Introduction
Yesterday I was discussing with some friends the nature of the Reformed collapse in the face of all our crazytoon times. Reformed guys are supposed to be the heady ones, the keepers of the Big Thinks, and they went down before the most transparent lies—they went down like dry August grass before a freshly sharpened scythe. And when I reference what I am calling the most transparent lies, I am referring to white fragility, third-way-ism, lockdowns, BLM stuff, climate change, Ferguson, the vaccine jive, St. George of Minneapolis, masks, that whole convoluted bundle. Why did we fall for all that? And, as I hasten to add, how come?
The Sin of Gospel-Centeredness
I speak of the sin of gospel-centeredness, but of course I hasten to qualify. There is a sense in which every faithful Christian is to be gospel-centered. We preach nothing but Christ and Him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). Yes, as far as that goes, and amen. But the real issue is not whether the gospel is central, but rather what it is central to. This is because there is another sense in which the devil himself is gospel-centered. He wants the gospel to be centrally-located—in the epistemic cage that he has constructed for it. So when we are dealing with his machinations, the question is not what is at the center, but rather where the center is, and where the circumference is. If the gospel is not central to all of life, then it is the devil’s version of gospel-centeredness. The devil wants the gospel bound, and he does not mind at all if we tie it up at the center. But Paul’s gospel, the one we are supposed to be preaching, is not bound (2 Tim. 2:9). This means, if you catch my drift, that it goes everywhere.
You may think this a harsh condemnation, but I dispute that. It is a hard word, I will give you that, but it is not harsh at all. It is the only truth that keeps the way of repentance open. The man who hears the word and does not do it is in fact doing something. What is he doing? He is deceiving himself (Jas. 1:22). In the same way, and for exactly the same reason, theological movements that emphasize hearing the truth without also emphasizing living out the truth in genuine application are movements that are trying to get spiritual delusion to scale somehow. Once they get it to scale, then they can start hosting conferences and invite one another to speak at them.
For various reasons, mostly having to do with laziness and sin, the modern Reformed world developed an allergic reaction to anything like specific applications of the doctrines taught. Application of the truth was thought of as legalistic. If you made specific applications from the pulpit, it was felt that you were “binding consciences.” Words like obedience made people think of works-righteousness, and that made them feel like something hot and sticky was crawling up their spine. For the most part, the Young, Restless and Reformed movement shared in this terrible aversion, and helped to promote it. The gospel-centered movement sounded really good, as it declared the good news of forgiveness in Christ, but was truly unprepared for the follow up question. Now what?
But Application of Some Sort Is Inescapable
Because men and women must live out their lives, day after day, this means that application is an inescapable concept. Remember that the inescapable concept is summed up by the phrase not whether, but which. It is not whether we will impose morality through the law, but rather which morality we will impose through the law. It is not whether we will have a theocracy, but rather which God will be the god of the system in that theocracy. That is how the inescapable concept works. Not whether, but which.
So it is not whether there will be application, but rather which application there will be.
If we are being taught the gospel, the natural thing to apply in your life would be that gospel. This is after all what Jesus instructed us to do. We were to disciple the nations, baptizing them, which is the proclamation of the gospel part. But then, after that, we were to teach the nations to do everything that Jesus had commanded us to do (Matt. 29:18-20). “Teach them to obey all” is how I think He put it. In what has to be considered a form of straight up disobedience, the executive directors of all our Reformed thinkeries determined that such obedience was not essential to their version of gospel-centeredness, and was in fact inimical to it. The calling of discipleship supposedly threatened the primacy of grace.
Now if you are living in circles that are suspicious of any application, especially applications that are taught from the pulpit, then the people will become extremely wary of trying anything like that. But we must still live our lives, which means that we are going to have to apply something. And if it is not the truth of the gospel, then it will be the holiness code of some other religion. Nature abhors a vacuum, and this includes the space where all the application needs to be going on.
If Bible teachers consistently warn Christians away from specific biblical applications “as legalism,” or as “not preaching Christ and Him crucified,” then this does not mean that Christians under such teaching will succeed in applying nothing. What it means is that they will wind up applying the tenets of some alien religion, and they will do this without any awareness at all that this is what they are doing.
