting God’s standards and is free to serve God out of the abundance of grace as the overflowing expression of your faith. This is how Luther saw it. And this engaged the world of 16^th century Europe with a part of the compelling good news of the gospel that had been lost in a Medieval Christendom.

Luther’s Solo fide however, in some sense, made possible the separation of one’s salvation from one’s works, or justification from sanctification. In his Galatians commentary he clarified the difference between justification and sanctification and his metaphors for justification developed more towards the forensic direction (under the influence of Melanchthon). So now, even though Luther himself talked in much deeper terms of justification (in theosis terms), as did Calvin, the Reformation as a whole began swerving towards understanding justification in forensic terms: that by faith the believer is imputed with righteousness for the forgiveness of sins through Christ’s sacrificial work on the cross. By the time of the Formula of Concord of 1577, or the Belgic Confession written in the 1560’s or the Westminster Confession of the 1600’s, justification had become more narrowed to the forensic understanding and split from sanctification. Although Luther never meant to do this, Luther set into motion the split between justification and the works that proceeded therefrom, i.e sanctification.

Add on to this, that Luther had already started to split the interior salvation of the soul from the transformation of the socio-political realm beginning with the German Peasants’ revolt. Historian Brad Gregory makes the case that this is where Luther reconfigured external works of the body away from inner workings of the soul (sanctification from justification). Luther overtly rejected the peasants claim that salvation meant external change of social conditions.[iii] Instead, he is convinced that the gospel, faith, and salvation are not to be combined with politics, social realities, or the economy. Works of mercy result from your salvation, they don’t contribute to it.[iv]

Luther’s split is also on display in his two kingdoms theology via his writings in On Secular Authority.[v] God has ordained two governments, he outlines, 1.) the spiritual by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteousness and 2.) the temporal, which restrains the wicked.[vi] Catholic political theologian C. C. Pecknold in his book Christianity and Politics: A Short History narrates how this led to a radical democratization of society where this idealized, individualized, interiorized ecclesiology drives a wedge between the individual and his/her social community.[vii] All of this, I contend, led to problems for a Christian church in mission 500 years later in North American Protestantism.

The Split Transferred Across The Ocean

This splitting, of Christ’s work in the individual soul from Christ’s work in the socio-political realities we live in, all took place from within the Reformation frame of the magisterial reformation. Here the Reformers had confidence in the magistrates, and their respective governing authorities, to lead the culture under God according to and in harmony with Christian principles and the church. The Reformers, in a sense, could allow themselves to ignore the social realities forming Christian lives. These social realities were under the rule of thre Magistrate under God. The church could focus on individual salvation, and let the magistrate rule society under the same God. But when transferred across the ocean, once the established church was done away with, this split between the individual and social, set into motion a series of dynamics which detached the Christian from mission and world all the more.

Bonhoeffer talked about this individualization in the essay mentioned in Post One.“ He said “God granted American Christianity no reformation. He gave them revivalist preachers, churchman, theologians, but no reformation by the Word of God.” The Protestantism that emerged in America therefore, via this same soteriology, “stands in conscious seclusion and detachment from the general life of the church.”[viii] It becomes essentially a private “religion and ethics.”

Whereas in Christendom medieval Europe, Christians could lazily assume their cultural systems were Christian (even though today we see their miserable failings), once across the ocean, several hundred years later, we assume no such thing. And with now an interiorized faith, Christians are essentially left alone to their own individual status with God, quite separated from what is happening in society and culture, to impact the social worlds they live in. In essence, we have been able to see ourselves as souls going to heaven when we die and managing our earthly lives as best we can in the meantime.

In this process, the inheritors of this salvation, in many cases evangelical Christians, can be formed into people who live pious lives in a convenient indifference to the unjust social systems as long as they are working to their own advantage.[ix] Even worse, we separate the social world as a space where Christ is not at work via the power of His Holy Spirit. It then becomes a space we manage restraining the forces of sin as best we can. This becomes a justification for voting for governments that somehow can enforce Christian morals, and prevent sin (like abortion etc.). We might even vote for Trump as the best option.

As a result, we end up enforcing Christian morals upon a people presumed to be without Christ. And this always turns into a coercion that breeds resentment and abject violence. Worse, the church is formed to think it enters the world to manage sin, not bring salvation, except to individuals who must be saved and extracted from the world. This I suggest was all made possible by a Reformed forensic soteriology, transported overseas, that separates our status of justification in Christ from the sanctification of our bodies in the world, extracting ourselves from God’s mission of justice in and among the world.[x]

The Effects of Justification by Faith Alone on Mission in North America

The effects of all this on our formation for mission, some 500 years later, is daunting. At its worst, it shapes Christians to be passive to the injustices in the world, and to manage them, ala Luther in the Peasants Revolt, for pragmatic outcomes. We give up both participation in our witness and God’s work for His justice in the world. We appear duplicitous and dispassionate. This I believe happened in the culture of the Moral Majority in the 1980’s, in the various evangelical voting blocks voting for the Trump presidency.

Theologian Willie Jennings describes this kind of malformation via the experience of Westernized forensic salvation of the African Olaudah Equiano on a British slave ship in the eighteenth century. He says, “His vision of salvation touches the ground, but it cannot do anything about the ground it touches. . . . If the social order and the processes of commodification are not transformed in relation to the body through salvation, then salvation becomes hyperlocalized to a single relationship: God and the one being saved.”[xi] And so Christianity gets absorbed into the evil systems of slavery and inducts Equiano into slavery as part of the process. Salvation becomes a status extrinsic to the injustices we participate in the world. And we lose our witness, nevermind God’s justice in the world.

Jennings goes on to further describe the social dynamic that occurs via a soteriology that extracts the individual’s salvation from the world into an individualized isolated relationship with God. It is powerless to “do anything about the ground that it touches.” This individualization, which started in Reformation Europe, could be ignored as long as there was the backdrop of an assumed Christian society and social institutions. But, when transferred across the ocean, this soteriology becomes the means by which our witness is undermined. It separates salvation from the salvation God is working in the world to make the world right in Jesus Christ. It separates us from mission. In so doing we are malformed to make space for God’s work in the world, to become witnesses/participants to his work of justice in the world. It works against mission in the North American context.

The Ana-Baptist Pentecostal In Me

I don’t think it’s fair to blame Luther for all the above. Luther highlighted “justification by faith” at a time when this insight was sorely needed. It transformed Europe for the gospel. In Luther’s context, though it wasn’t perfect, his theological work made sense.

Neither is it fair to blame Calvin for what has happened 500 years later in the mission fields of a totally different context in North American post-Christendom. Calvin did begin to move salvation in a more forensic direction. He was a lawyer after all. But Calvin, as well as Luther, sought to hold the ordo salutis together. They did not foresee the split that would happen via their elevation of “justification by faith” in the Reformation theologies of the 16^th century.

Having said all of that, the propensity to do the split remains in the camps of those Christians influenced by the Reformed theologies of 16^th century (for a review of the way this theological emphasis continues to this day to split salvation from works from faith, Matt Bates’s Salvation by Allegiance Alone, 107-112). It is evidenced wherever the paranoia against works righteousness persists or where social justice is only seen as a pre-amble to personal salvation (instead part and parcel of the same work). It is evidenced wherever evangelicals willingly throw all in with a corrupt Trump presidency.

The Neo-Anabaptist soteriology starts from a different place. Its understanding of salvation starts with the whole discipleship of the person into the whole of Christ’s kingdom in a local space and time. This discipleship looks not only to Christ’s atoning death, resurrection, and victory, for an understanding of salvation. That is only part of salvation. Instead we look to Christ’s ascension, his victory over sin, evil and death, and His reign over the world, and the bringing of his kingdom until he returns. To say “Jesus is (my) Lord” is as much salvation as to say “Jesus is my Savior.” The cross is not only the defining moment by which we have been redeemed (past tense) from the chains of sin, it is the sign of the way God works in the world and shall bring in his kingdom. The individual cannot be separated from the arena of lived life in the world when saved, because the same Christ that has saved me, is alive, ruling and working to save and heal the world.

And so the Neo-Anabaptist soteriology cannot separate evangelism from discipleship. To be saved is come under the Lordship of Christ for my life, and what He is doing in the world. In knowing Jesus, we are seamlessly led into a discipleship that follows Jesus into the renewal of all things.

This counters the Reformed impulse to interiorize the life of the Spirit.[xii] It also counters the Pentecostal emphasis to locate the experience of the Spirit to the interior of the individual. Instead, now, the Anabaptist Pentecostal sees the Spirit at work in the world, under the Lordship of Christ, confident He is drawing the whole world to Himself. We now go into the world confident, always being asked to cooperate with God through Jesus by the Spirit to overcome injustice, being witnesses to all of what God is doing through Christ to heal and save the world.

And so Jesus now rules from the right hand of the Father bringing in his kingdom. For “he must reign until all enemies have been made subject” (1 Cor 15:25, my translation). Following Jesus then is not only a personal moral journey, it is becoming a subject of his rule and extending his rule into space and time through his Holy Spirit presence wherever he may be received. Being justified and forgiven is the entry into his kingdom. By entering his very presence, we become a participant in his mission. Salvation is not about forgiveness of sin only. It is about bringing all things—personal and social—under the Lordship of Christ.[xiii] This unites justification and sanctification and mission in the world into one. Amen and amen.

My Last Post

This concludes my writing on “Why I’m not Reformed.” The answer has much to do with how I see the Reformation theology working against mission. It’s a bold statement I know. And there are arguments to be made that another more European form of reformed theology ala Leslie Newbigin, Darrel Guder (influenced by Newbigin) counteracts these propensities outlined in these articles. It’s a fair argument. But of course I’m not talking about Europe. I’m talking about the Reformed theologies that landed across the ocean from Europe, and the propensities it all lead to in the formation a churches (especially within evangelicalism) in North America. I hope these posts have served to promote a good conversation on all these matters.

If you’re interested in more conversations like these, that embrace serious theology and the questions of culture and mission, by all means subscribe to this substack (it’s free!). I write an average of two times a month. And if you’re into podcasts, check out the Theology on Mission podcast. Mike and I have fun as well as serious conversations of all things culture, gospel and mission.

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[i] Luther, The Annotated Luther, 143.

[ii] This argument is made by Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, 80.

[iii] Instead, in his 1525 On the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, he writes, “It is just when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you.” See Luther, Luther’s Works, 50.

[iv] Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, 111.

[v] Luther wrote On Secular Authority (1523) before his Galatians Commentary (1535). Here he said that “Secular government has laws that extend no further than the body, goods, and outward earthly matters . . . but where the soul is concerned, God neither can nor will allow anyone but himself to rule,” . . . [for] “by what right does secular authority, in its folly, presume to judge a thing as secret, spiritual, hidden as faith?” See Luther and Calvin, Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, 23, 25.

[vi] Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, 93.

[vii] Pecknold, Christianity and Politics.

[viii] Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, 117.

[ix] This explains the evangelical indifference to Trump’s amoral ethos all the while many of them in US voted for him?

[x] Tim Keller, the famed deceased NYC pastor, sought to overcome this (what I have called) malformation of Reformed theology for mission by making the individual’s experience of being justified by faith the conduit through which God’s grace flows to show love, mercy, and charity to the hurting. Keller says the individual, fully forgiven in Christ, naturally is moved to see victims of injustice differently. In that Christians have received of the grace and forgiveness of God’s love, we cannot help but give the same generously to those who are hurting and in need among us. Much like Luther, Keller sees the works of justice flowing though the saved individual and the transformation that springs forth in each person out of gratitude and love for God. The problem however is that Keller’s approach opens the pathway to make justice the after effect of salvation. Justice is the consequence of God’s Kingdom instead of the very reality that God does in and through his reign. It becomes something we do instead something God does as his reign restructures the way we live in the world. Our good works now become suspect. They become just what Luther feared, our attempts to do good to prove something. This too, in its own way, undermines witness. See Keller, Generous Justice.

[xi] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 196.

[xii] Charles Taylor, The Secular Age (Harvard Press, 2007) links the “interiorizing of the Spirit” to the Reformation, arguing that the Reformers abolished the exterior efficacy of the sacraments, and in so doing “disenchanted” the cosmos (Taylor is following Max Weber) of the work the Spirit.

[xiii] For a deeper understanding of discipleship as following Christ in the way of nonviolence, suffering, and his kingdom, read Arnold Snyder, Following in the Footsteps of Jesus. Here through the eyes of historic Anabaptism we find the roots of Neo-Anabaptist engagements with culture through communal discipleship.

I’m continuing to explore the thesis, put forth originally HERE on ‘Fitch’s provocations,’ that the theology of the Reformation has not aged well as a theology that could shape the North American church for mission. The theology of the Reformation (in which I include both Luther and Calvin) emphasized certain truths (such as ‘justification by faith’) to the de-emphasis of other truths, and then expanded on them for the crisis of European Catholicism at the time. This theology proved powerful as an expression of the gospel and theology for the church of Europe 15^th century. It was contextual theology at its best. But, when transported across the ocean, uprooted from its Christendom context, this theology does not translate well into the North American multi-cultural post-Christianized world we live in today. I argue it actually works in many ways against the church in mission.

In the previous post, I talked about the way the Reformation’s theology of Scripture – the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, did not transfer well for the times of mission we’re living in. In this post I close in on the Reformation distinction of the visible/invisible church, and the way it works against mission today.

The Emergence of the Visible/Invisible Church Distinction:

The Reformation articulated a new understanding of the church – ‘the visible versus invisible church’ as part of their emphasis on salvation through Christ Alone – Sola Christus.

The Reformation of course came into being as a reaction to the corruption of the Medieval Catholic church. Luther was declared a heretic and excommunicated from the “one true church.” And so Luther, and his many followers, were left churchless. And the Reformation was forced to answer the question: what is the true church? And can one be saved apart from it? It all led to the Reformation’s distinction between the visible/invisible church.

Faced with a corrupt institutional church, that claimed salvation could only be attained from within its institutional practice, the Reformers claimed that the one true church is invisible. The true church was the faithful spiritual body of believers across time known only to God. Meanwhile the institutional church must surely carry on the organized practice of the sacraments, ministry and mission of the church. But this institutional church inevitably contains true believers alongside those who practice the faith in rote only. The visible church is inevitably compromised containing both the faithful and the apostate. It is the conundrum of the visible/invisible church.

This doctrine of the visible/invisible distinction solved a few problems for the Reformation. It countered the Roman church’s claim to be the one true church apart from which no one can be saved. It set the medieval person at ease fearful they were condemned to hell if they had challenged the Catholic church. Furthermore, it emphasized the true saving faith of the Christian over the authority of the church to grant salvation. Reformers could now be saved outside the Roman church. But 500 years later, now transported overseas, this distinction creates new problems because it presents the conditions for a lack of a visible social witness amidst a post-Christianized culture. In other words, this distinction works against mission.

The History of the Doctrine

The Reformation cannot be blamed entirely for the origin of the visible/invisible church distinction. Augustine in City of God, famously said, “there are many sheep without and many wolves within.” He makes a distinction between the true body of Christ, which consists of the elect children of God from the beginning, and the mixed body of Christ, which includes all the baptized.[i] Augustine however never actually used the “visible-invisible church” distinction. It was the Reformation that did that and pushed the issue to the forefront. In particular, Luther, Zwingli, Wycliffe, and even Calvin put forth this distinction as a necessary understanding in response to the Roman Catholic church doctrine.[ii]

One hundred years after the Reformation, the influential Westminster Confession of Faith stated: “The Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect. . . . The visible Church, (which is . . . not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion and of their children.” In this confession, the visible church of Christ has been given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints. Then it provides the additional qualifier: “The purest Churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated, as to become no Churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan.”[iii]

In early versions of Westminster, the Pope was called the Antichrist and identified as an example of a false Christian in the visible church.[iv] Westminster also identified the Protestants excommunicated by Rome during the Reformation as “true Christians” that were not part of the only visible Church at that time and place. In this way again, the push for visible/invisible church distinction served the Reformers as a corrective to the Roman doctrine of the Middle Ages (from Cyprian): “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” (No salvation outside the church).

Instead of the church as the only way to salvation, Luther asserted Sola Christus, salvation is through Jesus only. In Luther’s words “What I am telling you is that it is easier for us humans to believe and trust in everything else other than in the name of Christ, who alone is all in all, and more difficult for us to rely on him in whom and through whom we possess all things.”[v] According to Luther, the Roman Catholic Church had clouded the gospel by adding assistants and helpers into the mix of a person’s salvation. Rome preached a gospel of “Jesus and . . . ”: Jesus and Mary, Jesus and purgatory, Jesus and the saints, Jesus and works of charity. For Luther, the Reformers needed to clear the fog by ridding the church of these helpers of salvation. Sola Christus!

What Happens When This Doctrine Moves to North America

But, hearkening to Bonhoeffer, the invisible/visible church distinction is fine when the backdrop of the Reformation is one monolithic Christianized culture out of which the church is established. Here the Reformed distinction of the visible/invisible church makes it possible to call people who have become comfortable in their status as a member of the monolithic church/culture to a more faithful discipleship. But separated from this Christianized culture, it has the reverse effect. It now makes it possible to be a Christian without the church. Five hundred years later in the multi-plural and the divided world of the secularized West of the twenty-first century, this malforms the church for witness in at least two ways.

First, we no longer have a visible way of life by which our witness to the world can be located and seen in a way of life by a watching world. By de-emphasizing the participation in the body politic of the church as the shaper of being a Christian, we lose the social reality of the church as witness. In a post-Christianized, secular and a pluralized world, we cannot argue our way to witness, because there is no single monolithic rationality.[vi] The gospel therefore must be displayed in a compelling way of life through visible social bodies in order for there to be witness. In Stanley Hauerwas’ words, “The gospel is . . . a seeing of a communion between people the world cannot otherwise know.”[vii] The malformation of the invisible/visible church distinction therefore leaves us without this kind of essential witness in a post-Christianized society.

Second, without the church as a visible social body we no longer have a way of life in which our language can make sense in the pluralist post-Christianized parts of North America. Truth, in a non-hegemonous world, with no dominant culture, where meanings and language can no longer be assumed, must have a community within which the words are used, and can be made sense of. Whereas the capacity to be freed from church institution and social embodiment was a positive in the Euro-Christendom Reformation, it is now a hardship in post-Christian society, because we increasingly find ourselves in a world that no longer understands our words like “sin,” “salvation,” “justice,” and “Jesus as Lord.” And we have no social world called church in which to use these words and from which they can make sense to an onlooking world.

