by Matthew Pinson | Dec 16, 2020
My readers have noticed that, some mornings, I have been reading gradually through the Puritan Thomas Brooks’s classic, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. My theological mentor F. Leroy Forlines died yesterday around 3:30 p.m. at ninety-four years of age, and it was fitting that when I sat down to read this morning, my eyes fell on the following words from Thomas Brooks about truth.
Mr. Forlines’s favorite passage of Scripture was John 8:32, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Another passage from the gospel of John aptly describes Leroy Forlines’s life: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Mr. Forlines patterned his life after Christ. So it was characterized by truth but also by grace. Another text that he was fond of along these lines was Ephesians 4:14–15: “As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.” Mr. Forlines always bore witness to the truth, but he always spoke it in love.
These texts came vividly to my mind early this morning when I opened Precious Remedies and saw the words below from Brooks. They describe the man who, outside my wife, children, parents, and grandparents, has shaped me more than any other living human being.
Brooks is discussing the eleventh device of Satan “to draw the soul to sin”: “By polluting and defiling the souls and judgments of men with . . . dangerous errors.” Leroy Forlines valiantly spent his life helping us battle this device of Satan. Brooks’s fifth remedy is “Hold fast the truth,” and his sixth is “keep humble.” This is the remedy Leroy Forlines modeled before us, and it is the gospel remedy that holds the cure for our souls and for the ills of our secular age—for believers in Christ to hold fast the truth and keep humble.
Meditate with me on this passage from Brooks that Leroy Forlines would smile on because it is so saturated in the wisdom of Holy Scripture. And meditate on it with the total-personality zeal with which Mr. Forlines would want you to read it—to think deeply, to feel deeply, and to ponder how this truth can transform you. And with it, reminisce about the way in which Mr. Forlines lived out for us and taught us and modeled before us these verities that alone can set us free.
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Remedy (5). The fifth remedy against this device of Satan is, To hold fast the truth. As men take no hold on the arm of flesh—until they let go the arm of God (Jer. 17:5); so men take no hold on error until they have let go their hold of truth; therefore hold fast the truth (2 Tim. 1:13, and Titus 1:9). Truth is your crown, hold fast your crown, and let no man take your crown from you. Has not God made truth sweet to your soul, yes, sweeter than honey, or the honeycomb? and will not you go on to heaven, feeding upon truth, that heavenly honeycomb, as Samson did of his honeycomb. Ah, souls, have you not found truth sweetening your spirits, and cheering your spirits, and warming your spirits, and raising your spirits, and corroborating your spirits? Have not you found truth a guide to lead you, a staff to uphold you, a cordial to strengthen you, and a medicine to heal you? And will not you hold fast the truth? Has not truth been your best friend in your worst days? Has not truth stood by you when friends have forsaken you? Has not truth done more for you than all the world could do against you, and will you not hold fast the truth? Is not truth your right eye, without which you cannot see for Christ? And your right hand, without which you cannot do for Christ? And your right foot, without which you cannot walk with Christ? And will you not hold truth fast? Oh! hold fast the truth in your judgments and understandings, in your wills and affections, in your profession and conversation.
Truth is more precious than gold or rubies, “and all the things you can desire are not to be compared to her” (Prov. 3:15). Truth is that heavenly mirror wherein we may see the luster and glory of divine wisdom, power, greatness, love and mercifulness. In this mirror you may see the face of Christ, the favor of Christ, the riches of Christ, and the heart of Christ—beating and working sweetly towards your souls. Oh! let your souls cleave to truth, as Ruth did to Naomi (Ruth 1:15, 16), and say, “I will not leave truth, nor return from following after truth; but where truth goes I will go, and where truth lodges I will lodge; and nothing but death shall part truth and my soul.” What John said to the church of Philadelphia I may say to you, “Hold fast that which you have, that no man take your crown” (Rev. 3:11). The crown is the top of royalties: such a thing is truth: “Let no man take your crown.” “Hold fast the faithful word,” as Titus speaks. Hold fast as with tooth and nail, against those who would snatch it from us. It is better to let go of anything, rather than truth! It is better to let go, of your honors and riches, your friends and pleasures, and the world’s favors; yes, your nearest and dearest relations, yes, your very lives—than to let go of the truth. Oh, keep the truth, and truth will make you safe and happy forever. Blessed are those who are kept by truth. “Though I cannot dispute for the truth, yet I can die for the truth,” said a blessed martyr.
