“I was afraid, because I was naked…”

This is Part II in a series. Although it isn’t essential to read Part I first, you may find it helpful.

Consider the history of sin entering the cosmos. In Genesis 3 we have both the history of events, and the Gospel reveal. God initiated contact with the now rebellious, fallen, and sinful man. God knew Adam had sinned. God wasn’t just wandering through the garden and couldn’t find the man He had created. God purposefully entered the garden and called out to Adam. The question God asked wasn’t because God needed to fill in missing knowledge. It was in part to reveal to the man what man no longer had. The man came out of hiding and replied:

And [Adam] said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”           Genesis 3:10

God replies to Adam with a question that, as always, contains much more than you or I can imagine it to contain. God isn’t asking a question that He doesn’t know the answer to. Just as God knew where Adam was when He asked, “Where are you?”, God’s purpose in asking the next question is to bring the man into understanding. To cause man to know the consequences of his actions. So that he could know his thinking had changed, and to know why he was now thinking differently.

Adam was naked before he sinned. He didn’t become more naked after he sinned. Adam was aware he was not wearing any physical clothing before he sinned. He didn’t just suddenly become aware of some extra sinfulness present in being without clothes. The sin didn’t cause Adam to suddenly realize his body needed to be covered. Here’s what transpired:

[God] said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”          Genesis 3:11

God is not just acting out the role of the offended rule enforcer. He’s not gleefully about to hand out punishment for no other reason than, you know, “Adam broke the rules and those who break rules have to be cast out.” Adam wasn’t some new-born baby-like intellect that needed to be taught right-and-wrong like all children. Adam was created with intelligence and rationality. God had previously instructed Adam in right and wrong. He was fully aware that rebellion against God had consequences. Ironically, those of us who are now six thousand years later in experience and knowledge often deny that rebellion has consequences. And that’s the point.

If you ask six Christians followed by a seventh how we should minister to the culture you will get seven times seventy opinions. The culturally-conscious mega-church pastor is convinced that essential and appropriate contextualization means starting Easter Sunday service with “Highway to Hell”. Across town, his covenant-theology brother is confessing the necessity of detailed exegesis even in the absence of any cultural application. They are both considered fools by the “Science Guy”. The culture presses on without being affected.

Since we, as Christians, have access to not just good ideas, but truth that is life changing, why is our ministry increasingly rejected by the world? It is because, as Dr. Al Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of Christianity’s foremost cultural appraisers notes, Christians are in an epistemological crisis.

To our shame, most Christians don’t know what epistemology means. Our loss of knowledge is strolling along blissfully hand-in-hand with our lack of understanding as to why the culture, and at times even our churches, are unaffected by the Gospel.

Epistemology – not a word most Christians use every day. Ironically, not even a word most Christians have ever used. Hence, part of the crisis. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and of knowing. It is an attempt to answer the question of “How do we know truth and what is true?” It is the mental drawer in which humans place our understanding of how belief occurs and the rationality for defending those beliefs as true. It is where we keep the theory by which we explain why it is OK to believe the Genesis account of creation is historically and scientifically accurate. That same place that explains why it is rational to confess that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. It is how we can defend the necessity and value to the culture of marriage defined by a husband (male) and wife (female) in a life-long covenant.

The Christian’s epistemological crisis is we do not know why people think the way they think, and why we must think differently. We observe the culture rejecting what seems to be obvious truth, even what some would call self-evident truth, and don’t know why or how to change the culture. We emphasized cultural conscious and cultural sensitivity in our attempt to minister to the culture, and found the culture simply rejected our attempts at an even greater level.

The culture — yep, the one that is in rebellion against God – that one – has claimed the high ground of intellectual influence. And there are a lot of Christians who believe that’s OK.

It is not.

Of all the criteria we would identify that defines a Christian, thinking should be high on that list. We are renewed, changed. The sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit is effective and ongoing at changing us. What part of “us”? What part of me the individual is being renewed by salvation? My soul? Yes. My body? Not yet, but will be. My mind? The way I think? My skills at reasoning and coming to the truth? Yes! With the new knowledge that God is Sovereign, purposeful, capable, and self-revealing, I can now submit my reasoning to the revealed Truth He has given.

Christians should be on the high ground of intellect, leading the culture in developing and applying knowledge across the disciplines. For the sake of those who will be regenerated by the Gospel, and for those who will still reject the Gospel, but live in this world, we should be seeing a transformation of the culture that comes from the common grace of the Gospel.

“Adam! Where Are You?”

by Ronald C. Marks

Each person in the two stories that follow shares the same problem:

A sixty-five year old man sits alone in a once-filled church room (he once called it a “sanctuary”). He knows what is true, and is just as passionate about these true things as he was in his twenties. The freedom found in God’s Word hasn’t changed, but some of his friends, much of his family, and almost all of his grandchildren don’t share the same passions he does. They don’t seem to cherish the amazing treasures and freedom of knowing God that he knows. He tries desperately to tell them about the sovereignty of God, about the joy of genuine submission in worship, of confessing the things about God that God has revealed to us. It only leads to deeper feelings of loneliness.

A twenty-six year old pastor of a large metropolitan church humbly but transparently admits this church is the modern model of informed enlightened Christian movement. Neither he nor his church are stodgy nor stuck in the old hymns of the past decade. The church is missional. It’s social-minded. He gratefully acknowledges that most of the church has put-off the old prejudices about marriage and same-sex-attraction. Yet, it’s clear the community only agrees with what the church is doing socially. There is no real change from the impact of the believers going out into the community (except that the church members have become more accepting and inoffensive regarding the lives of the non-church members). He’s frustrated and struggling with depression because he has to work harder and harder at making the Gospel exciting. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The un-churched don’t seem to care.