Perhaps I exaggerate a bit? Nonetheless, I contend that the invisible/visible church distinction in this day injures our ability to display what words mean via a practiced way of life in a pluralist world. In the words of Hauerwas, “Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world.”[viii] In a post-Christianized world, where we can no longer assume cultural habits sufficient to shape Christians, where the church’s practices have become diminished and consumerized, we by default are now individuals being formed by the practices of a post-Christianized culture. The loss of such a set of practices we call church has left us without a formation for witness. We just blend in. This I suggest is an unintended consequence of the Reformation’s emphasis on the invisible/visible church distinction some 500 years later.

The Neo-Anabaptist Corrective to the Visible/Invisible Distinction

The Neo-Anabaptist trajectory counters this lack. It starts with the assumption that Christians are a minority in a post Christendom world. The alignment with nation-state and/or cultural power is an anathema. It is not the way God works to redeem the world.[ix] Therefore, Christians must locate their own cultural identity and way of life in a political alternative: the church. It is church, as a visible way of life, that makes possible witness in the world to the way God works. The first task of the church, therefore, is to be the church, a contrast visible community as witness to the world.[x]

Thus, Neo-Anabaptists have traditionally focused ecclesiology on practices.[xi] Practices, not separated from beliefs but in conjunction with beliefs, become the starting point for shaping a community that is formed around and in mutual submission to the presence of Christ. Contra the Reformation, which so often founded their churches on Confessions and written catechisms, the Anabaptist stream starts with practices into which we live what we believe and shape how we articulate it anew. More than a confession or belief statement, these practices form a way of life by which we reconcile conflict, read the Bible together, disciple one another, and exercise leadership within the gifted community. These include thick practices of life together such as the way we eat, share economics, discern life together, recognize leaders, and engage the world through resistance and cooperation. All of this generates a way of life that enables a neighborhood to actually Jesus as Lord at work among a people, and His victory over sin, death, and evil. This kind of ecclesiology can be a resource for reinvigorating the visible church as the foundation for mission in the new post-Christendoms of North America.

In North America, in the face of cultural upheaval, in the face of a consumerized church discredited by its abusive pastors and its compromised alignment with a decadent president, it seems to me this Neo-Anabaptist practice of being witnessing communities of the Kingdom, is the way forward. It is the way of mission that overcomes the individualized Christianity spawned by the Reformation’s visible/invisible church distinction landing in North American evangelicalism.

If this is the first post you’ve read in this series, I urge you to go back and read the prior posts HEREand HERE. And I have one more post coming in this series. If you’re interested in being notified, make sure to subscribe to my substack below. It’s free. And as always, comments are much appreciated and I’ll respond as best I am able.

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[i] As cited by Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 7:457. Available online:https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc8.iv.xiii.iii.html

[ii] Wycliffe used the distinction in order to critique the hierarchy. With Wycliffe, “visible” carried the connotations of “ostentatious” and “fleshly.” The earliest use of the terminology itself is in Zwingli around 1530. See Peter Leithart on this in his “Augustine on ‘Visible-Invisible Church.’” Brad Gregory states Luther originated this idea apart from Wycliffe, Zwingli, etc. See Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, ch. 1 footnote 67.

[iii] Westminster Confession of Faith, XXV.VI.I–II.

[iv] Westminster Confession of Faith, XXV.VI.

[v] Luther, The Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, 79.

[vi] MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

[vii] Hauerwas, “Beyond the Boundaries,” 68. In the same vein, Anaan Baan argues that Hauerwas correlates what Wittgenstein means by “showing” to witness. The Necessity of Witness, 85-86.

[viii] Stanley Hauerwas, “The End of American Protestantism,” ABC Religion and Ethics, July 2, 2013.

[ix] I build out this case in David Fitch, ‘Reckoning with Power, Brazos 2024.

[x] Hauerwas’ famous line in this regard is “The first task of the Church is not to make the world more just but to make the world more the world.” It can be found in numerous places. See his discussion of it in Hauerwas, The Work of Theology, 26.

[xi] I build out this case in David Fitch, What is the Church?, Herald Press 2021, and David Fitch, Faithful Presence, IVP 2016.

A few weeks ago, HERE on ‘Fitch’s provocations’, I put forth the thesis that the theology of the Reformation had not aged well as a theology that could shape the North American church for mission. The theology of the Reformation (in which I include both Luther and Calvin) lifted up certain truths over others, emphasized certain truths to the de-emphasis of other truths, and then expanded on them for the crisis of European Catholicism at the time, providing a theology that made much sense in the context of Medieval Europe. This theology proved powerful as an expression of the gospel and theology for the church of Europe 15^th century. It was contextual theology at its best. But, when transported across the ocean, uprooted from its Christendom context, this theology does not translate well into North America for the multi-cultural post-Christianized world we live in today. As a result, that theology of the Reformation, including more specifically Reformed theology, actually works to malform the church for mission. I’m laying this out with three examples of what I’m talking about, in three posts that follow that first post. So here goes with the first example: The Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

The Reformation’s Doctrine of Scripture

The Reformation in Europe placed a new emphasis on the authority of Scripture, with a doctrine sometimes referred to as Sola Scriptura.

Luther, you might say, started it. When Luther was summoned, as a heretic, before the Diet of Worms by Charles V, he responded famously to the demand to recant some of his writings by saying, “I have been subdued by the Scriptures . . . my conscience is held captive to the Word of God, as a result. . . . I cannot and will not recant anything, because to act against my conscience is burdensome, injurious and dangerous. God help me! Amen.”[i] Luther thereby defied the emperor Charles, and the Pope. Not too long thereafter he translates the Bible into German. Thus, one of the central tenets of the Reformation is born. The Scriptures themselves shall stand above the church’s authority and shall (eventually) be made available to individuals apart from the mediation of the church: Sola Scriptura.

John Calvin used words like “infallible rule of faith and practice” and “final authority on Christian doctrine and practice” to articulate this new authority of Scripture.[ii] The Westminster confession, many years later, will elaborate on Sola Scriptura with phrases like: “Scripture is sufficient,” “contains therein all that is necessary for faith and practice,” “nothing need be added,” “Scripture is final in authority, infallible,” “whereas the Pope, the fathers, etc. even the Councils are still fallible . . . Scripture is perspicuous.” These ideas, all contained in the Westminster Confession, shaped a new understanding of Scripture’s authority over the church.[iii] It’s all part of what I see as the expanded doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Over time, this doctrine of Scripture would acquire additional clarity on what this would actually mean in terms of church practice within the Magisterial Reformation. Some guardrails would be established. By and large, except for the renegade Anabaptist groups, things would hold together in Europe.

What Happened Across the Ocean a Few Centuries Later.

Within the boundary of a unified Euro Christendom, this shook Roman Catholicism to its core and brought much change. It renewed a commitment to the study of the Bible and to seeking a new faithfulness to the apostles teaching. All of this was good!! But as this doctrine traveled across the ocean, having been melded together with an enlightenment epistemology, it would soon provide an opening for several new understandings of Scriptural authority including a hardened view of inerrancy, verbal inspiration, and, with the aid of the Spirit’s immediate illumination, perspicuity. In each case, the center of the church, its history and traditions, as arbiter of interpretation of Scriptures was diminished. The interpretation of Scripture became multiple, among the many churches, and all Christians were now freed to choose between them. This I suggest would later malform the church for mission in North America 500 years later.

The Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura stood as the corrective to a corrupt church in Europe. This solved one problem for the Reformation (how can a corrupt church be called to faithfulness?), but it left Christians across the ocean with new problems 500 years later, where there was no longer a pre-existing church to correct. Now we are left asking, how do we interpret Scripture faithfully when it has been separated from an authoritative tradition’s teaching office? This was not an obvious problem (there were problems) for Reformed churches and/or Lutheran churches in Europe as these traditions developed various authoritative teaching offices, Synods, Confessions, etc., over time within the magisterial Reformation. But now, 500 years later, in a now pluralist and vastly post-Christianized culture, where the church is navigating new moral issues not confronted previously, where various evangelical expressions of church have manifested no longer attached to the practices of the Magisterial Reformation, the church is faced with pluriform interpretations of multiple texts on each issue. Without a practice of discerning Scripture together for new challenges, churches devolve into multiple disputes over what the Scripture means for sexuality, politics, racism, economics. The very issues we should be engaging for mission become antagonistic spaces where we shake our Bibles at each other. And the culture remains un-engaged by the church. The church’s witness is shut down.

Some versions of evangelical Protestantism in North America, faced with these challenges, rearticulated the authority of Scripture over the church into the doctrine of inerrancy: The Scripture is inerrant, God-breathed, has a literal meaning, perspicuous to all via the Holy Spirit. And so we think the Bible remains authoritative for Christians in all of life and practice.

But this locked churches into modernist frames, seeking a propositional truth via authorial intent. Interpretation of Scripture remains individualized, setting into motion a social dynamic in the churches, so that whenever confronted with new cultural challenges for mission, such as sexuality, racism or politics, the church would now argue as individuals or experts over what the Bible said authoritatively on the subject. In turn, we get caught up in an enlightenment paralysis, stuck in multitudinous arguments, with church members dividing up in groups taking up the interpretation that they most align with. To this day, it is stunning how anytime a renowned New Testament scholar states his or her position on sexuality, the social media platforms of evangelicalism erupt as if the questions have been solved, at least for the one side of the conversation (e.g. Richard/Christopher Hays, Widening of God’s Mercy 2024).

But even worse, this approach to the authority of Scripture – over the church – leads a hardening of our interpretations of the text for issues we are facing. We become entrenched because the Scriptures are inerrant, and therefore our interpretations must be too. Scripture is left to protecting certain entrenched positions as opposed to engaging our culture . We cannot engage the mission because we cannot extend the text and the gospel into the new uncharted territories of mission. We are prevented from unlocking the imagination of Scripture for the challenges of the contexts we live in.

For sure, I am not blaming Calvin for ‘inerrancy.’ But, the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, the lifting up of the authority of Scripture over the church, and its refinement by Calvin and the ensuing tradition, eventually led to inerrancy as Sola Scriptura transferred into the modernist epistemologies of Post WW1 America fundamentalist evangelical protestantism. And we must admit, that this hardened inerrancy, with its habits of seeing Scripture as above culture and/or context, is most prominent among the evangelical inheritors of the Reformed tradition, especially the Neo-Reformed, The Gospel Coalition? Indeed, I suggest these ills have plagued in different even those Reformed and Lutheran churches remain within the practice of “synods” and “Confessional statements” for discerning Scripture for conflictual matters.

We Have No Practice Now

And so here we are, several hundred years later, grand numbers of evangelicals living under the influence of the Reformed doctrine of Scripture, with no practice to mete out the authority of Scripture over the church for the new questions we are facing in mission, except to call on the exegetical expert in the pulpit. And this has left us, more often than not, dividing into groups, arguing over the multitude of interpretations (think sexuality, racism, gender, economics, politics) that come from these places, paralyzed from engaging the places of mission.

This, I suggest, is an unintended consequence of the Reformation’s Sola Scripture doctrine. The church, set lose from Euro-Christendom, now had to look for some objectivity, and authority, in the historical critical method of the university. The historical method promised, that with enough hard work, we could locate the author’s intended meaning in the original context, and from there extract it to then be appropriated for the moment. This served to keep the Bible, the inspired Scripture at the center of church authority and put interpretation in the hands of the seminary trained expert in charge. This opened the gates for interpretation that either succumbed to the defensive agenda of the conservative church or the accommodative agenda of the liberal church. And now, either way, we fail to engage what God is doing and calling us to in the extension of the gospel for mission.

Hauerwas referred to this dynamic when he stated:

[F]undamentalism and historical criticism are but two sides of the same coin—that is, they are both developments of the Protestant stress on sola Scriptura that was transformed into sola text by the printing press. These developments were then given ideological formation through the development of democratic social orders, which created something called the individual citizen that presumed the ability to read the Bible without spiritual formation and moral guidance. As a result, the Bible was separated from the community necessary for it to be read as the word of God—that is, the church. [iv]

As a result, we have a Scriptural hermeneutic with no bite to encounter our cultures, and peoples with the truths of Scripture. Upon each test, each individual gets to make up his or her own mind, or perhaps even worse, each pastor, as he or she preaches, gets to choose which of the three or four options in his/her commentary to get a message across. We have lost the ability to read and interpret Scripture as a practice of the community engaged in a context for the shaping our imagination into what God is doing among us and in the world for his mission.

I do not blame Calvin or Luther for this mess. It is safe to say that Luther at the Diet of Worms, or Calvin in his writings, had no intention of unleashing Sola Scriptura as the “most important historical source of Western hyperpluralism.”[v] But here we are, 500 years later, and we see the unintended consequences of this doctrine in our inability to navigate mission in the waters of post Christendom.

A Neo-Anabaptist Way to Uphold Scripture’s Authority Among Us

In my view, the Anabaptists heritage offers an alternative way to both uphold Scripture’s authority in the church as well as interpret it for a given context for mission. Drawing on streams of Anabaptist history, there are practices that guide our ways of submitting our lives and the church to Scripture. This is not to be confused with current denominational Anabaptism, many of whom could be blamed for following the same trajectory that I am blaming the Reformed crowd for doing in evangelicalism.

This way starts with a local church practice of reading Scripture together, as a community, especially in times of conflict or struggle. The historic practice of the “Rule of Paul” traces its heritage to several early radical reformers.[vi] The church is called to gather together in the reading of a text for a particular contextual issue presented to the community. Following the pattern of Acts 15, we allow space for those recognized as gifted among us to teach, those of other gifts, such as pastoral and prophetic gifts, to speak, and allow the whole gathering to come together and be led in mutual consideration. We carefully examine the influences each of us carry toward an interpretation of the text towards a specific issue.

Scholarship is part of the process. We study the text with the help of the historical-critical details. We let those among us who are teachers guide us. There is a submission to a history, the given traditions of interpretation that we find ourselves indebted to, and the Spirit extends faithfulness into spaces we have never encountered before. The text is not hardened to the point that we cannot consider what it might mean anew, or how this truth might be extended into this new context. We listen to the context. We seek for ways the meaning of this text is laid hold of in the situations we are facing. And we wait carefully, until we can say together, “it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us …” (Acts 15:28). At its best, this practice combines the historical study of a text, with theological interpretation of the text, with contextual interpretation of the text that extends and broadens the breadth of understanding as to how this text speaks into a situation. In this way the gospel is extended authoritatively into new contexts for mission.[vii]

This reading Scripture is political in nature. By political, I mean that which pertains to a people group’s life together. The Scripture takes life and receives authority not over the church, but among the church, as we read submit to it, with the Holy Spirit. We read and interpret not only for a personal moral challenge or precept, but to learn who we are as the local church, and how we the local church are to be and act as a political body in the world. Scripture becomes the source of shaping our witness in the world, not only my personal life and walk as a Christ follower. Rather than the Bible becoming a proof text to argue over, the Bible becomes God’s Story into which we are to live in our local context. By discerning God’s working among us and around us through Scripture, we become his people extending his story of salvation, healing and renewal into the world as we live this Grand Drama.

The historical-grammatical interpretation serves to keep us grounded in the text. But it can become hardened to an interpretation specific to one context of the dominant group in power at the time. Theological Interpretation keeps us grounded within long streams of tradition which have proven fruitful in people’s lives that have preceded us. We don’t get to make things up. Historical and Theological modes of interpretation keep the church and its mission on the rails of orthodoxy. But it is contextual interpretation that helps us listen carefully to the context we find ourselves in, listen to the languages, concerns, meanings, at work so as to extend its meaning and power anew. Contextual interpretation enables the truths of history, proven down through the ages in traditions, to be illumined in expanded ways, into new territories for mission.

Let Us Shape a Practice

Let us shape a practice of communal reading of Scripture together, as led by pastors, teachers and prophets in a church community, where the historical-critical knowledge of the text is indeed present, but grounded in the Theological Interpretation of text - recognizing both the streams of tradition present in the circle, as well as the importance of faithfulness within the historic streams of interpretation we are a part of. Last but not least, let us practice Contextual Interpretation, the listening and understanding of the language and meanings at work in one’s context, all located together in a community. This practice takes skills and must be cultivated in church leaders for mission.

I could be wrong, (tell me how), but I don’t see many streams of current Reformed theology in evangelicalism as friendly to this direction? I see Holiness theologies (the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, the society meeting, etc), Pentecostal theologies (the Spirit’s authority in inspiring the Word and enlivening it in the gifts), and of course Anabaptist theologies as places for these kind of Scriptural practices. Tell me how I’m wrong?

*And just to be clear, I don’t think anything I’ve said here denies “the inerrancy” of Scripture, even though the term has problematics. I also don’t believe anything I’ve said here diminishes the authority of Scripture in the church and beyond. Quite the contrary.

[i] As quoted in Brad Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks (2017), 83–84.

[ii] Manetsch, Scott M. “Is the Reformation Over? John Calvin, Roman Catholicism, and Contemporary Ecumenical Conversations.” Themelios 36.2 (2011) 199.

[iii] Westminster Confession Chapter 1.VI, VII.

[iv] Stanley Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scripture (1993), 42–43.

[v] An admittedly controversial assessment by Brad Gregory, Unintended Reformation (2015), 92

[vi] See for example John Howard Yoder’s account in Body Politics (1992) ch. 5. I acknowledge with much grief the abusive behavior of Yoder to women he was teaching in his later graduate teaching career. Therefore, when using Yoder as a source, I acknowledge doing so with discernment, especially in regard to any attitudes, directives within his teachings reflecting on gender and sexuality.

[vii] I speak here specifically of the Theological Interpretation of Scripture as expounded by such authors as Stephen Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (1998); Daniel Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture (2008). Likewise I speak of Contextual Theological Interpretation of Scripture. Here I recommend the most recent book by Bo H. Lim, Contextual Theological Interpretation, (2025).

Last month I got into a dust-up on fb (you can find my fb page HERE to follow the conversations) with a post entitled “Why I’m not Reformed. If I were to write this book.” I made five points surrounding Reformation emphases like Sola Scriptura, forensic view of atonement, how Reformed theology understands authority and power within the church, and more. I said that these emphases made sense in the context of Medieval Europe, less sense now. Hundreds of thousands of lives and many Euro cultures were transformed in Christ. But when transported across the ocean, many years later, these emphases do not translate well into North America, as we face a multi-cultural post Christianized world. In fact, in some ways, these emphases, 500 years later, turn into hindrances for mission in many of the contexts we’re living in today. If I had been more precise in that post, I would have titled that post: “Why I’m not Reformed? Because it makes no sense for mission.”