Remedy (6). The sixth remedy against this device of Satan is, To keep humble. Humility will keep the soul free from many darts of Satan’s casting, and erroneous snares of his spreading. As low trees and shrubs are free from many violent gusts and blasts of wind which shake and tear the taller trees, so humble souls are free from those gusts and blasts of error which shake and tear proud, lofty souls. Satan and the world have least power to fasten errors upon humble souls. The God of light and truth delights to dwell with the humble; and the more light and truth dwells in the soul, the further off darkness and error will stand from the soul. The God of grace pours in grace into humble souls, as men pour drink into empty vessels; and the more grace is poured into the soul, the less error shall be able to overpower the soul, or to infect the soul. I have read of one who, seeing in a vision so many snares of the devil spread upon the earth, he sat down mourning, and said within himself, Who shall pass through these? whereupon he heard a voice answering, Humility shall pass through them.
That is a sweet word in Psalm 25:9, “The humble, he will guide in judgment, and the meek he will teach his way.” And certainly souls guided by God, and taught by God, are not easily drawn aside into ways of error. Oh, take heed of spiritual pride! Pride fills our fancies, and weakens our graces, and makes room in our hearts for error. There are no men on earth so soon entangled, and so easily conquered by error—as proud souls. Oh, it is dangerous to love to be wise above what is written, to be curious and unsober in your desire of knowledge, and to trust to your own capacities and abilities to undertake to pry into all secrets, and to be puffed up with a carnal mind. Souls that are thus asoaring up above the bounds and limits of humility, usually fall into the very worst of errors, as experience does daily evidence. The proud soul is like him who gazed upon the moon—but fell into the pit. You know how to apply it.
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Leroy Forlines would have loved these sentiments from the pages of Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. He embodied this union of truth and humility in his own life and work and taught us to do the same. May we continue to emulate his example.
The above scripture texts are from the NASB.
by Matthew Pinson | Oct 20, 2020
I am reading back through my copy of Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices that my old pastor Paul Harrison gave me in 2007. Dr. Harrison is always giving away copies of books by the Puritans—something I love about him—and one of his favorite books to give away is Thomas Brooks’s Precious Remedies.
I’ve been reading portions of it as part of my daily devotional exercises, and I’m going to share a choice quote from it below. But before that, let me reflect a little on Puritan spirituality.
I love to read the Puritans. As I often tell my classes here at Welch College, we need to read the Puritans. They represent some of the best spirituality and theology the Christian tradition has to offer. I often say that the sort of Reformation spirituality represented by our General Baptist forefathers (my own tradition, the Free Will Baptist Church, originated from English General Baptists who moved to this side of the Atlantic in the 1600s) is essentially Puritan spirituality.
Puritans could be either baptistic or paedobaptistic (baptizing infants) or Calvinist or Arminian. So, while most Puritans advocated infant baptism (like Brooks or Thomas Boston or John Owen), there were also baptistic Puritans (Baptists—part of a branch of what many scholars, such as my late major professor Richard Greaves, call “radical Puritans”) like John Bunyan and Thomas Grantham and William Kiffin. And while most Puritans were Calvinists, there were also Puritans, such as the General Baptists, who were Arminians. John Goodwin is probably the best-known Arminian Puritan.
General Baptist spirituality, as a branch of Puritan spirituality, is basically an Arminian and Baptist version of Puritan spirituality. Thus it is Arminian and so is non-deterministic and admits that apostasy of genuine believers is a possibility, and it is baptistic and emphasizes conversion in a way some paedobaptistic Puritan spirituality doesn’t. In this way it is like the spirituality of John Bunyan as seen in books like The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Thus, like Puritan spirituality, General Baptist spirituality is very much an “ordinary means of grace” spirituality. It is more about what Edith Schaeffer called “common sense Christian living.” It was about the spiritual disciplines. It was very common sense and down-to-earth, not as mystical and crisis-experience-oriented as much modern evangelical spirituality, which has been influenced by the holiness and charismatic movements.
Puritan spirituality was also less individualistic than much modern evangelical spirituality. It emphasized the church and Christian community. It was just as apt to talk about how to listen to a sermon and the importance of attending church as it was to talk about an individual’s solitary devotional exercises (which it also talked about a lot!).
Puritan spirituality, in being less mystical and more common-sense-oriented, was very Word-centered and doctrinal. Learning and studying and meditating prayerfully on Holy Scripture was at the heart of this sort of spirituality.
We need to get back to this sort of basic, biblical, evangelical, ordinary-means-of-grace spirituality.
