That’s the basic idea, with an important siderail - where they disagreed, the revivalist view often won out. Why? Because they were the dominant group. So where Machen and the dispensationalists differed, the dispensational view won out. Part of the problem was that the major educational institutions of Machen’s tradition were largely wiped out by modernism. They took some steps to address it, but in the interval, the institutions of the other factions - like Moody and Biola - became dominant. So when young Christian men went to school to study for pastoral ministry, they landed at the revivalists’ institutions much of the time.

What was characteristic of this theology that came to be dominant from the 1930s-1970s in American evangelicalism? Here I’m going to highlight three basic theological tenets and two characteristics.

1) Inerrancy - They saw the Bible as the inerrant and authoritative word of God.

2) The exclusivity of Christ - Faith in Jesus was the only means of salvation.

3) Dispensational premillenialism - This view sees Israel and the Church as being completely separate peoples of God. Israel is God’s Old Testament work to whom certain promises have not yet been fulfilled. The Church is God’s New Testament work whose time in the limelight is essentially an intermission before God finishes his work with Israel beginning in the Tribulation. From this view came several key points - the idea that the church’s time was short and therefore evangelization was the foremost priority, the idea that the world will be destroyed and therefore social issues are not important, and the idea that Old Testament ethical standards are not meant for the Church.

4) A suspicion of the academic - Beginning with the creation/evolution debates, mid 20th century evangelicalism was generally suspicious of the academy. Going back to their southern revivalist roots and the low view of the church inherent in Baptist and Methodist theology, it was thought that people only needed to read the Bible and take it literally to discern truth.

5) An essentially adversarial relationship to the non-Christian western world. While mid 20th century evangelicalism had a very sympathetic relationship with non-Christians abroad, seeing them as essentially lost and needy people they could help, they saw non-Christians in the United States in very adversarial terms. There’s a variety of factors contributing to this - the fundamentalist/modernist riff, the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Red Scares, and their reading of certain biblical texts.

This was the general consensus amongst most evangelicals until the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rapidly changing world prompted a crisis in evangelicalism, which caused a significant shift beginning in the mid to late 1970s. We’ll pick up there tomorrow.

First, we’ll need to describe the basic view-point Tullian is getting at in Unfashionable. The way of thinking espoused by Tullian is largely novel in the broadly evangelical movement in the USA so the discussion has arose as a result of this view’s challenge of the general status quo amongst evangelicals.

The difficulty here then is that before we can describe the view Tullian is getting at we need historical background on how the dominant evangelical view came to be what it is. So here’s a thumbnail sketch:

With the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, Baptists and Methodists became the dominant denominations in the United States. Congregationalism and Presbyterianism tried to hold on in the northeast with limited success with Presbyterianism also developing in a slightly different direction in the south, but by and large the Methodists and Baptists were dominant.

A tangential, but important, point: The basic theology of the Methodists and Baptists goes back to the Anabaptists, the basic theology of the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians goes back to John Calvin.

The key point with this is that both the Methodist and Baptist traditions represent a low view of the church - by which I mean an essentially congregational, or independent, church government and an understanding that the church is best defined as a gathering of justified individuals whose purpose is to evangelize. Due to this high emphasis on the individual, both of these traditions tend to be very egalitarian and populist by nature - this was often a reaction to the perceived excessive intellectualism of the northeastern Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The different attitudes toward intellectualism could also be seen as divided along geographic lines, with the north being the seat of a more urbanized, pro-academy form of Christianity and the south being more rural and skeptical of the academy.

Then, in the late 19th century as theological liberalism began to develop in Germany, it made its way into Congregationalism and northern Presbyterianism first. This isn’t at all surprising given the adversarial relationship between the Methodists and the Baptists and the academy and the relatively cozy relationship between the northern Christians and the same academy. As the 20th century dawned, theological liberalism became the dominant view in the northern churches. Conservative Presbyterians in the north - like J. Gresham Machen - reacted strongly against this trend, but fought a losing battle in their denominations.