Of course I received pushback. And maybe I deserved it? Some said I hadn’t interpreted Luther or Calvin or the Westminster Confession correctly. Some said I was too broad in my critique, that my critique applied mainly to the so-called Neo-Reformed Theo-Bro crowd, whom some Reformed claimed are not true Reformed theologically in the classical sense. Some said I wasn’t precise enough (it was a fb post eh?). All of which has prompted me to write a series of posts being more precise on these matters.

I’m going to do four posts (three after this one) on three aspects of Reformed theology that didn’t translate well into the post Christian context of North America. To each post, I’ll add a riff on why I see the Neo-Anabaptist stream of theology (not necessarily the same as the Anabaptist movement of the 15th century) as the way forward. I’m building on a lecture and journal article I did way back in 2017 for McMaster Divinity School. You can find it published HERE. So here goes “Why I’m not Reformed? Because it makes no sense for mission.” To all my Reformed friends, whom I love, I invite you to join with me and push back on these posts. I’ll try to respond fairly and respectfully. May we be mutually encouraged in the conversation. Here goes.

This Is About Unintended Consequences

These posts are about the “unintended consequences” of the European Reformation, not the Reformed theological doctrines of Calvin, Luther and the other figures of those times that formed the magisterial reformation.

In the last few decades, much has been made of the “unintended consequences” of the Reformation. I put those words in quotation marks because I’m alluding to Brad Gregory’s writing on the “unintended consequences of the Reformation.” For Gregory the “unintended consequences” of the Reformation led to a rampant pluralism in the interpretation of Scripture, consumer capitalism, and even secularism.[i] But Gregory is not the only one to write in this vein. Charles Taylor argues (among other things) that the Reformation’s rejection of sacramentalism led to an evacuation of the presence of the sacred in the world resulting in the beginnings of a modern naturalism/secularism.[ii] John Milbank, and a host of others, blame the Reformation for its alignment with the nominalism of Duns Scotus and the metaphysics of Univocity of Being.[iii] Hence we now have the privatization of the sacred and the sociological world has been left to nature, and human life to sheer autonomy and the exercise of power. Scholars as diverse as Peter Leithart and Ephraim Radner attribute certain divisions, antagonisms, and the excesses of denominationalism in today’s church to the miscalculations of the Reformation.[iv] This is not a new argument.

I’d like to throw in (or pile on) one more “unintended consequence” of the Reformation for us to think about: that the Reformation, once transported overseas to North America, specifically Canada and the United States, malformed the protestant church for mission.

The Reformation dominated the shaping of church life and culture in the United States and Canada once it arrived on its shores four centuries ago. Acknowledging the presence of Roman Catholicism in Quebec, Mexico, and Anglo Catholicism in parts of New England and Virgina, Reformed Protestantism has still shaped large parts of Christianity in North America via the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Wesleyans, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Reformed English Baptists. I want to suggest the theology of the Reformation, once transported across the ocean, left the churches most influenced by it lacking in an ecclesiology with which to engage a post-Christianized North America just a few centuries later. Reformation theology, which once worked so well given the backdrop of Medieval Euro Roman Catholicism, would later fail to sustain an ecclesiology in Canada and the United States sufficient to weather the storms of its own post-Christianization. The seeds of current day North American Protestantism’s failure in mission, in other words, were sown in the Reformed theology from four hundred years ago.

As a result, the future of the church in mission in North America—a continent in various phases of being de-Christianized—is not more Reformed theology. Instead it is in the drawing on the wisdom, theology, and ecclesiology of the Radical Reformation and what some now name the Neo-Anabaptist stream of theology. This stream can offer the North American church resources for an ecclesiology that can flourish in its exilic existence via the birthing of communities that witness to the gospel amidst the shifting turf of post-Christendom.

Bonhoeffer’s Observation

To start this series of posts, allow me to riff on an observation made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer after his first visit to America in 1930. In an essay entitled “Protestantism Without the Reformation,” he argued that Protestantism, in coming to America, a land devoid of the cultural habits of Catholic Christendom, had (mal)formed into a church of the individual. Devoid of the state-church synthesis, no longer tied to reforming the “one true church” and without the backdrop of a singular creedal confession, the Reformation church in essence would lose its original reason for being. With the Reformation having landed across the ocean, each Christian had the freedom to choose his or her church, or to even reject church, and the ability to believe whatever he/she chose to believe. There no longer existed a theological social foundation for engaging and/or resisting the culture. And so, in Canada and the United States, the movement that we call the Reformation would be tested as to whether it had the theology sufficient to form a church that could impact the world, not merely appeal to it.[v]

Bonhoeffer was limited in his own theological options at the time. His essay reflects that Bonhoeffer was comfortable within the state church alignments in Europe; and we know how fraught with problems this form of church would be in just a few short years in Germany. In addition, Bonhoeffer did not approve of the historical Anabaptists, sometimes speaking of them as enthusiasts and anarchists.[vi] But in writing Life Together, or in starting the Finkenwalde seminary in response to the Deutsche Christen movement, people like myself (and Stanley Hauerwas[vii] and Mark Theissen Nation[viii]) see in Bonhoeffer his own leaning toward some very Anabaptist themes in the face of the Reformation church’s failure to face Nazism in Germany.

And so it is Bonhoeffer’s observation that drives my analysis. I want to do three posts outlining three examples of Reformed theology that “worked” in Europe 500 years ago, but, when left without the background of the Catholic church to reform, backfired here in Canada and United States several hundred years later, when we find ourselves in the social situation of mission. Each post shows how a doctrinal formulation that worked in the context of Medieval Europe, became in essence a malformation for mission in post-Christendom North America. Reformed theology therefore left the church incapable of engaging a post-Christianized society. In each post I offer a few comments as to how the Neo-Anabaptist theological stream offers some resources to move forward.[ix]

I realize this is putting things boldly. And I am sure I’ll have to clarify, qualify and define, and then define, qualify and clarify even more. But if you’re interested in following these posts and having some conversation, make sure to subscribe to be notified of when each post hits. In the meantime, thanks for reading. I look forward to some gracious and friendly conversation.

[i] Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (2015)

[ii] This is just one of the themes Charles Taylor is narrating in his magnus opus A Secular Age (2007) On this theme, see pages 72–80.

[iii] See John Milbank’s summary of this issue in his preface to Theology and Social Theory, xxiv–xxvi. For an overview and defense of the Radical Orthodoxy view on Duns Scotus, see Pickstock, “Duns Scotus,” 543–74.

[iv] See Radner, A Brutal Unity and Leithart, The End of Protestantism.

[v] See Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, 92–118.

[vi] DeYonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther, 159–60.

[vii] Hauerwas, Performing the Faith.

[viii] Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin?

[ix] I use the term Neo-Anabaptist to refer to the numerous writings that follow Hauerwas, Yoder, and other Anabaptist writers, who work out of the streams of post-liberalism, post structuralism, post-linguistic turn, and otherwise post-Enlightenment understandings of culture, epistemology, and language. I see within these writers the influence of historic Anabaptism. By using this term, I also hope to include historic Anabaptist influences, but see the extension of many of the historic Anabaptist themes into current socio-cultural and philosophical discussions as most promising.

The past four posts have argued that the current state of American politics, as well as the discourse surrounding political theory and theology in the academy, has largely been determined by the contest between democratic liberalism and conservative illiberal nationalism in our country. The church goes missing as a social political reality itself, capable of engaging the wider politics, but instead is largely relegated to merely joining the politics as dictated by either of the two sides as given.

A couple weeks ago, I was giving a presentation to the Northern Seminary Faculty Symposium on this series of posts about the missing church in American political theory. Upon concluding, faculty member Nijay Gupta asks “what difference does this make for the pastor trying to lead a church through the polarizing issues of our times?” or something like that. This kind of practical question is rare among the New Testament studies guild (smile, wink, wink) so I took it with all seriousness. It’s the kind of question we’re always asking at Northern around our academic studies. It’s part of what makes Northern Northern. Good academics must turn to the shaping of a theology for the practice of ministry and the Christian’s everyday life.

So here goes with four ways recovering the church as a politic changes the way we lead church into American politics, and changes the way we live as Christians in a sick and divided political world.

On Beginning with the Church

1.) Political Discernment Begins with the Local

This means, as a general rule, pastors avoid discerning national political issues, UNTIL they have first been discerned locally with real situations in real people’s lives who are part of the church or surrounding neighborhood.

For instance, before we discern what I as a Christian, or we as a church, might argue for with a national abortion policy, let us discern carefully the situations in our own church, where perhaps an single mother, or a woman with an ectopi pregnancy, are forced to contemplate having an abortion. The church comes alongside the woman and her partner to discern with them, support them, in whatever pathway God leads. This kind of conversation/discernment happens in as small and safe a group as is necessary. In the process insights and convictions come to fore. The church responds with care. And from here, with what we’ve learned, we may press state wide, to then even nationally, to press for reforms to state or national policy.

Pressing into real lives, into real circumstances and context for the moral discernment, helps the church avoid ideologizing the issue. Instead of extracting the issue from real discipleship, thereby conceptualizing it in order to make a national argument where all ideology starts, we start with real discernments on the ground. Ideology dies in the face of discerning real people’s lives inter-relationally. Our disposition changes. We no longer argue to win an argument, instead we listen together to discern the issue that lies before us. In the process, the body of Christ, by its life and witness to what God has done and is doing in real people’s lives, bears witness to a justice made possible in Jesus, and from there, pushes toward the state to respond, not ideologically, but from an embodied witness.

In this way, issues of racism, economic barriers to the poor, issues of sexuality and gender in the schools, and many more, can be dealt with first in the church, then in town, thereby producing an embodied witness, from which God can use to change the world.

2.) Be Justice First and Then Carry Justice Into the World

To reiterate explicitly the point embedded in the first point above, the body of Christ must be the justice it gives witness to, before it can go into the world, and work with God for the same justice in the world. Otherwise, any justice work turns into more of the world’s jockeying for worldly power. This means the focus of the pastor first is to lead the church body itself to be a people of justice in relation to race, economics, sexuality, etc. From this place, with much lessons learned, and seeing the work of the Spirit, we enter the world. The pastor leads this.

3.) De-emphasize the Government as the Sole Arm of Justice

When Christians, and their leaders, see the church as a politic, not as a group of individuals who must choose between Republican and Democrat in order to change the world, there is a lessened propensity to put all our political eggs into the one basket of government. This chastens our attempt to put the work of God’s justice all onto the government. I have written in this BOOK HERE all the reasons why we should not divinize the work of government for the work of justice. And so we will not expect the state to enforce a Christian society, or Christian nation, on the public.

And yet, centering the church as our politics does not diminish the need for good government. The church will work for good and better government. But our expectations for what government can do are now necessarily limited. And it says this government too shall pass away, but the church, and God’s work through God’s people, shall continue on unto the completion of the age.

Pastors should preach and teach accordingly. Preach these basic core doctrines out of the book of Revelation, or even Romans 13. Leaders must chastise the divinizing of Donald Trump or any other political figure as outright heresy. And let us discern together how best to respond in this time, and this place, the political challenge we’re facing in the chaotic politics of Donald Trump. This is how Christians are to live.

There will be times when the church’s work leads to legislation. But this legislation only preserves the advances of the justice worked out previously on the ground by the embodied presence of the church in the world (LBJ didn’t enact Civil Rights legislation of his own accord, it was the on the ground swelling of change fermented by the Black church with others on the ground). I argue the Civil Rights movements of the 1960’s, the women’s suffrage movements (1848-1920), the abolitionist movements pre-Civil War were in many cases examples of this social dynamic. What we must be wary of, is the handing over of the work of God’s justice to the government where it goes to persevere what has been achieved, and then stagnate.

4.) The Church and Saving Democracy

One last word. Democracy must change. It cannot help but change. The church can assist the change (there are Anabaptist theologian types who claim it was the Anabaptists who taught the culture the practices of democracy in the first place). The church is called to give witness to this effort. The church must discern and resist authoritarian brutality one episode at a time. We shall discern how to show up peacefully, manifesting the presence of Jesus, in embodied demonstration, provide legal assistance, when ICE works its brutality.

These should all be local discernments. How do we respond when our immigrant, black or brown family members/friends/neighbours are being treated unjustly, brutally at the hands of the state. We shall not first get into an argument over the validity of ICE, entering ideologically into echo chambers and fanning their flames. We will first respond to local situations, enter into real people’s lives, walk the streets with presence, carrying the gospel, and then provide platform for their stories to be told.

If ICE shows up at our local voting booths in November, we will discern carefully together, if necessary we will show up kindly with coffee, filming bad actors, protecting the voters scared for their lives, by our embodied presence. The church shall simply go be WITH the hurting in the power and presence of the living Christ which shall disrupt all evil

And So The Challenge Goes Forth.

These initial four suggestions point to what it means to center the church as a politic. They point to the new kind of ecclesial leader pastor so needed for the political crisis of our times. One church at a time. Over time a thousand churches take up this task. Avoiding ideological antagonism, embodying justice in each town and village, a faithful presence to the gospel of Jesus takes root. In every town there’s a church body that resists peacefully, with its communities, the hideous works of injustice. In every town, there’s a church embodying the light of a new politic made possible in Jesus. It’s happening of course already. We see it in Minnesota and other places. This is the promise of a Hauerwas’ political theology recovered among us for such a time as this.

I hope these posts have gotten us thinking towards this end. Perhaps you have other suggestions, ways the church as politic changes the way we engage and lead each other for these chaotic times? If so leave a comment. Thanks for reading.

I know that David Congdon has responded to my posts (and critique of his work). I hope to write a short post (not exhaustive however because I’ve got to move on to pressing work) in response. If you’re one of the ones interested in that debate, go ahead and subscribe, so as to know when that post drops (I’m somewhat irregular in my writing – generally doing 2 posts a month). Thanks for reading. Thanks for the many comments sent to me personally. Let us pray for the renewal and embodied presence of the churches nationwide for such a time as this.

Via three posts here on ‘Fitch’s Provocations’, I’ve been writing on recovering Stanley Hauerwas for the present political crisis in America.

America, and the rest of the world, is facing the end of the post WW2 international order. Donald Trump, the absurdist disruptor, is wreaking havoc on NATO and International trade. He is the reveal of the accumulating massive failure of the post WW2 democratic liberal consensus in the United States.

Trump’s immorality, corruption, blatant disregard for law and order, abject incompetence, narcissistic petulance, makes him a cartoon-like figure too crass and outrageous to be taken seriously, and yet his absurdity IS the reveal of just how much the current democratic order is unraveling. And so he parades on. Until he doesn’t. A coming collapse is inevitable, but Lord knows what comes after him.

In the midst of all this, Christians are tempted to take hold of the steering wheel of history and guide their country towards one of the two main options: a better liberal democracy, or a better authoritarian moralist nationalism. Political theologians, pastors, Christian activists, scurry everywhere to either argue against Trump’s Christo-fascism and restore democracy, or to argue for a nationalist core of values that shall hold the country together via an authoritarian leader.

The option that the church itself is a politic engaging the world goes missing in the fray. It is not considered seriously that Jesus presents another political option for those who seek to follow him, and that option is the church, a people who come under the reign of Jesus and participate in a social reality together that is governed by His way, His power, not governed by empire, and thereby able to engage the world differently. It is through Christ’s reign, His power of the presence of the Spirit, that a way of life is birthed among us, a social form of resistance to evil, a social form of revolution that can truly change the world.

This option does not exclude the Christian hope/work for a better government. For we will “seek the peace of the city” (Jer 29:7). But whatever emerges via the state, it will be provisional until the completion of the age. The church in the meantime must live into its calling.

All of this is why I argue for the recovery of Hauerwas at this cultural moment, a theology of church as a politic, as we seek to navigate the current politics of America as Christians.

But Doesn’t Hauerwas Lead to Christian Fundamentalism or worse Nationalism?

But doesn’t Hauerwas lead to Christian fundamentalism, or worse, nationalism? I have no empirical data, so it could just be me, but it seems Hauerwas gets dismissed, or ignored, in the halls of academia and pastors conferences because of prejudices like this one? At a time when the Hauerwas third option is needed more than ever, the critiques of Hauerwas, that undergird this prejudice, go unexamined. This is why I’m examining these critiques that have seeped into the consciousness of the current theological intelligentsia. Each in their own way reveal why we need Hauerwas today.

David Congdon’s Journal of Religion piece from last October (find it here) has played the antagonist for me in these posts. Congdon argues that postliberal theology (and Hauerwas) leads to postliberal politics (and Christian Nationalism). In his expansive article, I’ve isolated three themes Congdon claims are resident in both postliberal theology/Hauerwas and postliberal politics. These three themes, Congdon claims, open the doors to authoritarian nationalism. These themes, which are also critiques of Hauerwas, transcend Congdon’s argument because they seem to have become a sort of accepted canon in understanding Hauerwas in the some regions of current political theology discourse (even though they have been engaged for decades by Hauerwas himself). I think in revealing the contradiction in each one, Hauerwas’s theology (and the third option) is proven as the way out of the U.S. political crisis in the churches.

In the previous posts I dealt with the theme of 1.) the critique of the autonomous enlightenment self, and 2.) the sectarian nature of postliberal theology. These themes are common to both postliberal theology/Hauerwas and postliberal politics. And yet Hauerwas takes these themes in a completely different direction that the authoritarian direction of postliberal politics. Congdon seems to either miss this or dismiss this. I see what Hauerwas does with each one as core to the notion of the church as a politic. And now I turn briefly to the remaining of the three themes.

From Enlightenment Universalism To Particular Communities

With Hauerwas, and the postliberal theologies in general, there is a rejection of Enlightenment universal forms of reasoning for the working out of theology. The Enlightenment in general rejected traditioned accounts of truth, truth worked out within a history of the church. These are prejudiced histories according to the enlightened. Instead we must extract beliefs out of tradition to be examined and affirmed via reason. Science, transcendental forms of reasoning, release us from cultural captivity. In this new age of reason we can affirm truths universally across cultures.

In contrast, post-liberal forms of theology see theological truth as necessarily worked out within communities of tradition, or as MacIntyre famously articulated it, within “an historically extended, socially embodied argument.”(After Virtue, 2^nd ed. 1984, 222). Indeed, those enlightenment forms of reasoning that are viewed as universal, have their own traditioned form of reasoning, MacIntyre would say. To not acknowledge this is to open a new gateway towards colonialism, the imposing of truth and belief on cultures outside of my own, because well its truth is true outside of traditioned history, it must therefore be true for you, just like it is for me. Or, in the words of Cornel West (in his ‘A Genealogy of Racism’, 1982), the modern Enlightenment “discourse produced forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity …all of which constituted the practices of white supremacy” (p.49). They were the source of hideous forms of colonialist enslavement.