Now that you have read my musings about Puritan spirituality, I want to give you a great quote from Precious Remedies. What Brooks does is list a device of Satan and then respond with several remedies against that device. The third device Satan uses against us is the “extenuating and lessening of sin.” Brooks writes,
“Ah! says Satan, it is but a little pride, a little worldliness, a little uncleanness, a little drunkenness, etc. As Lot said of Zoar, ‘It is but a little one, and my soul shall live’ (Gen. 19:20). Alas! says Satan, it is but a very little sin that you stick so at. You may commit it without any danger to your soul. It is but a little one; you may commit it, and yet your soul shall live.”
Brooks gives seven things to consider which provide remedies for dealing with this strategy of Satan:
- Sin which men account small brings God’s great wrath on men.
- The giving way to a less sin makes way for the committing of a greater.
- It is sad to stand with God for a trifle.
- Often there is most danger in the smallest sins.
- The saints have chosen to suffer greatly rather than commit the least sin.
- The soul can never stand under the guilt and weight of sin when God sets it home upon the soul.
- There is more evil in the least sin than in the greatest affliction.
The second remedy is one that I wanted to share with my readers. When engaging in spiritual warfare, we need to “preach ourselves a sermon” and remind ourselves that when we give way to a lesser sin, it makes it easier for us to commit a greater sin. Ponder the wisdom in Brooks’s last paragraph in this section:
“By all this we see, that the yielding to lesser sins, draws the soul to the committing of greater. Ah! how many in these days have fallen, first to have low thoughts of Scripture and ordinances, and then to slight Scripture and ordinances, and then to make a nose of wax of Scripture and ordinances, and then to cast off Scripture and ordinances, and then at last to advance and lift up themselves, and their Christ-dishonoring and soul-damning opinions, above Scripture and ordinances. Sin gains upon man’s soul by insensible degrees. “The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness, and the end of his talking is mischievous madness.” (Eccles. 10:13) Corruption in the heart, when it breaks forth, is like a breach in the sea, which begins in a narrow passage, until it eats through, and casts down all before it. The debates of the soul are quick, and soon ended; and that may be done in a moment that may undo a man forever. When a man has begun to sin, he knows not where, or when, or how he shall make a stop of sin. Usually the soul goes on from evil to evil, from folly to folly, until it is ripe for eternal misery. Men usually grow from being naught to be very naught, and from very naught to be stark naught, and then God sets them at nought forever.”
I encourage you to read Thomas Brooks’s Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices. Stick with it, despite the older vocabulary (some of which you might have to google). Because it’s so scriptural, it will be food for your soul, spiritual nourishment for your mind, heart, and will.
by Matthew Pinson | Sep 30, 2020
Some time ago, Phillip Morgan, who teaches history at Welch College, sent me a link to an interview Peter Whittle did with Katharine Birsbalsingh on the British conservative website The New Culture Forum. The topic is K–12 education, and many of my readers will find it fascinating. Birbalsingh, a French language teacher who was originally from New Zealand, the daughter of a Guyanese father and Jamaican mother, spent most of her childhood in Canada until her father began teaching at a university in England when she was 15. She has lived, studied, and taught in England ever since.
In 2014, Birbalsingh started a “free school” (the closest thing in England to what we would call a charter school), Michaela Community School in Wembley Park, London. Her views on education have been profoundly influenced by E. D. Hirsch, especially his 1999 book The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them.
Hirsch has also had a great impact on my thinking, and this is the most notable thing that intrigues me about Birbalsingh (she also talks a lot about conservative intellectuals like Roger Scruton, about whom I blogged at FWBTheology.com a while back, as well as the economist Thomas Sowell).
I read Hirsch’s The Schools We Need when I was taking a course in pedagogy at Vanderbilt University several years ago. His views on education were a breath of fresh air compared to the progressive methods I was encountering from some professors at Vanderbilt (while other professors at Vanderbilt advocated charter schools and more-traditional teaching methods somewhat similar to Birbalsingh’s). It was no surprise to me at the time that Hirsch would advocate conservative views on teaching, because I had been heavily influenced as a young adult by other books he had written, especially Validity in Interpretation, which had been very helpful to me when I was wading through postmodern critical theory while in grad school at Yale.
Birbalsingh is an enthusiastic (you will see that when you listen to the interview!) advocate of the more-traditional pedagogical methods Hirsch advocated in his career. She has said that Hirsch’s The Schools We Need was the book that, more than any other, opened her eyes to the need for an alternative to the progressive educational methods that, in her own experience, she’d found simply didn’t work, and which seemed to her to be failing children in the educational system of Great Britain.
