Michael Dowd argues that Christians should thank God for the New Atheists. A self-styled “evangelist” for evolution, Dowd recently preached a sermon in Oklahoma City in which he called for nothing less than a rejection of biblical Christianity and the embrace of a spirituality rooted in an embrace of evolution and a rejection of the supernatural.
A few weeks ago, a reporter called me for comment after Dowd had made a similar argument on his Web site, “ThankGodforEvolution.com.” In more recent days, Dowd has responded directly to my comments. Without doubt, his argument deserves a closer look.
In his 2007 book, Thank God for Evolution, Dowd recounts that he, along with his wife, Connie Barlow, decided in 2002 to go on the road as “evolutionary evangelists.” As he explains, “We offer a view of our collective evolutionary journey that frees the imagination, touches the heart, and leaves people wanting more.” An ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and a graduate of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now Palmer Theological Seminary), Dowd now finds his passion in spreading his message of “the epic of evolution” or “the Great Story.”
Having established in previous programs that the New Testament documents are the most reliable texts of ancient history, the hosts in this program discuss the way Jesus throughout these texts speaks of the Old Testament Scriptures. Are these a collection of myths and fables with helpful moral lessons? Is one interpretation just as good as the next? Since Jesus Christ rose again from the dead, his view of Scripture may be worth considering above all others (originally broadcast April 29, 2007).Check it out HERE.
THE American clergy is suffering from burnout, several new studies show. And part of the problem, as researchers have observed, is that pastors work too much. Many of them need vacations, it’s true. But there’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.Read the entire article HERE.
The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.
As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.
The trend toward consumer-driven religion has been gaining momentum for half a century. Consider that in 1955 only 15 percent of Americans said they no longer adhered to the faith of their childhood, according to a Gallup poll. By 2008, 44 percent had switched their religious affiliation at least once, or dropped it altogether, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found. Americans now sample, dabble and move on when a religious leader fails to satisfy for any reason.
1. We can no longer assume our children will just agree with us on this issue; they are going to want arguments for holding that homosexual practice is wrong. We need to go back to scripture and sharpen our swords, so to speak, as we can no longer assume that the cultural bias will play our tune anyway.
2. The impossibility of criticising gay culture without being labeled a homophobe means that a whole heap of other cultural traits will fly in under the radar, a point made in a recent Spectator article about the arrival of cell phones `apps' to facilitate cruising and anonymous sexual encounters -- a technological development welcomed by leading gay figures and the media at large. As the gay community prides itself on promiscuity and camp outrage, so any criticism of it on this score is anti-gay. But what of heterosexual promiscuity and outrageous behaviour? It too gets a pass as the behaviour of the gay community stands above criticism and comes to set the cultural agenda.
3. Churches that have sold the pass on other issues -- most notably women's ordination -- are going to find themselves skewered by the need to oppose homosexual practice with a consistent hermeneutic rather than the appearance of arbitrariness based on simple bigotry. I suspect many evangelicals were able to live with women's ordination because, hey, they liked women; women's ordination may have been wrong, but it was not distasteful in the way that two men in bed together is distasteful; they never in their wildest dreams imagined what was coming round the next corner, even though enough people pointed it out to them. Now, if they stand against homosexuality, they look like homophobes. Better to look like an outdated fundie than a bigot. Churches that have held the line on women's ordination can at least say `Nothing personal against homosexuals; we simply follow scriptural criteria' when asked by a practising homosexual why he should not be ordained.
4. Those evangelical leaders, academics and evangelical institutions that prize their place at the table and their invitations to appear on `serious' television programs, and who enjoy being asked to offer their opinion to the wider culture had better be prepared to make a choice. As I have said before in this column, we are not far from the place where to oppose homosexuality will be regarded as in the same moral bracket as white supremacy. Those types only appear on Jerry Springer; and Jerry generally doesn't typically ask them their opinion on the ethics of medical research, the solution to the national debt, or the importance of poetry to a rounded education.
T4G 2010 -- Session 2 -- R.C. Sproul from Together for the Gospel (T4G) on Vimeo.
Bill Feltner: Dr. Trueman, tell us first about the title of the book.
Dr. Carl Trueman: Well, on one level, it's an attempt to get a cheap laugh on playing on the idea of the “wages of sin” and picking up on the contemporary language of “spin,” but also I wanted to make a serious point that so much of what passes for modern evangelicalism is spin to an extent. It's words being used in a way that they haven't traditionally been used, and it's ideas being twisted, spun, to suit particular agendas. I wanted to probe that a little bit. And in saying that, I'm certainly not exempting myself from doing the spinning, I think it's something that as sinners, if you like, we are all prone to do it to some extent when we talk.
BF: Now as I recall earlier on in the book, you're trying to be something of a provocateur, you're trying to start a dialogue about subjects perhaps that there are different viewpoints in the Christian world?CT: Yes, one of the things that concerns me I suppose, still concerns me, is the level of indifference that often pervades modern society. We often have passionate opinions about things that don't really matter: sports teams, pop stars, those kind of things. But when it comes down to Christian beliefs, and how you look at the world, often we can be relatively indifferent and relaxed about those things. I wanted to produce a book where even if (if you read the book) you disagree with what I'm saying, you can at least understand that the issues I'm addressing are important. And if you disagree, and disagree strongly, then on one level I feel like I've achieved what I aimed to achieve in the first place, that is, to make people feel passionately about things that really matter and draw their eyes and their hearts away from the trivia that really clogs up modern life, generally.