Postliberal theology’s method moves from the particular to the universal, within the bounds of those limitations, and is comfortable with those limitations. Enlightenment forms of reasoning do the opposite, seek the universal truth first, from which we naturally apply to the particular.

For Congdon however, postliberal theology’s way leads to insularity and fundamentalism which opens the doors to Christian nationalism. Congdon mentions Hans Frei (of the Yale postliberal theologians) in this regard and his rebuke of evangelicals. Congdon quotes Frei as accusing evangelicals that they share with liberals, “the pursuit of a universal, “trans-cultural” understanding of Christianity, something he now considered impossible.”(418) In the next paragraph Congdon fills this notion out by saying “postliberalism… rejects the attempt to account for humanity in general or to speak in global terms. Instead, it is a consistently localist project that views each particular community as essentially incommensurable with every other. Theologically, this leads to a sectarian ecclesiocentrism. Politically, as I will suggest, it leads to nationalism” (419).

According to Congdon, Hauerwas/postliberal theology argue the best way to do theology “is to gather in small-scale, tradition-homogenous communities where proper Christian virtue … can be cultivated.” This worries Congdon because most people “do not have the capacity” for such community. This leads to nationalism because, as Congdon says, “is it any wonder, then, that Christians catechized on a diet of Hauerwas and Milbank would eventually seek to take over the reins of political power in the United States and elsewhwere?” (435) These communities, evidently, cannot help but train people to see people outside their communities as “utter alien, incapable of understanding or engaging with the truth revealed to the church.” He asks, is it any wonder that a generation of Christians conditioned in this way of thinking want to take over government, deciding that “such people should not be allowed to govern society” (436)

Why I Beg to Differ

Hauerwas’ method is to start with the particular as the way to a universal, because this is the way God works. The word – the logos- the universal truth - became flesh and dwelt among us, and in this, we have seen - witnessed - His glory. (John 1:14) God enters a culture in the Son, on the culture’s terms, learns the language, gets a job (carpenter) and thereby God reveals Himself. For Hauerwas, there’s no way of getting around this for the Christian.

But this does not deny the universal. It’s just that the recognition of the universal comes in the form of the particular. For Hauerwas “The gospel is indeed universal, but it is particularly carried.” (Approaching the End p.55) “ But as Hauerwas has been prone to say, “If God had wanted to reach the world through abstract universal truths, he would have raised up philosophers, not a church of witnesses.” (a Hauerwas quote I can’t find a citation for) God comes into each culture, one culture at a time, through the local church inhabiting of that culture, the gospel is then translated (not unilaterally) and extended by the power, dialogue of presence via the living Christ manifest in a people.

This is the localism Congdon frets over.

But does this kind of reasoning lead to where Congdon says it does? Does the starting point in the particular somehow make us prone to a Christian nationalism? As I see it an anti-colonialism is woven deep within the logic of “particular to the universal” that makes becoming a Christian nationalist impossible.

It is an emphasis of Hauerwas that because God comes in the particular he comes as one not in (worldly) power. It is tindeed the giving up of any such power (Phil 2). In the working out of his theological method, Hauerwas draws on several places: Wittgenstein, and the linguistic turn, MacIntyre, the recovery of narrative and virtue. Yoder, and hermeneutic of community. I could go on. But if anything, when Hauerwas puts this all together, the focus turns to how God works in a people of God as a minority community to become the place of God’s revealing in all His non-coercive power, in opposition to the power of empire. By definition then, for Hauerwas, Christians are the people, who are not in worldly power. Because this is how God has chosen to work. How does this make Hauerwas prone to Christian Nationalism?

A big part of Hauerwas’ oeuvre is to extend this logic of particular to universal in a way that defies Christendom, the union of the church with the state, i.e. Christian Nationalism. The big idea here is that we are, as Christians, a people who by our very calling are not in charge. And therefore, the extension of a tradition does not go the way of a colonialist imposition but the way of a continuation within the diaspora (as exiles) grounded in the nation of Israel (following Yoder). For this is the way God works, and the way of God’s mission. It’s anti-Christian nationalism. How could Congdon miss this?

Are There Weaknesses in Hauerwas et. al.? Of Course

Granted this way of doing theology defies the Enlightenment impulse, a comfort zone for the majority of Christendom protestants and evangelicals that they can’t seem to escape (and neither can Congdon?). But this logic of ‘particular to the universal,’ and not the reverse, is present in many academic places and disciplines (schools of mission, sociology, majority world theologies), and it hardly leads to authoritarian nationalism. In fact it leads to the reverse.

Take the “ethnographic turn” in theology born out in the work of Luke Bretherton, Mary McClinton Fulkerson, Christian Scharen, John Swinton, and many others. The grounding of theology in conversations, observations, practices of a particular culture, from which we learn, dialogue and explore what an inherited theological belief might look like and be revealed in a particular context. The existing tradition, extended faithfully in the process, gains traction and depth in the process. And everything about it seems to work against the pretension of authoritarian nationalism.

I think there are weaknesses in Hauerwas’ work of course. An important pushback of this ‘way of knowing’ comes from Willie Jennings in his ‘The Christian Imagination’(2011) where Jennings reveals the failure of MacIntyre’s traditioned way in the life and mission of Acosta as he brought Christianity to Peru in the 16^th century. (ch. 2). As Jennings says it, Acosta “stepped into the Inca and Andean world only in a qualified sense. Primarily Acosta brought his world with him” as he stepped and lived into Peru. And so we learn that there is the strong possibility that those who live within the formation of a history/culture can bring their culture with them and unknowingly enforce it upon a new people. Not only is this possible, we see its effects everywhere among the current evangelical alliance with Christian nationalism.

But MacIntyre of course recognizes this to a degree in his ‘Three Rival Versions’ 1994 book. A tradition of inquiry must be open to challenge, dialogue, mutuality alongside other traditions to grow and not die. But Hauerwas does different stuff with “traditioned inquiry.” MacIntyre remains a Roman Catholic while Hauerwas places this method and shapes it for the being of a minority people divested of any pretense to power. Instead whether it is in United States, or Peru of the 16^th century, we go humbly, inhabit a place, as ‘resident aliens” to live and bless our neighbors (Jeremiah 29). The posture is one of listening (ethnography) and dialogue and prayer, of bringing core practices to a place, and living, serving and engaging a culture in the fullness of God grace.

Granted, Christians can surely abuse the “intratextual way” of Lindbeck, the “traditioned embodied” form of life of MacIntyre, and “the resident alien community” of Hauerwas to justify violence, coercion and even Christian Nationalism. But for me, enlightenment reason is a far easier road to go if you want to get their faster.

A Theology for our Time? Hauerwas Plus Ethnography, Plus the Theologies of Liberation

My theology has been formed from the works of Hauerwas, Ethnography and Liberation Theology. Most of us are familiar with “the preferential option of the poor” as articulated by the various liberation theologies of the past several decades. This well known practice suggests that by going and being among the particularist communities of the oppressed, we shall learn and see God. Doing local church practice, critical pedagogy, listening and dialoguing, among the places which do not inhabit the places of privilege and power, is the way we shall see the Spirit at work.

To me joining Hauerwas/postliberal theological discourse with liberation theology and the practice of being present, enables us to see the colonialist impulses in Enlightenment ways of knowing. It all lays the ground work for a new Christian faithfulness and witness through the ways of humility, of witness, of presence as the postures for doing theology in the world we live in today. Via this way, communities of presence stand as an alternative to the power hungry, out of control Christian Nationalists seeking to impose their theologies and moral precepts on a culture through the power of the state. It is not the way to Christian Nationalism. It is the way of resistance to Christian Nationalism. It shapes a posture for leading the church into politics, it changes the way we lead the church into politics. It is a theology for our time.

I’ll have one more post summing up the challenge here, and a few suggestions for what I think this means for pastors, leaders of churches leading churches through the current political crisis and the future upheaval we are facing in USA. I’ll also try to fit in a few words of response to David Congdon’s response to this series. Thanks for reading, all comments are welcome, and I’ll try to respond, and be sure to subscribe to this substack (for free!) if you’re interested in being notified of the next post.

American Christians are living in the middle of a political upheaval, a tug of war between those defending a liberal democracy and those working for a Christian Nationalist government. It’s a tug of war carried out on the news channels, Turning Point USA rallies, evangelical mega churches, local political action groups, podcasts, etc. Amidst all this, the church gets dragged to the one extreme or the other, and Hauerwas gets cast aside. Some graduate schools and their students seem to think Hauerwas’ time has come and gone. I suggest differently. Hauerwas has never been more important for the Christian navigating today’s broken USA politics. This series is about recovering the work of Stanley Hauerwas for the politics we are living in America today.

The common critiques levied against Hauerwas over many years now seem to be accepted, yet equally unexamined among the educated elites of evangelicalism, post evangelicalism, and Protestantism in America. So in these series of posts I’m laying out the three most common critiques against Hauerwas using an Oct 25 article by David Congdon (see the prior posts HERE and HERE)). To me Congdon’s article (locate it HERE) is an example of some of the lazy consensus out there on Hauerwas.

The article charts the history of two movements: the postliberal theology and postliberal political thought movements. The former is a theological school of thought from Yale in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s of which Hauerwas is a part. The latter is a group of political thinkers and think tanks arising in the last decade critiquing a failed democratic liberalism and promoting a postliberal/illiberal vision for an authoritarian brand of political society. Congdon talks about three commonalities between the two movements (as discussed aby James K.A. Smith did HERE) and uses those themes to argue that those themes in postliberal theology leads to postliberal politics.

These three common themes, between postliberal theology and postliberal political theory, transcend Congdon’s article. They coincide with the three most common critiques towards Hauerwas these past decades. They have become part of the “Hauerwas leads to nationalism” trope in some places. Congdon sees each of these three issues as leading to the illiberal politics/Christian Nationalists. Contra Congdon, I’ll show how Hauerwas takes them in a completely different direction. The direction Hauerwas takes us is toward the church itself as a viable political social reality engaging the world. It is the option we sorely need for our time and yet is missing from our current theological imagination for Christian politics in America today.

So here goes with with theme no. 2.

Hauerwas Is a Sectarian and This (always) Leads to Authoritarianism?

The second of these themes (I dealt with the first one in the prior post), and probably the most well-known critique of Hauerwas, claims that Hauerwas is a sectarian. Or in the famous words of Jim Gustafson, Hauerwas’ doctoral supervisor at Yale, he is a “tribalistic sectarian fidiest.” (from “The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church and the University,” James Gustafson Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 40/1985 83-94). Hauerwas’s theology separates the Christian, and his/her church, from culture and into an inherently antagonistic relation to the world.

This accusation is easy to arrive at. For example, Hauerwas famously argues “The first task of the church is to be the church and thus help the world understand itself as the world.” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 1983, 100). In other words, the church must separate itself from the world in order to first know itself, before it can engage with the world as a witness to the gospel. As such, the church-world distinction, and the clarifying of that distinction, is unapologetically central to Hauerwas theology. It is what leads to the almost knee jerk accusation that Hauerwas is a sectarian.

But Hauerwas is not clarifying the church-world distinction for the purposes of withdrawing the church from the world, or for setting up an Us vs.Them antagonistic relation to the world (as Congdon suggests- I’ll get to this later). It is actually to do the opposite. It is for the express purpose of engaging the world.

For Hauerwas, if the church wishes to engage the world, it must first be the church in all its distinctiveness. It is from here that the church’s social reality can be birthed under the Lordship of Christ and given a visual embodied display of what God has done and is doing in Jesus Christ. This display makes witness possible.

The assumed protestant church/world relation is turned on its head. The church serves the world best not by adopting the world’s political strategies. The church is a political strategy. That strategy is to first be the change before arguing to others for the change. Justice is embodied (and made possible) in Jesus first, from which the world can see, taste and join in with God’s justice in the world. It is the contrast lived in community that makes such witness possible.

This all sounds excessively sectarian to the mainstream assumptions that inhabit both evangelicalism and Protestantism. And they can’t help scurrying to the sectarian charge

Meanwhile, Lindbeck, and the Yale family tree of postliberal theology, developed a theological epistemology that coincided with Hauerwas’ theology of church in culture. In his famous Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck describes how knowledge of God happens not through cognitive propositions, or expressions of experience but within a culture, or a community, which socially inhabits a way of life that makes possible the knowing of God, experiencing God and even desiring God. Knowing Jesus Christ, in Lindbeck’s terms, requires a language, a culture, practices, a grammar, a community.

It is impossible to summarize the depths of Hauerwas/Lindbeck writings in the decentering of the cognitive autonomous mind (for evangelicals) or the authentic depth experience (for Schleiermacher and protestant mainliners) as the basis for knowledge of God and doctrine. Their move to centering the community, lived embodied tradition, linguistic culture of the church as the center in which we come to know God, experience God and embody the truth of God in our lives is so counterintuitive to the Enlightenment mind, that again, they surely must be ‘tribalists.’ And it all sounds so ecclesiocentric. It puts us in the position of needing the church. And this kind of ecclesiocentrism is an anathema to most protestant mainliners and missional evangelicals. It’s all part of the sectarian fideistic tribalism we’re trying to avoid. And it leads to an Us vs Them relation to the world.

But is it? And does it?

Us Versus Them?

Congdon buys into the Hauerwas tribalism critique 100 per cent, and then draws a line from it to Christian authoritarian nationalism. He states that “Postliberal theology was to religious identity what postliberal politics is to political identity, in that both reject apologetic effort to find common ground with cultural “outsiders” and instead recommend protecting the walls that distinguish one’s own community from others. Theological postliberalism calls this “intratextual theology,” while political postliberalism calls this “Christian Nationalism.” (425) It is rather stunning the correlation Congdon makes, but is it well founded?

“Intratextual theology” refers to the Lindbeckian idea that rationality, and ways of putting things together (coherence) in the world, are developed within histories and languages within particular cultures. One should not therefore automatically expect to transfer one’s own rationality learned within a Euro context to an African context or an Islamic context, or another cultural context. You get the point? Intratextuality actually cultivates a sensitivity to other cultures that counteracts colonialist instincts. It actually trains you to first enter into a culture, listen and learn the rationality at work, learn its language, its grammar, its ways of thinking, before making the translation, before rushing to assume you know what they mean. As such, I see Lindbeck as anti-colonialist to the core and yet somehow Congdon associates postliberal intratextuality with the very colonialist Christian Nationalism.

Congdon traces postliberal theology’s so-called tribalism through the work of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), Hauerwas’s (with Willimon) Resident Aliens (1989), through John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1991) and again lands on Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine (1984) where he focuses on Lindbeck’s “cultural-linguistic argument for seeing different religious communities as incommensurable language games incapable of understanding each other.” Congdon is playing off Lindbeck’s very Wittgensteinian understanding of the way language and culture works.

For many of us in graduate school days (back in the 90’s), studying Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn in philosophy helped us understand profoundly how we must not assume we can impose a translation on a culture, without first living in it long enough to speak its language, understand its meanings and the way of life it makes possible. Indeed we must learn to first inhabit a language in order to experience the reality to which it refers. Congdon thinks this puts up walls between church and other cultures. I suggest the opposite. It makes us go listen and learn a culture before we engage it. It is a profound counter to the colonialist impulses of the imperialist ways.

Somehow, Congdon blames this postliberal theological insight for “A tendency to pit the church against modern society, to see the relation between church and world as an antagonistic one.” (429). He says “Postliberal theology taught Christians to see the cultural Other as utterly alien, incapable of understanding or engaging with the truth revealed to the church. After a generation of being conditioned to view others this way, is it at all surprising that some have decided such people should not be allowed to govern society?”(436)To which I say, it can, but it doesnt have to. And indeed via Hauerwas and Lindbeck it can be the gateway to a whole new way of dialogue.

To step back for one moment, before I make my final point, let me just say that Congdon is right that some scholars/writers/theologians, originally under the influence of Hauerwas, MacIntyre and postliberal theology, went the authoritarian route. I think of Rusty Reno, and the journal First Things, that Hauerwas was on the editorial board with. Rusty Reno learned from Hauerwas. Reno, and several like him, including many who still write for First Things, are now firmly in the conservative Nationalist branch of politics. Rod Dreher, and his now famous book The Benedict Option, relied heavily on the work and influence of MacIntyre. And he ended up going to Hungary. These cases Congdon draws on. And there are others as well.

But Hauerwas left First Things in a stink over the journal’s editorial response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks, its advocacy of American exceptionalism and militarism and what Hauerwas saw as their silencing of his voice and pacifism by the editorial board. Hauerwas saw the direction First Things was going and left because it was counter to everything he was saying. MacIntyre famously disavowed Dreher and his Benedict Option (see HERE) as a complete misread of his work. And so there are significant theological, epistemological and philosophical differences here between the postliberal theologians and the postliberal illiberal political thinkers. Congdon seems to gloss over these (he says a little in the footnotes).

A Case of Missing the Point

To call Hauerwas a tribalist therefore is a case in missing the point of his theology. It reveals a failure of theological imagination. The core of Hauerwas’ theology is to display the church not as sectarian institution at war with the surrounding culture but rather to reveal the church as a social strategy for engaging the world as a minority people with no worldly power. Versus trying to change the world through winning arguments, winning elections, having better think tanks, and lobbying organizations, Hauerwas says the church itself, living in the world, interacting in the world out of who it is in Jesus, is a social strategy. It is by living our lives together, as politic under Christ’s Lordship, being the social space for transformation and renewal in the Holy Spirit, we carry a way of life, a way of reconciliation, a way of love and wealth distribution into the world that frankly shocks the world that this justice could even be possible.

Lindbeck wrote The Nature of Doctrine explicitly to promote postures and the means for ecumenical dialogue between different Christian traditions. But this went to the deepening of “the inter-relationships of religions” (p.52ff) as well. It was not an Us vs Them. He opened new ways to understand and participate in dialogue that depended on respecting and understanding one’s dialogue partner first. Dialogue wasn’t merely as engagement of beliefs on neutral terms. It was a deep exploring of one another’s cultures for places of commonality, places of learning, places where we differ and understand why and what that might mean. I could on and on about how the postliberal theology moved us towards deeper dialogue and respect between cultures and religions, but this piece has become too long already. So I’ll just conclude with saying that like Rusty Reno, Rod Dreher, and somes others in the postliberal political group, Congdon just missed the point of postliberal theology and Hauerwas.

And So Here We Are

If you live in the U.S., you know our culture wars are spinning out of control. The inherent antagonism, vitriol, ideological coercion at work on the right and the left keeps getting worse and worse. We are stuck in Enlightenment politics.

