A Radical Review: The Bad, Pt. 4 (False Dichotomy 5 – God’s Love for Us vs. God’s Love for His Glory)

God’s Love for Us vs. God’s Love for His Glory: 

Platt really shows his Reformed cards throughout the book when he discusses his understanding of God’s motivations for saving the world. After citing Ezekiel 36, Platt goes on to say, “What a statement! God goes so far as to say that when he acts among his people, he doesn’t show his grace, mercy, and justice for their sake but for the sake of his holy name among the nations.” (68). 

There is much to be said about this, but one of the conclusions one must come to when Platt’s words are traced throughout his book is that the God he worships is a God who is self-centered and self-serving – He’s a God who seeks his own glory above everything else and is self-referenced in all of His actions. Indeed, Platt even says this, “God centers on himself.” (71) 

The problem is, when I look at Jesus on the cross, I see there a God who took on shame, not glory. I see a God who acted in love for sinners. I see a God who gave up his own glory for death.

Platt would criticize my understanding of Jesus’ death, to be sure. Beginning on page 70, pay attention here(!), Platt argues that, “‘God loves me’ is not the essence of biblical Christianity. Because if ‘God loves me’ is the message of Christianity, then who is the object of Christianity?….me.” 

Now, here’s the thing: First of all, I understand that we have a very self-referenced understanding of Christianity. And this self-referenced understanding needs to be criticized and we need to repent of our “me” focused religion. But this is much different than what Platt is arguing. 

For when I say, “God loves me,” who cares if I’m the object? Because God is the subject! It doesn’t take glory away from God for him to love me. It doesn’t take away his centrality to the gospel story for him to love me! Rather, it magnifies it! I didn’t love him first, he loved me first! I didn’t make the move toward knowing him, he made the move toward saving me! Yes, I am the object of God’s affection! But God is the subject of the sentence and the subject of creation and redemption! Let’s stop laying this either/or game. God is both glorious and great. And God loves me enough to give up that glory for me and you and all of creation. That’s what love means – it is self-giving and finds glory in the ‘other’!  

In the end, Platt wants to argue that God is the object of God’s affection and love, not me. 

This is a really complicated discussion that I will take up in the final section of my review. But in the end, it’s just another one of his false dichotomies. God loving me and God seeking to make his name great among the nations are not antithetical. In fact, quite the opposite, it is through his great love for me/us that he makes his name great among the nations…so that he might love them too, and they might love him! His love for us does not put the focus on us. His love for us puts the focus on his self-giving (not self-serving!) nature! There’s no theological reason for Platt to separate God’s love and His glory. Neither his love nor his glory end with us; they are always to be offered to the world for the sake of His great name and love being given to all people. (Please see my final section, “What was missing” for further reflections on this subject. 

A Radical Review: The Bad, Part 1

After 5 posts examining The Really Good and The Good aspects of David Platt’s Radical, we are moving on to some of the less positive aspects o my review. This, too, will take 4 or 5 posts as we examine The Bad and The Really Bad.

The Bad….

 

A Limited Gospel: 

One of my frustrations with much of the evangelistic efforts of modern Evangelicalism is the ingrained assumption that the gospel is primarily about getting people into heaven. All other things serve that purpose. The Southern Baptists are largely the spearheads of this understanding of the gospel, and David Platt, in general, fails to break free from the mold. While I am excited about Platt’s push for justice for the poor and marginal (something rarely discussed in Southern Baptist churches), Platt still falls into the assumption that the gospel is primarily about preparing people for the next life instead of teaching them that heaven is being brought to earth in this life when the church lives out the ethics of Jesus.

Platt spends the entire 7th chapter of his book discussing what ‘the gospel’ is. His outline is as follows (The parenthetical statements are my brief summaries of the sections):

1) All People Have a Knowledge of God (God has revealed Himself to everyone…even people who’ve never heard his name)

2) All People Reject God (All persons have rejected God because of their sinful hearts)

3) All People are Guilty Before God (No one is innocent)

4) All People are Condemned for Rejecting God (The law cannot save anyone, it only condemns)

5) God has made a way of Salvation for the Lost (Jesus is the only way, not other religions)

6) People cannot come to God Apart from Faith in Christ 

7) Christ Commands the Church to Make the Gospel Known to All Peoples

Now, if you’re paying attention to the outline, you’ll notice that Platt is following the typical Evangelical formula for “getting someone saved” by leading them through Paul’s epistle to the Romans. But my biggest beef with this approach is that it fails to take into account Paul’s intentions in the book of Romans, itself, and substitutes, instead, the Evangelical agenda for the book of Romans. Such an approach reduces Paul’s greatest letter to a series of proverbial proof-texts designed to “lead someone to the Lord.” 

