The Protestant disease


The disease decimating mainline Protestantism has two main symptoms:


  • Cheap-grace antinomianism that holds forth the promise of forgiveness, without issuing the call for amendment of life. Thus, only half of the message of grace is preached, the more appealing part. "Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" Well, yes, for who are we to judge? After all, judge not! This fatuous self-excusal from seeing ourselves as moral failures leads to a distorted understanding of reality, for from time to time we all fall down morally, and there is none of us who could not do with a bit more holiness.
  • Social syncretism. The mainline senses the spirit of the age and confuses that with hearing the Holy Spirit. Societal causes and movements are force-fit into a Christian frame. The loud debate about the authority of scripture is really a debate about this. For example, the church now feels an imperative toward marrying homosexuals to each other, the scriptures do not provide for anything of the sort, and so the scriptures must be downgraded in importance, radically re-interpreted, or both.

The whole of the message of grace, even the inconvenient part of it, is important. We fail to be and to become all that we might, if we fail to see God's grace as challenging us, and empowering us, to grow morally. It is tempting to say instead that grace undoes the question of our sinfulness entirely: God's love erases such considerations. Moral questions thus fade into irrelevance. That has enough truth in it to make it a dangerous idea.

A particular habit in understanding the Bible helps us to find our way in a changing world. It is the habit of comparing current events to scriptures to understand the events. Not the reverse: Events are not used to tell us how to appraise the scriptures. Peter demonstrated the right pattern on Pentecost when he looked at what was transpiring and said, "This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel." In the like way, until quite recently, even mainline Protestants read Romans 1 as saying that spiritual, cultural and sexual depravity walk together. Chapter 2 goes on to assure us that everyone in the fallen creation is guilty of something. We have, in our day, Protestant debates on the authority of scripture for a reason that is perfectly obvious. Sometimes the Bible offers us bitter pills.

It is those bitter pills that are the cure for the Protestant disease. We find ourselves in a peculiar situation. Christendom now has in it a component, mainline Protestantism, that is refusing to take its medicine. The medicine is not important, they say, or not what we need in the present day. The troubling thought this raises, for me at least, is that it is not the well but the sick who have need of the Physician, who came to call not the righteous, but rather sinners, to repentance. (Mark 2:17)

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