Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit's Power

PREFACE

The year 1974 was declared the Year of the Evangelical. Apparently no one was listening. The year came and went as our culture continued slouching towards Gomorrah. Fast forward to 2007. Islamic terrorism threatens our borders, our political discourse is shrill and spoken in sound bites, and an epidemic of pornography addiction threatens the very possibility of healthy relationships between men and women. People have to think twice about whether saving aborted babies or snail darters is more important. We can’t agree about the sexual makeup of a flourishing family.

Spirituality is in, but no one knows which form to embrace. Indeed, the very idea that one form may be better than another seems arrogant and intolerant. A flat stomach is of greater value than a mature character. The makeup man is more important than the speech writer. People listen, or pretend to listen, to what actors — actors! — have to say! Western Civ had to go, and along with it, the possibility of getting a robust university education. Why? Because political correctness so rules our universities that they are now places of secular indoctrination, and one is hard-pressed to find serious classroom interaction from various perspectives on the crucial issues of our day. The DaVinci Code — I just can’t go there.

What are we to do? In 1974, we Evangelicals were not ready to step into the vacuum and lead our culture to higher ground. And because the 1960s revolution had not been around long enough to do its damage, the culture was still living on the borrowed capital of a Christian worldview and could not sense the urgency to return to the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Today, we stand at a crossroad in the American Evangelical church. Since the mid 1800s, there has never been a greater window of opportunity for us to seize the moment and, by our lives and thought, to show our culture the way forward. Now is the time for us to stop being thirty years behind the times. Now is the time for us to gather our confidence and lead.

Signs indicate we are gaining momentum and may well be ready to manifest our Lord’s true character in a way appropriate to the crisis of our age. Our Christian schools are already outperforming our secular counterparts. More and more churches are recovering our rightful role in racial reconciliation, in caring for the poor, and in being a presence of light in a dark place. There is a growing dissatisfaction with playing church. The Intelligent Design movement cannot be stopped. Christians have substantially recaptured lost ground in the discipline of philosophy in universities around our land. Rumors of miracles are starting to trickle out of our churches. We are figuring out that the Holy Spirit didn’t die when the apostle John was martyred. Tools for spiritual formation are available as never before in my lifetime.

But the way forward is often murky to us, and in the pages to follow I want to shed light on the crisis of our age and the way out. I hope to provide an understanding of the times that will give you the courage to believe that a return to Jesus and life in his Kingdom is the only solution to this crisis. I also want to give you eyes to see the worldview issues that underlie the news, the entertainment industry, and the chaos and confusion all around us. Finally, I hope to envision for you and your church what I call the Kingdom Triangle — the essential ingredients for the maturation of the Evangelical community and the profundity of its presence in the general culture.

Because it may appear presumptuous for me to speak on these matters, permit me for a moment to speak as if insane (when Paul boasted to defend his right to speak with authority, he said he spoke as if insane; cf. 2 Cor. 11:23). I came to Jesus in 1968 in the midst of the sixties but more importantly in the center of the Jesus movement. I served with Campus Crusade for ten years and planted two Crusade ministries, including opening the ministry in the state of Vermont. Educationally, I was honored to study under Howard Hendricks during my Th.M. studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. Subsequently, I studied under Dallas Willard during my Ph.D. work in philosophy at the University of Southern California, and Dallas and Jane Willard have been mentors to my wife, Hope, and me for twenty-five years.

I have been in the ministry for thirty-seven years, I have planted two churches and pastored in two others, and my pastoral duties have ranged from the learning center, to small group leader, to pastor-teacher. I have spoken on around two hundred college campuses and in hundreds of churches in forty or so states, I have participated in twenty-five debates, and I have taught in three different seminaries over the course of twenty-seven years.