Whether you yourself are a teacher or simply someone who’s concerned about the problems besetting so many of today’s schools, I think you’ll find the interview interesting. You can find it here.
by Matthew Pinson | Sep 19, 2020
I recently read an address C. S. Lewis gave to a group of Anglican priests and youth leaders in 1945. It reminded me of what many of us in the Free Will Baptist Church have been thinking lately: Falling all over ourselves to de-emphasize our Free Will Baptist confessional beliefs and practices is probably the surest strategy for denominational extinction we could devise. Let me make a few general observations about denominational identity and survival, and then we’ll look more closely at what Lewis can teach us.
The First Strategy for Denominational Survival
There seem to be two competing strategies for denominational survival vying for prominence in the Free Will Baptist Church (as in all denominations). The first is this: If we want to keep from dying, we must become as much as possible like the non-denominational, consumer-oriented megachurch. This, among other things will mean de-emphasizing strange doctrinal beliefs and practices like the possibility of apostasy, the pedilavium, or requiring immersion for new members transferring from non-immersionist churches. It will mean not teaching distinctive Free Will Baptist doctrine from the pulpit. It will require making it as hard as possible for people to discover that our congregation is Free Will Baptist, based on its publications and communications.
The Second Strategy for Denominational Survival
The second is this: If we want to keep from dying, we must fulfill the Great Commission mandate of evangelizing people and teaching those we evangelize everything Jesus and his deputies, the inspired apostles, taught. This means we must teach and preach doctrine, like the apostles in the New Testament said to do, and we must practice what we believe the New Testament teaches, even if it seems strange to people outside our confessional tradition. This includes distinctive Free Will Baptist doctrine and practice. If we don’t carefully inculcate the scriptural doctrines our confessional tradition has affirmed, and if we don’t emphasize distinctive biblical practices our tradition has extolled, and if we do our dead-level best to cover up the fact that we’re Free Will Baptists, within a generation we will be assimilated into the non-denominational matrix and will go out of existence as a separate denomination.
These two strategies are mutually exclusive. If one is right, the other is dead wrong. You can’t have a hybrid of these two strategies.
The Last Thing We Need is Another Denomination
Please understand: I do not think, as I know C. S. Lewis did not think, that we need more denominations. That we need more schism. If it’s not necessary to have a separate Free Will Baptist denomination because it is our conviction that the Bible teaches what our Church affirms, then it’s really wrong to have another denomination. It’s schismatic. It’s divisive. And we need to join another denomination. I think Lewis, good Anglican that he was, would agree with me on this.
There’s something that breaks my heart—and I think breaks the heart of God—about the proliferation of all the different denominations out there that basically believe the same thing but are separated because of squabbles they have had that are not about the doctrine and practice they believe the Bible entails. A denomination is not a “network.” It is a fellowship of churches that believe that their affirmation of certain scriptural—apostolic—doctrines and practices necessitates having a separate denomination.
The last thing we need is another denomination. If there are other conservative Arminian Baptist denominations that believe that the washing of the saints’ feet is a divine ordinance that must be practiced liturgically—and other beliefs in our Treatise that we believe necessitate our Church’s existence—by all means let’s join up! Let’s not be schismatic because of our preferences, or because we’re used to seeing each other and going golfing or eating sushi together at the Annual Session of the National Association each July.
If we’re going to fall all over ourselves finding more efficient ways to bury our Free Will Baptist identity, doctrine, and practice, why go to the trouble of having a separate denomination? Why not just join the Southern Baptists or become non-denominational?
Are “Missional” and “Confessional” in Opposition?
These are things a lot of us have been talking about in the Free Will Baptist Church of late. We’re trying to figure out what it means to be who we are, with integrity, in a mission field in our secular age in the West.
We’re in a rapidly secularizing culture. We must be missional. And when new believers on the mission field in majority-world countries are converted, they want you to level with them about what’s true and what’s false. They’re hungering and thirsting for knowledge. They want to know what all these things they come across in the Bible really mean:
What does the Bible mean when it says that you will receive the crown of life only “if you continue”? What does it mean when it says you can fall away and not be renewed to repentance? Is affusion (sprinkling) okay in baptism, or is infant baptism okay? Or do I have to be immersed as a convert to follow Jesus in baptism? Do we—literally, physically—need to observe the Lord’s supper liturgically, or was that just a spiritual lesson? Do we—literally, physically—need to wash people’s feet liturgically, or was that just a spiritual lesson?
That’s why the people who are opposing Protestant liberalism most in the mainline denominations are from the global South and from the mission field. It’s people in the consumeristic modern West who want to de-emphasize theological precision and biblical doctrine and practice—who seem to want to do anything but teach and preach—and sing—doctrine.
