New York Times colum-nist Ross Douthat recently described the collapse of liberal Christianity in America, pointing to a 23 percent drop in Episcopal attendance over the previous decade as evidence of its demise. While Douthat and others single out the Episcopal Church, the rapid decline is shared by other mainline denominations, including my own, the Presbyterian Church (USA).
This collapse is all the more startling in light of the current global success of Christianity. Historian Philip Jenkins observes that African Christianity is growing at 2.36 percent annually, and the number of Christians on the continent is expected to double in less than 30 years. According to Jenkins, the growth of African Christianity represents the largest quantitative religious change in history….
In my own denomination, I have witnessed the casual dismissal of essential truths of the faith by pastors and professors. One Presbyterian pastor in Tennessee has gone even further, rejecting the idea that Christ died for our sins ”” claiming the idea is “absurd” and stating that the cross “doesn’t even make sense.”
Without orthodox biblical truths guiding and protecting the church, liberals have become immersed in religious pluralism, leaving the church with a weakened message of tolerance and theological relativism. Yale theologian Richard Niebuhr described this situation back in the 1930s, asserting that liberals preach a “God without wrath who brings human beings without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a bloody cross.”
Read it all from the local paper’s Faith and Values section.
“they need to recover “the faith once delivered to the saints†(Jude 3) and preach it with conviction and clarity. If they do, they might experience the global success of Christianity occurring from Seoul to Sao Paulo. If they don’t, then their collapse will only continue.” How very simply and well put.
I was chatting with our curate recently about how people lose their faith. He said that it’s a matter of laziness, that there is SO much scholarship on our Christian beliefs but they just don’t want to read and consider it. The more I think about it, he’s absolutely right.
The bloody Cross is difficult and viscerally repugnant. What kind of God would send His Son to it and what kind of God would willingly accept it? However, almost a thousand years of scholarship and reflection works that out, doesn’t it?
We live in a society that wants things easily presented to them on their smart phone or computer in condensed form so that it can be digested in less than a minute. I think that’s why “karma” is so popular — it’s a whittled down concept that sounds “moral” and doesn’t take much thought or explanation. Christian teachings and apologetics are complex. It’s a thinking person’s religion that doesn’t lend itself easily to a Google search or sound byte.
When you try to turn Christianity into something very simple and a sound byte, that’s when the problems ensue. This is what the mainstream Christian churches are encountering.
[blockquote]It’s a thinking person’s religion that doesn’t lend itself easily to a Google search or sound byte.[/blockquote]
You got that right. After all, we are to love the Lord our God not only with all our heart and soul but also with all our [i] mind[/i]. And as we do, we discover as Dorothy Sayers said, that “Christian dogma seems to offer the only explanation of the universe that is intellectually satisfactory.” (Letters volume 2, page 401). She goes on to say that this is what one should expect since at the centre of the Christian scheme of things is the Divine Word, the Logos.
Carver’s Niebuhr quotation is off. HRN said: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
“One Presbyterian pastor in Tennessee has gone even further, rejecting the idea that Christ died for our sins — claiming the idea is “absurd†and stating that the cross “doesn’t even make sense.â€
Sounds like this Presbyterian pastor might pass the discernment process in in many of ECUSA’s dioceses.
I doubt that the spread of Christianity in the third world is the result of the study of theology. For the few who are interested in finding out what is going on, I suggest reading The Century of the Holy Spirit by Vinson Synan.
[blockquote]I doubt that the spread of Christianity in the third world is the result of the study of theology.[/blockquote]
Perhaps not. I suppose it depends on what you mean by the study of theology. But if the human leadership in any purported move of the Holy Spirit isn’t firmly grounded theologically it won’t be Christianity that you end up with.