We all, to our shame, are prone to embracing ideas and behaviors on the basis of what we’ve been through. Trouble is, we usually don’t know we’re doing it. Our experience neither proves nor disproves, makes wise or foolish whatever idea/behavior we’ve come to embrace. It can, however, in the absence of a carefully reasoned argument, suggest a reason why. The stern mistress who heads the Womyn’s Studies department at the local university didn’t start worshipping Osiris because she’d done the apologetic spadework and was compelled to believe.
I have, for the past year or so, tried to understand the rise of Christian fascism. I’ve seen more and more ninja groypers on the interwebs. These angry young men insist, usually anonymously, that my failure too long for a new Franco is gay, ghey and not at all based. I cannot believe these gents opened their Bibles, applied their Logos tools and came away thinking God wants fascism.
So where does this silliness come from? Bots designed to discredit actual Christians and conservatives? Trolls and engagement farmers laughing their way to the bank? Could it be the loons have always been there but are now equipped with anonymity? The truth is I don’t pretend to know. It baffles me.
My best guess, and such is all it is, a guess, is that it’s all reactionary. After living in a nutty world where meritocracy has been washed away in a tsunami of identity politics, after decades of being painted as the Great Satan on account of being white males, they just couldn’t stand it. They’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more.
It was not, however, a world governed by post-war consensus, or natural law theory that once gave us an ideology of freedom, and then found its center could not hold. No, the notions that economic transactions should be engaged in freely, that all men are equal in dignity and value, these are biblical notions. It is not believing these notions that has led us to the collapse of western civilization, but the failure to hold on to these notions that have brought us here.
As is usually the case, the problem with reactionaries isn’t that they react, but that they react against the wrong thing. They react in a wrong way. And more often than not, their reactions grow out of the very seed of what they are reacting against. Thus we have the Woke Right insisting they are the King of the Valley, the bottom rung of victim status, who will rise from the ashes like the Third Reich.
These young men insist that aging boomers like me need to learn what time it is. I concur. We all need to learn what time it is. The answer, however, is found in the mirror, not the headlines. Now is the time to submit ourselves to the Lordship of Christ. It’s always time to manifest His reign, to love justice, do mercy, walk humbly with our God. Our calling now is to love our neighbor as ourselves. He commands we live in peace and quietness with all men, as much as it depends on us.
Dear Peter Pan,
Are you having fun yet? It sure looked that way to me back when we first crossed paths. My mom took me to the movies, and there we met. I was like you, though not quite so daring and dashing. I was young, and pleased to be that way. My favorite thing to play was pirates. My little friends and I would treat our little barn as a great ship. We would don our eye patches and cutlasses. We would peer through our spyglasses, and we would arrrrrgue about who got to be the captain.
It was a delightful boyhood. One time the bigger kids in the area blessed us little by burying treasure for us, and providing us with a map. The treasure chest was a paper sack, the treasure itself a veritable trove of penny candy.
I don’t, I hope you see, begrudge children their childhood. I do not look at all upon my own youth as wasted. It is a delightful time chock full of blessings from the hand of God. It creates memories that we will carry with us into eternity. It even has its own set of virtues that are hard to hold on to as we age- wonder and trust, and peace. Our Lord enjoins us to hold onto these virtues as we age, that we would have faith as children.
I am writing, however, not to agree with, but to challenge you, to invite you into the deep end of the pool. The water is just fine. You are wise to rejoice in your youth, and a fool for wanting to never leave. I recognize both of these, because I’ve been there. When there is no Never Never Land on which one could land, when age comes inevitably, we make your mistake by flying to the island of Nostalgia. We pine for what we have lost. We take our minds to a magical land where we are young again, remembering only the good, the bad buried within the belly of the alligator time.
The trouble is, whether we are in the land of Nostalgia, or if we are in Never Never Land, in both cases we never land at home. We were made to be men. We were made to lead not other boys, but women. To put it bluntly, what you are missing is Wendy. And one step beyond that, you are missing boys that would be yours, that you would not merely lead, but raise. It is not enough that you should be a hero in battling Hook. It is far better that you should lead a woman, that you should defeat your foe, and that you should raise your children to defeat the children of your foes.
