Can we please stop doing this?

In the wider Protestant world, the term “Reformed” specifically means “Calvinist.” In some circles, the word “Reformed” is even narrower than that – it refers to a specific type of confessional Calvinist.  So when I hear Lutherans referring to American evangelicals (and even Pentecostals/charismatics) as “Reformed”, I cringe a little bit.  Most of those folks are not Calvinists by any stretch of the imagination, and will not hesitate to let you know that.  And I cringe more than a little bit when Lutherans say “the Reformed believe X” when X is a belief that only an American evangelical – and no confessional Calvinist – would actually hold.

I understand why Lutherans use the term in such a broad way.  Sometimes it’s for the sake of convenience when we are speaking among ourselves, as simply using the term “Protestant” to refer only to Calvinists and Arminians and not Lutherans can be confusing to some.  And historically, the non-Lutheran Protestant denominations ultimately – in one way or another – are theological descendants of the original Calvinists of the 16th century.

But neither of these reasons really excuse a practice that is generally unhelpful when one is actually interacting with Calvinists or Arminians.  At best it causes confusion and at worst it can cause unnecessary offense – to the point where the Calvinist or Arminian writes off you and Lutherans in general as being ignorant of what they really believe.

A while ago I was listening to a lecture on the two natures in Christ by Dr. Rod Rosenbladt of White Horse Inn fame, at the end of which (during a question and answer session) he takes Lutheran pastors and professors to task for their use of the word “Reformed” to refer to Wesleyan evangelicals (and conversely, for using the term “evangelical” to refer to Calvinists). Here’s some of what he (himself an LCMS pastor and professor) had to say:

If you’re in a wider Christian circle and you do what our LCMS pastors do – and they’ve been trained to do it – I’m going to be speaking to a group of them back in Minneapolis and I’m gonna tell them to repent of this – if you’re in front of a broad Christian group, and there are a lot of Calvinists there, and you call them evangelicals, they’ll be totally offended.  To them that means Arminian.  They might just walk out of the room because they think you’re an idiot – an uneducated idiot.  And correlatively, on the other side, if you have a large evangelical gathering and you call them Calvinists, their hands will be in the air and they’ll say “I am not – whatever I am, I’m not one of those.”…

So as you say “evangelical” today, it usually means Arminian/Wesleyan….When you say “Reformed”, it means one thing, and only one thing – 120 proof Calvinism.  Now we even have in our books in the LCMS guys – professors – who use (or have used) the word “Reformed” to mean everybody who isn’t Lutheran or Roman Catholic.  Disaster.  Disaster.  We’ve got to stop doing that.  I talk to seminarians – they still blunder into it – and so I try as politely as I can to say, “You want to distinguish those.”  Because if you’re speaking in a broader Christian audience, you want to be precise about that, or you’ll have no idea why fifty percent of the room packs up its briefcases and walks out the back door.  But they will.

1. The potential for idolatry. No, I’m not saying that every church or pastor that uses a big screen or Power Point slides during their service is necessarily guilty of idolatry.  But when the people of a church finds themselves thinking things like “we can’t reach this generation without this kind of technology”, or when a pastor finds himself freaking out when the Power Point presentation crashes two minutes before the service starts, they might be.  I have heard people actually say that the glitches in their church’s Power Point presentation were caused by the devil.  Really?  I think Satan is more interested in making us think that the Power Point presentation is necessary in some way, and that people will either not believe in Christ without it or that the church will die without it.

God does not need a big screen or a Power Point presentation.  His Holy Spirit is the one who creates faith in our hearts through the preaching of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments.  There will not be one more person in heaven because a pastor decided to supplement his sermon with Power Point slides or because a church decided to put the lyrics of all their songs on a big screen.  Conversely, there will not be one more person in hell because a pastor or church decided NOT to do these things.  When we think that our human activity apart from the Word of God makes the difference between heaven and hell, we are no longer trusting in God alone to save sinners.  We are guilty of idolatry and need to repent.