These are the sorts of conversations that are happening among many Free Will Baptists—especially those in the ministry who are in their twenties. They are taking part in a new mentality to which David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, called them when he said, “After countless interviews and conversations, I am convinced that historic and traditional practices, and orthodox and wisdom-laden ways of believing, are what the next generation really needs.”
Now to What C. S. Lewis Said
So, in light of these exciting conversations that are taking place, especially among Free Will Baptists in their twenties, I loved what I read recently from C. S. Lewis. Again, remember he’s talking to Anglicans in England in the 1940s:
“Some of you are priests and some are leaders of youth organizations. . . . And here at the outset I must deal with an unpleasant business. It seems to the layman that in the Church of England we often hear from our priests doctrine which is not Anglican Christianity. . . . It is not, of course, for me to define to you what Anglican Christianity is—I am your pupil, not your teacher. But I insist that wherever you draw the lines, bounding lines must exist, beyond which your doctrine will cease either to be Anglican or to be Christian: and I suggest also that the lines come a great deal sooner than many modern priests think. I think it is your duty to fix the lines clearly in your own minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession.
“This is your duty not specially as Christians or as priests but as honest men. . . . Men who have passed beyond these boundary lines in either direction are apt to protest that they have come by their unorthodox opinions honestly. In defense of those opinions they are prepared to suffer obloquy and to forfeit professional advancement. They thus come to feel like martyrs. But this simply misses the point which so gravely scandalizes the layman. We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held; what we complain of is your continuing your ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative Party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of another.
“Even when we have thus ruled out teaching which is in direct contradiction to our profession, we must define our task still further. We are to defend Christianity itself—the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers. . . .” [1]
Lewis and Denominations
C. S. Lewis was speaking here as an Anglican to Anglican clergy, and he was doing what he did in so many other places when he talks about confessional doctrine and not just “mere Christianity.” In his writings, Lewis talked about the virgin birth, but also about lesser doctrines such as the Anglican doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s supper. Some people only read Lewis’s wonderful book Mere Christianity, and they think that is all Lewis was interested in—a sort of amorphous, non-denominational Christianity.
But they forgot to read the preface to Mere Christianity, in which Lewis said that “mere Christianity” is like the central hall of a great house which leads to distinctive rooms, and he did not want his appropriate discussion of mere Christianity, which unites Christians in the different distinctive “rooms”—denominations or confessional traditions—to discourage people from going into those rooms and exploring them and enjoying them.
Lewis said that his silence in Mere Christianity about his Anglican distinctives of doctrine and practice should not be interpreted that he is “sitting on the fence” about doctrines and practices that distinguish one denomination from another, nor that he thinks them unimportant:
“I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. . . . When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. . . . When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong, they need your prayers the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.” [3]
Moving from Entry-Level Christianity to Unabridged Christianity
Oh what need we are in of this sort of time-honored wisdom in our own day of an evangelicalism that is so unsure of itself, so intimated by the spirit of the age. We need what we see throughout Lewis’s writings, and throughout the writings of the great saints and martyrs throughout the church’s past: We need to be ourselves.
We need to be, un-self-consciously, with integrity, what the Scriptures call us to be. We need to be teaching what the Scriptures teach, practicing the simple practices the Scriptures enjoin us to practice. We need to be zealously evangelizing the lost and then just as zealously teaching them to observe everything Jesus and his deputies, the inspired apostles, teach and command and enjoin in the New Testament—not just the core, not just what it takes to be saved, but everything.
Leroy Forlines says it this way: The part of the Great Commission that says we must teach people to observe everything Jesus teaches and commands means He won’t allow us just to teach “entry-level” Christianity. His Great Commission to us demands we teach “unabridged Christianity” [4].
This is what has, historically, happened on the mission field. New Christians rescued from the grip of sin and its devastation on their life, and fitted for glory, usually don’t want to stay at the “entry level”—in the hall. They want to know more. They want honest, direct answers to the questions that come to their minds when they’re reading the Bible.
That’s what we need to do. If we believe that the Free Will Baptist confession of faith and practice is biblical, we need to teach it and preach it and practice it with gusto—not to be ashamed of it. This, we’ll find, is not only a recipe for survival as a small, theologically distinctive denomination. It’s also just a common-sense playing out of the Great Commission—an honest, authentic attempt to teach people everything that Jesus and his apostles have put forward for his church. And it’s this kind of full-throated, confident discipleship in Christian truth that will lead mature disciples to make other disciples of Christ and bring growth and replication and renewal to our churches in our increasingly secular age.
[1] C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970).
