“…their nominal faith in God was supported and accredited by a closed system of mutual human honoring which made the need for any honor from God superfluous.”
In other words the Pharisees faith was buttressed not by the good news of God’s Kingdom but rather by their own religious culture that they had created. If they had Together for the Law conferences back then the same dudes would have likely headlined each conference. They had effectively created an echo chamber and eventually the voice of God grew dimmer and dimmer.
This almost feels too painful to write about. And maybe some of the events are too raw for us to talk about. But I think God is doing something here and I don’t want to be silent or refuse to learn from pain.
Ten years ago. That wasn’t so long ago was it? But I went back in my mind to 2009 when I was bumping Lecrae and turned to my wife, with tears in my eyes, excited at how God was speaking such biblical truth through this medium. I was a kid who grew up listening to 2Pac and I never thought I’d be able to see God so deeply glorified through this same medium. In 2009, Time magazine considered New Calvinism one of the 10 Ideas Changing the World. And that was my tribe. It felt like God was really moving within Reformed Evangelicalism.
But that was ten years ago…
Ten years ago. I was reading CJ Mahaney’s book on Humility and giving Joshua Harris’ book, Dug Down Deep, to some folks to help with discipleship. (Okay, that was actually 2010).
Ten years ago. I was defending Mark Driscoll and trying to learn from some of his missional strategies in Seattle. Only eight years ago I was an associate pastor at a church where we were going through Tullian Tchvidijian’s Jesus + Nothing book. We appreciated it’s gospel-centeredness.
Ten years ago there wasn’t a massive fracture over issues of social justice. The Gospel Coalition and Founders seemed to be on the same page. Christian Hip-Hop wasn’t fractured.
Seven years ago, Paul Tripp wrote a great book for pastors called Dangerous Calling. Three of the four men who had blurbs on the back of that book either are out of ministry or should be. We’ve blown up.
What do I do with all this? How does my faith respond when the echo chamber that I was part of ugly explodes? What is God doing in the midst of Reformed Evangelicalism? Why is He allowing such fractures?
These things hurt. And I’m not even all that closely tied to them. I’m a distant follower to many of these things. But it is (was?) my tribe and it hurts to no longer have a home. It hurts to have lost that place of “mutual human honoring”. It leaves me feeling raw and homeless and discouraged and questioning.
But God is doing something good here. It’s good for me to doubt a faith whose hope was tethered more to Reformed Evangelicalism than to Jesus Christ. It’s good for us that our echo chamber has blown up. But what do we do with all the pieces?
Again, Os Guinness is incredibly helpful. He encourages us to go back to square one:
Life can proceed with deceptive ease on the basis of a faith which was once vital but has become so taken for granted that it is no longer authentic. At that stage any pressure may be such a test for faith that the believer is faced with a choice: Give up or go back to square one. If we give up, then we abandon faith altogether. But if we go back to square one (and so back to our roots, back to our foundations, back to our beginning), we will find a faith which is solid and secure. The lesson of the Square One Principle is this: The person who has the courage to go back when necessary is the one who goes on in the end. (Guinness, 19)
We’ve blown up. Are we going to go back to square one, dig in and keep pretending, try to carve out a new place of ‘mutual human honoring’, or abandon our faith altogether?
I’m convinced the Lord is calling us into a more authentic faith and that he has graciously blown up our little tribe for the sake of the gospel. Maybe as we pick up the pieces we’ll hand them to the Lord instead of use them to build another house for ourselves. He’s building a kingdom that will never falter—and somehow it includes our broken pieces redeemed.
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