THE GAGGING OF GOD: CHRISTIANITY CONFRONTS PLURALISM

BY D.A. CARSON

1996 Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 640 pages

CITY HALL LIBRARY 230.1 CAR

A Book Review by Joseph Ng

August 2003

There is much in this book that affirms the Bible-believing, evangelical position in this age of postmodernist attitudes to life, biblical illiteracy, and hermeneutical equivocation in the Christian world. Among the symptoms of our age are a spiritual downgrade that afflicts denominations desperate to salute the feminist agenda or grow into megachurches, ministers that shrink from identifying apostate churches and leaders as such, the popular appeal to feeling as final arbiter of truth in areas ranging from choice of music to emotional healing. Not one to sit down with a tome of over 600 pages, I found myself reading it straight through and enjoying the affirmation and articulation of biblical principles, as of a spiritual kinship and fellowship within what Peter calls a “like precious faith” (2 Peter 1:1, KJV). It is certainly a book I would commend as a guide to church leaders hoping to inoculate their charges against the spiritual infection of our age.

DESCRIPTION

The Gagging of God comprises 14 chapters:

1. The Challenges of Contemporary Pluralism

PART ONE: HERMENEUTICS

2. The Taming of Truth: The Hermeneutical Morass

3. Escaping from the Hermeneutical Morass: “Let God be true, and every man a liar”

PART TWO: RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

4. Has God Spoken? The Authority of Revelation

5. What God Has Spoken: Opening Moves in the Bible’s Plot-line

6. What God Has Spoken: Climactic Moves in the Bible’s Plot-line

7. God’s Final Word

8. On Drawing Lines, When Drawing Lines Is Rude

PART THREE: CHRISTIAN LIVING IN A PLURALISTIC CULTURE

9. Nibbling at the Edges: The Range of the Challenge

10. The Vision Thing

PART FOUR: PLURALISM WITHIN THE CAMP

11. Fraying, Fragmented, Frustrated: The Changing Face of Western Evangelicalism

12. On Heralding the Gospel in a Pluralistic Culture

13. On Banishing the Lake of Fire

14. “This is my Father’s world”: Contextualization and Globalization

The first chapter surveys the landscape of pluralism. Here, Carson depicts a realistic situation facing many of our high school students going on to college and university for the first time:

Miss Christian goes off to the local state university, full of zeal and the knowledge of a few fundamental truths. There she will not find lecturers who will devote much time to overturning her truths. Rather, she will find many lecturers convincing her that the meaning in her religion, as in all religion, is merely communal bias, and therefore relative, subjective. No religion can make valid claims of a transcendent nature. ... Miss Christian is told, a trifle condescendingly, that if her religion helps her, she should be grateful, but that no intelligent person this side of Derrida, Foucault, and Fish, could possibly believe that her beliefs have a transcendent claim on everybody everywhere. Thus, without overtly denying her faith, Miss Christian discovers that its vitality has been sapped. (p. 36)

Those who have grown up on a diet of shallow Contemporary Christian Music and experienced-based theology will find themselves assimilated and neutralized by the prevailing mindset of the secular classrooms. The sad thing is that Bible-based religion is missing not just for those who come from atheistic or pagan backgrounds but also from kids from ostensibly evangelical churches:

In many parts of the country, we cannot assume any biblical knowledge on the part of our hearers at all: the most elementary biblical narratives are completely unknown. Furthermore, the situation is getting worse, now that the Bible is all but excluded from our schools, is not systematically taught in most of our churches, and has been further sidelined with the demise of family devotions. (pp. 42 – 43)

Carson also exposes the Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) document for its failure to shoot straight on real differences in theology between a Reformation faith and the apostate church. So desperate are the signers of the document that it took a second signing (dubbed the ECT 2) for some of the evangelicals to clarify their position on justification by faith alone. In trying to forge a common front with the Roman Catholic church and other sects on social issues, many evangelicals have compromised their faith, with questionable results:

Most evangelicals are entirely happy with what Francis Schaeffer used to call “co-belligerency” on select issues: e.g., abortion, the importance of persons, the social importance of the family, and much more. We will disagree on some social/moral issues (e.g. gambling). But recent evangelical/Roman Catholic pronouncements in this area have, ironically, done more to set back co-belligerency than to advance it. Instead of focusing on the agreed social issues, some evangelical and Roman Catholic theologians have agreed to use ambiguous language to project an image of theological agreement where both sides mean quite different things. Those who think that the theological issues are of minor importance in comparison with the social issues, and who feel that the theological differences should be buried in order to confront a common foe of secular humanism, are delighted. In my view, they are, at best, naive. Candor, integrity, and even the moral issues are not advanced by uses of language that mask profound differences. Substantial numbers of evangelicals quite frankly feel confused and betrayed by these arguments. (pp. 418 – 19)

Also exposed, and duly so, are those of the charismatic faith industry (see the book review of James Randi’s The Faith Healers), who approach the ministry with not the most honest of methods. But marketing Jesus isn’t the exclusive domain of the charismatics. Carson shows up also the unbiblical approach to evangelism that characterises much of contemporary church-growth gurus’ teaching:

More alarming still [than the charismatic faith industry, a la Benny Hinn and company] is the consumer mentality in the heart of mainstream evangelicalism. ... In any case, there is a fundamental difference between trying to learn from Acts 17 how to be culture-sensitive as we go about declaring the good news of Jesus Christ to people who are perishing without him, and thinking of the church as a corporation that must market its product to potential customers. Crossing the cultural barriers to communicate the gospel “that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3) is one thing. Bus as we have seen, if we control our evangelism by analysis of market “needs” the result is virtually always a domesticated gospel. (pp. 465 – 66)

Much of Carson’s teaching is by example, and we’re indebted to his sharing in first person and verbatim his conversations with those in need of help. To a missionary whose life, soiled since childhood with abuse and pain, “became integrated” after a mystical visioning “rebirthing” exercise, Carson extends a humble and gentle yet uncompromising hand:

“I cannot help but be glad if your life is truly more integrated. ... But I have to tell you that at best you have experienced second best; and at worst you have been seduced to idolatry. ... My dear brother, all the emotional catharsis, all the tears, all the healing integration, might well have been yours along biblical lines. You might have meditated long on Ephesians 3:14-21, praying along with Paul that God would give you the power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of God, to know this love that surpasses knowledge. ... For the fact of the matter is that you now associate our emotional release not with the cross, but with rebirthing techniques. You will be less inclined to think of the gospel as that which is the power of God unto salvation. You will think of the gospel as providing some sort of pardon, and rebirthing techniques as providing healing, power, restoration.” (p. 468)

He even shares his response to objections and models for us in a practical, repeatable way what could be described as speaking the truth (no less) in love (no less):

“And if you ask, ‘Why be so fussy as long as I am genuinely healed, or at least substantially improved?’ then you have brought yourself to the very heart of my argument: the primary criterion for what is right and true and valuable cannot possibly be whether or not you feel helped. This does not mean that the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified can’t help you: it can, and does, and will. It means that the content of the gospel cannot be determined or approved simply on the basis of whether or not you feel helped. For if that were the case, would not the archenemy, whose love of deception is well known, have a field day ‘helping’ people, and helping people feel helped, provided the result is that they are diverted from the cross? ... And that is why I insist that at best you have experienced second best; at worst, you are being seduced into idolatry.” (p. 469)

Coming closer home to mainstream evangelical circles, Carson deals with the church-growth emphasis so rampant through churches associated with Bill Hybels (whom he explicitly identifies), Rick Warren, David Paul Yonggi Cho, and Robert Schuller (whom he does not name). “Seeker-sensitive” has become a buzzword and a guarantee of success, and services, seating arrangements, and even the gospel message itself have been massaged—through use of statistics—to attract the largest crowd. Carson isn’t impressed.

More frightening is the impression that the social sciences hold the key for church renewal and growth. ... Blessings are not guaranteed by reading Gallup reports. Worse, the emphasis on awareness of the social sciences tends to divert people from things that are forever basic: the truth of the gospel, a living walk with the living God, love for men and women, an eternal perspective, hatred and fear of sin, a passion for holiness, a profound desire to see Christ exalted. ... Probably the best known and most widely imitated “seeker-sensitive” church is Willow Creek. (p. 474)

Carson makes it clear that it isn’t a personal attack he’s launching on Hybels, whom he considers a brother in Christ. It is the message and method of “church growth” enthusiasts that is under question.