Meanwhile, the Baptists and Methodists continued to thrive in the south. Additionally, other groups began to crop up, particularly in areas that had experienced many revivals where the experiential nature of the Christian faith was the primary emphasis. It was at this time that the teachings of an Englishman named John Nelson Darby began to become more prominent through his followers, the Plymouth Brethren. Those teachings, an early form of dispensationalism, became more prominent with the release of the first study Bible featuring the notes of Darby’s follower C.I. Scofield. There was also a burgeoning Pentecostal movement. However, the dominant group continued to be the revivalist Baptist and Methodists.

To simplify what happened next - Machen and other conservative northerners began to align with the southern groups. They had significant disagreements with them - principally on issues related to the End Times - but they saw those issues as being trivial when compared with the larger disagreements they had with liberals in their own denomination in the north. The result was a loosely-bound coalition of revivalists (like Billy Sunday), Pentecostals, dispensationalists (like Scofield), and the odd conservative Presbyterian (like Machen).

The result was that some of the views espoused by Calvin and his followers were generally marginalized. The primary points of emphasis became those issues where the conservative Presbyterians and the more experiential, revivalistic Christians of the south could agree. Those points, which form the foundation for evangelicalism up till the mid 1970s will be discussed tomorrow.

Before presenting the two sides, let’s start with some basic ground rules:

1) This is an intramural discussion. In other words, it’s a disagreement amongst brothers and sisters. As such whatever discussion we have has to be consistent with biblical expectations for how Christians function in community. (Think John 13 and 17 or Paul’s words in 2 Timothy.)

2) Because it’s an intramural discussion, the language we use is going to be vitally important. Once when I was discussing this issue, the discussion ended when the other person told me that I, “clearly have no idea what the Gospel is.” Needless to say, the discussion was basically finished at that point because I was no longer defending a theological proposition, but my status as a Christian.

3) Let’s also commit to asking good questions before making judgments. As someone who has had many discussions about this question, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the time when we think we’re disagreeing, we’re really just talking past each other. Or, if there is genuine disagreement, it’s actually over a much subtler point than we might first suspect.

4) Finally, I introduced the discussion by saying I wanted to describe “both” sides, but that’s a bit of a misnomer because even if there are two basic teams on this issue, the reality is within both those groups, there will still be a tremendous amount of variance in how different proponents of a similar view might express their ideas.

5) Last point - beneath the surface of this entire discussion are some very basic but much bigger theologial questions. For example, “How do the Old Testament and New Testament relate?” or “What is the nature of the Fall in Genesis 3?” or “Can we distinguish between ‘implications’ of the Gospel and the Gospel itself?” or “How should we interpret Scripture?” In other words, the posts may beg more questions than they answer, but if nothing else they can hopefully move the discussion forward by exposing the larger questions that undergird the very specific questions that many Christians are wrestling with today.

The discussion at CT is titled, “Are Christians overemphasizing cultural renewal?” While I have very strong opinions on the question, I’m not naive enough to think that as a 21-year-old college student I can contribute anything new to the discussion. So instead I’m going to try to summarize both views in the next couple of posts and hopefully provide resources presenting both sides of the discussion. Since I’m on summer break now, I’m going to have a lot more time to do this, so hopefully the posts will be coming almost daily.

Last time, I tried to offer a take on the big story of Christianity, putting the questions of hell and divine judgment in their proper contexts. I’d like to sum up four major points from this story:

1. God does not stand between us and heaven. He is not trying to keep us from going there by beating us back into hell. Instead, we are standing between God and the restoration of what He has created. If we are not mercifully spared, we must be dealt with some other way. And, if God’s work of saving the cosmos is to succeed, part of sparing us must be restoring us into our right roles in relation both to God and to creation. The sense many people have that God could somehow save people while they continue on in their merry little ways, rebelling and worshipping idols and abusing the world and one another, is to completely miss the point. You cannot be saved without becoming a worshiper of Yahweh, because until you do you are still standing in the path of the freight train of restoration coming to this world, shaking your fist.