2. Making the screen the focal point of the service. Instead of the focal point of the service being the pulpit and the altar and the baptismal font – the places where the Word is proclaimed and the gifts of God are distributed – the focal point is the big screen at the front of the sanctuary.  Instead of drawing people’s attention to the place where God comes down to us, the screen draws people’s attention to the things WE are doing.  If there is a way to NOT make the screen the focal point, I would be very interested to hear how that could be done.

3. Detaching lyrics from the actual musical notes to which those lyrics are sung. I have learned the tune of many a Lutheran hymn simply because the words AND musical notes were available to me in the hymnal.  Musical notes are generally not projected on a screen, for copyright reasons – and thus the only songs that are projected onto the screen are usually 1) very simple praise songs with little depth and/or 2) songs with tunes that everyone knows already.  Since big screens are purported to be an “outreach” tool, how does it help outsiders to the church if everyone expects them to already know the tunes of all the songs that are being sung?  Had it not been for the hymnal and its inclusion of the musical notes I would have been hopelessly lost when I first started attending a Lutheran church – where the majority of the hymns were hymns I did not know.

“But what about the fact that most people don’t know how to read music to begin with?”  That’s more of a commentary on the current state of education in this country.  Drawing the conclusion that “thus we should completely abandon written music in church” does not follow.  The fact that many (maybe even most?) people nowadays are NOT able to read music is no excuse for making it more difficult for the rest of us who are.  I have found that my ability to read the music of a tune unfamiliar to the people around me makes it easier for them to catch on to the melody.  Take the hymnal away and I might be just as lost as anyone else.  Without the written music it makes it much harder for people to learn new or unfamiliar songs that have any theological depth.

So those are a few of the reasons why I am not a big fan of screens in church.  You may disagree with me, and that’s fine.  Or you may feel the same way as I do but for other reasons.  Feel free to post your comments.  And read this article by Pastor Fisk.  Great stuff.

Noll states early on:

The book’s main narrative describes a shift away from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America.  It is not an exaggeration to claim that this nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged (p.3).

So why was this the case?  How did Christian theology develop in the early United States of America, and why did it develop in the specific way that it did?  Noll answers that question by postulating a particularly American synthesis of “evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning” (p. 9).

1. Evangelical Protestant religion.  The religious landscape of the early United States came to be dominated by Protestant evangelicals who “shared an emphasis on conversion, the supreme religious authority of the Bible, and an active life of personal holiness” (p. 11)  These Protestants were also highly influenced by the revivalism that swept through the colonies in the 18th century.

2. Republican political ideology.  An almost unique feature of American thought is the idea that Christianity and a republican form of government are compatible.  To this day in America, one is assumed to fit with the other, hand in glove. But this has not at all been the case outside the United States – in fact, in the eighteenth century “almost all observers outside the United States assumed that republican thinking contradicted the principles of traditional religion” (p. 54).

3. Commonsense moral reasoning.  American Christians in the late 18th to the early 19th century had come to rely on “common sense” to determine truth in matters of theology and ethics.  “In the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, almost all Americans, especially Christian ministers who ventured into print, relied strategically on the weight of ‘self-evident truths’ or ‘intuitive truths,’ even as they expressed repeatedly the conviction that ‘the best reason which anyone can have for believing any proposition is that it is so evident to his intellectual faculty that he cannot disbelieve it’” (p. 95).  This was a departure from traditional Protestant ways of thinking that were much more suspicious of autonomous human reason.

Noll discusses the various historical and religious factors that led to this unique American synthesis, not the least of which is the fact that Puritan revivalism had the unintended effect of undermining the traditional link between church and society and paved the way for republican ideas to fill the vacuum.  He goes on to describe in great detail how the American synthesis shaped Calvinism and Methodism (two dominant religious traditions) in America.  The story of the Americanization of Calvinism (which was really the Americanization of Puritanism) was especially intriguing.  It shed a great deal of light on a puzzling question that I had been pondering for some time: how did Presbyterianism produce a Pelagian like Charles Finney?  The answer in a nutshell is that American “commonsense reasoning” led Calvinism in America down a slippery slope that eventually led to a practical Arminianism and ended in the denial of original sin altogether.  In the same way “commonsense reasoning” seemed to have led Methodism from its original emphasis on “prevenient grace” to a more fully Pelagian view.