But Paul’s intention was quite different. After all, he wasn’t writing to unbelievers, but to believers.  

In Romans, Paul’s primary concern is not establishing a bunch of proverbs intended to lead unbelievers to faith in Christ. Paul’s intention is to write to Christians about how God has put them in right standing with His covenant purposes and how God has shown himself to be faithful to His covenant promises in sending Jesus as both the representative of humanity (Israel) and God. Jesus fulfills both sides of the covenant obligations in his death and resurrection. And through faith in Jesus (and the faithfulness of Jesus!), all people can be put in a right relationship with God, no matter if they are Jew or Gentile. 

But none of this is mentioned in Platt’s recounting. Platt’s primary concern in citing Romans lies far from Paul’s primary concern. In pursuit of his own agenda for Romans, Platt consistently cites scriptures outside of their context to reinforce this pre-established agenda. Paul’s point about all people having a knowledge of God, all people rejecting God, and all people being guilty before God are not primarily about teaching unbelievers they’re sinners. Rather, Paul’s primary point is to teach Jewish and Gentile Christians that neither party is morally or spiritually superior to the other. Paul’s not writing a handbook of soul-winning, Paul’s writing a handbook on ethnic diversity in the early church – especially ethnic diversity that dealt with the status of the Jewish people in relation to the Gentiles who are newly grafted into the story of Israel. 

In short, Platt uses Romans to “get people saved,” but Paul was writing Romans  in order to tell “saved people” how they are to understand their new-found relationship to each other and God. Platt is concerned for the billion people in our world today “who will not go to heaven because they have never heard of Christ” and are “dying and going to hell without ever knowing there is a gospel.” But Paul mentions neither heaven nor hell in the book of Romans! Because his point is elsewhere. 

Add to this the fact that for all Platt’s talk of the gospel being “God-centered,” I’m a bit disappointed that he spends most of his time in this chapter discussing humanity and our falleness (which Platt, by the way, attributes to the sovereign determination of God, which acted prior to human free will!). Even under point 5 where he talks about what God has done to make a way for us, he gives all of two or three lines discussing the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the rest of the time he spends pounding the gavel of exclusivism in a pluralistic world. Another subject Paul doesn’t discuss in Romans, though he has a ton to say about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Platt’s discussion is lopsided because his theology is lopsided. And his exegesis is lopsided because he fails to do the hard work of biblical interpretation in Romans. Rather, he just assumes he knows what the book is about. 

In the end, when we reduce the gospel to nothing more than “getting people saved” by taking them through Platt’s 7 points, we are left with no conception of the recreation of all things beginning in the present age, no conception of how the gospel brings heaven to earth in the present age (in fact, quite the opposite, on page 179, Platt contends this world is not our home, which is the opposite of what the NT writers claimed!), no conception of how resurrection life begins in the present age. Instead, what we get is a lot of guilt, a brief mention of a God who died and rose for us, and then a commission to go out to the world in order to make them feel guilty with our proof-texts and then mention at the end that they, too, can be saved because Jesus died and rose again….that is, they can be saved if God doesn’t hate them (but we’ll get to that in a bit).  

For all our arguments over the bodily resurrection of Jesus, if we do not offer a salvation to the world that actually means something to their physical, this-worldly existence (not denying, of course, that there’s a next wordly aspect to our salvation…but even it is physical!), then our cognitive assent to the bodily resurrection of Jesus is meaningless act of the intellect. 

While there is truth to Platt’s understanding of the gospel (we are all, indeed, sinners who cannot save ourselves!), I merely contend that it is not a robust enough understanding of the gospel. If Evangelicalism is to have a powerful voice in our culture, then we need a deeper, more biblical understanding of the gospel and how the scriptures speak of the gospel. 