This comes to you if you would but accept the call to grow up- you will be allowed to live bigger than yourself. You will multiply your life far beyond what you will have by merely extending your childhood. Stay young as long as you like, but eventually, one way or another, you will face what comes to all men, and all boys- death. If you would live forever, you will have to live not as a boy, but as a man, and through the lives of others. Peter, let me encourage you to put aside all the effort you expend to be a boy, and invite you again to be a man, and so to live forever.
To embrace adulthood isn’t, however, merely to embrace the future, but is to embrace the past. When I, for instance, take on the man’s job of standing in the pulpit to deliver the Word of God, I am not there alone. Now I am no longer the boy of my father, but the man my father has raised. Perhaps better still, I am a man in a long line of men. I get to be in the family portrait. I stand there with both my father, and my fathers.
You may have heard of the Reformation. There men, not boys, stood not just with their earthly fathers, but with their heavenly Father. They did real work, and were real heroes, something a boy can never be. One of those, John Knox, was forced to flee his native Scotland, as Bloody Mary was breathing down his neck. He escaped to Geneva where he learned from and worked with John Calvin. When conditions allowed for his return, Knox went home to his native Scotland. There he was reported to have cried, as the gospel spread across the globe, “Give me Scotland, or I die.”
That he might secure Scotland, that the light of the gospel might spread across that land, and outlast Knox, he set about establishing the church of Jesus Christ. He prepared other men, not boys, for the gospel ministry. And the first man he ordained there was my ancestor, Robert Campbell Sproul. As a man, and as a minister of that same gospel, I get to share in that calling, in that suffering, in that opportunity to be a hero.
You have fame. Decades after your story was first told, children still read your story. Children still line up to watch your story on the silver screen. But, and pardon me for my frankness, yours is a story of a boy winning a boy’s battle. You are bold and exciting, but you are, if only because you are a boy, less than a hero. Leave the land of Never Never, or you will never live forever. Leave the land of Never Never, or you will forever be a boy, exciting perhaps, but less than significant.
You have been a boy long enough. The time has come to be a man. The time has come to enter into the very purpose of your existence. The time has come to enter into your life in its fullness. Be a man.
In the King’s Service,
R.C. Sproul Jr.
New Year; New Study; Old Testament
Tonight we begin a new study, exploring God’s book of Hosea. As always, all are welcome in our home for dinner at 6:15, and the study begins at 7:00 eastern. In addition, we will livestream the study on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul, and eventually post said livestream right in this cyber space. One way or the other, we hope you’ll join us, as we will feed upon the Word of God.
I am a veteran of church planting, having planted three churches over the past thirty years. I have as well given counsel to others planting churches. One thing I am quick to explain is that there are two difficult phases to get through before things begin to get more smooth.
The first phase is the absolute beginning phase. This phase is marked by uncertainty and excitement. What defines it, however, is the sheer loneliness. By this I don’t necessarily mean the psychological experience of loneliness but the practical kind. You will have very little help. You will, as with a business start up, be chief cook and bottle washer.
If, in this first phase, you have any visitors, the likely reason they will not come back is because they don’t want to have to share in those early burdens. They’d rather board a ship with quite a few strong rowers below deck. The good news in this phase is that you get to make all the decisions. The bad news is that you have to do all the work. Want to celebrate the Lord’s Supper weekly? Congrats. No one will object. But no one will fill the little cups either.
If you make it through this phase, getting to the place where survival seems nearly certain, and where growth is robust and steady, congratulations. In this second phase you will not only have the resources you need, but plenty of volunteers. There will come, however, a new challenge. All those volunteers? Many of them are there because you have successfully planted the almost perfect church. They just need to control this one committee, provide this element of the vision, remove that practice to bring it all the way home.
In short, all these volunteers want to take over. If, however, you can make it through this phase, you will be in the clear. You will reach a critical mass that is not easily moved. You have reached phase three, a time of stability and manageable growth.
There will be, however, another journey through the phases coming. Some in the church will insist that perfection has been reached, and want to close the door behind them. They resent those who come in after them, creating cliques and divisions. Others get excited, seeing the opportunity to grow a mega-church, and, as in phase two, want to control the church’s rudder. This version of phase three, however, usually ends up either with a split, a splant (a split disguised as a plant) or a more long term stability.