2. Human sin really is bad. It’s destructive. When God punishes sin, it is not some petty dictator killing a political prisoner. It is a doctor pouring antiseptic on the wound. The only ones who see it as anything but good are the bacteria. Too often, we have articulated the doctrine of sin in such a way as to keep hell from making sense. It is true that human sin is ultimately grave because it offends the holiness and glory of God. However, we miss the point when we separate this fact from sin’s other consequences. God in His holiness and glory wants the world to work together in joy, beauty and shalom. To pretend as if we are offending God without also breaking the world we live in misses the whole point.

3. Because of this, the idea of judgment (of which hell is a part) is actually a good thing. Granted, it’s not a happy thing for those being judged. But when we see that the thing keeping the world from working in the way we all know it should is our own shalom-breaking, it helps us recognize that God’s wrath poured out on sin is the wrath of a Father coming to defend His beloved. And this, assuming you love what the Father loves, is a very good thing.

4. In addition, salvation really is gracious on God’s part. If the story I told last time is the biblical one, then there would be no reason that God couldn’t have fixed things without saving any of us. He could have simply come like a warrior and wiped us all out. But He didn’t. He instead included us in the restoration.

Next Time: Now that we’ve laid the groundwork (some might say belabored the point), I’d like to begin to examine the biblical and exegetical concerns that lead us to a doctrine of hell.

In fact, let me make that point here. Let me tell you a story:

In the beginning, God made people with souls and bodies. He made a good world for them to live in, but they chose to rebel against him, irreversibly dooming both the world and their bodies. Since God wasn’t the sort of guy who could put up with this sort of rebellion, he declared that these people would die and, upon death, be punished forever in hell. However, being an all-around good fellow despite this rather stubborn streak, God came into the world as Jesus to save peoples’ souls so that, rather than tormenting them for all eternity, their souls could instead go to heaven when they died and happily live with God forever. However, if people didn’t accept this message about Jesus being the way to get to heaven, then it was straight to hell with their immortal souls.

While I realize this is a caricature, plenty of people both outside and inside the church understand this as the story of Christianity. Might I suggest that if that’s all there is to it, most objections to hell are spot on. It isn’t fair, it doesn’t make sense, and God is the sort of brutal bastard who you want to stay on the good side of… or else.

The biblical story works differently. Let me try to articulate it instead:

In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth, all of it good. He created humans as a part of this creation to tend and steward it. All of this was a source of joy to all creation and glory to God. However, man rebelled against the place God had put him in as His viceroys over His creation. They turned against Him, against His creation, and against each other. They began the process (continuing ever since) of abusing and destroying what they were to tend and care for.

God, though, wasn’t done. He was not willing to let go of what He had made, and so he set out to work against the enemy – us – and redeem and restore His creation. In love he chose to do this by restoring human beings to their right position of stewardship and community, that through them the scars on our hearts and our world might be healed.

He did this by coming as Jesus Christ. What Jesus did for creation was to triumph over the sin (and sinners) that oppressed it, so that it might be restored, and what he did for humanity was to offer us an avenue through which we can be reconciled to the God we are in rebellion against and be restored to our positions as His viceroys over the created world. The church is this restored community, through which this work is to take place.

However, God is still in a very real sense at war for His creation. He will not abandon it, and He cannot simply make it better without dealing with the problem, which is still us. Jesus provided an avenue for dealing with it, but for those who persist in rebellion, something else must be done. They have to be cut off from from the good world, cast out of it, or they will never stop hurting it. There must be some final restoration of all things, which includes dealing with a humanity that refuses to be reconciled to God. This is hell – being cast out of the goodness and blessing of this cosmos so that our reign of terror might be brought to an end.

I realize that was quite the story, and I left a lot of important things out, but I hope the difference becomes clear. God is not a peevish misanthrope who can’t seem to get over an offense we’ve done Him; the God of Scripture is a king who stubbornly refuses to give up what He has made. In His grace He gives us a recourse other than condemnation, but things cannot be made right with rebellious humans still in their places of authority and power.

In a couple of posts, I’ll try to broach some more specific textual and theological problem. However, next time I just want to offer a few observations we can make about the biblical story which emphasize certain things about how hell fits in.

I want to say this clearly from the start – I believe in hell. There are those who are so troubled by the contemporary objections to hell that they want to move away from affirming the doctrine entirely. After all, they reason, if someone would be willing to become a Christian otherwise, why should we let this one thing stand in their way?