Another fascinating aspect of the book was Noll’s treatment of how the American synthesis dealt with the issues underlying the Civil War.  The dominant hermeneutical grid used by Americans of the antebellum era to interpret the Bible was what Noll describes as a “Reformed, literal hermeneutic.”  Noll describes the Reformed nature of this hermeneutic (as opposed to hermeneutical principles employed by Lutherans and high Anglicans) as follows:

First, Calvinists appropriated the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura by perceiving the Bible as an authority set over against other religious authorities.  Second, Calvinists often practiced some version of the “Regulative Principle,” a position the English Puritans had developed from general Reformed leanings.  It held that believers were required to do what the Bible commands but were equally required not to do those things about which the Bible is silent.  Last was the so-called third use of the law, or the belief that, after its twofold use for restraining sin in society and for showing individuals their need of salvation, the moral teaching of Scriptures existed also (even primarily) to provide a blueprint for how Christians, in grateful obedience to God, should live their entire lives (p. 377).

He then describes the “literal” nature of the hermeneutic, which went beyond the Reformed Regulative Principle and could be better traced to American historical circumstances, particularly those that encouraged anti-traditionalism.  It was also very much tied to the idea of commonsense moral reasoning:

The assumption that people could see clearly and without ambiguity what the Bible said, and that this biblicistic knowledge qualified one to judge connections between moral cause and moral effect, was the common person’s counterpart to the Enlightenment confidence displayed by intellectual elites who employed learned formal moral philosophy to the same ends.  Democratic biblicism undercut trust in traditional interpretations of Scripture with the same force that they were being leveled by a reliance on philosophical common sense.  In both cases, confidence in present abilities overmastered confidence in what was handed on from the past.  In both cases, a liberated modern self was the starting point for biblical interpretation (p. 381).

Noll goes on to describe how the Civil War shattered the near-universality of this hermeneutic in America and presented an insurmountable challenge to the American synthesis itself, since pro-slavery arguments drew directly on the “Reformed, literal hermeneutic” and one had to step outside this interpretive framework in order to argue against slavery.   Yet to step outside this framework was unthinkable for many.  Evangelical Protestants saw the Reformed/literal approach to Scripture as having been validated by its success in evangelizing the nation and achieving widespread social transformation, and it was inextricably linked to republican ideals.  But the same interpretive principles that led to Christian republicanism and fueled revivalism also led to arguments for the enslavement of a particular ethnic group in America.

I found this book to be very enlightening as to the historical reasons why Americans think in the ways that they do about politics and religion, even into the 21st century.  The American synthesis and the Reformed, literal interpretation of Scripture no longer dominated American thought after the Civil War, but in conservative Protestant circles they certainly seem to have persisted, sometimes very strongly.  American evangelicals by and large do not see how much their theology has been influenced by the unique twists and turns of American history.  When I was growing up, a mostly-Arminian sort of revivalism was all I knew.  To me that was Christianity, and there were no other categories: there were Catholics, there were liberals (which included most Protestant denominations except conservative Baptists) and then there were Christians.  My church was a “Bible church” because we just believed the Bible, not like all those denominations out there that held to creeds and confessions.  Patriotic holidays would be celebrated in church and no one would blink an eye.  There seemed to be no question in anyone’s mind that the founding fathers had intended America to be a Christian nation and that America was in some sense special in God’s eyes.  The end of America meant the end of the world, literally.

As I eventually learned, things were not so simple.  But things make a lot more sense now.  My eyes were opened to a Christianity far more ancient than American revivalism long before I read America’s God.  But this book helped me to better understand the origins of the Christianity that was made in America, and to better understand how the current American theological landscape came to be.  If you have the patience, it is well worth the read.