I’m not trying to be cynical. I am trying to avoid being a romantic. Church planting is deeply challenging and not for the faint of heart. Every church out there, the good, the bad, and the ugly, was once a church plant of one kind or another. And every one had people willing to do the work, take the risks, guide and guard the flock. If you are not church planting, you can make a profound difference in the health of your church, whatever phase it might be in, by laboring diligently alongside the shepherd who loves and serves you.
This is the twenty-seventh installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday January 12 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
Richard Weaver first made a name for himself when he published his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences. It is a brief work with ideas that are still reaping consequences. He was to the secular academic world something of a Francis Schaeffer, introducing thousands to the concept of worldview, arguing that what we think about little things, more often than not, is determined by what we think about big things.
Weaver demonstrated how a modernist worldview was not something academia simply studied, but it was instead something that shaped academia. Indeed, modernism is academia’s mother. You wouldn’t have the latter if you did not first have the former. Schaeffer named many of the strongholds we are called to tear down, the sundry “isms” that we in the evangelical world carefully study, the same ones we once studiously ignored.
While I don’t deny the importance of the study of worldviews, I’m afraid there just might be something modernist about our modern fascination with “isms,” whether we’re fighting or promoting them. The Bible does argue that we fight against every lofty thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, but on the other hand, it spends far more time worrying about sins on a grand scale.
The children of Israel, for instance, are never sent a prophet who thunders against them because they have embraced behaviorism. He never destroys a city with fire and brimstone because the citizens there believed in utilitarianism. No, the problem doesn’t have much academic allure. The problem was always idolatry. Nations rise and fall, cultures ebb and flow, based on this simple question: do they worship the true and living God? Worldviews may shape how we see the world, but theology shapes our worldviews.
We are a schizophrenic people, with a love/hate relationship with our own nation/history/culture. We, at least within the church, prefer to define ourselves in light of the heroes of our past. We are the heirs of the Puritans and the Pilgrims. We are the children of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, George Washington. We were, and there is the heartache, were, a great people. Today we’re a nation of looters and rapists. We are child predators and baby killers. Today, third world nations, with pity in their hearts, send missionaries here, for the sake of our souls. And so we want to know where it all went wrong. When did our city on a hill become Sodom and Gomorrah?
Of course, since the fall of Adam, wherever we were, there we would find the seed of our own destruction. But such doesn’t mean we can’t look for particular forces that toppled us in a particular direction. Some, for instance, see the war between the States as the great moment of national apostasy. Others look to the Scopes “Monkey” Trial as a watershed moment when we turned our backs on the God who had so blessed us. Still others think it all went wrong when prayer was removed from the state’s schools. A few might argue that it was January, 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade.
The handwriting was already on the wall, we’d been tried in the balance and found wanting, when our New England forbears jettisoned not just the rugged Calvinism that had sustained them in times of hardship, but when they embraced Unitarianism. Here the problem isn’t simply the playing fast and loose with the Bible, not merely the Pelagian revival, wherein we create the New Man, and usher in paradise. The problem wasn’t the smug pride that drove the rejection not only of the Bible, but of the wisdom of our fathers in church history. The problem was this, we stopped worshiping the true and living God. The evil of Unitarianism is that it isn’t Trinitarianism.
So now what do we do? We do not simply change our worldview. We do not simply elect better politicians. We do not merely refute Darwin or Skinner or Derrida. All of this is lopping the tops off of dandelions, bandaging cancer cells. No. There is but one way for us as individuals, as families, as churches, as a culture, to become once more pleasing in God’s sight. We must worship God in spirit and in truth, which means we worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We repent for our idolatry, and we turn away from it.
The historians will argue for centuries over what brought about the downfall of this once great land. Dissertations will be written, and tenures will be denied. Great schools of thought will do battle with competing schools. Arguments as elaborate and as rickety as the tower of Babel will rise and fall, like rising and falling empires.
There is, however, only one thing that exalts a nation, one way for a nation to enjoy blessing from the true and living God, and that is our worship of Him and Him alone. We will only enjoy His blessing when we pray, “And may the blessing of God Almighty — Father, Son and, Holy Spirit, abide with you now and always.” So let it be done, for the sake of our fathers, for the sake of our children, and for the glory of our triune God.