Hauerwas poses another way. Let us limit the state for who it is, what its role is, and what it can do. Yes we need good government. We need to define good government. We need good discussions around what good government is. But it is the people of God gathered as the church that God shall use to lead history. And yet we’ve got no imagination for that. Certainly not in our graduate schools of theology.

And so we are stuck in the options of a modern Enlightenment death spiral. Neither side sees any other way for political formation other than the state in some form. The church must take up sides, and deify government to do what it cannot nor should do. It’s either TurningPointUSA or HRC (Human Rights Campaign), The Heritage Foundation or Democratic Socialists of America. Christians have no imagination for being ourselves the righteouess expression of the justice of God, from which we engage the world, and call into account the State before God. We refuse the call to be the people of God, a light to the world, a call to another way.

And it’s all a bit tragic. Because we’re missing the point of Hauerwas at a very bad time in the history of the USA.

There’s a lot of questions left untouched. A lot of things unsaid. I won’t get to a lot of it, but I have one more post to go on recovering Hauerwas for today’s politics. If you’re interested in reading it you can subscribe for free, and get notified when the next post hits.

Thanks for reading. And please comment. Push back. Fitch provokes and Fitch welcomes provocation back!

This series of posts is about recovering the work of Stanley Hauerwas for the politics we are living in America today. In the previous post, I discussed the current post-Hauerwas malaise amidst graduate studies in theology and political theory. I then warned that connecting Hauerwas with the current postliberal/illiberal political movements in the U.S.A. risks losing Hauerwas’ contribution for today’s political climate. In what follows, I use an article by David Congdon to illustrate how the link is often made between Hauerwas and Christian Nationalism. I aim to show how this link is not only wrong, but in the process misses Hauerwas’ contribution so crucial for today’s Christians navigating the current political landscape.

Congdon’s article, entitled ‘What Has New Haven to Do With Hungary? On Theological and Political PostLiberalism” (The Journal of Religion, vol 105, no. 4/ Oct 2025), draws a direct line of influence from the theological postliberal movement of Yale (New Haven) in the 60’s-80,’ of which Hauerwas was a part, to the current day postliberal political movement, which describes many Christian Nationalist Conservatives like J.D. Vance, Deneen, Rusty Reno, Ahmari, The Heritage Foundation, etc., and is symbolized in the article by the authoritarian government of Hungary. Congdon argues that New Haven somehow leads to Hungary.

Congdon outlines in great detail the history of the two movements: postliberal theology (which includes Hauerwas) and postliberal political thought and politics. I greatly appreciated it. In the process, he charts the things the two movements share in common. These commonalities, together with the fact that the Yale New Haven school preceded the ‘Hungary’ postliberal school, is for Congdon evidence that the one opens the door for the other.

I won’t engage the force of the entire article in this series of posts. Instead I’ll focus on three of the commonalities between postliberal theology and postliberal politics that emerge from the Congdon article (similar to what James K.A. Smith did HERE). I choose these three commonalities because they transcend the article. They make up what has become the common “Hauerwas leads to nationalism” trope. With each of these commonalities however, I’ll show how Hauerwas actually goes in a completely different direction than do the Christian Nationalists. And the direction Hauerwas goes, which is the church itself as a viable political social reality engaging the world, is the option we need for our time and yet is missing from our current theological imagination for Christian politics in America today.

So here goes with common theme no. 1.

Interrogating the Modern Autonomous Self

Congdon mentions early on in his piece that one of “the key planks of postliberal theology” is its “assault on individualism.” (p. 417) This is the first of the three commonalities I’ll examine. Although Congdon weaves this theme in and among other themes, there can be no doubt that this is a cornerstone ‘plank’ of both postliberal theology ala Hauerwas/Lindbeck and current day postliberal political thought thinkers of postliberal politics. In fact, in reading Patrick Deneen on this theme, in his Why Liberalism Failed, one might easily confuse him with Hauerwas. Let’s examine this further.

Hauerwas argues that the “self’ is an achievement only possible within social communities, social commitments, cultural languages, and narratives of meaning. For Hauerwas, the cultural formation of democratic liberalism undermines all of this. He goes to great lengths in his early work to describe liberal democracy as a form of politics committed to the presupposition that a social order and a corresponding mode of government can be formed on self-interest and consent alone. The result, he says, is “a self-fulfilling prophecy, a social order that is designed to work on the presumption that people who are self-interested tend to produce that kind of people” (Community of Character p.80). Sounding a lot like Deneen, the problem of liberalism as a social philosophy is in its own success, shaping a consumerist, divided, empty populace.

Post Liberal political theory does much the same. One of the movement’s intellectual leaders Patrick Deneen, in his Why Liberalism Failed (Yale Press, 2016), argues, in Hauerwas fashion, that the autonomous individual is an illusion of liberalism, liberated from “particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities...” In the process “the autonomous self is … subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation.” “Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cultures, traditions, places, and relationships, liberalism has homogenized the world in its image …” (p.16-17). This so-called liberation of the individual requires all the tools of the state to enforce it via social organization. In the process, the liberal democratic state becomes a “liberal imperialism” from which we now need liberation from (ch. 2).

The Ubiquitous Critique of the Modern Self

More generally speaking, this critique of the modern autonomous self is hardly new or unique to Hauerwas or postliberal politics. It’s well-worn turf in the field of culture studies. For sure, Lindbeck of Yale was early on in applying Wittgenstein, and the way linguistic cultural formation works, to the formation of the self. And Hauerwas was a pioneer for the recovery of virtue ethics for modern Christian Ethics in the 70’s, thereby leading the way on understanding the shortcomings of the modern autonomous self. But there’s a wide swath of literature and research that stands behind and around this critique. It spans across academic disciplines from Europe to N America, from post WW2 to the present. It cannot be ignored.

I’m thinking here of how the Frankfurt school of post WW2 saw the way self-formation was inextricable from cultural forces, and explored what to do about it. See for example Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, the chapter on “culture industries,” “the bourgeois self” etc. I’m thinking here of Foucault, Judith Butler on “subjectivity,” bio-power, regimes of knowledge, and formation of self within power relations. I’m thinking of Louis Althusser on interpellation and ideological forces of the state. See his famous 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In a completely different stream, Charles Taylor examined the self via his “Sources of the Self” (1989) and The Secular Age (2007). The streams of research are endless examining “the self” as formed within culture, language, power. Postliberal political thinkers therefore, arguing for the unsustainability of the detached autonomous individual, are doing nothing new. The fact that Yale postliberal theology was doing this earlier than the postliberal political thinkers hardly proves a line of causation.

Today, whether it is the “cogito,” the romanticist self, the autonomous self generated ex nihilo from one’s own internal being, free from culture and formation, the Enlightenment idea of the modern autonomous self is frankly naïve. And yet I would say this naïvete lingers unexamined among evangelicals, post-evangelicals, mainline protestants and what I’ll call the Disney generations. It is assumed in the way we talk about sexuality, gender, racism, economics and yes politics. This naivete among evangelicals is probably why James K A Smith felt it necessary to start his cultural liturgy series by taking aim at the “discrete autonomous self” myth, calling it out as “Bobble-head Christianity,” a Christianity that assumes discipleship happens through the cognitive mind-self learning info from the head up and then making decisions, telling the body what to do. (Desiring the Kingdom 2009, 42-43).

Congdon sees the critique of the modern self at work in the development of narrative and virtue ethics with MacIntyre, the Lindbeckian cultural linguistic themes of culture formation, as well as the postliberal political movements. Hauerwas is firmly in the middle of all this. There is no doubt that the political New Right of postliberalism (or illiberalism), which emerged to prominence with Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed (2018), and found a theological dialogue partner in the journal First Things, had the critique of the modern autonomous individual, and its liberation, as its foundation piece claiming a society cannot be held together apart from a cultural core of values which can shape selves to live for purposes beyond themselves. In this, both Hauerwas and the post-Liberal politics can agree.

Congdon however, seems to go a step further, when he describes how the “rejecting of individual autonomy” led the New Right to support “mechanisms of authoritarian state power” to establish cultural values and roles to form the right kind of society (p.423). It is a bit tricky to assert that Deneen and others in the postliberal political movement argue directly for a Christianity aligned with state control of society. Nonetheless, I agree, this seems to be the direction they go. Catholic integralism as well as protestant Christian Nationalists like Stephen Wolfe draw heavily on political theorists like Patrick Deneen to undergird their proposals for such an alignment of the State and Christianity to order a society with Christian values and institutions. Deneen himself argues for a Christian coalition of elites that can unite a vision of the “common good,” an “aristopopulism,’ that can harness the forces of the government to defend the cultural traditions of what he sees as the common people, ie. the Christian majority. Today there is little doubt that Christian Nationalists like J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Tucker Carlson, The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025) have drawn their intellectual inheritance from Deneen and other likeminded postliberal political thinkers.

And so Congdon I think is right in this regard. There is a line that runs from postliberal political thought to Christian Nationalism, from the critique of the modern self to authoritarian state Christianity. The question is whether the same is true of postliberal theology? Is there a line from it, and Hauerwas, to Christian authoritarianism/nationalism? Is there an avenue that runs from Hauerwas to a Christian Nationalism?

Is Pacifist Hauerwas An Authoritarian?

There are two parts to address in this question. There is the “individualism” part and the culture part. In other words, can a political theory both honor the individual, his or her freedom/self determination to be a self in formation, while at the same time providing the space for culture, a culture sufficient enough to make self-formation possible, which by definition imposes on the self?

In relation to these two parts, democratic liberalism emphasizes the freedom of the individual from all enforcement of any culture upon the individual. The agency of the individual is paramount and must be protected at all costs against the enforced encroachment of tradition, religion, and culture upon it. Individual rights must be in place. Individuals must make up their own minds as to what culture they choose to partake. This is the “modern” Enlightenment impulse. But in the process liberalism enforces a culture which strips the self of any culture that can provide the resources for making such choices, for becoming a self. This in essence is the postliberal argument.

Postliberal politics, on the other hand, emphasizes the need for a culture, and a set of cultural practices, sufficient to generate the values necessary to be a self in the world. This cultural center of values becomes paramount, and absolutely necessary to hold a society together. It is in essence what allows for the freedom of individuals to opt out and live on its fringes. But without this center there is no society, and no whole selves, and therefore all we have is chaos. This center therefore must be held together with the coercive powers of then state. This leads to a set of cultural elites coalescing a value infused political state that governs the masses (Deneen’s “aristopopulism”), a pathway to a Christian Nationalism.

This describes the present state of the current war over politics in the U.S. (and many other developed democracies in the West). This debate simmers below the surface of much of the current divide between the liberal democrats and the populist right in the U.S.

The conundrum is, can any political system do both? 1.) Protect the freedom of individual agency, as well as 2.) provide culture formation?

As already mentioned, this question pulsates through the entire gamut of culture studies referenced above. But in the midst, there is Hauerwas offering an approach which theologically does both 1.) and 2.).

In regard to the individual’s agency, Hauerwas’ argues that selves are formed, their agency grows, within a narrative, provided within a culture. Sounds illiberal? Sure. But for Hauerwas, a person is an agent because they can claim their actions, their history and experiences as part of a story they can call their own. It is in this interactive process, self and story, that one is truly free and can inhabit decisions of meaning and purpose. (See for example chapter 3 of Peaceable Kingdom). Individual agency is not possible apart from one’s “ability to inhabit our character”. As opposed to ensuring freedom by stripping the individual of the cultures, narratives, traditions (ala Democratic Liberalism), Hauerwas sees freedom as only possible within the process of finding oneself within those things, finding oneself in a story.

At this point, the democratic liberals are raising a red flag. We’re headed for autocracy and imposed culture, enforcing the one true narrative and culture on people, in order that they might find themselves? This is a recipe for Christian Nationalism all over again!

But Hauerwas is a Neo-Anabaptist to the core on the issues of power and the state. His theology of power is driven by the realization that God has revealed who God is and how God works in the crucified Christ. And so we learn to know God’s power in vulnerability, gentleness, serving, submitting mutually to the power of God at work in the non-violent reign of Jesus. God’s power can never be coercive. By definition God’s power is always an expression of God’s love, can never usurp a person’s agency.

This way of power and life defines Jesus and the life we live as church in this Kingdom of Jesus. This God never imposes Himself or His story on anyone. Instead this God comes to be with and among us. And it is in this social space of living Christ’s relational transforming forgiving reconciling power that selves can be found in Him, never coercively, but in the story of what God is doing to save the world. And so the church is this utterly unique political possibility, made possible under the death, resurrection and reign of Jesus Christ, built on God’s power of love, mutuality, relation and the Holy Spirit, where both a culture can be lived without coercion, and selves can be found in freedom.

Hauerwas’ solution to the failure of democracy therefore, is not some Christian alignment with the state. It is rather the church and it is profoundly the church as a politic. Any alignment of the church of Jesus Christ with the coercive powers of the state, is an anathema to Hauerwas’ theology. The answer to the failure of liberal democracy is not a God ordained state. It is an alternative political reality made possible in the life, death, and resurrection of the living Christ, i.e. the church.

By definition, the state and its powers is now relativized. Government has a limited role to play within God’s history of redeeming the world. But it is a side manager, an ordinance made necessary by a sinful world. It is in essence always temporal, withering away. The church is the center of God’s history, not the government.

This is the third option of Hauerwas, for which there is little political imagination for today.

Where is this Church?

But of course, such “big-talk” of the church will be met with skepticism. The church in America is largely viewed as a failure, a place of moral decay, broken leadership, abuse of power. It looks more like the world’s politics than the politics of Jesus. So who, in their right mind, is going to look to this church for a way out of the broken decaying politics of our time? Given this set of circumstances, how can anyone take Hauerwas’ proposal seriously?

It all feeds into what I have been calling “the missing church” in the politics of evangelical and protestant churches. The church’s role, for these churches, is always to be played out in the field of the world’s politics. Whether evangelical or protestant mainline, it’s the same thing: the church provides volunteers for the world’s politics, to influence those politics towards Christian principles. Inevitably, the church gets absorbed into the world’s politics. Its democratic liberalism versus national conservatism all over again.

The church itself as politic, where Jesus is Lord, and therefore runs on a different kind of power than the world, goes missing. “Impractical” they say. “Never happen.” It all speaks to the failure of imagination for a church that can actually be the church of Jesus Christ in these most grievous of times for the politics of United States.

But as I said in the previous post, maybe the reason why Hauerwas’ church doesn’t exist is because of the very thing we do to it, i.e. marginalize it making it the mere servant of the world’s politics. Maybe we should listen to Hauerwas all over again, as we meet the challenge of our broken country and its ugly politics? Maybe it’s not time to write off Hauerwas? Maybe it’s time to double down on Hauerwas? Double down on a vision for a church that can be a different culture, devoid of worldly coercion, sufficient to invite the world into a social and personal transformation made possible only in Christ. As I’ve heard Hauerwas say, “let us not preach down to our own limitations.” Just because it is not yet visible, does not mean it is not possible. And the broken politics of our times is crying out for something different.

I continue to explore the recovery of Hauerwas for our 21^st century politics in the next post, examining the accusation that Hauerwas leads to a tribalism, an Us vs Them, Christ against Culture politics. If you’re interested, be sure to subscribe to this substack to get notified when the next post hits. Most likely in two weeks. Comments are open, and as always, I welcome comments that further the conversation.

The Current Post-Hauerwas Vibe

Evidently theologian Stanley Hauerwas has gone out of style? I have no statistics, I just notice that there’s a post-Hauerwas vibe (he’s been retired over 10 years now at Duke) among recent graduate students of theology (and political theory). The once Time Magazine named “America’s Best Theologian” is still revered, but in the face of the last decades crisis in American politics over the future of liberal democracy, his name appears absent in many journal articles, podcasts, or social media commentary on the future of Christianity and American politics.

From my read on things, the new crop of graduate theology students have largely accepted the most common critiques of Hauerwas that have often accompanied him since his earliest of days at Notre Dame. He’s a tribalist, they say. His theology can be used too easily to reinforce fundamentalist’s authoritarianism and its animus to be against the “world.” His epistemology can be used to perpetuate a Eurocentric dominant church all over again. And Hauerwas’ ecclesiocentrism isn’t workable. The church he talks about does not exist, therefore his theology does not either?

Even with all that, for many it’s Hauerwas’ critique of liberal democracy from the eighties and nineties that clashes most with the current political climate. With the ongoing threat of Trumpian authoritarianism, the rise of Christian Nationalism, and all of the abuse of power within the current U.S. white house, we don’t need screeds against democracy, we need some help to fortify and improve a flailing democracy.

But perhaps, just perhaps, we’re missing something? Maybe now is not the time to gloss over Hauerwas, but rather it’s a time to recover him for the present cultural moment. Allow me to make my case.

Hauerwas’ Critique of Liberal Democracy

Hauerwas’s critique of liberal democracy is quite complex, tied closely to his critique of capitalism, using many of the same methodological moves within both critiques. Nonetheless, at the risk of oversimplifying, Hauerwas seeks to expose how the democratic liberal politic is built around the autonomous enlightenment individual who is incapable of making moral decisions, living a fulfilled life of purpose because it cannot self-generate a moral story from which to make sense of its “self.” One of Hauerwas’ more famous quotes in this regard goes something like this: “Liberalism is the presumption that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story.”

For sure, liberal democracy’s focus is to keep the self “free” via the political structure of individual rights and procedural law. But there’s a difference between negative liberty (freedom from all interference) and positive liberty (freedom to do) in the words of Isaiah Berlin (from his Two Concepts of Liberty) The self of democratic liberalism cannot be free because it is without grounding, untethered, susceptible to every shaping force of capitalism. It is doomed to mindless consumerism, fear and anxiety, all of which perpetuates the powers and principalities upon which it is subject to. And the ideology that comes forth from this, that the United States is the world leader of “freedom,” ends up shaping us all for violence, and war. Democracy, as such, is incapable of bearing the meaning and worship we give to it in the United States.

With this basic critique, back in the 80’s and 90’s, Hauerwas was taking aim at mainline protestantism. Mainliners, in their work for justice and the Kingdom of God, saw their best hope in democracy, and working for a better world through it. Good unselfish Christians should follow the way of Jesus and work for justice in the world through democracy. Hauerwas worried that, in the process, democracy becomes the hope of the world, not Jesus. Democracy takes the place of the Kingdom. (One of Hauerwas’s earliest and most cutting presentations of this critique can be found in chapter 4 of his A Community of Character 1981).