One cannot listen long to Hybels in person without recognizing his personal commitment to Christ and to the gospel, his passion to see men and women converted and genuinely transformed. ... Yet where does it stop? Liberal churches have long since airbrushed “sin” and related terms out of their vocabulary. Now many so-called evangelical churches are running down the same course. (p. 475)

The fault he lays squarely at the feet of pastors who allow their practical concern with numbers to obscure their need to interact closely and comprehensively with the Word. It is tempting to leave behind the task of biblical thinking in seminary on graduation:

The specialization in our seminaries and churches at the hermeneutical level plays into the hands of the dictatorship of the present, or at least the “over-privileging” of the present. Thiselton shrewdly observes that we have traditionally assigned the task of describing what the biblical texts “meant” to biblical scholars, left the organizing of that material to the systematicians, and assigned to experts in pastoral theology the responsibility of determining what in the text “can meaningfully address the present.” We might add that we then give to the pastors the task of putting it into practice. ... One might add that this division of labor, common under modernism, is exacerbated under postmodernism, in that the findings of the biblical scholars and theologians are more and more easily relegated and ignored as the product of private opinion or an (old-fashioned) interpretive community: what works is what has value.

We simply must smash down the various bifurcations. We must have theologians who are pastors and evangelists; we must have evangelists who think biblically and theologically. (p. 479)

Or, worse, seminary’s the place where apparently “evangelical” professors peddle a culture-determined approach to the Scriptures. In a section on “playing fast and loose with the Bible,” Carson exposes postmodern teacher Stanley Grenz’s teachings, which have influenced a generation of women-ordaining church leaders and swept away a slew of Paul’s teaching on cultural pretexts:

But the problem is not restricted to pastors, televangelists, laypeople, and evangelical journalists. It can be found among “evangelical” theologians as well. For example, in two recent books Stanley J. Grenz rejects the “propositionalism” in “modern evangelicalism’s” approach to Scripture. ... He prefers the direction illumined by [the father of Liberalism Friedrich D.E.] Schleiermacher, arguing that the three sources or norms for theology are Scripture, tradition, and culture. This is, to say the least, decidedly unhelpful. Quite apart from the extraordinary complexities of linking Scripture and tradition in this way, the addition of culture is astonishing. ... With the best will in the world, I cannot see how Grenz’s approach to Scripture can be called “evangelical” in any useful sense. (p. 481).

Carson is right that this hermeneutic of “modern evangelicalism,” exhibited also by Gil Bilezikian, a mentor of Hybels, and others in the “evangelical feminist” camp, is a direct descendent of classic Liberal theology, founded by German theologian Schleiermacher over 200 years ago. Liberalism then, also known as Modernism, denied the veracity of the Scriptures on the basis of modern scientific thought, notably evolutionism. It was succeeded by Neo-Orthodoxy, which seemed to recall faith in the Scriptures, but only as it “became” subjectively “meaningful” to the reader. It was not surprising, then, that in this age of postmodern deconstructionism, that another attack on the Scriptures should come about, this time neutralizing portions of the Word through cultural and pragmatic means. Instead of digging and reflecting deeply on God’s Word, a shallow agenda of trendy causes has come to preoccupy the church:

One observes the decline of family and personal devotions and the rising number of self-confessed evangelicals who assume the gospel but devote themselves to relatively peripheral issues that become their premier passion: debates over Lordship salvation, spiritual warfare, counseling, home schooling, divorce and remarriage, abortion, Christian schools, Gothard seminars, social drinking, debt-free financing, charismatic issues, tastes in music and corporate worship, sex education in public schools, church polity, church discipline, ecology, women’s ordination, and much more. (p. 482)

Some of the issues Carson lists are immediately recognizable in our midst, and we have to wonder if he’s right that they’re the result of a steady drift from the clear teaching of Scriptures towards the distractions of this age. But lest he be accused of getting too philosophical for any earthly good, as those who’ve ground their way to the final sections of the book might be tempted to think, Carson offers his “A Short List of Practical Points.” First, he demands that both the trendy and the traditional Christian rethink what he or she is doing in terms of biblical mission:

Those committed to seeker services ought to ask themselves constantly if commendable zeal for the lost does not sometimes lead them into a lamentable pragmatism that unwittingly displaces worship by aesthetics, transform biblical understanding of conversion into the shallowest kinds of decisionism with all the real life-transforming content introduced after “conversion” in various small-group therapy sessions, and reduces God to the status of divine genie: he helps me when I need him. Those committed to traditional services ... must ask what pains they ought to take to explain what they are doing to outsiders, and to forego their own comfort zones for the sake of communicating the gospel. (p. 511)

He offers a third way, of having “guest services,” which may be viewed as nothing quite new, but which nonetheless reminds us—model answers and all!—of how to reach the lost in a post-Christian, pluralistic society, both in the church and without:

There are many useful alternatives to the antithesis, seeker service or traditional service. Many churches use “guest services” to which believers are especially encouraged to bring unconverted guests. Those services include singing, prayers, preaching—but every element is carefully and wisely explained. The leader does not say, “Turn to hymn number 33.” Rather, he or she says, “Christians have always loved to sing praises to the God they have come to know and trust. In this church we sing many such songs, drawn from various periods of the church’s history. The one we are going to sing now was written about two centuries ago, by a man whose Christian faith was tested by recurring bouts of mental illness. You will find it as number 33 of the blue book on the rack in front of you. When the musical instruments begin, it is our custom to stand to sing.” (p. 512)

Very frequently I begin an evangelistic series to complete outsiders (university students, perhaps) with something like this: “If you think I have come to defend Christianity, guess again! For some of us, Christianity is so little known and understood that defending it would be like defending the general theory of relativity to a first year arts major. What I shall be doing, rather, is outlining, explaining, and showing the relevance of some of the fundamentals of any kind of Christianity that tries to be faithful to its founding documents, gathered together in a book that we call the Bible. If there is defence, it will largely be implicit. But I hope you will listen carefully as you enter into a world of thought and experience that you may never have encountered.” I find that some such introduction as that changes the focus of expectations. At the end of each talk, people come out talking about the gospel, not about apologetics. (p. 512)

CRITIQUE

The most obvious downside of this book, mercilessly highlighted by reviewers elsewhere, is its sheer size and length. Its contents range from crisp summaries of various thinkers to rambling (though frequently helpful) sharing of the author’s thoughts and speech. Who knows, but the overall impact is deliberate. It might be Carson’s way of promoting his tome—sitting on a row of popular self-help books in a library—as a spectacle to postmodern readers more stimulated by sight and colour than by words and propositions? The title and Michelangelo’s depiction of God the Father certainly shout out. Yet the criticism is true—if not for its possibility of being a reference book—it takes some perseverance to get from one cover to the other.

Carson hits the right note in identifying the problem of ecumenism, but he doesn’t go far enough in dealing with ECT’s drive towards “co-belligerency.” Given the theological apostasy of Roman Catholic Church, the anathemas of Trent remaining in force despite the seductive charades of Vatican II, evangelicals should be wary of aligning themselves with Rome, social and political demands notwithstanding. The prophet’s rebuke of compromising King Jehoshaphat comes to mind: “Should you help the wicked and love [or, and make alliances with] those who hate the LORD? Because of this, the wrath of the LORD is upon you” (2 Chronicles 19:2 NIV). A better stand is taken by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (http://www.christianity.com/ace), on whose council Carson sits, which affirms the biblical, Reformation faith in its Cambridge Declaration (http://www.christianity.com/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID307086|CHID560462|CIID1411364,00.html). Similarly, the International Testimony to an Infallible Bible deplore “this apostasy” that Rome represents and reminds us, as Jude does, to contend for the faith (www.itib.org).

These are times of confusion and compromise, and Carson’s work, despite his apparently pulling of punches in a couple of instances, is a timely and needful corrective to the influence of pluralism on our churches.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

Sidwell, Mark. 1998. The Dividing Line: Understanding and Applying Biblical Separation. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579240747/kjb1611biblevsmo

Veith, Gene. 1994. Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Turning Point Christian Worldview). http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0891077685/kjb1611biblevsmo

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals site: http://www.christianity.com/ace

Church Reform site: http://www.churchreform.org/templates/cusccr/default.asp?id=20082

International Testimony to an Infallible Bible site: www.itib.org

Kim Hawtrey’s paper [“Economic Justice: A Twin Axiom Framework,” Reformed Theological Review 50 (1991): 98 – 105] begins with an old Polish joke: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the reverse.” (p. 431)