David Wells discusses the fundamental difference between biblical Christianity and pagan spirituality, and shows that many who call themselves “Christian” and “evangelical” actually have more in common with pagan religion than with Christianity.
Christian and Pagan Paths
There are two families of spirituality in life. Within each are many differences, much as there are within human family members. But what distinguishes them most importantly is that one begins above and moves down whereas the other begins below and tries to move up (or perhaps in). One starts with God and reaches into sinful life whereas the other starts in human consciousness and tries to reach above to make connections in the divine. One is Christian and the other pagan. These are the two fundamental spiritualities in the West today.
Throughout the Old Testament this earthy, pagan spirituality was constantly being engaged both outside and inside Israel. Readers today associate this paganism mostly with its more vivid, reprehensible episodes such as sacrificing children to Molech, or Jezebel’s flock of priests who tried to keep Baal content and whom Elijah faced off against. But beneath it all were assumptions of a spiritual kind that are often missed. These spiritual assumptions have persisted across the ages, coming down into our present moment, even though today the barbaric practices that went hand in glove with this ancient paganism in the Old Testament period have passed away.
These spiritual assumptions were present in the New Testament period, too. The apostles confronted them. Yet the church did not really enter into a life-and-death struggle until the centuries that fol lowed immediately on the patristic period. At stake was its very exis tence. Would it think of its faith as the grace of God coming from “above,” being incarnate in the Son, and conquering sin and death on the cross? And would it insist, against great cultural pressure, that there is absolutely nothing sinners can do to reach upward to God, to connect with him or to influence him, that he has had to reach down to us through his Son? Or would it allow for the possibility that sinners can reach down into themselves and find solace there in the sacred? Can they make this connection by their own religious effort? The apos tles had made their argument that the real and saving spirituality was from above and not, in these ways, from below. The early church, for the most part, followed.
This life-and-death struggle was therefore won, for the moment, by upholding the New Testament’s doctrines of incarnation, grace, atonement, and resurrection. However, this message was soon lost in the Middle Ages. Luther in the sixteenth century, followed by Calvin and the other Reformers, once again returned to Scripture and once again resounded the notes of God’s undeserved grace, coming from above, which alone enables sinners to know him. Christianity is not about sinners lifting themselves up to God but about God coming down in condescension and grace to them.
Biblical spirituality and our contemporary spirituality are not two variations on the same theme. They are stark alternatives to each other. In the one, God reaches down in grace; in the other, the sinner reaches up (or in) in self-sufficiency. These spiritualities belong in dif ferent worlds, one moral in its fabric and the other psychological. One thinks in terms of salvation, the other of healing. One results in holiness, the other looks for wholeness. In the one, God’s sovereignty is seen in the establishment of what is spiritual; in the other, a human-seized sovereignty is at work to create its own spirituality. Between these two kinds of spirituality there can be no accord, no peace, no cooperation. The one excludes the other. This is the message we have heard from the apostles. This is the message that was recovered at the time of the Reformation. And this is the message that should be resounding in the church today.
The church, however, is courted in every age by the alternative counterfeit spirituality, first in one form and then in another. Today the evangelical church is in a life-and-death struggle with this spiritual alternative, even as the apostles were in the New Testament period and the prophets were in the Old Testament. Today this pagan spirituality comes, not in barbaric forms of child sacrifice — assuming that abortion is more about convenience than spirituality — but in the innocent tones of popular culture. We meet it everywhere.
Sometimes it is dressed up in sophisticated psychological lan guage. More commonly we hear it in the everyday self-talk of our therapeutic culture. It is there in the television chatter, in the magzines near the checkout counter at the supermarket, and it is mentioned between neighbors. This understanding of being spiritual sounds plausible, compelling, innocent, and even commendable, but, let us make no mistake about it, it is lethal to biblical Christianity. That is why the biggest enigma we face today is the fact that its chief enablers are evangelical churches, especially those who are seeker-sensitive and emergent who, for different reasons, are selling spirituality disconnected from biblical truth.
The seeker-sensitive are adapting their product to a spiritual market that believes it can have spiritual comfort with very little truth. The emergents are adapting their product to a spiritual market that is younger, postmodern, and leery about truth. But in both cases we see this strange anomaly. Here are those who think of themselves as being biblical, as being the children of the New Testament, the followers of Jesus and the apostles, embracing an alternative spirituality in order either to be successful or to be culturally cutting-edge.
—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 176–178.
TrackBack URL: http://www.thirstytheologian.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/879
Share this post:
Posted in: Church & Culture · David Wells · The Courage to be Protestant
Link · 0 TrackBacks
← Previous · Home · Next →
Comments on this post are closed. If you have a question or comment concerning this post, feel free to email us.