Bear in mind, this critique was delivered in the shadows of the “social gospel,” when it was still a thing. Rauschenbusch himself had long been dead, but his argument that the Kingdom had come in democracy lingered on in mainline Protestantism. And then there was Ronald Reagan reigniting the vision of the United States as the center of the world for freedom, “a city on the hill”, a light to the rest of the world for truth and justice. In the coming years, as Hauerwas refined his critique, the world saw the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall fall, Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay gain fame, and democracy as an ideology achieve dominance around the world. Hauerwas was illuminating what befalls the churches that become its servants.

Today, however, we are living in different times. Democracy appears to be flailing around the world. Right wing populist movements are rising to prominence all across the Western democracies. Christian Nationalism, using post-Liberalism, Ill-Liberalism arguments seem to overlap with Hauerwas’s critique against liberal democracy. If one is lazy, one might assume that Hauerwasianism leads to Post-Liberal Nationalism.

The Main Options in the landscape of U.S. Politics

The current state of political debate in the U.S. is a rehash of the liberalism versus communitarianism debates that have gone on for decades. These appear to be the two main options for understanding political organization.

Political liberalism argues for a government that can protect individual freedoms and individual flourishing through procedural justice: legislative and otherwise. The state should never impose purposes or moral goods upon anyone: those choices are left to the modern autonomous individual. Famously, John Rawls (1970’s) argued that any policy or law should be made employing the test of the “Veil of Ignorance,” where policy makers go behind a veil of ignorance regarding all those who shall be impacted by the law, so that ethnicity, social status, religion, etc. is eliminated from consideration. Policy/law made in this way, from a neutral position, ensures that each policy/law shall be in the best interest of everyone.

Communitarians, on the other hand, see the goods, moral purposes, visions of the good life, born out in one’s ethnic culture, as central to who a person is, how a person makes moral decisions, how a person lives his or her life. To strip these considerations from individuals is to eliminate the very things that make living possible. These thinkers critique liberal democracy for its excess proceduralism devoid of such cultural goods leaving persons without what is necessary to bind our lives together and make life meaningful. As such, political liberalism cannot hold a people together and risks sidelining those cultural forces that can provide the goods to hold a people together.

Again this is an old debate. Political liberalism theorists include Rawls (Theory of Justice 1971), Ron Dworkin (Matter of Principle 1985), Bruce Ackerman (Social Justice in the Liberal State 1980). On the other side early on were theorists like Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice 1983, Thick and Thin 1994) and Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice 1982). Skip ahead several decades and the critique of liberal democracy now includes Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed 2019), and the critique of neo-liberalism (capitalism) now includes Wendy Brown (In the Ruins of NeoLiberalism 2019), and many more.

But strikingly, and maybe even alarmingly (for those of us who still see democracy as the best of the worst systems for governing a society), a wave of political thinkers, church movements and political think tanks have arisen that move beyond communitarianism, and call for new forms of post-liberal or il-liberal alignment of the state with a moral system ala Christianity. This is seen in the rise of post-liberal political theological theorists like John Milbank (Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future 2016), the aforementioned Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change:Toward a Post-Liberal Future 2023) and the re-emergence of Catholic integralists, all of whom argue for some version of an alignment of church and state to establish a moral core to society. Thinkers like conservative nationalist Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism 2018) and Sohrab Ahmari of Compact magazine, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, Rod Dreher, and Curtis Yarvin all fall into this camp. None other than J.D. Vance is influenced by many of these names, and the rise of Christian Nationalism among certain sectors of evangelicalism receives its intellectual nutrients from this intellectual stream.

Where Does Hauerwas Fit?

Some people like to see Hauerwas as somehow connected, or at least providing the cover, for these streams of the post-Liberal authoritarian Christian Nationalist movements. They seem to assume that Hauerwas’ critical posture towards liberal democracy must mean his political theology fortifies the illiberal option, i.e. Christian Nationalism. I go ‘Hmmm?’

As already detailed, Hauerwas criticized democratic liberalism in those decades leading up to Trump but democracy was the dominant form of political organization of the era. Churches, especially protestant mainline ones, were nationalists in their own right, in the way they supported democracy as the political way of life. Hauerwas’ criticism of them does not mean Stanley is siding with the alternative political option of a post-Liberal authoritarian state church alignment.

For Hauerwas, the alternative to democratic liberalism was never a Christian nationalism, it was always the church. The church itself is a political formation from which we are formed, offer our allegiance to Christ, and give shape to the social possibility made possible in the death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus the Christ as Lord. Here is where a political reality is formed to which we live out our allegiance to Jesus as Lord. And it is from here we engage the rest of the world, including the state.

This third option - the church as politic - escapes the imaginations of today’s political thinkers. For them the question is always how does the church participate in the politics of the world (a legit question), it is never how is the church itself a political reality from which we live, enter and show the way for the rest of the world. For all the “post-Hauerwas” political thinking above, it’s as if the third option never broaches their imagination. They cannot conceive of the church as a political reality making possible witness, disruption of the powers, in which the state, whatever form it is, is a temporary operation governing the functioning of a world in transition to the king of Kings.

Admittedly the church has been a massive failure on many levels. But maybe part of this is because of the very thing we do, marginalize the church via the world’s politics and make it the servant of the world’s politics?.

Please Don’t Confuse Hauerwas with Post-Liberal Political Theory

Confusing Hauerwas with either old-line communitarian political theory or current day postliberal political thought risks losing Hauerwas’ unique contribution in today’s political climate. It risks missing the very point we might need at this moment. In a few posts to follow on this substack, I’m going to engage a journal article by David Congdon in the The Journal of Religion entitled ‘What Has New Haven to Do With Hungary? On Theological and Political PostLiberalism” (vol 105, no. 4/ Oct 2025) because it appears Congdon might be doing exactly this thing. James K.A. Smith responds to Congdon HERE in his substack. Using these two pieces, I want to explore three unique contributions the work of Hauerwas makes for today’s political moment that we miss at our own peril.

In the meantime, I welcome feedback on this proposal, anything I went overboard on? anything I’ve missed? Please leave a comment.

And make sure to subscribe to this substack (it’s free) if you wish to be alerted when the next few posts drop. Thanks for reading. Thanks for your interest.

Slavoj Zizek is famous for his Starbuck’s example in explaining the logic of late capitalism. “You pay alot more for a cup of coffee” he says, “but 5 cents goes for food for Africa, one cent goes for orphans in Haiti, etc. etc.” Zizek is talking about the add-on charges for contributions to charities (often involuntary) that come with expensive consumer items like Starbucks lattes. It’s ubiquitous now. Would you like to round up your charge and contribute to such and such charity? The actual dollars and cents may be small, but it makes you feel like you’ve done something good today. The add-on charge for charity has become a regular part of today’s consumer economy.

Zizek says that we used to feel guilty for excess consuming an expensive coffee that comes from exploiting coffee bean harvesters in South America, so you had to do something somewhere else to make up for it, to assuage your guilt. Now Starbuck’s make it simpler for you. Compensatory justice is now included in the price of the coffee. How convenient. Yet nothing really changes says Zizek. It all works to build the exploitation into the system so as to make us believe we are not actually doing it. For Zizek, it’s the way ideology works. It is ideological cynicism at work in the culture that keeps the system going, keeps the exploitation going, and keeps the ones in power, who make the money off the system, firmly in place. It all works to maintain the status quo.

My concern is in what ways do justice programs at your local church participate in same logic?

Evangelical Mega Churches and Justice

‘Justice’ hit the mainstream of evangelicalism three or four decades ago. For years, fundamentalism, the predecessor to what became evangelicalism in N. America, had separated individual salvation from social justice. In reaction to the modernist-fundamentalist controversies of the 1920’s, evangelical fundamentalism avidly defended personal conversion and resisted with a fury any blurring of that salvation with social justice.

But this started to change post World War 2. Carl F Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947. It got the discussion going. In the 70’s significant challenges started to appear to the evangelical bifurcation between personal and social salvation. Sojourners was started by Jim Wallis and friends in 1971 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Evangelicals for Social Action was begun by Ron Sider and friends in 1978. The Emerging Church movement in the 2000’s criticized mega churches for being churches of convenience for affluent Christians in the wealthiest of suburbs. Where was the call to be present to the poor, the broken and hurting of our culture? They asked. This produced a rising call for social justice to be part of evangelical church witness.

This call for justice led Willowcreek Community Church to open a 10 million dollar Care Center on its mammoth Barrington IL campus in 2013. They built a mall like building where they provided a clothes exchange, car repair, food pantry services, computer training, and other care services for those struggling with suburban poverty. The entire church was challenged to sign up to volunteer and serve at least once a month. I believe at one time 17,000 people were signing up to serve. The goal, in the words of the pastor Bill Hybels, was “holistic ministry” to those in need around the church. (HERE’S the announcement of its opening). The Care Center was an impressive feat by any measure.

Now I applaud the good labours of Willowcreek Care Center in the serving of the poor and hurting. There is no question much help and aid was provided to hurting people. But Zizek’s Starbuck’s logic begs us to ask some questions of it. When a Christian signs up for 3 hours of volunteer work at the Care Center, all organized and prepared for by a staff, centralized in one place for convenience, can this turn into a token performance of justice for Christians to add easily to their portfolio, fit into their busy lives? For these affluent Christians, does this provide the means to “pay their dues,” assuage their conscience, enabling them to persist in an affluent consumer lifestyle in the name of Christ?

Meanwhile, the whole structure of the justice being done does little to disrupt the socio-economics of the poverty we aim to serve. 3 hours, once or twice a month, provides little time for Willow Christians to know the people they’re serving. I in essence end up providing a service for people, not with people. I am not going to the poor, the poor are coming to me. I am positioned as “the have” to give to “the have-not.” It socializes and ensconces the conditions of poverty. And there is a real danger in all this that I, as the privileged one, now feel better about myself after my volunteer service is done. All done in a way that was convenient for me. It’s like paying that extra 5 cents to buy an exploitive cup of coffee at Starbucks (or McDonald’s – I know what a lot of you are thinking!).

And so Zizek would ask if the Care Center is actually the means to sustain the socio-economics of affluent Christians in Barrington Il?

Traditional Church with a Justice Project Added On

In the years 2000 to 2015 the missional church movement took sail. I was part of that movement. Among this movement, I remember the calls for churches to be present in their neighborhoods, to embody the gospel, to work for the welfare of the city (Jer 29:7). I remember worrying about this. Are we just sprinkling a little social justice over the traditional church programs and calling it “missional church.” One of my more quoted lines was “Missional church is nothing but a Sunday morning service with a few justice projects added on.”

At the time, it seemed to me many traditional churches, in attempts to become missional, were merely adding a few justice projects to their programing. And now they could call their church ‘missional,’ which might attract a few more young people to the church. But nothing of the culture of the church had changed.

Nothing in the neighborhoods around the church gathering changed because the justice projects were parachute drops into the neighborhood for three hours and then leave. There was no presence. I was convinced then, and remain convinced today, that God can preserve people through aid done FOR people, but God works to transform people’s lives when we join WITH God alongside people. God’s redemptive work comes through relational presence with people..

Faithful Presence

I believe there’s something to what Zizek was saying about the Starbuck’s logic that churches should be paying attention to today. I think it’s important for the core work of mission that should be part of every church.

This is where my book Faithful Presence came from. I proposed in that book that the church is not a set of programs that meets in one centralized place. It is a way of life lived under and with the presence of the resurrected Christ in all three circles of life. Here, in a place, we live and practice our life in Christ together in all three circles of our lives, not just the one circle of the Sunday morning gathering. Justice becomes something we live, and discern together, with people, as we make space for Christ’s presence to work not only on Sunday morning, but in our homes, and in spaces of mission.

The church as presence in the neighborhood is disruptive, encouraging, and transformative because we make space for Christ’s presence to become manifest in every conflict, every meal, every ministry effort, every attempt to be present to injustice. I argued this kind of church takes less time to organize, and in terms of actual time demanded on parishioners, it’s actually less than the volunteerism-driven programmed church. But the resultant patient ferment set loose in our neighborhoods for justice would be miraculous. Just as those first table fellowships of the first two centuries disrupted Roman Empire (see the book HERE), the monastic communities of Ireland disrupted and brought life to Ireland and the dark ages of Europe (see the book HERE) and the SNCC table fellowships in the Jim Crow South disrupted the ideologies of racism, and led to the civil rights movement in the 60’s (see the book HERE), this is how God through Jesus Christ can bring justice into our neighborhoods, our country, and our world. Until Jesus returns.

You can find and read Faithful Presence HERE.

Let me know if this post resonates with your experiences? And by all means subscribe if you enjoy reading about Church and Culture here at Fitch’s Provocations.

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This is the third and last post examining “Charlie Kirk” as a cultural symbol, a social phenomenon, an archetype for what a large part of Christianity has become in America. Notice the quotation marks around “Charlie Kirk.” They indicate I’m not talking about Charlie Kirk the person. Instead, in these posts, I’m examining “Charlie Kirk” the cultural symbol and how it functions to reveal where we’re at as Christians in America.

It goes without saying, I grieve the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the personal tragedy of his death, the loss for his family and so many others. More than three weeks later, the ramifications of the murder linger on. Which proves just how much Charlie Kirk is more than a person. He’s a cultural symbol that reveals much about the choices leaders must face in leading churches into this moment.

In the first post, I discussed “Charlie Kirk” as an ideological object, around which people gather against enemies. In the second post, I examined “Charlie Kirk” as a symbol of Christianity for many Christians, and how it reveals the missing church (and church leadership) among twenty-something’s within the orbit of evangelical church. In this third (and last) post I want to examine how “Charlie Kirk” represents the link between young evangelical Christians and the cultural forces of Christian Nationalism. Again, each of these three posts presents a challenge to Christian leaders in America as to how we must engage the cultural forces we’re living in.

From Jesus to MAGA

Of all the things you can say about Charlie Kirk, and there are many, there are two that are indisputable. 1.) he had a “personal” faith in Jesus Christ ala evangelical Christianity, and 2.) he advocated unabashedly for a Christian Nationalism as led by Donald Trump in the white house. He was immensely successful at recruiting and convincing 20 somethings to become Christians that aligned with Trumpism nationalism. Some even attribute the 2024 Trump election victory to his political organizing/influence.

Because he was so public about these two beliefs, “Charlie Kirk”, the cultural phenomenon, helps us understand the connection between evangelical Christian commitment and MAGA Republicanisms. Much consternation has been directed at how an evangelical Christian can support an immoral, deeply corrupt, narcissistic, racist dog-whistling, sexually perverse man like Trump for president. This seems so contrary to the Christian faith. Many of us know wonderful pious Christian people, who stand with Trump. “Charlie Kirk” illumines how this works. Examine it with me for a moment.

Charlie Kirk would talk about his personal faith in Christ via terms familiar to evangelicals. He would talk about the forgiveness of sin, the atonement for sin on the cross, eternal life, even sanctification and growth as a disciple. All this was in a language box evangelicals are very familiar with. I do not question at all the sincerity of Charlie Kirk’s personal commitments in this regard.

Seamlessly, he would also challenge his audiences, especially young male audiences, to individual responsibility, becoming faithful husbands (and wives), having children, being contributors to society. When it came to justice, he singularly focused on individual liberties. He railed against DEI, Affirmative Action. He was for gun rights.

When it came to cultural issues regarding marriage, LGBTQ+, transgender persons, other religions, he read his moral commitments off the Bible, or the interpretation of the Bible he was most skilled in. For him, the authority of those moral conclusions came from the Bible and therefore have universal application because they carry Biblical authority, the authority of God. These convictions therefore should not only be defensible in the public square, they should be advanced by Christians into the public square for the good of all society.

And so the logic of “Charlie Kirk” is 1.) Personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, 2.) The Bible as deposit of moral precepts, as given by God and ordered according to creation, is truth, 3.) Therefore, Christians, in their allegiance to this God through Jesus Christ, should not only live by these moral precepts, but also work for a culture shaped by them.

I have not watched hundreds of hours of Charlie Kirk, and so I can be proven wrong, but from what I have seen, this logic is carried out again and again in his ‘Prove Me Wrong’ events, and other presentations and debates. As always, I am open to be proven wrong. Just put your sources in the comments.

The Straight Line that Runs from Personal Jesus Relationship to MAGA

It is the individualism of 1.) and the epistemology of 2.) that drives the line that runs from the evangelical personal relationship with God through Jesus to a MAGA commitment. It is more than just Kirk. This logic infuses many of the evangelicals who have become supporters of Trump. I’ve even seen this logic slip out in public by people like Ted Cruz and Mike Johnson.

The individualism of the evangelical relationship to Jesus focuses on one’s pardoned and restored relationship with Christ. It is my personal status of being justified in Christ. This is quite different from most protestant mainline churches, where my relationship to God is shaped by knowing Jesus as a teacher, a life to be emulated, a principled morality to be followed (this too BTW has its immense problems).

Extracted as this lived salvation (in 1.) is from the social problems of the world, this “personal relationship” is freed to vote for a president, who though morally flawed, will advocate for legislation and aligning the government with Christian values and moral precepts as perceived by my reading of the Bible. “We’re appointing a leader … not electing a Sunday school teacher” in the words of Lewandowski in 2016.

In my opinion then, there’s pretty much a straight line from this brand of personal Christian faith in Jesus to supporting a leader who will promote the cultural values the evangelical Christian believes are essential for a cultural flourishing of a nation.

But it’s also the epistemology that undergirds this straight line. The Bible is a book of truths that can be applied universally. It is as if there is no accounting for the faithful reading of Scripture for our time. There is no accounting for interpretation. How I read the Bible is universally true (almost automatically). So it is as if permission is granted to read a moral precept off the Scriptures and work for its implementation through whatever means available, including government, even if the leader of that government is morally corrupt and a person who lives and works in every way against Christ.

In this Instagram video (HERE) of Charlie Kirk arguing for a Christian nationalism, he reasons along these lines. Notice how he describes Jer 29:7 as saying “demand the welfare of the nation you are in.” Stunning. This is a text written to and explaining why God has sent his people to be exiles in a foreign nation. There is no “demand” in this text. There is no presumption of “demanding” anything. Instead the exiles of Israel are challenged to go seek the welfare of the city, and serve those they live alongside. They are exiles, to live as exiles, not as those controlling the power of a national government to instill their will on a people, even if it is God’s will. It is indeed the opposite of Christian nationalism. Jeremiah is challenging them to lives as exiles, a people not in worldly power, serving the people they live with unto the glory of God.