…the religious history of the late-colonial period, particularly the Great Awakening and its effects….is a story of unintended consequences.  Leaders of the Awakening – from Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, Joseph Bellamy in rural Connecticut, Gilbert Tennent in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Samuel Davies in Virginia, to George Whitefield, who went everywhere – knew what they were after when they enlisted affective rhetoric to preach about intractable human depravity and supernal divine grace.  They were trying to reawaken the church for the sake of the church itself, to reassert the sovereignty of God’s divine love in conversion, to exalt the substitutionary, penal work of Christ as God’s way of reconciliation with sinners, to demonstrate the necessity of conversion as a prerequisite for truly virtuous living, and by these means to check the worldliness promoted by the era’s new forms of commerce and entertainment.  Yet the pursuit of such goals had ironic consequences.  The awakeners preached a higher, more spiritual vision of the church, yet the result was decline in the very notion of church and a transfer of religious commitment from the church to the nation.  They focused on God’s role in conversion yet brought about an exaltation of human activity in the process of salvation.  They preached a traditional doctrine of the atonement yet opened the way toward redefining the work of Christ as an outworking of governmental relationships rather than the assuagement of God’s wrath.  They rooted true virtue in supernatural conversion yet created conditions for a new concept of virtuous living as in principle available to every person by nature alone.

From Mark A. Noll, America’s God, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 13-14.

Thus says the Lord of hosts: "Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes.  They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord.  They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, 'It shall be well with you'; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, 'No disaster shall come upon you.' "

For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord to see and to hear His word,
Or who has paid attention to His word and listened?
Behold, the storm of the Lord!
Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest;
It will burst upon the head of the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn back
Until He has executed and accomplished the intents of His heart.
In the latter days you will understand it clearly.

"I did not send the prophets, yet they ran;
I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied.
But if they had stood in my council,
Then they would have proclaimed My word to My people,
And they would have turned from their evil way,
And from the evil of their deeds.

"Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away?  Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord.  Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord.  I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, 'I have dreamed, I have dreamed!'  How long shall there be lies in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart, who think to make my people forget My name by their dreams that they tell one another, even as their fathers forgot My name for Baal?  Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has My word speak My word faithfully.  What has straw in common with wheat? declares the Lord.  Is not My word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?  Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, declares the Lord, who steal My words from one another.  Behold, I am against the prophets, declares the Lord, who use their tongues and declare, 'declares the Lord.'  Behold, I am against those who prophesy lying dreams, declares the Lord, and who tell them and lead My people astray by their lies and their recklessness, when I did not send them or charge them.  So they do not profit this people at all, declares the Lord."

This sounds like it could have been written yesterday to the church in America.

It is not we who build.  [Christ] builds the church.  No man builds the church but Christ alone.  Whoever is minded to build the church is surely well on the way to destroying it, for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it.  We must confess – he builds.  We must proclaim – he builds.  We must pray to him – that he may build.

We do not know his plan.  We cannot see whether he is building or pulling down.  It may be that the times which by human standards are times of collapse are for him the great times of construction.  It may be that the times which from a human point of view are great times for the church are times when it is pulled down.

It is a great comfort which Christ gives to his church: you confess, preach, bear witness to me and I alone will build where it pleases me.  Do not meddle in what is my province.  Do what is given to you to do well and you have done enough.  But do it well.  Pay no heed to views and opinions.  Don't ask for judgments.  Don't always be calculating what will happen.  Don't always be on the lookout for another refuge!  Church, stay a church!  But church, confess, confess, confess!  Christ alone is your Lord; from his grace alone can you live as you are.  Christ builds.

From Treasury of Daily Prayer, Concordia Publishing House, 2008, pp. 840-841.

This sort of thing seems to be very foreign to many in the church today.

In high school, Matthew Smith was a faithful church attendee, active in his youth group, and eager to grow in his faith—but despite all of this he felt like a failed worshiper in his congregation.

“In the church I grew up in, I felt like I had to drum up an emotional experience for myself in worship,” said Smith. “The praise choruses we sang were centered on me: ‘I give you praise God,’ ‘I give you my all,’ ‘I want to worship you.’ But I often didn’t feel those things—or even mean those things—when I sang them, so the whole experience felt dishonest.”

When he began attending college at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., Smith started visiting Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) meetings, and for the first time began hearing old hymns set to new music. “These hymns weren’t about me—they were about Jesus. They didn’t say, ‘I want to worship you.’ They described what Jesus has done, and that is what made me say, ‘I want to worship you.’ Singing these hymns, along with the teaching I was hearing, completely changed my perspective on worship. And ironically, when I stopped focusing on myself and my emotional experience in worship, that’s when my heart began to feel.”

