Ghost Town Denominations

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As the ancient preacher pondered the futility of our existence here under the sun, one of his complaints pointed to the problem of inheritance. Each of us will die, and each of us will leave behind us the fruit of our labors. And who knows, the preacher wondered, whether these heirs will be wise or foolish?

As we consider the history of the church in North America, this question should be in the front of our minds. So many churches, denominations, parachurch ministries, mission agencies, and publishing houses have drifted into unbelief and liberalism that one would think that we should know what it looked like by now. But Solomon’s words still ring true. Fools receiving an inheritance from the past do not think to inquire whether or not they are being fools. Every morning is a new day to them, and they see no need to cling to all those dry and dusty lessons from the day before. They just take the valuables, shake the dust of wisdom off them, and head down to the pawn shop.

Consider our great ghost town denominations. For some reason, it is still customary for us to speak of them as the “mainstream” denominations. But because of the consequences of their capitulation to liberalism, and their resultant loss of millions of members, it would be more accurate for us to speak of these now as the backwater denominations. Nothing has proven to be more irrelevant than the liberal lust for relevance. As C.S. Lewis put it once, “Whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date.”

As we reflect on what has happened to these denominations, most modern evangelicals would acknowledge the whole thing as a sad business. J. Gresham Machen was a great man, just like all those other prophets whose tombs we wish to decorate. The problem comes when anyone tries to point out that the same things are happening to us, here, now.

Coming to the point, what we call modern evangelicalism is a terminal disease. Not only so, but it is, in its essential respects, the same terminal disease that was called modernism or liberalism in the twenties and thirties. The point here is not that modern evangelicalism is sick, but rather that it is the sickness. And what is the name of the sickness? The name is unbelief, and the apostle warned that it is by faith that we stand. We do not support the root, but rather the root supports us. With his characteristic insight, Machen argued in Christianity and Liberalism that these two names referred to two different religions. The same thing is true in our day.

The similarities between modern evangelicalism and liberalism are striking. Both emphasize an experience with Christ over the truth about Christ. Throughout history, some of course have made the opposite error, that of holding to bare propositions instead of holding rightly to the truth — but in our century few have gone in that direction. Our tendency is to exalt personal experience over dogma. Indeed, I at first hesitated to use the word dogma because in today’s climate, it is a dirty word. Taking all this together, I like to tell people that Christianity is not a relationship; it is a religion. Of course it is a religion with a covenant relationship at the heart of it. God promises to be our God, and we will be His people. But the liberal (and modern evangelical) emphasis is on what we are pleased to call a personal relationship (meaning private relationship) — and not the biblical notion of a public covenant relationship. When the relationship becomes “personal,” the truth that undergirds it becomes equally “personal.”

Second, both liberalism and modern evangelicalism seek to accommodate unbelieving culture. The only real difference here is that liberals pursued high culture, while the modern evangelicals pursue low culture. The result of this is that the liberals maintained what we might call residual standards longer. The modern evangelical pursuit of unbelieving low culture includes the pragmatism of church growth techniques and the slavish imitation of pop culture in worship. Those who desire another example need only wait a few months.

Third, both liberalism and modern evangelicalism utilize the ecclesiastical equivalent of Lenin’s useful idiots. When the modernists captured the current backwater Presbyterian church, that church was still overwhelmingly dominated by conservative evangelicals. They wouldn’t fight, but they had conservative evangelical hearts. Both heresies effectively use those who personally hold to the truth, but who for various reasons tolerate those who do not hold to it.

Both have highly-developed social agendas which are divorced from the Bible. From the liberal and evangelical teetotalling efforts for Prohibition to the current evangelical jihads for prayer in the government schools, the tendency is to fight for our own traditions in the name of Christ. But instead of this, our social agenda, to the extent we have one, should be based squarely on Scripture. We must fight for the truth, goodness and beauty of all that Scripture contains.

Of course the dishonesty of the whole endeavor is what causes conservative believers to adopt our classic and traditional tone — that of Shrill — which we have used for so long it has almost become an art form among us. We have been cordoned off, and our response is to dance impatiently in place, while heckling unbelief from our assigned place on the periphery.

Sadly, this has been conservative response to the possible problem of fools receiving the inheritance. We leave no inheritance.

Note:

I wrote this some years ago, and it just came up in my rotation for republishing old articles. But I could not read it again without thinking of the recent actions of the PCA. So if anyone asks if I think all this applies to our current situation, the answer is that I do believe that. The one thing that I would add is that instead of conservatives refusing to fight, what they have done here is try to prove their manliness by fighting fellow conservatives. The TRs seem to think that there are way too many folks in the PCA who are six-day creationists who are also opposed to women’s ordination. So they are resolved to hassle them until they are all R-U-N-N-O-F-T. Then they can have their sufficiently tiny amill martyr’s band, look sadly out over the ramparts of the Alamo, and say, as Bowie or Crockett well may have, “Apres moi, le deluge.”

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