Kirk seems clueless on the other examples he gives of Daniel, Esther, etc. They also are living in exile, not seeking to take over government but instead to serve from below. Even his Deuteronomy reference seems clueless as to the fact that Israel is a theocratic nation (if Deut is written by Moses) before the monarchy. But even if written during the Josiah monarchy, this is nothing like a modern nation state, but a people birthed for one single purpose, the living together with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is a long stretch to extend Deuteronomic law to the modern nation state, demanding many more levels of conversation which Kirk simply passes over.

I call Kirk’s epistemology the “flat reading of Scripture” – i.e. the reading of a set of moral precepts within a specific interpretation, and then assuming they are universally applicable across all lines, all contexts, because they come from God’s word – enabling evangelicals to go in a straight line, from their personal relationship with Jesus to voting for and supporting a flawed authoritarian leader who will impose those precepts upon a people regardless of whether the leader lives a life exemplary of these precepts themselves, and regardless of whether the people want this or not. This logic – individual relationship with Jesus + positivist flat understanding of the Bible that universalizes a particular interpretation of it – enables voting for someone to impose these universal moral precepts. It is what many label “fundamentalism.” Charlie Kirk models this logic of fundamentalism. It is what drives the straight line from personal evangelical faith to MAGA Christianity.

Can We Engage the Flawed Logic of Charlie Kirk/Evangelicalism/MAGA?

I am not one for going for the jugular when engaging the theology of MAGA Christianity. It rarely gets anyone anywhere on either side. First let us affirm 1.) that our relationship with God must be personal, a commitment and experience born out of a daily presence with God through Jesus Christ. Once we agree with MAGA Christians on this, let us explore what it means to make this same Jesus Lord and King of our lives, as well as recognize this same Jesus as the one who rules as Lord and King over the world. Also, let us affirm 2.) the authority of Scripture for all of us who follow Christ. Once we agree with MAGA Christians on this, let us explore what we do with interpretation and how much the Bible, and its interpretation, require a church, with a history to interpret well. These are the discussions we must have with all MAGA Christians who are the products of that line that runs from evangelical Christian belief to MAGA.

But these two points also lead us to some wider and incredibly important lacuna (empty holes) in the Charlie Kirk theology, the MAGA Christian theology and, dare I say, evangelical theology as a whole. And they are rarely if ever dealt with.

First, in relation to a personal relationship with Jesus, there is simply no theology of power in the “Charlie Kirk” theology that is informed by the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ work on the cross, the new relationship I have with God through Jesus, excludes an engagement with the Jesus who walked and taught and lived, healed, and accomplished a victory over sin, death and evil, not through government or military power, but through the cross and resurrection, and through the very real inter-relational social and personal work of the Holy Spirit among us. It is this Jesus who rejected state power (in the wilderness temptations), who said we shall not lead “as the Gentiles do” – “over” people (Mark 10:42-45). And we are called to know and live into this power again and again by the apostle Paul (Eph 1:18-23, Phil 3:10, to name a few). I could go on and on (I written an entire BOOK on the subject of power and the Christian). But a Jesus centered theology of power is missing in Charlie Kirk (if you find any videos to the contrary please let me know via the comments to this post). And I might add, it is largely missing within evangelicalism as a whole in the United States. Which is one of the main reasons evangelicals will continue to be susceptible to falling under the spell of worldly power ala Trump, big mega churches etc. etc. If you ask me, this is the single most important starting point for engaging the MAGA Christian, what is your theology of power? and how does it align with Jesus our Lord?

Second, in relation to the epistemology of Scripture, and the straight line that goes from here to state power to enforce Scripture, it all reveals that there is no place for the church in the theology of “Charlie Kirk”. For Charlie Kirk evangelicals, the church is a gathering of individual Christians for mutual support, encouragement, teaching and worship. The interpretation of Scripture is perspicuous. It is delivered via the anointed preacher/teacher. Furthermore, the church is not is a social politic, a place of living, interpreting the Scriptures. The church is not a culture for shaping persons. It is not the means by which God shall use to engage and shape the surrounding culture. The church is a supplier of goods and services to support individual Christians to grow and evangelize other non-Christians. As such there’s no space for questioning and discerning Scriptural interpretation. And when Christians threatened by a culture that is misshaping us and our children, the only option we have to protect ourselves is the state. As opposed to the church itself becoming a vibrant culture shaping the lives of our children and our people, we must go to the state to enforce changes to the culture that is shaping us. Likewise, the only option we have to transforming our culture at large for goodness, and righteousness, is the state. As opposed to the church itself living and embodying a way of life that challenges our culture, engages it with love, helping people see God in Christ at work all around them, and cooperating with God at work in the world, we must go to the state to legislate such righteousness (as we see it) upon our culture. It is the only option Christians have.

This all brings to light again, the missing church in the Charlie Kirk theology of culture. But this is also true of evangelicalism at large in America. And so, if you ask me, the second starting point for engaging the MAGA Christian, what is your theology of church? How is the church God’s instrument to bring change in the world? (My book on the church as a force for change in the culture can be found HERE).

In Closing

In closing, “Charlie Kirk” the cultural symbol, cultural phenomenon, and cultural metaphor have much to teach us about the state of evangelicalism today in America. I hope enough pastors and leaders resist the knee-jerk reactions to hurl and engage with anger and instead lead patiently your church through the issues and questions that emanate from the “Charlie Kirk” murder, memorial services, and massive flow of media reactions to it all. I hope these three posts have pushed the conversation towards that end. If you found these posts/conversations pass them along to your friends. Let us work for the renewal of the church for our time.

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It’s Thursday Sept 24, and this past Sunday’s memorial service for Charlie Kirk has taken over the social media world. The compelling act of forgiveness by Erika Kirk toward the shooter was a remarkable and unforgettable act of Christian faith. Christians around the world are mesmerized by what happened there at State Farm stadium in Arizona. Many believe we’re on the verge of a new Christian revival in America.

But I push for understanding this moment culturally. There’s more going on here than meets the eye.

In the previous post I argued for seeing “Charlie Kirk” as an object of ideology. I said Charlie Kirk was a particular kind of social formation. It’s hard to miss the coalescing of millions of people around being for “Charlie Kirk” or against him. And so, I argued in the previous post, it’s no longer Charlie Kirk the person, but “Charlie Kirk” the ideology. And then I said this kind of gathering could not be labeled the church for many reasons. This was a politic of antagonism sucked into the national politics our time. I argued that Christians must be an alternative to this politic, not a politic formed around an antagonism, but a politic formed around and in the presence of the living Christ in our midst. Engage the world out of the space of being His presence in the world, not a space defined by what we together are against politicalyly. Let Christians refuse the way of antagonism and go be present amid the world unwinding the antagonisms.

But admittedly, in order to see this way as a viable alternative to the politics of antagonism in our culture today, we need a viable church. Without a church as Christ’s embodied presence in the world, the church becomes co-opted by the world’s political antagonisms of our time, rendering it the instrument of the state, keeping the current state powers in place, accomplishing little on the ground for Christ.

The challenge now, more than ever, is to cultivate churches that live as social bodies of His Kingdom, His Presence, His healing transforming power in the places where welive. (I have described what such a church might look like here and here). We need churches that are not Republican or Democrat politics, but outposts of the Kingdom of God politics, a very real political social reality, where Jesus reigns and His presence is alive and working for the healing of the world.

And yet, many ask, “Where is such a church?” They say, “I have no imagination for such a church. I’ve never seen one like this.” And so in a way, “Charlie Kirk” reveals the empty ecclesiologies of so much of what has become of evangelical church. “Charlie Kirk” is a symbol of the missing church. And this has left us unequipped for being an alive social body of His presence sorting through the broken politics in our neighborhoods.

Allow me to expand a little bit on this with a few points.

Charlie Kirk-The Influencer

Charlie Kirk was a so-called influencer. He acquired millions of followers on all major platforms, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, etc. (See the astounding stats here). He was influencing millions of college age people to attend his TurningPoint USA gatherings. His influence was astounding. Cardinal Dolan of NYC even called him the apostle Paul of our day. He was one of the top, if not the top Christian leader of GenZ’s in America when he died.

Putting aside all the acerbic, offensive and demeaning things he said toward immigrants, persons of color, women, democrats etc., etc., what does it say about the state of the church in USA, and its leadership, that Charlie Kirk the Influencer was the most significant Christian leader for Jesus among Gen Z persons in America? I think it’s a serious question.

An influencer, to gain influence on the social media platforms, must say outrageous things. This is the key tactic in all the algorithmic platforms to gain followers. Incite rage, gin up anger, get followers. Enragement to get engagement. It goes with the turf. Charlie said things that enraged, dehumanized, demeaned, insulted. And then (this too is part of the strategy) he went on to fill out the meaning later, in dialogue. Say the outrageous and then invite dialogue. Break down the inciteful comment and defend what he just said. This is why so often people defend his outrageous comments with the surrounding context and development of his arguments. And BTW, these engagements and dialogues would often lead to him speaking about his faith in Jesus.

In the previous post I argued that this kind of speech act is what keeps ideology going. Kirk was a leader of a flock built on antagonism, anger against an object – whether it be the transperson, the black person, the immigrant. the right against the left. Yes there would be much spoken about Jesus. Yes he participated in church. But he was gathering a mass following, NOT by inviting into the peace-giving, gentle, transforming power and presence of Jesus, but via the antagonisms he created. This is leadership of the world, not of Jesus, and the church that names him as Lord. It’s why I don’t trust what people say on twitter who have over 100,000 followers (and there are thousands of them)

Evangelicals have often been about the numbers. We would say “Never mind the means, did people hear the gospel? Receive Christ?” Going back to Billy Graham, to the seeker service mega church, using celebrities, or weightlifting competitions, or whatever to put on a spectacle from which we would have a presentation of the gospel, evangelicals have long used various crowd gathering means to attract people to a show through which they could hear the gospel. When the end was accomplished (people hearing the gospel), the means did not matter. But it has been proven over and over again, the means do matter. The stunning lack of discipleship in many of these endeavors cost a heavy price (I even have the stats on Billy Graham crusades). And so we must seriously ask, into what discipleship were the Charlie Kirk masses being invited into?

At this past week’s Charlie Kirk memorial, thousands upon thousands heard the gospel. Thousands of evangelicals have praised Erika Kirk for the presentation of the gospel. Many even received Christ. But under what banner, what discipleship. When pres.Trump follows with hate filled political speech, how does this shape everything else that the mesmerized listeners heard, especially when the same crowds that cheered Erika Kirk’s great act of forgiveness, cheered Trump’s “I don’t forgive, I hate” comments afterwards. The question we should be asking here is what kind of discipleship is happening here? A discipleship that leads one to putting faith in a Christian nationalism led by Trump? Or a discipleship that leads one to follow Christ, make Him Lord of our lives, and become a people of His presence in the world for His Kingdom, not another.

As such, I believe Charlie Kirk is a symbol, a cultural reveal, of the missing church in the lives of Gen Z-ers. With little to no leadership on the ground in the lives of GenZ-er’s, Charlie stepped into the vacuum. But an influencer cannot take the place of the church. And no leader of the church can lead any other way than by the presence, inter-relational love and truth presence of Jesus. For it was Jesus himself who told the disciples, the future leaders of the church, that they shall not lead “as the Gentiles do,” lording it over them”. Instead they shall lead as servants one to another (Mark 10:42-45).

Charlie Kirk-The Educator

Charlie was educated. Though he never did college beyond one semester at a local community college, he read and researched. But he was self-directed. He practiced debate skills vigorously. He could be stunningly quick in speech, rattling off Bible verses in defense of his point. But if you listen long enough, you know Kirk read, researched and interpreted for his own purposes stunningly ignorant of context, and definitely living within a single stream of theology, the evangelical individualist personalist streams of fundamentalism.

I once heard him use Jer 29:7 to defend a Christian nationalism, a government ordered by God: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” He quoted Jer 29:7 as “demanding” we seek the welfare of the city, for its welfare will be yours. He somehow missed that the social posture of the people was as exiles, marginalized people not in political or cultural power, that indeed it was God that sent them into this status, and it was in this status that God was going to use these people of exile.

And so it blows my mind that the guy influencing and leading more college kids in America than any other Christian is an independently taught leader with no theological accountability to, or dialogue partnered with, a community or stream of tradition. It is the way American evangelicalism works. We get our theological leadership from famous writers of books, social influencers, anyone who can draw a crowd and sound good. How many times do we have to see it happen among the mega star pastors and influencers? As they eventually leave in their wake abuse, theology off the rails, and thousands of Christians misled and hurt

And so, once again, Charlie Kirk is a symbol, a cultural reveal, of the missing church in the lives of Gen Z-ers. Not taking away from the good work of campus organizations, including Inter-Varsity and Cru etc. But we need more good work, supported by and trained by the churches.

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Charlie Kirk-The One Who Dares to Speak It Out Loud

One of the great appeals of Charlie Kirk to Gen Z’ers was that they were getting bold, uncensored answers to the sexuality, gender, racism, economics questions that are occupying the minds of Gen Z’ers everywhere. In the wake of the massive post-Christendom shifts of our culture, the massive shift of consensus around sex, gender, race, economics, politics, the churches have had little to offer.

Take sexuality. The churches have either opted for a “Not Affirming” LGBTQ position along with a load of bland and uninspiring legalism and consequentialist ethics. Or, the church has delivered an all-encompassing “Affirming LGBTQ” position, with little substance except “be your true self”. Amidst the struggles of Gen Z’ers, searching for identity and a location in amid the ultra confusing sexuality/gender scripts being thrown at them, they are sensing “there must be more than this.” Meanwhile, in the churches and universities and other social spaces of Gen Z’ers, they are not allowed the space to even question, engage, discuss, and seek. In university spaces, or activist liberal churches, any questioning of LGBTQ+ liberal orthodoxy is met with outrage and/or disdain. “You must be a homophobe, a cisgender bigot, or unenlightened.” Likewise, in most evangelical churches, if you question the sexuality orthodoxy, the regime as lived by the majority, you are warned, condemned or even ostracized.

And so there’s a massive vacuum out there. The Gen Z’er’s feel it and the church isn’t engaging it with any depth or discipleship. Charlie Kirk did. He spoke into it and disrupted the space of “you can’t say that or question that”.He blurted out stuff that many Gen Zer’s were thinking but weren’t allowed to say. Although they didn’t always agree, they were desperate for a place to work it out.

And so again, “Charlie Kirk” is an indictment against the missing church in USA that will not talk, discuss, discern, the cballenging and vexing questions of our day with our GenZ-ers. Charlie stepped into that. As already mentioned, I didn’t agree with a lot he said and the way he said it. But he stepped into the vacuum of the missing church and millions of GenZ’ers got sucked into it.

Summary

Charlie Kirk, his podcasts, his Turning Point USA, his social media platforms could never be the church. Rather, for all the reasons above, Kirk is a symbol of the missing church in America for Gen-Zers. He is not a leader in the Christian sense, he is an influencer. He is the sign that the church needs to start training leaders for the churches, not influencers. He is not a theological educator, he is a master performative debater with no accountability to a proven stream of orthodoxy. He did make space for discussions however, saying things out loud, but discipleship doesn’t happen in debates, it happens in the spaces of fellowship, teaching, tables and learning. This is what we call church (Acts 2:42-46). Charlie Kirk is a cultural symbol of the missing (evangelical) church in N America. He engaged issues out loud most churches want to stay neutral on. Again Charlie Kirk is a symbol of the missing church.

Charlie Kirk is a symbol of the missing (evangelical) church in America. I rest my case. But please push back in the comments. Or fill this out more. Christians are at a moment in America. We either see our hope in the renewal of the true church in America or nation state politics. I pray God save us from the latter.

In my next and last post on Charlie Kirk, I unravel how Kirk’s link between the gospel and Christian Nationalism is the ultimate reveal, that for Charlie, there is no church, just individual Christians and a nation state. In other words, it is Charlie’s Christian Nationalism that reveals ultimately the missing church in evangelicalism. Subscribe to the substack to get notified when. It hits.

Charlie Kirk is a person.

The murder of this man is utterly vile and a despicable evil. I grieve his death. I grieve the loss of a husband and a father. I grieve the violence and I condemn the violence. I hope it is clear that I am sincere in feeling how much this tragedy sucks.

Charlie Kirk is also a cultural symbol. His name, his media presence, his image, the talk show that goes by his name, his Turning Point USA mass gatherings on college campuses, all of this has become far more than the one man’s person, his life, ministry, beliefs and political activism. He is now a symbol, a representative of a cause to believe in, a cultural diagnostic, that helps us see and understand the way the culture is working.

It is worth reflecting then on his assassination for its impact on culture at large, the so-called Christian Nationalism he believed in, and the various groups that galvanized for and against him. So walk with me through a few basic ideas? Whether you are a Kirk supporter or not, can you bear with me (in this post and the next).

Pastors must lead in relation to the culture’s chaos. This is a cultural moment. And so we need an understanding of what is happening here with Charlie Kirk the cultural symbol that can elicits a response by Christians that meets this moment.

Charlie Kirk, The Signifier

In my 2011 book on ideology, and how it works, I defined “master-signifier” as “a conceptual object around which people give their allegiance thereby enabling a political group to form. This object of belief “represents something to believe in, a badge which identifies a person as part of this political cause” (p. 26). On the very next page (p.27) I define signifiers that are empty as those whose content can be filled in in various ways by groups of people. I labeled those as “empty-signifiers.” Signifiers function best ideologically when they are empty signifiers because persons can fill in the meaning to align with their own purposes. The empty signifier can then be used to rally multiple people groups against other groups filling in what the signifier means and castigating those who are against the signifier as the despised enemies.

Once the signifier is established among a people, it is used to stoke passion, anger and even “jouissance” (vengeful enjoyment) against the other side around this signifier as an antagonism is created. An antagonism gets entrenched as each side digs in all the more around this signifier. Each side gets entrenched against the other. All of this is described in ch. 2 of The End of Evangelicalism? where I use these political and culture theory concepts of Zizek, Lacan, Mouffe and LaClau and others to describe how ideology works in political formation.

Political formation like this ends up shaping, what I called, “an empty politic.” People gather around an antagonism enflamed in their vitriol but on the ground there’s nothing actually there to live into. We’re fighting for a cause that has no real on the ground substance. It ultimately is an empty signifier that keeps the ones in power sustaining the status quo.

I suggest that “the assassination of Charlie Kirk” reveals these ideological dynamics surrounding Charlie Kirk. “Charlie Kirk” has become an empty signifier. I use quotation marks to delineate that I AM NOT talking about Charlie Kirk the person. This is Charlie Kirk the image, the meme, the sublime object, who is either worshiped, exemplified or vilified.