A little more than a month ago I discovered some of Matthew Smith’s music and the Indelible Grace CDs mentioned in the article – all old hymns set to new music. I have listened to those songs over and over and over again. They are like cold, clear water to my soul. They are not about me or about my feelings or about what I think I am going to do in the future – they are about Jesus and about His saving work on the Cross, and about His mercy and grace and love and how He saved a wretched sinner like me, helpless to save myself. How salvation is all of God and none of me.

And that is why I love hymns.

HT: (Take Your Vitamin Z)

Give me songs that are God-centered. Songs that are centered on Christ and His Cross. Songs that focus on who He is and what He has done. Songs that highlight His beauty, His holiness, His goodness, His faithfulness, His saving work, etc., not what I feel or what I think I’m going to do for Him in the future.

One of my pet peeves has long been the type of song that says in one way or another “this is what I am going to do for You, God” or “this is how faithful I am going to be.” There are certain songs I have difficulty singing without feeling presumptuous in some way. It’s always like this voice is in my mind saying, “Really … isn’t that what the apostle Peter thought before he denied Jesus?” What can I do for God that He does not enable me in some way to do? Or how faithful can I be without Him in some way enabling me to be faithful?

I’ve only recently realized that this is part of a trend in Christian music to focus on ME. And this isn’t necessarily a recent trend – there are a lot of hymns that do this too. This is what I’m going to do. This is how I feel about You, God. Look how faithful I am. Look how much I love You. Etc, etc, etc. But really, what is any of that? Of course we should seek to serve the Lord and to do His will, and to be faithful and to love the Lord with all our hearts. But should focusing on our ability to do these things be the center of our worship?

Our response to God’s amazing and undeserved grace should be obedience to His commands. But should the center of our worship be our inevitably imperfect obedience, or should the center of our worship be the perfect, sinless One, Jesus Christ, who gave His life for us on the Cross so that we might be declared righteous in the sight of a holy God?

Has the evangelical church become all about image now as well? We think we as a church have to look perfect to outsiders. Everything has to be right on schedule, we can never make a mistake during the service, everyone’s voices have to be CD-quality. At the expense of being real.

Do we, as a society, want reality? Or do we want our fake version of reality? Is our fake version of reality preferable to the real version?

I was recently reading a blog by C. Michael Patton at Parchment and Pen entitled, “The Entertainment Driven Church.” Let me just say that one of my first thoughts after reading it was “God help us all – it’s even worse than I thought.” (If that were not bad enough, check out this blog at Internetmonk.com – my reaction to reading that was something more like, “Oh … dear … Lord …”)

In many churches it seems to have gotten to the point where the church is so much like the world that unbelievers don’t even notice a difference when they walk through the church door. In fact, that seems to be the point. Our society values the new and exciting over the old and boring. Church as traditionally done falls into the “old and boring” category, so we have to make it “new and exciting.” We don’t want solid Bible teaching, we want to be entertained. We want to wow everyone with how technologically advanced our church is. We want to show the outside world that we can be cool, too. We want to feel as though we are watching the Super Bowl or an amazing movie, but in a spiritual context. We want all our senses bombarded by the visual sights and sounds.

Is it really true that if we do not give people these things, they will not come? Are people drawn to Christ by image, or by the Holy Spirit?

The image that our society worships so devoutly is an illusion, but somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that it is real. Even Christians have bought into it. I admit that am affected by it too. Being blown away by audio-visual effects is like a spiritual experience for this generation. But in all the excitement, we can miss God’s still, small voice.

Jesus is not about image – He is about reality. Gritty reality. He is not the God of perfect people, but of imperfect people. Of people who make mistakes and say stupid and corny things. Who don’t have it all together. Who are sinners, pure and simple – people who morally blow it consistently and often deliberately. He is a God who can see into all of our hearts. And knowing this, it is amazing that He still loves us.

The scary part is when we begin to no longer be amazed, but secretly begin to think:

“What would God do if He didn’t have such cool people on His team?”