Platt is writing for the church in this book. He’s not writing for non-Christians. Thus, I contend that he missed an opportunity to do exactly  what Paul did in Romans – preach the gospel to the church and show her how it matters to how she lives her everyday life. Platt had an opportunity to spell out, for the church, what words like ‘gospel,’ ‘justification,’ ‘atonement,’ etc. mean in the context of Romans. But Platt  assumes (a faulty assumption, in my opinion) that the readers of his book already understand these terms and goes on to reinforce the old Evangelism-technique approach to Romans. Such an approach, unfortunately, leaves Paul’s intentions in Romans behind and leaves the modern reader lacking a fuller understanding of Scripture. As a pastor who happens to believe these words matter to our everyday lives, Platt’s approach genuinely saddens me. I wish he had used his platform better. 

This is not a matter of me complaining Platt is not scholarly enough. And, really, this is not a matter of me singling out Platt for his reduced gospel. This is a frustration I have with the larger Evangelical community in general. Our gospel is reduced to “getting sinners into heaven” instead of making disciples of Jesus who bring heaven to earth. We all, not just David Platt, need to repent of this.

Things I’ve (Re)Learned from the Rob Bell Saga

• Before we say, “I disagree,” we should be able to say, “I truly understand.” There’s no point in disagreeing with something we haven’t made sure we fully understand. When we disagree prematurely all we’re really saying is, “You’re not going to change my mind; don’t confuse me with the facts.”

• Some people get offended by criticism no matter what. There have been good-critical reviews of Bell’s book. There have been bad-critical reviews of Bell’s book. The trick is to understand the difference, not just throw all criticism together in the trash-heap of “Rob-Bell-Haters.” And the other trick is to be able to take criticism without always seeing it as a personal attack. Criticism, when done correctly, can only make us better people.

• The word “heretic” is almost useless the way we use it. As are the words “orthodox,” “conservative,” and “liberal.” In the end, the way we use these words essentially says more about us than they do about the person we’re criticizing. In the Evangelical world, “heretic” and “liberal” are simply those who disagree with “me.” And “conservative” and “orthodox” are those who happen to agree with me. In other words, we’ve abandoned the actual definitions of these words for uses of these words that are polarizing and promote distrust and misunderstanding instead of understanding. Therefore, our uses of these words make them ultimately useless.

• Some people are heresy hunters. They’re looking for ways to denounce people who don’t agree with them as apostates to the gospel. I attribute this to a messiah-complex whereby they see themselves as the last true Christians on the planet. This kind of elitism is unfortunate and will ultimately lead to their irrelevance in our culture. And this makes me sad because their passion could be beneficial to the kingdom of God.

• Some people are just naïve. People will tack themselves to personalities instead of the gospel. They will defend a person regardless of what they say, simply because they like the person. Rob Bell could’ve denied the gospel and some people would’ve followed him because they love Bell more than the gospel. On the other side, Kevin DeYoung could’ve been an absolute jerk in response to Bell and people will defend him with scripture because they loved his polemics over Paul’s call to unity in I Corinthians.

To all such people, I ask this: Was Rob Bell Crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Kevin DeYoung?

• John 17 is completely ignored by most American Christians. We prefer disunity over unity. We prefer schism to an appreciation of diversity. We prefer ousting people from both heaven and the church over opening our arms as wide as God’s. And, guess what! The world was watching. And you know what they saw? Christians fighting…again. Isn’t it funny how every time we make national media it’s because we’re fighting for, over, or against something? So much for them knowing us by our love and unity.

• We are sheep. This whole saga was a marketing ploy by HarperOne. And it worked. We did exactly what they expected. They, and they alone, are the true winners in this. And boy did they win – last I heard Bell’s book was #6 on Amazon.

• We pastor’s have done a terrible job of teaching our people that the goal of salvation isn’t a good after-life in Heaven, but that Heaven begins in this life….salvation begins in this life. We aren’t waiting for Heaven; we’re co-workers with God bringing Heaven to earth. Until we get this straight, we will continue to misunderstand the gospel.