I am painfully aware of my inadequacies, and there is a scared little boy in me just as there may be a scared little boy or girl in you. I have been in Christian therapy for three years and know many of my limitations (one of my limitations is that I don’t know all of them!). My thirty-nine years of Christian experiences, study, and passion for God, along with countless hours of discussion with non-Christian thinkers and other Christian leaders, have given me enough of a background that I am starting to have something meaningful to say. Of course, you will be the judge of whether this book is among those meaningful assertions! But I cannot in good conscience before the Lord remain quiet about what I am seeing and thinking regarding the health and future of our community.

While I am at bottom an advocate of mere Christianity and, thus, have much in common with conservative Catholics and Orthodox believers, I am also convinced that Evangelical Protestantism of a supernatural kind is the best expression of Christianity available. Besides, no one listens to me outside that community! So I offer my community my deepest reflections on the crisis of our age and the way forward. I have done my best to be faithful to the message exploding out of me, and I regret that there are many things I have omitted. May God have mercy on me and on all of us!

With this in mind, I challenge you to gather into groups of fellow believers, to read and argue about the ideas that follow, and to find ways to put into practice the ideas you judge true and worthy. I hope that entire churches and parachurch groups will take this manifesto seriously. If you discover a more effective way forward as a result, then to God be the glory. After all, I have been mistaken before. In fact, I once thought I was mistaken about something, but later found out I was wrong. That fact alone guarantees that there is at least one mistake in this book.

I want to foment a revolution of Evangelical life, spirituality, thought, and Spirit-lead power. My purpose is to mobilize, inspire, envision, and instruct an army of men and women for a revolution on behalf of Christ. If this book contributes to that revolution, I will be thankful indeed. Make no mistake about it: The crisis of our age requires nothing less than a revolution of those who live in, proclaim, and seek to advance the Kingdom that was not made with hands.

PART 1

ASSESSING THE CRISIS OF OUR AGE

CHAPTER 1

THE HUNGER FOR DRAMA IN A THIN WORLD

Helen Roseveare is a physician from Northern Ireland who has served as a medical missionary in Zaire, Africa, and the surrounding region for some time. Here, in her own words, is an eyewitness account about a hot water bottle. I would love to sit down with you and ask your honest, unfiltered reaction to this story. Your response would tell me a lot about you — specifically, whether you believe the naturalist, the postmodernist, or the Christian story. But I’m getting ahead of myself. These vastly different perspectives will be the focus of the next three chapters. For now, here is what Dr. Roseveare heard and saw. It’s a bit long, but as you will soon see, it’s well worth the time.

One night, in Central Africa, I had worked hard to help a mother in the labor ward; but in spite of all that we could do, she died leaving us with a tiny, premature baby and a crying, two-year-old daughter.

We would have difficulty keeping the baby alive. We had no incubator. We had no electricity to run an incubator, and no special feeding facilities. Although we lived on the equator, nights were often chilly with treacherous drafts.

A student-midwife went for the box we had for such babies and for the cotton wool that the baby would be wrapped in. Another went to stoke up the fire and fill a hot water bottle. She came back shortly, in distress, to tell me that in filling the bottle, it had burst. Rubber perishes easily in tropical climates. … and it is our last hot water bottle! she exclaimed. As in the West, it is no good crying over spilled milk; so, in Central Africa it might be considered no good crying over a burst water bottle. They do not grow on trees, and there are no drugstores down forest pathways. All right, I said, Put the baby as near the fire as you safely can; sleep between the baby and the door to keep it free from drafts. Your job is to keep the baby warm.

The following noon, as I did most days, I went to have prayers with many of the orphanage children who chose to gather with me. I gave the youngsters various suggestions of things to pray about and told them about the tiny baby. I explained our problem about keeping the baby warm enough, mentioning the hot water bottle. The baby could so easily die if it got chilled. I also told them about the two-year-old sister, crying because her mother had died. During the prayer time, one ten-year-old girl, Ruth, prayed with the usual blunt consciousness of our African children. Please, God, she prayed, send us a water bottle. It’ll be no good tomorrow, God, the baby’ll be dead; so, please send it this afternoon. While I gasped inwardly at the audacity of the prayer, she added by way of corollary, and while You are about it, would You please send a dolly for the little girl so she’ll know You really love her?