It was Ronald Reagan who warned of the scariest words. “We’re from the government and we’re here to help” ought to terrify us. I’m sorry to report many who see themselves as conservative seem to have lost sight of this wisdom. “Conservatives” and liberals now argue over what we’re going to spend “our” money on. Once upon a time a conservative was someone who understood it’s not our money. It’s this guy’s money and that guy’s. That the one who owns it ought to decide how to spend it. There’s no need to debate how to spend the money when it belongs to the one who decides.
It doesn’t surprise me that there are “conservatives” out there celebrating the recent law by Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt. A draconian education bill. Governor Stitt, an outspoken Christian, along with the Oklahoma legislature, decided no one can graduate from an Oklahoma high school without either being accepted into a college, a trade school, or the military.
Granted this bill doesn’t involve perverts dancing in front of school kids. There are no lessons on sodomy in health class. It doesn’t teach students to hate America. It doesn’t teach them New Age meditation techniques. All it does is use the same power of the state that liberals use to force feed liberal garbage to force feed “conservative” garbage. It maintains the core belief of liberal political theory- we know better than you and will make you do as we wish. It just changes, however slightly, who “we” is.
Before you speak in defense of college, trade school or the military, before you warn me about aimless youth, keep in mind that such isn’t the point. Were the government to pass a law requiring us to eat our veggies, the wisdom of eating veggies has nothing to do with it. Government overreach is the point.
It is wicked, foolish, and ill-conceived enough that the state is involved in education at all. All education is necessarily and inherently discipleship, and will strive to pass on the ideology of whomever controls the purse strings. But to say to young men and women who have survived that process, “We’re not finished with you until you secure one of these three options” is just plain tyranny. Far worse than the kind that inspired our forefathers to throw off British rule.
That there are thousands of “conservatives” that would cheer on this horror tells us how far we have fallen. “We know better than you and will make you do as we wish” is never conservative. No matter what they want to make us do, no matter what you want to make them do. A conservative recognizes that the biblical calling of the state is to exercise the power of the sword (Romans 13). It is someone who doesn’t want to be making decisions for other people.
Until we get this right, our political battles are just so much rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
Economics in this Lesson explains the principle of “opportunity cost.” Plus, an ode to snow skiing and a celebration of His grace.
It was an astonishing conclusion, though I don’t remember when it came to me. As I grew up I looked forward to the day when I’d be grown up. I assumed that I’d cross some clear, luminescent line when I’d turn into a grown up. For some years I worried that I was behind. Eventually the eureka moment came. Not when I became a grown up, but when I realized that moment would never come. I’m a grandparent more than a dozen times over yet I’m still the same kid who believed all was right with the world if I had a pocketful of bubblegum.
While we are called to mature, the wisdom of experience tells us that much of us, what was part of us from the start, stays with us all our days. Consider fencing. No, not sword play, but safe play. Experts tell us that little children crave the security that comes from limitations. Put a passel of tikes in a sandbox and their imaginations will take them around the world. Put those same wee ones in an open field and they become fearful. Even from birth babies are more at ease bound burrito-like in a blanket than let loose.
What if we never outgrow that? What if there will always be something comforting to us in limitations imposed on us? What if, from birth to death we flourish best when confined? What if the reason we never leave childhood and enter adulthood is because we are now and always will be His children? And what if our security is bound up in being bound up inside the fence of His good law?
Outside the fence we find destruction and death. What looks to us, in moments of temptation, as greener grass is the poison that drove our first parents, when they were still new, east of Eden. Outside the fence we forfeit the protection of our Father. Inside the fence we are ever under His protective watch.
As this year draws to a close we enter another season of resolutions. Some of us will resolve to lose the pounds that found us during our feasting. Others will resolve to shed this vice, and others to cultivate that virtue. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with that. The only trouble is when we spend our energy so focused on shoring up the south fence that we fail to see the fence has toppled to the north, east and west. That is, what we need is not merely to improve in this area or that.
What we need is to resolve to love and obey His law. All of it. We need to understand that God’s law isn’t Him capriciously spoiling all our fun, but is Him tenderly leading us in the safe paths of righteousness. His law is good, a gift, a blessing, a reflection of His glory.
Whether you are young or old, whether you, like me, have the aches and grey hairs of the aged with the uncertainty of childhood all in one package, as we enter together into a new year we get one year closer to home, one year closer to both the fullness of maturity and sitting in our heavenly Father’s lap. Give thanks.
For a book length consideration of our call to be like children I commend my book The Call to Wonder, available here.