It seems to me that there are three problems with this willingness to ignore or deny the idea of hell.

First, there is no question that Scripture affirms it, repeatedly and in the strongest language. There are those who want to make far more of the Bible’s teachings than it actually contains, but that doesn’t mean that we should make less of it instead. While there is certainly a place for prudence in when we address certain doctrines in the course of conversation with someone, we cannot make the gospel more palatable to unbelievers than Scripture does. To think otherwise is to assume that deception is a valid tool for evangelism, and that is a dark path down which I have no desire to go.

Second, without hell we cannot rightly understand ourselves and our sin. Almost every objection I’ve heard about hell is ultimately rooted in a problem the person has with what the Bible says about who we are as humans – how we are to relate to God and His world and what our role in distorting these relationships has been. I’ll put it bluntly – if we deny hell, we deny that humans are the real problem with the world. And this denial will make it impossible for those we convert to be truly transformed into people who are becoming part of God’s solution to this problem.

Third, hell is an essential component of the gospel. By gospel, I don’t simply mean “you get forgiven by putting your faith in Jesus.” I mean the good news that Jesus came, died and was raised in light of the (true) story Scripture tells about God and the world He has made. I’ll be expanding on this idea in the next post, but I’ll state it up front: to remove hell from the story of the bible is like removing the feud between the Montagues and Capulets from Romeo and Juliet. It might be distasteful, but the rest of the story makes no sense without it.

Despite my best efforts, my automatic response was to have every Josh McDowell evidentiary argument I had ever read rush through my head. I actually found myself thinking something like “how can I give a succinct argument for why Christianity is true and every other religion is false, in the 45 seconds I have to answer this?”

By God’s grace, this wasn’t what came out of my mouth. Instead, I basically just said this:

“Well, think about being married. My wife is a person, not just some thing I made up, and so I have to deal with her as she really is. Say she doesn’t like to eat something. I don’t have the right to make it for her and insist that she must like it because I want her to. It doesn’t work that way with people.

I believe that God is a person too. I think this is what the bible teaches. If God is personal, not just the force or something, then He has the right to define himself the way He is and we can’t change that definition.”

Like I said, I’m not sure where that explanation came from (not from me by any stretch of the imagination), but it seemed to help her. And it got me thinking.

I think there’s something really fundamental here about how we discuss Christianity.

One of the reasons that Christians have such a hard time in our pluralistic world is that we define God in some abstract way. He is the One, the Divine, the Thing Greater Than Which No Thing Can Be Conceived. When this sort of God-Thing becomes who we worship, we have a very hard time saying that Muslims or Hindus don’t worship the same God-Thing.

But the truth is we don’t worship a God-Thing at all. We worship a God-Person.

This means that the particulars of our religion - the character God expresses, the works He has done, and the worship He requires - are not secondary. Just as I cannot conceive of my wife in the abstract (that being demonstrating the characteristics of wifeness), I cannot conceive of God without talking about the Triune God of Scripture.

This should inform the way we talk about God to the world. The problem is that when we discuss God, it’s often to tell the difference between YHWH and Oprah’s broad spirituality. This should not be the case.

Instead, I should talk about God the way I talk about one of my friends or family members. The way I talk about my wife, or my father. Nobody thinks they can be the son of Dan Tonjes (my dad) without joining my family, and the same goes for our Father. We must think of Him in this way if we are to make any sense in the modern religious bazaar we find ourselves in.

I’ve heard the idea expressed before, but have never given it much thought. What do y’all think?

It reminded me of my own background and of many discussions I’ve had with friends who have grown up in the church - we seem to have an implicit assumption that emphasizing the rules of Christianity is what creates conviction and a sense of urgency in the listeners.

My question is two-fold: 1) Is this biblical? 2) If we’re understanding grace rightly, isn’t that infinitely more urgent and convicting than any list of rules, no matter how fiery their delivery might be?

If you want to hear grace preached with urgency many Christians reserve only for the dos and don’ts of Christianity, I don’t know a better sermon to direct you to than this one by my pastor, Ben Loos.