[2] Ibid., 89–90.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 6–12.
[4]See Forlines’s classic essay, “A Plea for Unabridged Christianity,” Integrity: A Journal of Christian Thought 2 (2003), 85–102, which can be downloaded here.
by Matthew Pinson | Jun 15, 2020
Today the Supreme Court of the United States voted in a 6–3 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects homosexual and transgender individuals from discrimination in the workplace. “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” the decision read.*
This is a reinterpretation of the language from the 1964 law that made it illegal to discriminate against people in the workplace on the basis of “sex,” which at that time meant whether one was a biological male or a biological female. In other words, an employer could not refuse to hire, or fire, a woman in favor of a man, because she was a woman. Nor could an employer discriminate between men and women in terms of pay or any other treatment in the workplace.
The word “sex” has evolved to include homosexuality and transgenderism. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices have now redefined the word, thus making the law say something different from what the law’s framers meant by it, and what its interpreters have thought it to mean over the past fifty-six years.
This redefinition is troublesome on two fronts. First, obviously, it represents a mammoth shift in the way the morality of homosexuality is thought of in our culture, and this shift must be of concern to traditional religious people who intend to continue to view homosexuality and transgenderism the way they always have (more on this below).
Second, it has enormous implications for the way law is interpreted and decided in our time. The normal way of changing laws in our system of government is to enact legislation or to have a constitutional amendment. It appears that these are no longer necessary. Rather than write new legislation changing the wording of the Civil Rights Act specifically to include LGBT individuals (as the “Equality Act,” which cannot get enough votes to pass, would essentially do), or have a constitutional amendment giving LGBT individuals these rights (such as the the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote, or the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote), the Court simply has to redefine one word in the 1964 legislation to make it mean something different from what it was intended by its framers and how it has been interpreted for fifty-six years.
As Justice Samuel Alito said in his dissenting opinion, “. . . our duty is to interpret statutory terms to ‘mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written.’ (A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 16 [2012] [emphasis added]). If every single living American had been surveyed in 1964, it would have been hard to find any who thought that discrimination because of sex meant discrimination because of sexual orientation––not to mention gender identity, a concept that was essentially unknown at the time.”
There will never be another amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Because of the new, arbitrary modus operandi of the judicial branch of the federal government, amendments are no longer needed. A constitutional amendment could never have passed—nor could congressional legislation—in the cases of Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in all fifty states, Obergefell v. Hodges, which made homosexual marriage legal in all fifty states, or the Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, decision handed down today.
Bostock v Clayton County Georgia Case
The Bostock case represents another instance of the gradual evolution away from the American system of government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution toward a new system of legislation by the judiciary. And even justices John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch, whom some have described as “originalists” (interpreting the Constitution according to the original intent of its framers), are operating, in this case, according to the same mode of more-liberal justices in the other above-mentioned cases.
Justice Alito said in his dissenting opinion, “Usurping the constitutional authority of the other branches, the Court has essentially taken H. R. 5’s [the “Equality Act” passed by the U.S. House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate] provision on employment discrimination and issued it under the guise of statutory interpretation. A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall.”
He went on to say: “Many will applaud today’s decision because they agree on policy grounds with the Court’s updating of Title VII. But the question in these cases is not whether discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity should be outlawed. The question is whether Congress did that in 1964. It indisputably did not.”
This decision could further erode religious institutions’ First Amendment right to the free exercise of their religion. As you will see below, there is ambiguity in what the ruling says about protection for religious institutions whose beliefs prohibit them from employing LGBT individuals. Allow me to share some lengthy excerpts from the majority opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch that concern religious liberty:
“Separately, the employers fear that complying with Title VII’s requirement in cases like ours may require some employers to violate their religious convictions. We are also deeply concerned with preserving the promise of the free exercise of religion enshrined in our Constitution; that guarantee lies at the heart of our pluralistic society.”
“But worries about how Title VII may intersect with religious liberties are nothing new; they even predate the statute’s passage. As a result of its deliberations in adopting the law, Congress included an express statutory exception for religious organizations. This Court has also recognized that the First Amendment can bar the application of employment discrimination laws ‘to claims concerning the employment relationship between a religious institution and its ministers.’ (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC).”
“And Congress has gone a step further yet in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). That statute prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion unless it demonstrates that doing so both furthers a compelling governmental interest and represents the least restrictive means of furthering that interest. . . . Because RFRA operates as a kind of super statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws, it might supersede Title VII’s commands in appropriate cases.”