• Those who use the keys of death and Hell are often trying to unlock the doors of power. Do you want power over a person, a culture, or a movement? Just threaten to unleash Hell against all potential deviants. Not only will you end all rational discussion, but you’ll effectively control both those who are already convinced you’re right AND those who don’t think you’re right, but are afraid of you. People throughout the centuries have believed that the threat of Hell holds the potential to control empires. And they are right…until they are wrong. People can be controlled by the threat of Hell for a short time, but they can’t thrive under the threat of Hell…and sooner or later they will be so desperate for real, thriving life that they won’t be manipulated by fear anymore. The power of the gospel, then, is not in the threat of Hell, but the beauty of Jesus Christ.

• Rob Bell is apparently more of a danger to orthodox Christianity than a tsunami is to the Japanese coastline. Since we’re talking about Hell and all, I find it interesting that in the separation of the sheep from the goats, Jesus is clear that one’s eschatology (doctrine of the Last Things) is not the deciding factor in where people spend eternity, but rather, one’s response to human suffering is. I am saddened by myself and others who followed this saga more closely than we followed the tragedy in Japan, who have fretted over this saga more than we’ve fretted over dead babies in Japan, who have prayed more about Rob Bell than we’ve prayed for God’s presence in Japan. It’s time for me to repent.

Is there anything you’d add to my list?

Forget Soul-Winning, Let’s Be Friends

As a young Christian I used to haunt “The Square,” a single city block in downtown Springfield, Missouri. This was the Friday night hangout Springfield’s Trench Coat Mafia types who would congregate and party all night. I frequented their Friday assemblage, not because I enjoyed donning Goth garb and dying my hair a depressing shade of black, but because I wanted to “win[1] those lost souls to Jesus!”

On occasion this necessitated sermonizing to several sinners at once, but most often it was just me, dressed in my khakis pants and American Eagle polo, having an awkward conversation with a single person who was frenetically looking to flee because they rightfully perceived my plan to manipulate the conversation toward sin, salvation, and their eternal damnation.

As many of you know from your own experience, these exchanges were artificial and fated to fail. At best, people would politely converse with me because they were interested in discussing spirituality. At worst, they expressed downright anger – and not necessarily for “gospel” related reasons.[2]

For those of you zealous to share the good news of a crucified and risen Jesus with everyone you meet, let me propose a better alternative to this awkwardness: Friendship.

I know friendship is a peculiar sort of proposal in the world of Josh McDowell and Kirk Cameron, but humor me for a moment.

If you want to share a truncated gospel with someone, you can easily memorize Ray Comfort’s conversation-manipulator-techniques; you can mimic Josh McDowell’s “reasons;” or you can even street preach as passionate as Billy Graham.

But none of those things can replace having a genuine friendship with another person and therefore none of them exhibit a genuine concern for the person after salvation. Thus, they represent a truncated, stymied gospel, not only in the verbal presentation, but more specifically in the way you live it out. .

In genuine friendship you desire what’s best for a person. And as a Christian, you probably believe that what’s “best” is found in a relationship with Jesus. But because you are a friend, you never manipulate conversations, you never preach at someone, and you never violate your friends trust only befriending them for the purposes of gospel-expansion. Because the kind of friendship based on “soul-winning” is more damning than Ray Comfort or Kirk Cameron are willing to admit.

But genuine friendship, for its own sake, is never damning, even when it must respectfully disagree.

I am not advocating a silence about the gospel – indeed, I am telling you, by your friendship, to be an even more faithful prophet through your life and words spoken in a timely, not a hurried, manner. Genuine friendship with someone, based on mutual respect and love always trumps a 5 minute, stilted conversation. Indeed, it makes such a weird conversation unnecessary because you’re not trying to manipulate anyone.

In a world aware of the church’s sex scandals, hypocrisy, and our outdated soul-winning tactics, street preaching and fly-by evangelism are not sufficient (assuming they ever were!). In this disconnected and disillusioned world, there is no greater testimony to the gospel than genuine friendship, especially with those who are religiously different than we are. And that, friends, will take our time, efforts, and vulnerability – all things which drive-through evangelism is simply uninterested in.