If you preach a thundering sermon on the importance of ethnic harmony, and say it is a really good sermon, but you don’t make specific follow-up applications from the Word, then you can rest assured that some Sunday School teacher is going to start channeling Robin DiAngelo. Applications are inescapable, and if you don’t insist on good ones, you are actually insisting on bad ones. If you preach on the vile sin of child abuse, and you make the crucial point most clearly that child abuse is really, really bad, but you don’t teach the biblical principles of actual due process, then you are inviting the Boz in to chase all the ambulances he wants. If you preach on marital harmony, you can say lots of great things, but if you don’t make specific applications in the area of male/female roles, you are turning your entire women’s ministry over to the feminists.
And this is exactly what happened to us.
An Application Sampler
Christian kids should receive a Christian education. Married women should be keepers at home. Christian voters must vote against politicians who promote abortion. Christians should not be entertained by raunchy sex comedies. Women must be kept out of combat roles in the military.
The previous paragraph contained just a small sampling of the kind of necessary applications that we should be making all the time. But if your mind rushed immediately to the difficult cases that would make such application difficult or impossible (“she has a quadriplegic husband, and three kids, and so she can’t be a keeper at home”), then this just demonstrates how thoroughly you have been trained by the current Reformed allergies.
The Fundamental Choice
The Puritan preachers were no slouches when it came to unpacking the doctrine. After they had done this, for an hour or so, they would then loosen their piccadill, spit on their hands, and move on to the applications. There would be seventeen of them.
These Puritan men have had the tombs of the prophets erected over their graves, and their collected works are sold in the little bookshop you need to go through to exit the museum. And we know we have reached the zenith of our folly when a man can get in trouble with the museum authorities for teaching something that he actually learned in that book they made him buy and read because he said he wanted to go to seminary.
Like the constables in Penzance, we constantly say, “We go, we go, we go!” Yes . . . but you don’t go.
Appliqué Applications
Application is obedience. Application is starting up the car and taking it out for a spin. Application is giving as much weight to Ephesians 4-6 as you do to Ephesian 1-3, and making sure to center the former on the base of the latter. Application leads to a sanctification that sweats, and even that sweat is a gift of God—lest any man should boast. Application is like plowing a field, running a race, fighting a war. We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared beforehand for us to do. It is okay to quote that verse because it is found in chapter two. But be careful, your mentor warns.
We have opted instead for appliqué, that which is decorative needlework. You have an ecclesiastical enterprise that is dedicated to honoring the memory of the Puritans, but you have to leave out a bunch of the stuff that they did. And said. And wrote. And disciplined for. If any of their downstream heirs ask leave to do anything similar in our day, they are shushed and silenced and run out of town.
But you still have to look like a Puritan, and so little appliqué applications are allowed. This would include things like buying an expensive humidor, reading books that weigh twelve pounds, and becoming a craft beer snob. If in any of those books you read about the Puritans’ exploits in application, this is permissible just so long as you follow the exhortation of James, which is to be a hearer of the Word, and not a doer of it. Something like that. Something something.
The whole thing would be hilarious if it weren’t so funny.
Our Reformed forefathers, and the Puritans in the Angloworld, built a great civilization. But we live in a time when the purported Reformed of today would have trouble building a shaved ice stand in Atlantic City in August. This is because building things out there in the world requires applications. The only thing we know how to build would be our own nests—so that we might have something to feather.
And so returning to the earlier point about inescapable concepts, the modern Reformed guy builds. Oh, yes, he builds. He builds diversity offices. He builds third way political excuses. He builds pathways towards women’s ordination. He builds Sunday School curricula to further climate change awareness . He builds a ramshackle cardboard shantytown in the place where his forefathers once built glorious churches and vibrant towns.
He does this because as a man, he must have application. As a modern Reformed man, he must not have Christian application. So what we get is pagan applications. Everybody is acting worried about the Reformed installing a Theodosius, when what they ought to be worried about is our contemporary Reformed johnnies installing a Diocletian. They are whipped up that the Reformed are going to give us a Protestant Franco when the more likely scenario is a Stalin who actually finished his seminary studies.
And we would breathlessly await a NYT piece from David French. “Why Diocletian is No Trump . . . And That’s a Good Thing.”
Application is Risky
Someone is going to protest that all such applications really are risky. They really can be legalistic. Some people really do bind consciences. The application can be biblical enough, like giving away everything to the poor, but because it is done without love, it is still nothing. And the applications urged by some believers can be well intentioned, and still be flat wrong.
All of this is quite true. Applications are risky. But the servants who took their risks are the ones praised in the parable. And the one who took his talent and buried it in a napkin was the one who took the sane, conservative approach (Luke 19:20). He was the worthless servant.
But at least he was a worthless Reformed servant. And he said he believed in inerrancy.