BF: And it's no surprise that early on in your book, you address what you see as a big tendency in the world, in the culture, and certainly in the church, and that is to be anti-historical. Where does it manifest itself, and why does it matter?
CT: I think the anti-historical tendency is fairly pervasive of the culture as a whole. We live in a world where we're so used to the idea of scientific progress, for example, that we tend to assume that the best is always coming tomorrow or next year, or it could be just down the line; that today is bound to be inferior to the future. And there's good reason on one level for thinking in that way because science has led to great progress. I make facetious reference somewhere in this book to “I don't want to live in a world without antibiotics, pain killers, and flush toilets.” I consider the world today to be a nicer place to live in, from that perspective, for me, than the world that my great-great grandparents grew up in.
Pastors used to be some of the happiest and healthiest people alive, with better life expectancy than the general population. But...
Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change jobs if they could.
So reports the New York Times. The stats are scary:
A continuing survey of 1,726 Methodist ministers in North Carolina. Compared with neighbors in their census tracts, the ministers reported significantly higher rates of arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma. Obesity was 10 percent more prevalent in the clergy group.
Internal surveys by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which found that 69 percent of its ministers reported being overweight, 64 percent having high blood pressure and 13 percent taking antidepressants.
A 2005 survey of clergy by the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church also took special note of a quadrupling in the number of people leaving the profession during the first five years of ministry, compared with the 1970s.
The article touches on a number of possible causes:
•Cellphones and social media expose the clergy to new dimensions of stress
•These people tend to be driven by a sense of a duty to God to answer every call for help from anybody, and they are virtually called upon all the time, 24/7
•A misperception about serving God...They think that taking care of themselves is selfish, and that serving God means never saying no
•Larger social trends, like the aging and shrinking of congregations
•The dwindling availability of volunteers in the era of two-income households
•The likelihood that a male pastor’s wife has a career of her ownHowever, most research shows that the usual reason is simply not taking time off. Pastors are not taking a day off a week. They are not taking vacations. They are not taking care of their own bodily and spiritual needs.
The NYT report simply confirms what I've seen both in the UK and the USA. Pastors seem to think that "six days you shall labor" applies only to non-pastors. Pastors can, of course, take steps to remedy this situation themselves. However, the NYT reports that many institutional churches are now imposing daily and annual breaks on their pastors. I would also encourage pastors' wives, deacons, and elders to intervene aggressively. Make a weekly "sabbath" a non-negotiable. Insist on a lengthy annual vacation without any possibility of being contacted about congregational matters. Make it a matter of morality for which the pastor is accountable.
And maybe also address the spiritual problems that may be at the root of this. Is there man-pleasing behind it? Is the pastor trying to impress hard-working people in his congregation that he is just as tough as them? Does the pastor really depend on the sovereignty of God or does he think God is dependent on him? Does he want people to think he is indispensable? Is he being defined by his work, rather than his relationship to God? Is he really resting in Christ for himself and for his congregation? Is he trying to keep up with Pastor Popular down the road? Is he trying to impress his fellow-pastors with glowing statistics?
If you are really resting in Christ, you will be resting your body, mind, and soul from time to time.
For many modernists, Romanists, and evangelicals the visible church is just another vehicle for achieving a socio-political goal. The cultural right wants the church to do one thing and the cultural left wants it to do another and neither seems to understand that the visible church was commissioned by her Lord to represent a kingdom “not of this world” with transcendent concerns with implications for this life that are not neatly consistent with any particular socio-political agenda.
Sometimes becoming confessionally Reformed, especially when leaving American evangelicalism, is like a second conversion because it requires a death to autonomy. As an evangelical I did not have to renounce my autonomy. Indeed, I was encouraged to baptize my assumptions and to bring them into the church. When I discovered the Reformation I found that there was another way of understanding the Christian faith which required me to deny that I am the measure of all things. It is this recognition that is at stake in the argument about human free will and sola gratia: autonomy. This is what is at stake in the argument about sola scriptura: the denial of human autonomy relative to the source of authority. Perhaps the great difference between Reformed confessionalists and American evangelicals is, however, the doctrine of the visible, institutional church. It is the recognition that Jesus wasn’t only meek, he wasn’t a rebel against all institutions, he wasn’t a prophet of pietism and the spontaneous experience of the divine. It was a great shock for me to learn than Jesus intentionally established an institution: the church (see Matt 16; 18; 28:18-20).
Rice is right about some things but she is also wrong too. Jesus wasn’t a proto-modern. He wasn’t a prophet of modernity nor a preacher of personal autonomy. He wasn’t an anti-institutional rebel. He was and is God the Son and the Son of God (and the Son of Man). He purified the temple but he did not destroy it, not until AD 70. The temple that was destroyed c. 33 AD was was his body which he gave up willingly for sinners. Yes he was at war with the status quo but not in service of enlightened, rationalist or post-enlightened subjectivist late modern religion. He was a warrior for the glory of God and the salvation of sinners, two agendas in which autonomous modernity has had absolutely no interest. Jesus wasn’t devoted to human welfare. He did not heal every sick person in Palestine nor did he raise every corpse. By enlightened modern standards he practiced animal cruelty. He did not stop the slaughter of animals in the temple and he sent pigs racing off a cliff. He was (apparently but not actually) indifferent to some pressing human concerns. If he was really all about our health and well being then his death, which he could have avoided in the service of temporal human welfare, was ill considered and ill timed.