“But how these doctrines protecting religious liberty interact with Title VII are questions for future cases too. Harris Funeral Homes did unsuccessfully pursue a RFRA-based defense in the proceedings below. In its certiorari petition, however, the company declined to seek review of that adverse decision, and no other religious liberty claim is now before us. So while other employers in other cases may raise free exercise arguments that merit careful consideration, none of the employers before us today represent in this Court that compliance with Title VII will infringe their own religious liberties in any way.”
The ambiguities in the above language should be of concern to traditional religious people and their institutions—e.g., RFRA “might supersede Title VII’s commands in appropriate cases” (italics added) and “. . . how these doctrines protecting religious liberty interact with Title VII are questions for future cases. . . .”
Justice Alito points this out in his dissent that “the position that the Court now adopts will threaten freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and personal privacy and safety. No one should think that the Court’s decision represents an unalloyed victory for individual liberty.” I will quote Justice Alito at length, since his statements encapsulate the concern that traditional religious people and organizations have expressed on how this will affect religious liberty:
“Briefs filed by a wide range of religious groups––Christian, Jewish, and Muslim––express deep concern that the position now adopted by the Court ‘will trigger open conflict with faith-based employment practices of numerous churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious institutions.’ They argue that ‘[r]eligious organizations need employees who actually live the faith,’ and that compelling a religious organization to employ individuals whose conduct flouts the tenets of the organization’s faith forces the group to communicate an objectionable message.”
“This problem is perhaps most acute when it comes to the employment of teachers. A school’s standards for its faculty ‘communicate a particular way of life to its students,’ and a ‘violation by the faculty of those precepts’ may undermine the school’s ‘moral teaching.’ Thus, if a religious school teaches that sex outside marriage and sex reassignment procedures are immoral, the message may be lost if the school employs a teacher who is in a same-sex relationship or has undergone or is undergoing sex reassignment. Yet today’s decision may lead to Title VII claims by such teachers and applicants for employment.”
“At least some teachers and applicants for teaching positions may be blocked from recovering on such claims by the “ministerial exception” recognized in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. Two cases now pending before the Court present the question whether teachers who provide religious instruction can be considered to be ‘ministers.’ But even if teachers with those responsibilities qualify, what about other very visible school employees who may not qualify for the ministerial exception? Provisions of Title VII provide exemptions for certain religious organizations and schools ‘with respect to the employment of individuals of a particular religion to perform work connected with the carrying on’ of the ‘activities’ of the organization or school, but the scope of these provisions is disputed, and as interpreted by some lower courts, they provide only narrow protection.”
So what should conservative religious people do in response to this threat Justice Alito discusses? First, we should pray for justices at all levels of the judicial system to be appointed who will uphold the liberty of religious institutions to have hiring and admissions and free association policies consistent with the First Amendment. There are some judges who will want both LGBT people and religious people to have liberty. Thus we can pray that justices such as Roberts and Gorsuch, who ostensibly do not follow the originalism of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, will make common cause with originalist justices such as Alito and Thomas—common cause for the protection of that “first freedom” of religious liberty.
Second, we must continue to be active in the public square and must, in the many ways available to us, work toward that for which we pray—voting, writing letters to public officials, and advocating for religious liberty, but in a way that is charitable, compassionate, sensitive, winsome, and intelligent.
Third, we must, more than ever, prayerfully and financially support religious institutions that are committed to maintaining fidelity to their religious beliefs in the face of public pressure to modify those beliefs. Nothing has changed for these institutions, such as Welch College, which have always humbly followed their sincere religious beliefs on sexuality and gender and a host of other issues and will continue to do so regardless of the pressure exerted on them to abandon those beliefs.
Most of all, we must maintain our focus on Christ and the gospel of the kingdom, which is transforming our minds and affections and the way we live our lives, allowing that transformative effect to spill out into the lives of our families, churches, communities, and cultures. And we must rest confident that through His ordinary means of grace, our Lord will build His church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
*All quotations from the Supreme Court majority opinion and Justice Alito’s dissent are from the ruling itself, which can be found at https://www.supremeCourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf. In-text citations removed.
by Matthew Pinson | Jul 24, 2018
Today at our Annual Session of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, I gave a seminar on how to keep our denomination thriving. One of the things I mentioned in my talk was how important it is for us not to get the answers wrong on why young people are leaving the church. If we get this wrong, we’ll jump to conclusions and fail to realize the reasons all the credible research says young people are actually leaving the church, and we’ll be spinning our wheels on mistaken solutions to the problem.