As often with children’s prayers, I was put on the spot. Could I honestly say, Amen? I just did not believe that God could do this. Oh, yes, I know that He can do everything: The Bible says so, but there are limits, aren’t there? The only way God could answer this particular prayer would be by sending a parcel from the homeland. I had been in Africa for almost four years at that time, and I had never, ever received a parcel from home. Anyway, if anyone did send a parcel, who would put in a hot water bottle? I lived on the equator!

Halfway through the afternoon, while I was teaching in the nurses training school, a message was sent that there was a car at my front door. By the time that I reached home, the car had gone, but there, on the veranda, was a large twenty-two pound parcel! I felt tears pricking my eyes. I could not open the parcel alone; so, I sent for the orphanage children. Together we pulled off the string, carefully undoing each knot. We folded the paper, taking care not to tear it unduly. Excitement was mounting. Some thirty or forty pairs of eyes were focused on the large cardboard box. From the top, I lifted out brightly colored, knitted jerseys. Eyes sparkled as I gave them out. Then, there were the knitted bandages for the leprosy patients, and the children began to look a little bored. Next came a box of mixed raisins and sultanas — that would make a nice batch of buns for the weekend. As I put my hand in again, I felt the … could it really be? I grasped it, and pulled it out. Yes, A brand-new rubber, hot water bottle! I cried. I had not asked God to send it; I had not truly believed that He could.

Ruth was in the front row of the children. She rushed forward, crying out, If God has sent the bottle, He must have sent the dolly, too! Rummaging down to the bottom of the box, she pulled out the small, beautifully dressed dolly. Her eyes shone: She had never doubted! Looking up at me, she asked, Can I go over with you, Mummy, and give this dolly to that little girl, so she’ll know that Jesus really loves her?

That parcel had been on the way for five whole months, packed up by my former Sunday School class, whose leader had heard and obeyed God’s prompting to send a hot water bottle, even to the equator. One of the girls had put in a dolly for an African child — five months earlier in answer to the believing prayer of a ten-year-old to bring it That afternoon! And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear. Isaiah 65:24¹

What do you make of this? Your answer will depend, in part, on your worldview. If you are a naturalist, you’re likely to think that the story is a fabrication. Dr. Roseveare is either a bald-faced liar or someone with such a desire to promote her religion that she is prone to exaggeration and the selective employment of a self-serving, faulty memory. Or maybe it’s just a big coincidence. But a miracle? Nonsense! Such things are unscientific relics of an age gone by.

If you are a postmodernist, you may think that this is just wonderful for Dr. Roseveare, Ruth, the baby, and others close to the story. It’s great that these people have their truth, but we all have our story that’s true for us, and no one has a corner on this market. It would be intolerant and downright bigoted for Dr. Roseveare to force her beliefs on other people. The story may confirm Dr. Roseveare’s truth, but there are lots of other truths out there.

If you are a Christian, you are either incredibly touched and encouraged at this kind act of God, or you are wearied by it. These things happen to other people, you may reason, especially to those on the mission field. They don’t happen to my friends or me, so I can’t really relate to the story.

Regardless of your worldview, if you read the story carefully and with feeling, there’s something about it that’s hard to dismiss — it is filled with drama.

WE HUNGER FOR DRAMA

It doesn’t really matter who you are or what you believe. You love drama. In fact, you hunger for it. God made you — yes, you — to lead a dramatic life. No doubt you’ve had this experience at the mall: You are walking by the electronics section of a department store when you come upon a crowd of people gathered around a TV set. It’s the bottom of the ninth inning, the home team is down by a run, the bases are loaded with two outs, and the team’s leading hitter is at the plate. There’s drama in the air and people are compelled to stop to see what happens. From romance novels to Harrison Ford movies to athletic events to tense moments on the evening news, people love to experience drama, even if only vicariously.