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[1] Notice the “win” language here. As I will argue, genuine friendship is not about “winning” a competition or a war. Genuine friendship is about inviting people into a journey that you exemplify in your own life, but do not force upon them.

[2] Even when someone did ‘pray the prayer,’ I didn’t have a genuine friendship with them to know if they were really ‘saved’ or not. Of course, that didn’t matter to me at the time. After all, they had their Fire Insurance, didn’t they?

Seminary is Not Cemetery

When I left the Christian security blanket of Hannibal La-Grange College for the supposed secular cesspool of the University of Missouri, I had well-intended friends who were worried about whether my faith would wane in its confidence. While I had no such worries, I without a doubt did wonder what ways I would come out the other end a different man. After all, all worthwhile education ought to transform the student in some way or another.

But although friends articulated such apprehension at my attending a secular school, I actually may have amassed more words of alarm when I departed for seminary. Indeed, I cannot even add up the amount of times I heard the axiom “seminary is cemetery.”

Such outspoken angst in both instances made me wonder if Evangelicals often just don’t have a fear of higher education – as Mark Noll more than hints at in his 1995 book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” where he prophetically calls the American church out on her anti-intellectualism.

But in the end, my concern in this post is to lay those fears to rest. Yes, of course, in my education at both the University of Missouri and Asbury Theological Seminary, my life has been dramatically changed.

Being at Mizzou didn’t ruin my faith – it informed it, fleshed it out, confirmed it, and challenged it to think more deeply about the this-worldly, everyday aspects of my theology. I wouldn’t change my time there for the world. I still engage the world with some of the valuable lenses I was given as a graduate student at Mizzou.

And as a graduating seminary student, I can tell you that my seminary experience has also been anything but death for my spiritual life. Seminary has helped me see the value of orthodox theology and orthodox practice for the everyday things in life. I don’t think anyone who spends any time with me would say that seminary was cemetery for me. In a lot of ways, seminary has brought new life to my Christian walk – new life that will encourage and challenge me throughout the rest of my life.

So if anyone tells you that seminary is a cemetery for good Christians, they are either ignorant or foolish. I don’t doubt that some people have bad seminary experiences. And I don’t doubt that there are bad seminaries out there. But let’s not take the exception to the rule and apply it like it’s a universal axiom.

The Christian faith is not anti-intellectual. The Christian life is a place where, as Asbury says it, “head and heart go hand in hand.”

Theology Gone Funny: Rapture Edition

Almost everyone can appreciate good Rapture humor…

The Demise of American Christianity?

In light of a few recent articles on the demise of American Christianity, I found this post by Greg Boyd to be extremely thoughtful and right on the mark. My thoughts lined up quite nicely with his as I read the articles he references. While people like Albert Mohler are fighting to maintain Christianity as America’s Civil Religion, Boyd is calling for a distinctive witness that is authentic and not concerned at all with relevance or efficiency. Let me know what you think…
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“Don’t Weep For the Demise of American Christianity”

I’ve come across two very interesting and insightful essays this week on the demise of American Christianity. The first is Michael Spencer’s “The coming evangelical collapse” published in the Christian Science Monitor, and the second is Jon Meacham’s “The End of Christian America” published in Newsweek. Meacham discusses the decline of Christianity in America in general while Spencer discusses what he believes is the soon and inevitable demise of Evangelicalism in particular. In this post I’d like to provide a brief overview of both articles (supplemented by some information from Christine Wicker’s The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church (HarperCollins, 2008), and then offer my own assessment of this demise.

The Demise of Christianity

There are many indications that Christianity in America is in rather rapid decline. For example, the percentage of self-identifying Christians has fallen 10 points over the last decade (down to 76 percent). According to a recent Newsweek Poll, the percentage of people who think that America is “a Christian Nation” has dropped 7 percent in the last year (down to 62 percent). And the percent of those who say that religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems” is at a historic low – down to 48 percent (it never dropped below 58 percent until the last few years).