It’s not an age thing.

No longer is it just the “mature” Christians who see the ineffectiveness of the church in impacting the culture and wonder “what happened?” It is seen in Christian education, church ministry, and para-church ministry – we are all looking at the incredibly beautiful and powerful truth we have been given and tasked to give, and are dumbfounded by the utter lack of interest and care from the culture. More shocking, this same disinterest characterizes our children and fellow Christians. What happened?

Has the Gospel “run its course”? Is Biblical truth no longer relevant?

No. Instead, I propose the sixty-five year old church member and twenty-six year old pastor belong to the same church. Not a physical church. This one is “The Church of ‘Unintended Consequences’”. The members recently meet in a business meeting and voted to change the name. They changed the name from, “The Church of ‘Things We Have Forgotten’”.

Of the many forces at work, two need to be addressed:

Our culture, the one in which we are planted, continues to secularize. It is shifting from a Christianized culture. Because of where we have been, many churches are unknowingly shifting with it.

To be effective in carrying the Gospel in any culture, we must understand with our minds where we are, how we got here, and where we are going. And, we must understand where the culture is, how it got here, and where it is going.

We all travel from “here” the “there”. To get to “there” from “here” we must know where we are. By AEMoreira042281 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

There is a “pop culture” quote, though it is most likely sourced all the way back to Confucius. It is rooted in Eastern Mysticism. That eastern mystical root explains why it is a recurring theme in Western pop culture with its affection for all things mystical. Regardless, it rings true for many people, and thus we are attracted by at least the thought.

Remember, no matter where you go, there you are!”

Perhaps we feel it releases us from the responsibility of being where we are. As if to say, “Don’t worry how you got here or where you are going. You’ll get there no matter what.” We feel a bit of peace. It is a false peace. It is a hopeless confession we think absolves from responsibility for either knowing where we are and where we are going, but also from any fear that we could have kept ourselves from getting here in the first place. It runs hand-in-hand with the dangerous pitfall of quietism – “Let go and let God”.

In one way or another, this passive view of progress or growth or change represents many who call themselves Christians today. Some through passive ignorance. Others, by a purposeful run out of pietism as expressed in a legalistic background.

If you are still with me, consider this. Most Christians have no idea how we (the church and the culture) got to where we are. Christians who have been around a few years watched as their neighborhood and cities that once actively embraced and affirmed a Christian view rapidly transformed to post-Christian and even pre-Christian in character. While watching the rapid conversion, they held onto a failing belief that “It’s not happening here, yet.” Or, even though “the West Coast” was rejecting Christianity, where we are was still mostly Christian. Or, at least, accepting of Christianity. Our thought was, “we are still safe here.”

We enjoyed a Christianized culture for several decades in the U.S. It was socially beneficial to be in and part of a church. It may have brought job opportunities, or social acceptance. For whatever reason, the Christianized culture was both the product of the strength of Christian truth and a natural outcome of Biblical truth permeating education, the Government, and the media.

But then, our culture shifted. Since we had linked our culture to our churches (Christianized, but not necessarily to Christianity), we didn’t notice our church shifting as the culture shifted. Perhaps we thought we were safe inside our Christianized cultural conclaves. Maybe we believed that if the culture soured, we could retreat to the safety of our Christian communities. And certainly, our church would always be the never-changing stronghold to protect what we believed to be true. We would still be salt and light.

We are wrong.

Secularization of the culture began with the centers of intellectual power – the schools, universities, and intellectual social organizations. It spread from there to our public grade schools. You know – the ones where we sent our children. In our churches we ignored intellectual issues and focused on issues that touched our feelings. Going to church became about having the right experience. It was all about the right music and the right preaching. We wanted it to make us feel good. We embraced the emotional change and were ignorant of the intellectual. We felt that the thirty minutes of Sunday School our children were exposed to would be enough to inoculate them against any accidental indoctrination that crept in through the school system. And, we where shocked when “we sent our children to Rome, and they came back Romans”.

There were warning signs. Those things that told us our “9-11” was coming. For the Baptists, it was the loss of the seminaries and colleges to liberal theology that required difficult work to win back. Most of us are unaware of how close we came to loosing that battle. It was the centers of intellect that were the first to turn. The average member in the church was not aware of the denial of the virgin birth, the rejection of miracles, the disdain of a supernatural God that liberal theology embraced and taught in our Christian schools and seminaries. A few noticed, and took action.

Similar events have occurred for the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Church of God (Anderson Indiana), etc. The colleges planted on a firm foundation of confessional Christianity began to waver. Some recovered. Others, did not.

So, considering that battle as done and over, we moved on. And so did the secularization of our culture.

But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”          Genesis 3:9

Where are we?

We are in a culture that has rejected Christianity. A culture that many Christians still see as the culture of their youth – one that embraced Judeo-Christian values and ideas. But, it isn’t. The culture has, with increasing speed, embraced a thoroughly secular worldview. Secular with a design to reject Christian. The culture handed us the forbidden fruit, and we ate.

We are in a culture that is going where the intellectual forces are moving. Ignoring those for whatever reason is to turn your back on the Great Commission. Even the poor and uneducated are under the yoke of the culture that is following these intellectual forces.

Whether we are carrying the Gospel to a lost and dying world, or lifting up the weary in Christ by teaching the reality of Creation, we must realize a few important truths.