I got a taste for drama my senior year in high school. In ninth grade, I was the quarterback of the Grandview Junior High School football team that had one game left on the schedule. A victory — and we would have been the first undefeated team in school history. Though we had the best team, we lost the game on one fluke play to a school we hated: Lees Summit. Our senior year was payback time, and we had worked and waited three years for revenge. We always played Lees Summit the week before the last game of the season, and in my senior year, going into the game, we were tied for first place.

Since it was the biggest game of the week in the Kansas City area, the stadium was packed. As if we weren’t excited enough, we learned before the game started that several players from the Kansas City Chiefs were in the stands. Talk about drama! In the face of all this excitement, we managed to stick to our game plan, which worked to near perfection. Lees Summit moved to within two points of us in the first play of the fourth quarter, but we tightened our defense, and they managed to run only two more plays the rest of the game — an incomplete pass and an interception. We went on to win 32 – 18 in, well, dramatic fashion.

Until my junior year in college, I remember longing for that kind of drama again, and I kept the game’s memory alive and fed off it. I remember thinking: If only life were like the Lees Summit game. If only there were a quest, a cause, a war, a real and important theater that commanded all I have and for which the stakes are high! Oh, how I wish life could be like that! Why is life so mundane? Why can’t daily life be dramatic?

My guess is that in your life you have had your own Lees Summit games, and I suspect you have had this same longing for drama, faint though its realization may seem when your life appears boring and you feel trapped. Many of us have seen a good movie, finished a great novel, or left an invigorating sporting event, only to return to a life we may consider drab compared to the supposed drama we have just experienced vicariously. It is precisely this convergence of two factors — a persistent hunger for drama and a feeling of boredom with our own lives — that creates an addiction to dramatic stories, media-driven celebrities, sports, or other vicarious substitutes for our own authentic drama. This tells us two things: We were made for greatness, but there is something about our culture that undermines both its intelligibility and achievement.

While the hunger for drama gives pangs to us all, our culture is unable to satisfy them. To repeat: The current addiction to the cult of celebrity and professional sports, along with our preoccupation with happiness, tells us something about our true nature and the bankruptcy of our culture. Allow me to explain.

HAPPINESS, DRAMA, AND THE CRISIS OF WESTERN CULTURE

In 1941, Harvard sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin wrote a book entitled The Crisis of Our Age. Sorokin divided cultures into two major types: sensate and ideational. A sensate culture is one in which people only believe in the reality of the physical universe capable of being experienced with the five senses. A sensate culture is secular, this worldly, and empirical.

By contrast, an ideational culture embraces the sensory world, but goes on to accept the notion that an extra-empirical immaterial reality can be known as well, a reality consisting of God, the soul, immaterial beings, values, purposes, and various abstract objects like numbers and propositions. Sorokin noted that a sensate culture eventually disintegrates because it lacks the intellectual resources necessary to sustain a public and private life conducive of corporate and individual human flourishing. After all, if we can’t know anything about values, life after death, God, and so forth, how can we receive solid guidance to lead a life of wisdom and character?

As we move through the early portion of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that the West, including the United States, is sensate. To see this, consider the following. In 1989, the state of California issued a new Science Framework to provide guidance for the state’s public school science classrooms. In that document, advice is given to teachers about how to handle students who approach them with reservations about the theory of evolution:

At times some students may insist that certain conclusions of science cannot be true because of certain religious or philosophical beliefs they hold…. It is appropriate for the teacher to express in this regard, I understand that you may have personal reservations about accepting this scientific evidence, but it is scientific knowledge about which there is no reasonable doubt among scientists in their field, and it is my responsibility to teach it because it is part of our common intellectual heritage.²

The importance of this statement lies not in its promotion of evolution over creation, though that is no small matter in its own right. No, the real danger in the Framework’s advice resides in the picture of knowledge it presupposes: The only knowledge we can have about reality — and, thus, the only claims that deserve the backing of public institutions — is empirical knowledge gained by the hard sciences.

