Brian Labosier © May 12, 2021
Most of us would readily admit we live in strange days in twenty-first century America. Alan Dunn in his essay in a new Festschrift in honor of the well-known Reformed Baptist pastor Albert Martin (A Workman Not Ashamed, Free Grace Press, 2021) makes several startling observations regarding the state of the church in contemporary America.
- First, he reports a conversation he had recently in China with a Chinese pastor, who told him that he and others were praying for American Christians. So far, so good. But then his Chinese friend went on to say he was praying specifically that “American Christians would be persecuted!” Needless to say, this is not the way most of us pray for ourselves. Dunn concludes with the question: “Will the Lord answer his prayer?” (page 113).
- Then Dunn goes on to share his own analysis of the church: “we in America nestle in the seductive embrace of the Babylonian Harlot” (page 113). Here he is picking up on the imagery of the epitome of spiritual opposition in the end times, especially as this is described for us in Revelation 14-18. What is significant is that Dunn is assuming we are already experiencing at least some of the beginning phases of this final period of great spiritual opposition.
- As he concludes his chapter, Dunn raises the following question: “What might be in store for us American Christians who, in large measure, live in Vanity Fair?” (page 125). A footnote references John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as the source of this imagery of the seductive power of the world around us.
Whether you agree with every detail in Dunn’s analysis, his conclusion remains: we are living in a broken world where conditions are far more likely to get worse, rather than better.
What makes Dunn’s analysis so surprising to at least some of us is that we have bought into the mistaken assumption that America is inherently a Christian nation that occupies a unique and privileged place in God’s sovereign plan. Some of us may even operate under the illusion that the vast majority of our nation’s founding fathers were orthodox, gospel-believing Christians and that all we need to do today is to get back to Christian America. Certainly, there were a number of bright spots in the history of our country, but there is also the reality that this hypothetical golden age of the past wasn’t really as golden or as widespread as we might think.
We confirm we have bought into these kinds of faulty assumptions every time we are surprised when our politicians and those in the popular media express views that are totally opposed to God and biblical principles. Shouldn’t we expect nonbelievers to respond as nonbelievers? We also confirm our commitment to these mistaken views every time we assume that our present-day situation can be remedied simply by human means: getting the right politicians elected, or writing enough letters of protest to our congressmen and senators, or taking a public stand for traditional morality.
But we do need to recognize that we are rapidly moving into a new and different world that is far removed from any remaining vestiges of a Judeo-Christian world-and-life view. Whatever glimmers of hope we may have seen in the past regarding the Christian nature of our country have now largely disappeared. We live in a broken world, and it has not left the church untouched.
Perhaps unwittingly, those of us in the church have bought into the American dream ourselves with its focus on material comforts, multiple cars, a nice home, a comfortable retirement to look forward to. We have unconsciously accepted many of the values of the materialistic world in which we live simply through the air we breathe from the surrounding culture. The bottom line here is that many of us don’t understand God and His ways as clearly as we should.
The present attack on the gospel is nothing new. God’s character and the trustworthiness of His Word have been the focus of specific attack from the very beginning of human history. Satan and his strategies haven’t changed that much over the centuries. The exact packaging and configuration of evil and worldliness may well change from time to time and place to place, but its basic essence as rebellion against God remains unchanged. We see this attack illustrated for us in the story of the Fall with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3 when they chose to rebel against God and align themselves with Satan. Adam and Eve haven’t been the only people to question the truthfulness of God and His ways and chart out a pathway of pride and rebellion. Ever since then, Satan has continued to sow doubt and confusion, and people have continued to rebel against God and to resist God’s message of grace.
Today we live in a time of increasing biblical and theological illiteracy. Despite increasing knowledge in many areas of life, people know less and less about God and the core truths of the Bible, including the gospel message. We are witnessing firsthand the intensity of the present-day battle for the minds and hearts of people and how these attacks are focused on the core truths of the gospel: the greatness and love of God, our desperate need of His rescue, the amazing story of God’s gracious provision for us in Christ, and the wonder of His plan to call out a people for Himself where He will be their God and they will be His people by His grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Instead of focusing on a distinctly God-centered gospel, too many today have succumbed to the temptation of concentrating on a man-centered or self-centered gospel, as they try to entertain those in the pew and build humanly successful churches.
We shouldn’t be surprised that God and His ways are under attack, yet many of us are still caught off guard by it. It is often hard to recognize the world in which we live. We are confronted by questions that seemed inconceivable to most of us only a very few short years ago. At least one college has offered 43 options on its application form to answer the question of one’s gender. Recent studies have shown that one in six young people now have questions about their own sexual identity. We truly live in a changing world.
We have known for some time that we live in an age of relativism where there are no absolutes. Even as long ago as 1998, David Wells reported that “67 percent of Americans do not believe in the existence of moral absolutes and that 70 percent do not believe in absolute truth” (Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, Eerdmans, 1998, page 26).
Contemporary evangelicalism has also changed much in recent years. In 2012, Michael Horton wrote a book entitled Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of The American Church (Baker). We could easily wonder how Christianity could ever be Christless? But this seems to be the case in many churches. More recently, Jonathan Tjarks wrote a December 4, 2019 article for The Gospel Coalition, “Your Neighbor Is Probably a Unitarian Universalist,” where he argues that “Unitarian Universalism is already the default option in American life.” Unitarianism involves, among other things, a flat denial of the deity of Christ and a rejection of any traditional understanding of the Trinity, with at best, a vague concept of the existence and character of God. Julius Kim, the President of The Gospel Coalition, warns about “a church in America that is ultimately Christless.” Still more recently (August 9, 2020), Joe Carter wrote The Gospel Coalition article, “Survey: Majority of American Christians Don’t Believe the Gospel.” Again, this seems like an oxymoron: how can Christians not believe the gospel of Christ?
Sadly, at least to judge by the popular contemporary church around us, a haze about the person and work of Christ has settled over the teaching and preaching in many places, leading to all kinds of faulty views of God and His ways. Spiritual confusion is nothing new; but its presence is growing, and the pace of this change seems to be accelerating. It is easy to feel unnerved—and rightly so.