There are indications that conservative Christianity (Evangelicalism) is being hit particularly hard by this downward turn. (See Christine Wicker’s The Fall of the Evangelical Nation for superb research supporting this claim). While some megachurches continue to grow, the majority of smaller evangelical churches are shrinking (in part because many of their members are migrating to the “full service oriented” model of the megachurches). Yet, there is an over-all net loss of church attenders each year, though this is somewhat concealed by the fact that most conservative churches are reticent to take members off their membership rolls as well as by the tendency of evangelical churches and organizations [especially Southern Baptists, according to Wicker] to grossly exaggerate their numbers (see The Fall of the Evangelical Nation for a full exposé on this trend).

Also significant is the fact that the average age of attendees in conservative churches is rising and there are many indications that the largely personality driven mega-church phenomenon was a “baby-boomer” trend that will likely die with this generation. In light of these and other indications, Spencer goes so far as to predict that ”[w]ithin two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants.” “The end of evangelicalism as we know it,” he argues, “ is close.” More generally, Meacham argues that America is entering into a “post-Christian” epoch.

The Cause of the Decline

What has brought about this decline? The answer to this question is, of course, very complex, but from these essays two factors stand out.

First, as Spencer notes, American evangelical churches have been, to a large degree, gutted by good old fashion American pragmatism. We’ve become preoccupied with being “relevant” and “efficient” at the expense of holding fast to the theological depth of our biblically based traditions. Megachurches in particular are guilty of this – which in part explains why they become megachurches, for relevance and efficiency sell well to baby boomers. (To younger folks, not so much.) Spencer refers to this, quite appropriately, as the “megachurch vacuity.”

Spencer wonders whether “the coming collapse” of Evangelicalism will “get Evangelicals past the pragmatism and shallowness that has brought about the loss of substance and power?” He’s not very optimistic, however. While he’s quite sure Evangelicalism will continue to decline, he also somewhat caustically anticipates that “[t]he purveyors of the evangelical circus will be in fine form, selling their wares as the promised solution to every church’s problems. I expect the landscape of megachurch vacuity to be around for a very long time.”

A second important factor, which both Spencer and Meacham stress, is that Evangelicals “have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism.” Spencer notes that “[w]e fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.” Even some of the staunchest guards of conservative Evangelicalism are beginning to see this.

For example, Alert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, concedes that “[t]he worst fault of evangelicals in terms of politics over the last 30 years has been an incredible naiveté about politics and politicians and parties.” Manifesting typical Constantinian triumphalism, many conservative American Christians naively thought we could transform American society in a “Christian” direction by acquiring political power to enforce our (self-proclaimed) superior views on selected topics (especially abortion, gay marriage, creationism in schools and stem cell research) on the broader culture. It has not gone well, to say the least.

After 40 years of intense political involvement, Evangelicals have little positive to show for their efforts. To the contrary, we’ve arguably only succeeded in getting multitudes of non-Christians [or simply non-Evangelicals] to distain us and the “Good News” message we’re supposed to be bringing. (A great book on the [mostly negative] non-Christian perceptions of Evangelicals in America is UnChristian by David Kinnamen and Gabe Lyons). Now that the political parties and positions Evangelicals largely identified with have fallen on hard times, Evangelicals have, to a significant extent, fallen with them.

Is The Demise of the Christian Religion a Bad Thing?

For those who are heavily invested in the Christian religion, at least as it’s usually been understood in America, the news that America is entering into a “post-Christian” epoch is understandably alarming. As Meacham makes apparent in his article, people like Albert Mohler find the indisputable evidence of Christianity’s demise in America deeply disturbing. Mohler vows to fight this demise tooth and nail, predicting that a “new generation of young pastors” is about to rise up “to push back against hell in bold and visionary ministry.” “Expect to see the sparks fly,” he adds.

Personally, I strongly suspect that all such “spark flying” efforts on the part the righteous to protect us sinners from ourselves will only speed Christianity’s demise.

Others of us interpret the demise of Christianity and America’s descent into a “post-Christian” epoch quite differently. Indeed, I and many others see this as good news! Yes, the loss of a Judeo-Christian civic religion may bring about a greater degree of moral and religious relativism and intensify American’s moral decadence. This is admittedly unnerving. But here are six reasons why I do not think Kingdom people should weep over the demise of American Christianity.