Nonempirical claims (those that can’t be tested with the five senses) lie outside the hard sciences, such as those at the core of ethics, political theory, and religion; they are not items of knowledge but matters of private feeling. Note carefully the words associated with science: conclusions, evidence, knowledge, no reasonable doubt, intellectual heritage. These deeply cognitive terms express the view that science and science alone exercises the intellectual right (and responsibility) of defining reality. By contrast, religious claims are described in distinctively noncognitive language: beliefs, personal reservations.

In such a culture we now live and move and have our being. Currently, a three-way worldview struggle rages in our culture: between ethical monotheism (especially Christianity), postmodernism, and scientific naturalism. I cannot undertake here a detailed characterization of scientific naturalism — we will examine its nature and impact more thoroughly in chapter 2 — but I want to say a word about its role in shaping the crisis of the West.

Scientific naturalism takes the view that the physical cosmos studied by science is all there is. Scientific naturalism has two central components: a view of reality and a view of how we know things. Regarding the former, scientific naturalism implies that everything that exists is composed of matter or emerges out of matter when it achieves a suitable complexity. There is no spiritual world, no God, no angels or demons, no life after death, no moral absolutes, no objective purpose to life, no such thing as the Kingdom of God. Regarding the latter, scientific naturalism implies that physical science is the only, or at least a vastly superior, way of gaining knowledge. Since competence in life depends on knowledge (you can’t be competent at selling insurance if you don’t know anything about it!), this implies that there just is no such thing as learning to live life competently in the Kingdom of God. Spiritual competence is a silly idea.

Partly out of a reaction to naturalism, a second worldview — postmodernism — has come on the scene. Like a magnet, it’s attracting more and more people, especially those in the arts and the humanities as well as the dilettantes of pop culture, by its mesmerizing power. Postmodernism is so important that we will devote an entire chapter to examining it (chapter 3). The following précis will suffice for now.

Because postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines, it is difficult to characterize it in a way that is fair to this diversity. Still, it is possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general, since its friends and foes understand it well enough to debate its strengths and weaknesses.³ From a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, and the self.

In a postmodernist view, there is no such thing as objective reality, truth, value, reason, and meaning to life. All these are social constructions, creations of linguistic practices, and as such are relative not to individuals but to social groups that share a narrative. Roughly, a narrative is a perspective (such as Marxism, atheism, or Christianity) that is embedded in the group’s social and linguistic practices.

Under the influence of naturalist and postmodern ideas, many people no longer believe that there is any ultimate meaning to life that can be known. These folks — and they are legion — have given up on seeking that meaning and instead are living for happiness. Today, the good life is a life of happiness, and it is the goal most people have set for themselves and their children. A major talk radio host has interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years by asking the question, What did your parents want most for you — success, wealth, to be a good person, or happiness? Eighty-five percent said happiness.

Happiness is a good thing, all things being considered. But if it is overemphasized or made the focus of one’s life, it leads to depression, a loss of purpose in life, and a deep-seated sense of fragmentation. In short, it ruins your life. Why? For one thing, there are more important things in life than being happy. There is a larger meaning and a bigger purpose that should be our life’s aim. Put simply, we are wired for more than happiness. We are made to live for God’s honor by learning how to become spiritually competent, mature members of his Kingdom and to make that Kingdom our primary concern. If happiness is what life is all about, then things like discipline, sacrifice, and their kin are intrinsically evil, or at least meaningless.

Tell that to Mother Teresa! Happiness may be a big deal to most people, but living for the cause of God and his Kingdom is bigger still. And such a life is preoccupied with a lot more than trying to be happy.

There’s a second reason why happiness should not be the be-all and end-all of the human condition. This reason is what philosophers call the paradox of hedonism: The contemporary sense of happiness (i.e., pleasurable satisfaction, feeling really good and stoked inside) cannot be found by seeking it. If you have ever tried to be happy, you know this is true. If you spend all your time trying to be happy, you end up focusing all your attention on yourself and how happy you are and, as a result, you become a shriveled self who can’t live for some larger cause. Your life will center on