I mentioned the research by sociologists like Christian Smith, Melinda Lundquist Denton, and others, as well as other writers like Thom Rainer, Ken Ham, Kenda Creasy Dean, and the Barna Group’s David Kinnaman. These studies all show that young people are leaving all sorts of churches of all cultural and stylistic types, at the same rate—traditional to contemporary, rural to urban, liturgical to charismatic, small to mega.
Why Millennials are Leaving the Church
This comment struck a chord in many of the people in the audience in conversations after my presentation. Many of them had always heard that stylistic issues were the reason young people are leaving the church. There was specifically concern about students who have left the Christian faith altogether, becoming “nones” (who list no religious affiliation on religious surveys), given the fact that young people who become nones tend to explain that they left Christianity because they had little intergenerational mentoring; little depth, substance, and transcendence in the worship, preaching, teaching, and other practices of the church; and did not get answers to the tough intellectual questions they were asking in high school and college.
In conversations after the session, I mentioned some things David Kinnaman, CEO of the Barna Group, has said recently about this issue. He has discovered that Millennials are harder to figure out than we sometimes think—that making Christianity “cool” is not the answer to attracting Millennials to church, or keeping them from leaving. One study he and the Barna Group did, for example shows that 2/3 of Millennials in a major church architecture study preferred a traditional worship space to a contemporary one and preferred the word “classic” over “trendy” to describe their preferred church experience.
I quoted a statement Kinnaman made that our youth and family ministry teacher at Welch College, Chris Talbot, tweeted recently:
“After countless interviews and conversations, I am convinced that historic and traditional practices, and orthodox and wisdom-laden ways of believing, are what the next generation really needs.”
—David Kinnaman, CEO, Barna Group
Kinnaman refers people to Rachel Held Evans’s recent article in the Washington Post, “Want millennials back in the pews? Stop trying to make church ‘cool.’” I thought some of the readers of this blog would find this article interesting, and I have reprinted some quotes from it below.
Of course, we conservative evangelical Baptists will disagree with Evans on some important points she makes in the article. But what she says represents a growing number of Millennials, and studies show that the generation following them (currently school-age students) known as Generation Z are even harder to peg in terms of the assumption that getting a corner on “cool” will help us attract Millennials.
These excerpts from Held’s article will give us more insight into this complex generation and how that our simple assumptions about what will be the silver bullet to get them in church (or keep them from leaving) are often dead wrong.
“Many churches have sought to lure millennials back by focusing on style points: cooler bands, hipper worship, edgier programming, impressive technology. . . . These are not the key to drawing millennials back to God in a lasting and meaningful way. Young people don’t simply want a better show. And trying to be cool might be making things worse.”
“For a generation bombarded with advertising and sales pitches, and for whom the charge of ‘inauthentic’ is as cutting an insult as any, church rebranding efforts can actually backfire, especially when young people sense that there is more emphasis on marketing Jesus than actually following Him. Millennials ‘are not disillusioned with tradition; they are frustrated with slick or shallow expressions of religion,’ argues David Kinnaman.”
“My friend and blogger Amy Peterson put it this way:
‘I want a service that is not sensational, flashy, or particularly ‘relevant.’ I can be entertained anywhere. At church, I do not want to be entertained. I do not want to be the target of anyone’s marketing. I want to be asked to participate in the life of an ancient-future community.’”
“Millennial blogger Ben Irwin wrote: ‘When a church tells me how I should feel (‘Clap if you’re excited about Jesus!’), it smacks of inauthenticity. Sometimes I don’t feel like clapping. Sometimes I need to worship in the midst of my brokenness and confusion—not in spite of it and certainly not in denial of it.’”
“While no two faith stories are exactly the same, I’m not the only millennial whose faith couldn’t be saved by lacquering on a hipper veneer. According to Barna Group, among young people who don’t go to church, 87 percent say they see Christians as judgmental, and 85 percent see them as hypocritical. A similar study found that “only 8% say they don’t attend because church is ‘out of date,’ undercutting the notion that all churches need to do for Millennials is to make worship ‘cooler.’” Our reasons for leaving have less to do with style and image and more to do with substantive questions about life, faith and community. We’re not as shallow as you might think. . . . Our reasons for leaving have less to do with style and image and more to do with substantive questions about life, faith and community. We’re not as shallow as you might think.”
These quotations from Kinnaman and Evans reaffirm my hunch, which I shared in my seminar, that we need to be careful not to rely on anecdotal data and think we’ve easily got it figured out that the reason young people are leaving church and becoming “nones” is because of church style. The real reasons they’re leaving, and not coming to, our churches are much deeper, much more profound, and get much closer to the heart of the sorts of things the Bible talks about when it discusses basic human need.