1. America has never been, and will never be, a “Christian” nation in any significant sense. Among other things, America, like every other fallen, demonically-oppressed nation (see Lk. 4:5-7; 2 Cor. 4:4; I Jn. 5:19; Rev. 13), is incapable of loving its enemies, doing good to those who mistreat it or blessing those who persecute it (Lk. 6:27-35). By applying the term “Christian” to America, we’ve massively watered down its meaning — which undoubedly helps explain why the vast majority of American Christians assume being “Christian” is perfectly compatible with hating and killing your national enemies if and when your earthly Commander and Chief asks you to. The sooner the label “Christian” gets divorced form this country, the better. It provides hope that someday the word “Christian” might actually mean “Christ-like” once again.

2. Related to this, there’s a good bit of research demonstrating that the majority of American’s identify themselves as “Christian” when asked by a pollster, but when asked what this label actually means in terms of core values and lifestyle choices, it becomes apparent that for the majority of them the meaning of “Christian” is basically “American.” I submit that the main problem Kingdom people confront in spreading the Kingdom in America is that a majority of people assume they are already in the Kingdom — they are “Christian” — simply by virtue of being American or because they prayed a certain prayer or go to Church once a year, or whatever. If fewer people are identifying themselves as “Christian,” this is good, for it means there’s one less major illusion that Kingdom people have to confront and work through as they invite these folks into the Kingdom.

3. If Evangelicals lose all their political clout, we may be less tempted to lust after political power, which means we may have one less distraction from actually doing what God called us to do — namely, manifesting God’s reign by how we humbly live, love and serve.

4. As my friend Alan Hirsch demonstrates in his great book, The Forgotten Ways, the Kingdom has always thrived — and really, has only thrived — when it was on the margins of society. The Kingdom is, by its very nature, a “contrast society.” If Christians lose all their power and position in society and become marginalized, this can’t help but be good for the Kingdom. If Christians become persecuted, it likely will be even better. We’d be turning back the clock from the disaster of Constantinian triumphalist Christianity in the direction of Apostolic, servant Christianity.

5. The “Christian” element of American culture was never deeper than the thin veneer of a shared civic religion. A major problem Kingdom people have faced on the mission field of America is that the majority of people mistook the civic religion for the real thing. So it is that so many think that being “Christian” is focused on preserving the civic religion (e.g. fighting for prayer before sports events, keeping the ten commandments on government buildings, holding onto a “Christian” definition of marriage within our government, etc.). Not only this, but this veneer of Christianity causes Jesus followers not to notice the many ways foundational assumptions that permeate American culture are diametrically opposed to the values of the Kingdom. If the civic religion of Christianity were to die, Kingdom people would be less tempted to associate Christianity with symbolic civic functions and would become more aware of how the Kingdom sharply contrasts with foundational aspects of American culture.

6. Finally, and closely related to this, if Jesus followers lose all their position and power and become a minority (or better, revealed to have always been a minority) in American culture, this will expose the idol of American individualism we have bought into for far too long and perhaps help us realize that we need to cling to each other and that the Kingdom is inherently communal. We are called to manifest God’s uniquely beautiful love and bear witness to the reality of Jesus Christ by how we share our lives and serve one another (e.g. Jn. 17:20-26; Acts 2: 42-47. 4: 42-45). But its very difficult for many of us to embrace radical Kingdom community when we can get along very well (by American standards of “well”) without it. The demise of Constantinian American Christianity would serve us well by stripping us of the privilege of individualistic living.

Other possible positive outcomes of the demise of American Christianity could be listed, but this must suffice for now. I hope it is enough to show that, from a Kingdom perspective, the demise of American Christianity is not something we should weep over. To the contrary, its actually good news. Yes, it will likely bring about cultural disarray. But, as has often been noted, the Kingdom thrives best when the broader cultural is falling apart. The God-given mandate to Kingdom people is not to keep the broader culture from falling apart, but to offer all who are hungry a radically different, far more beautiful, way of doing life. And often people will not take this offer seriously until everything else is crumbling around them.

Let the civic religion die. And if the culture crumbles, it crumbles. Our task is to live in a way that gives people hope.

HT: Greg Boyd – http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/dont-weep-for-the-demise-of-american-christianity/