Afflicted with pretty much everything, the modern church is certainly looking around for remedies. But where and how we look for these remedies remains a function of what ails us, and we are not yet desparate enough to ask for directions to the divine pharmacy.
How are we to explain our general cultural irrelevance? On the one hand, our nation is teeming with Christians, and yet, on the other, our presence here doesn’t seem to matter all that much. We try to fix the problem with political involvement, but our involvement only makes our problem glaringly obvious. When Christians have organized, and written, and voted, and lobbied, what do we have at the end of the day? We have a church which has plainly declared herself to be nothing more than just another lobbying organization. The Church of Jesus Christ believes herself to be just another special interest, alongside all the others. We have reduced ourselves to the level of big tobacco, or the gun lobby, or the greens. We want what we want just like they want what they want. Our authority for wanting it resides in our numbers, and not in the authority of God.
But one thing we have not considered. How do Christian husbands treat their wives, and of primary importance, why do they treat them that way? The center of our cultural life is found in the family, and at the center of every Christian family is a particular theology of atonement.
The older classical Protestant view emphasied the efficacy of the atonement of Jesus Christ. In other words, when Jesus Christ died on the cross He secured the salvation of all His elect. The love that He displayed there could in no way be described as an attempt. This was the bedrock assumption of the Protestant church from the time of the Reformation down to the first part of the nineteenth century. With this doctrinal understanding of the cross, when husbands were told to love their wives as Christ loved the church, they understood that injunction in a certain way. They were to love their wives in a transformational way, taking full responsibility for the state of their marriages and homes.
But a century and a half ago, evangelicalism walked away from this older reformational understanding of the cross. Put another way, evangelicalism fell away from evangelicalism. In place of an efficacious cross, evangelicals began to substitute an atonement which did not actually accomplish anything in particular, but rather expressed a feeling on the part of God — as the tee-shirt has exhorted us, He loves you “this much.” This was understood as a divine feeling that was certainly willing to do something for us if the sinner would only [fill in the blank]. Various evangelical traditions filled in their blank in different ways — walking the aisle, filling out a card, raising a hand. But in the older theology, there was no blank to fill in. The cross had filled in everything.
Equipped with the new doctrinal understanding of the cross, husbands still knew they were supposed to love their wives as Christ loved the church — it says to do that right in Ephesians. But they now had a completely different view of what Christ had actually accomplished for the church. They thought that He had done nothing more than express His sentiment, and then courteously left a very important decision with us. And so Christian husbands, en masse, began to walk away from their husbandly responsibilities. They were still willing to express their sentiment — just like Jesus had. They were taught a greeting card view of the atonement, and so an industry was born which continues with us to this day. Husbands still believe (because they have been so taught) that when they have “sent flowers” they have done “their part,” and now it is “up to her.”
When we trace our general cultural woes back to the home, that molecule of all culture, we are doing well. Our problems do begin there. But our attempts at renewal are almost always a little more of the hair of the dog that bit us. Faced with trouble, we encourage husbands to go back into the home, and express their sentiments some more. Our marriages are looking more and more like our evangelism. With modern evangelism, trying to fill in the gap God left, our attempts to evangelize have gotten increasingly more manipulative and bizarre. In the same way, we tell husbands to redouble their efforts to do “their part.” But the problem has never been how hard we do what we do. The problem is what we do.
When the atonement of Christ is the standard, it should not be difficult to see that men with differing views of that atonement will approach their wives and families differently. We should have the courage of our convictions. The century or more of modern evangelical experimentation is culminating in the disintegration of the Christian home. A departure from the cross has resulted in many departures from many homes. Perhaps the time has come to return to the old paths. This suggestion is perhaps a little radical, but the transformation of the home really is directly linked to the transformation of our culture. Because this is the case, the best thing which a husband could do for his marriage, and his nation, would be to put down that copy of How to Put Zing Back in the Ol’ Marriage, and pick up John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.