This signifier “Charlie Kirk” has become empty because we can fill in whatever we want Charlie Kirk to mean for this group or that group. It has become evident that one side picks the awful, racist and dehumanizing comments out from Kirk’s videos to define what he represents. The other side picks the words of personal piety and commitment to Jesus Christ to define what he represents for the other side. He can even represent real dialogue and non-violence to the group that isolates that part in his messages, while to others he can represent the perpetuating of violence that took his life by finding those messages that promote violence, or the death penalty for Biden etc., etc.

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Charlie Kirk, The Antagonism

And, so Charlie Kirk has now become the center of the antagonistic storm that keeps the politic of right entrenched against the left, and the politic of the left entreached against the right. And this for sure goes nowhere, because once Charlie Kirk becomes the object in the middle of the antagonism, which holds the antagonism together, it’s not about Charlie Kirk’s personal tragedy, or the tragedy for his family anymore. It’s not even about his message(s) or his tactics. Instead Charlie Kirk gets abstracted out of his life to stir up hate on one side to the other. There’s no long anything at the core.

It seems as if anyone getting caught up in arguing for or against the right or left caricatures of Charlie Kirk will get pulled into the antagonism, become part of the antagonism, and indeed pour gasoline on the flames of the antagonism, all the while getting nothing on the ground accomplished. Indeed it is the antagonistic swirl that keeps the current regime in place. It avoids any work on the ground in real life, any attention to real issues, distracting from and thereby empowering the current regime in power. It is the way ideology works.

In my opinion, this tactic, stirring up an antagonism to keep its power regime in place, is what the current Trump regime does extremely well, again and again, to keep itself in power.

The Church that Breaks the Hold of the Antagonism

Over the years, I have advocated for Christians, especially Christian leaders, NOT entering into the antagonisms of our culture on the terms dictated by the antagonism. This goes for the ideologizing around sexuality, race, gender, economics. I argue it is only the presence of Christ that breaks the hold of the antagonism. The church, as a social body, centered and filled with the presence of Christ, becomes present to the pains, hurts, brokenness of a social group or person, and out of His presence unwinds the antagonism, disarms its hold, and makes space for healing and transformation.

In my book already referred to, I called this “the politic of fullness.” In contrast to “the empty politic,” “the politic of fullness” is not empty at its core, it is filled with the shekina presence of Jesus Christ. Though Christ is present at work in the whole world, here in this social body his presence is made manifest socially, a becomes a disruptive peaceful presence in the world.

This church, as a people, as persons, thereby do not enter the antagonism on the terms dictated by the antagonism. Instead, we go be present to those hurting in the actual spaces of the hurt and anger and the pain. Jesus illustrated this in John 8:11 when he refuses to enter the antagonism of the Pharisees regarding the woman caught in adultery. He illustrates it as he sits with the woman at the well. When he is confronted with the choice whether to pay taxes unto Ceasar. Jesus never enters the antagonism on the terms as dictated. Instead he becomes present, asking questions, unwinding the duplicity by listening and or asking questions or making observations.

This dynamic is noticeable within all the Charlie Kirk discourse since his assassination. I’ve noticed how the antagonism gets dislodged whenever a person actually tells a story about a personal encounter with Charlie Kirk. It changes the tenor of the antagonism.. Look up the stories Cornel West, Bill Maher, Robert Baron etc. have told this past week. That’s a taste of how presence breaks the hold of antagonism. Multiply this a thousand times for the church, because the church is the social body of His presence, “the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:22-23), and we see the power of the church in Christ to disrupt the ideological hold in the neighborhoods and bring peace, healing, transformation into a society.

I believe that even when Jesus speaks vigorously against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, or turns the tables at the Temple, he does so outside the antagonisms, making observations or performing disruptive acts from within the social circle, as an eruption of the real revealing the lack, not an act of antagonism against the sinners or the party being opposed by the group in power This requires much more explaining J.

Summary

And so the challenge is, how do we as leaders, Christians in our various spaces not avoid the Charlie Kirk swirl of our moment, but how do we enter each antagonism bring the presence, the unwinding disarmed presence of Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, into these spaces.

Next post, I want to explore two additional insights that this Charlie Kirk moment reveal about our political antagonisms and what has become of the church. Subscribe for free in order to be alerted of the next post.

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This is the third of four (or possibly more) posts on the practice of reconciliation as described by Jesus in Matt 18:15-20. In previous posts, I’ve been describing both the practice and its dangers with the backdrop in view that many have called for either the limiting of this practice or the canceling of it in churches. It is easy to see why: there have been myriad of leadership abuse scandals in churches nationwide and this practice has been used by abusers to assert their power over the (accusations that come from their) abused.

Nevertheless, even within this backdrop, I’ve been pushing for a reclaiming of this practice. A resetting of it. A teaching and guiding of it that reclaims its inherent purpose and process. And so I’ve been seeking an imagination for what Jesus is inviting us into as a core practice of our way of life together. I suggest that this practice can not only be reclaimed away from its abuse by the abuser, it can itself undercut the worldly power of the abuser, and in the process transform the church, heal the abused, and perhaps, with cooperation, transform the abuser. With proper protections in place, with a teaching of what Jesus invites us into, with a proclaiming of what Jesus has made possible in our conflicts and brokenness, I am suggesting we can reclaim this practice and its essence for a miraculous shaping of the Christian life, our communities and churches?

To this end, here’s one more insight into reclaiming this practice: the practice of reconciliation requires the continual exposure of worldly power and the submission to the power/presence of another kind, that of Jesus Christ in our midst.

All Practices (of the church) Are Corruptible

First, let’s acknowledge that all Christian practices, from the Eucharist to Divine Healing, are corruptible, open to abuse of power, when led by human beings. The question is: does this mean we discard/limit the practice or reform it?

Lauren Winner, in her 2018 book titled The Dangers of Christian Practice, engages with the theological trajectories of Hauerwas, MacIntyre, et. al. who focus strongly on “practices” as the shaping force of ecclesiology and Christian ethics (I confess that I have been one under the strong influences of this group). She makes the case that “characteristic damage” is inherent to the practices of the church. In other words, it is in the very nature of the practices of the church that they are prone to deformation, to become the instruments of corruption, for they are practices given in human form to be exercised by humans.

She gives several examples of this happening. For instance, fallenness can be seen in the way the Eucharist funded violence against Jews in the host desecration pogroms of the late Middle Ages. Likewise, fallenness can be seen in the way intercessory prayer journals were used by slave-owning women of the antebellum South to justify and sanctify their owning and enslaving of Black persons. These practices, and the many more core practices of our faith, have been and will continue to be prone to human corruption.

Winner’s solution however is not to cancel them or limit them. She argues for “depristinating” these practices, in her terms. Let us become aware of the corruptibility of these practices, recognizing these practices are not pristine in themselves, but in need of regular repentance, grace and reform. This kind of “depristination” is necessary and goes hand in hand with their regular practice. In the process, this kind of revealing and repentance becomes part of the way we practice. And the practices, though flawed, remain good gifts given to us by a gracious God for our transformation.

Winner’s work on the practices is important. Faced with the corruption of the practices, and the harm done in their name, she does not rush to cancel them or remove them from the life of the church. Instead she admits their vulnerability to corruption and urges us to persevere on with humility, ever exposing the corruption, seeking faithfulness to their intent.

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But What About the Power?

But what Winner misses in The Dangers of Christian Practice is an issue near and dear to my own work: the issue of power. For it seems that central to the practice of reconciliation, the eucharist, preaching gospel and all the practices, is the laying down of worldly power for submission to His power at work in these practices.

Eucharist demands we sit at a table, that we become mutual with one another, laying down the presumption of worldly power. We receive, never take. And the presider must go first in submission to the King (Mark 10:44). Or else all stops there. It is not inconsequential that Jesus washes the feet of the disciples at the inauguration of the Table.

Likewise we come to the practice of reconciliation “in his name” v.20, under His authority and presence (“there am I in the midst” 20) and in this His power is unleashed (what is bound on earth is bound in heaven … v. 18). We must give up worldly power and submit one to another under His reign.

In the same way, proclaiming gospel (preaching) demands giving up worldly power that His presence might become manifest (1 Cor 2). The very core of this practice, as with all of the practices, is the practice of giving up worldly power and submitting one to another to the presence of Christ among us. (I go into great length on the nature of this posture, the giving up of worldly power in submission to this space of Christ’s power in all the core practices of the Christian faith, in Faithful Presence pp.37-38).

What then seems important to recognize, is that reconciliation is a practice which at its core, in the very practicing of it, requires the giving up of worldly power. Far from perpetuating it, it requires the giving up of it. Indeed, it reveals the one who refuses to give up worldly power.

There’s a long history of the core practices of the Christian faith being abused by the ones in authority. Many medieval Catholic clerics famously abused the eucharist to pressure communicants to buy indulgences. Many faith healers have promised divine healing, as if it were their power, in order to increase their fame and raise bigger offerings. Many a preacher has become abusive in the pulpit to further his/her own agenda. In each case there was an abuse of power, a taking control of the practice for human gain or fame. Still, no one argues we should give up these practices (although some have changed them so much – denying the real presence - that it changed the practice itself and it’s ability to dethrone worldly power). We do not discard these practices. We reclaim them.

The issue of power then is central to reconciliation. When exercised in line with the purposes and instructions of Jesus, this practice calls for each party to lay down worldly power, one to another unto Christ, and thereby make space for God’s power to work among us in and through Jesus. Indeed, when done safely and humbly, this practice exposes worldly power. The one stuck controlling, holding onto control, with a refusal to listen and lay down power, is exposed.

And so the question becomes, will we allow this practice to be torpedoed by worldly power? Given in and cancel it or limit it. Or will we exercise this practice first and foremost as submission to God’s power at work among us in and through Jesus? Will we give up worldy power and submit to the one who promises to be “in the midst” – leaders go first. These are the questions brought to every conflictual encounter, and the demand to give up worldly power and submit to Jesus is always laid upon the leader first, and exposes him/her as one who will follow Christ or the world.

In the next post, I wish to explore the way the practice of “mutual submission” embodies a totally different kind of power and leadership around the practice of reconciliation. I also want to explore how the NT church of Paul and Acts expands the practice of reconciliation into all areas of our lives. As such, instead of limiting this practice (as some scholars propose), it should become our witness to the world in all the spaces of our lives.

Subscribe (for free!!) if you’re interested in following the rest of this discussion. I write about culture, power, “the self in culture”, language, economics and how the gospel, church engages all of threse things. Join me in these discussions.

Last post I described the Christian practice of reconciliation as given to us by Jesus Christ in Matt 18:15-20. This practice, I suggested, is fundamental to the way we live as Christians. Conflict is part of everyday life. It is part of being human. But as followers of Jesus, we enter each conflict (and they are sure to happen) as the space where Jesus works to forgive, heal, renew, and move us into the future. By walking through this practice, we take forgiveness out of the realm of the theoretical and move it into the spaces of our lives. Just in practicing this one discipline, we can become different people in the way of Jesus. It is truly spiritual formation of the utmost kind shaping us into the very being of Christ.

And yet this practice has been abused. There is no doubt about this. As a result, some scholars have argued for limiting the use of this practice in the church to family and friendship relationships. This practice should not apply to church leaders, or those abused by church leaders. The abused should not be asked to go to the abuser. The abuser can use it to inflict further abuse on the already abused. The danger is real. Some commentators therefore go further, and even suggest we should cancel the use of this practice altogether in the church. Let us have instead conflict resolution offices in the halls of the church. Let the professionals do this work professionally. (It is the evangelical way)

In the last post, I acknowledged the ways this practice has been ‘weaponized’ and abused by leaders in the church. But instead of limiting it or canceling it, I proposed the opposite. Instead of limiting this practice, or canceling it, let us reclaim it for what it is, and make it part of, not only church life, but our everyday lives. I said this practice, properly engaged, with safeguards in place, actually undercuts, dismantles the worldly power responsible for abuse. In deepening this practice, I contend, the abusive worldly power of leaders would be exposed, and undercut, and even stopped in its tracks.

But this requires great care. So allow me to explore the social dynamics of Matt 18:15-20 further.

Instead of Limiting to Inter-relational – Expand the Inter-relational.

As I already said, according to some scholars, the use of “brothers” in Matt 18:15 implies that this practice of Matt 18 is to be limited to the interpersonal relationships of family and friends (what I’m calling the “inter-relational”). It is therefore not for conflict involving leadership of the church, where there is an implied hierarchical relationship. It is only for family-like relationships.

But, I suggest, that there should be no hierarchal relationships in church, even for leaders. In the church, we lead “among”, never “over” (Mark 10:42-45).

I do think “brothers” implies a “with” inter-relationship instead of an “over” relationship. But I also believe, wherever the kingdom is manifest, there should be NO “over” relationships. I describe at length, in my recent book on power, that God’s power works with, among, inter-relationally, and that Jesus says explicitly to the disciples, there will be no ruling “over” as the Gentiles (or the world) do. In the new Kingdom coming, it shall “not be so among you” (Mark 10:43). Matt 18:15-20, I suggest, is in effect the unraveling of “power over” relationships.

The practice of reconciliation, as Jesus describes, is an explicit description of two or more people entering into “God’s power” (“there am I in the midst” vs20) not “worldly power.”. It entails the dismantling of worldly power “over” and the making of a space of “inter-relationality governed by the Holy Spirit. The practice itself requires each person to give up “power over” and instead come into the space of Jesus’ presence, and mutually submit to God’s power at work among them. It requires two or three or more to gather “in my name” (v. 20) under the power and authority of Jesus Christ.

The Matt 18 text therefore, is much more than Jesus extending the principle of Deuteronomy 19 into the New Testament community. Jesus is transforming what had become a practice of covenant enforcement of judgement upon a guilty party into a space of His Kingdom power. Here the power unleashed, “when two or three agree”, results in “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”(Matt 18:18). The power of God’s rule (elsewhere Jesus uses similar words to describe the keys of the kingdom Matt 16:19) is unleashed in this space to heal, forgive, see truth, restore and move us into future. And this power of God is inter-relational power, power “with”, never power “over” (as maybe the Deut 19 could be read). All this I outlined in my book on power from last year (see it HERE)

And so, instead of canceling this practice from the halls of the church leadership where perhaps worldly power has brought abuse, we should bring it here to dismantle the apostate worldly power, or at least reveal it so that the church can remove themselves from it.

In (my book) Faithful Presence (Appendix 4) I cite Klyne Snodgrass’s take on the use of “brothers’ in the Matt 25 text where Jesus is describing the King separating the sheep from the goats. To those on the King’s right hand, the righteous, the king tells them they have inherited the Kingdom, for when I (the King) was hungry, you gave me food, when I was thirsty, you gave me a drink, when I was naked you clothed me, etc.. Confused by this, the righteous ask the Lord, when were we there? when did we do these things with you?” Jesus says (vs. 40) when you did it to “the least of these my brothers” you did it to me.”

The meaning of the use of “brothers” here in verse 40 is highly contested. There are those who restrict the meaning of “brothers’ to referring to family, close relationships, tight knit church community. This is the so-called restrictive interpretation. There are others who argue “the least of these my brothers” refers to all those who are in need, wherever they may be found (the nonrestrictive interpretation).

I took the lead from Klyne Snodgrass’s expert analysis of this passage in his much esteemed classic commentary Stories with Intent and argued for a third option. I said “that the kingdom/presence of Jesus becomes manifest in the dynamic between “the disciples” of Jesus (the you in “as you did it to …”) and “the least of these my brothers.” Jesus is, in essence, emphasizing the relationship of “withness” or “kinship” that takes places when Christians come alongside and are present “with” the poor, thereby not paternalizing the poor in a power “over” relationship.

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If I (and Snodgrass) are right, the practice of being “with” the poor breaks the hold of worldly power “over” and opens space for Jesus to Himself be present and work. It breaks the hold of paternalizing the poor and the way worldly power “over” works. And so, I suggest, just like this practice of being “with” the poor undercuts “worldly power over” so also can the practice of reconciliation. When Matt 18:15-20 is practiced NOT via the terms of worldly power, but making space for the power of the risen Christ to be there, and us with Him and each other, it in essence dethrones the worldly power at root in the abuse. The King of kings now rules in this space to break down the hierarchal power of abuse, reveals it, and unravels it, making space for healing. The pre-conditions are the initiation of all parties into a space of mutual submission to the power at work among us, Jesus Christ the King.

When therefore a person refuses this space, especially a person caught up in worldly power and abuse, it reveals his/her rejection of Christ. This space of listening, of the victim being protected with witnesses and friends of the victim, quickly reveals the worldly power at work to all. But it all requires preparation, an initiation, a submission one to another out of reverence for Christ’s power among us (Eph 5:21). It requires a read of Matthew 18 in preparation. It requires humility, grace, listening , a posture of listening to the Spirit, at work in a community of two, or three, or more. It cannot be entered into on the terms of worldly power. It requires a posture of prayer.

Of course a person abusing worldly power can refuse to enter in. There will be signs including manipulation, refusal to allow third, fourth and more observers. There will be signs of no (or faux) humility. At this point power over is revealed. In essence, the practice of Matt 18 then reveals that this is not the church of Jesus Christ. Jesus does not rule here. In essence we are then told by Jesus, ^“ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” In other words, this place is not a church, they are ruling as the “as the Gentiles do” (Mark 10:42) and disqualified from being a servant of Jesus Kingdom.

We Need This Practice More Than Ever

For this reason, I resist those who wish to limit or cancel this practice from the life of the church, especially regarding leadership. Instead I propose a reclaiming of it, a setting it up better, a renewed teaching of Matt 18:15-20, and expanding it, especially when applied to leaders. I suggest we need tools to recognize when a leader is indeed doubling down on worldly power, to protect or justify himself/herself thereby disqualifying him or her from leadership in the church. When a leader rejects outright the Matt 18:15-20, we need steps to include friends and various mutual forms of discernment and accountability, as to how and when he or she should step down. I personally have experienced the transformation when I have submitted to this practice when I have been leading, and being accused or disagreed with. I have not been perfect down through my many years. But when I have entered into mutuality and respect, the space of Jesus and the practice of reconciliation, God has changed me and moved the church or institution forward.

Please post questions or observations in the comments.

In the next post, I want to talk about expanding this practice of reconciliation beyond the church into our neighborhoods. I want to talk about the word “submit” and how it too can be abused but also reclaimed in a surprising way strengthening the one hurt, and breaking down the hold of worldly power. This then will help us understand a key part of the practice of reconciliation. And I want to talk about Lauren Winner’s BOOK on the Christian practices and how she sees them abused and corrupted. All this in the next post. Probably in two weeks. If you want to be alerted, make sure to subscribe. It’s free!!