Since we’re talking about Os Guinness, I pulled my stack of well-worn copies of his books off my shelves. And one of the most dog-eared, check-mark-littered, and highlighted copies is the book Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Baker, 2003).

The book is a piercing critique of the church’s uncritical pursuit of relevance for the sake of relevance. His argument: “Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant” (p. 12). Guinness explains it like this:

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant. (p. 11)

This is because, as Guinness writes, faithfulness to eternal truth is the means to genuine cultural relevance. In every generation, our goal is centered on the proclamation and advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ through the local church. Only because of the gospel’s continued relevance is it rightfully called the “good news.”

The gospel is good news. In fact it is “the best news ever” because it addresses our human condition appropriately, pertinently, and effectively as nothing else has, does, or can—and in generation after generation, culture after culture, and life after life. Little wonder that the Christian faith is the world’s first truly universal religion and in many parts of the world the fastest growing faith, and that the Christian church is the most diverse society on planet earth, with followers on all continents, in all climates, and under all the conditions of life and development. Of course, Christians can make the gospel irrelevant by shrinking and distorting it in one way or another. But in itself the good news of Jesus is utterly relevant or it is not the good news it claims to be. (p. 13)

Escaping the Cultural Captivity

The strength of Guinness’s book is not only the insightful criticism, but the constructive vision he presents to the reader. Chapter six, “Escaping Cultural Captivity” (pp. 95–112), was especially helpful. Guinness writes,

Without God, our human knowledge is puny and perverse, limited on the one hand by finitude and distorted on the other by sin. That said, and that said humbly, three things can help us cultivate the independent spirit and thinking that are characteristic of God’s untimely people. In ascending order, they are developing an awareness of the unfashionable, cultivating an appreciation for the historical, and paying constant attention to the eternal. Each is crucial for effective resistance thinking. (p. 96)

Guinness then develops each of these points:

1. Awareness of the Unfashionable: Because the cross runs across the grain of human thinking, the faithful choice is often not the culturally popular choice. Guinness introduces the countercultural actions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany. While the Führer demanded complete allegiance, Bonhoeffer was stressing the cost of discipleship and allegiance to Christ alone. In all generations, the church needs to cultivate an awareness of the unfashionable to avoid being captured by the popular or “relevant.”   

2. Appreciation for the Historical: Americans, Guinness writes, seem to know everything about what’s happened over the past 24 hours, but little about the past 600 or 60 years. “Essential for untimeliness is appreciation for the historical, for no human perspective gives us a better counterperspective on our own day” (p. 100).

Guinness continues,

Mere lip service to the importance of history will not do. We each have to build in a steady diet of the riches of the past into our reading and thinking. Only the wisdom of the past can free us from the bondage of our fixation with the present and the future. C. S. Lewis counseled, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” (p. 104)

On the next page, he quotes Lewis again: “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of history blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books” (p. 105).

3. Attention to the Eternal: “Essential for untimeliness is attention to the eternal, for only the eternal is eternally relevant” (p. 105). The way to remain relevant is to stay on the path of eternal truth. Guinness asks us to consider, if we are seeking to be relevant, why? To what end are we seeking relevance? “Nothing is finally relevant except in relation to the true and the eternal….Only the repeated touch of the timeless will keep us truly timely” (pp. 106, 112).

Yet again, it’s worth quoting him directly:

How then do we lift ourselves above the level of the finite and the mundane to gain an eternal perspective on what is true and relevant? The biblical answer is blunt in its candor. By ourselves we can’t. We can’t break out of Plato’s cave of the human, with all its smoke and flickering shadows on the wall. We can’t raise ourselves above the level of the timebound and the earthbound by such feeble bootstraps as reason. But where we are limited by our own unaided efforts, we have help. We have been rescued.…God has broken into our silence. He has spoken and has come down himself. And in his written and living Word we are given truth from outside our situation, truth that throws light on our little lives and our little world. (p. 107)

Conclusion

I highly recommend Prophetic Untimeliness, especially for pastors. We would do well to heed Guinness’s call to faithfulness: “It is time to challenge the idol of relevance, to work out what it means to be faithful as well as relevant, and so to become truly relevant without ever ending up as trendy, trivial, and unfaithful” (p. 15).

The role of the church in influencing and shaping contemporary American culture is a topic generating much interest, discussion, and disagreement. Gauging from the many books on the subject, there is a lot that can be said, but I especially appreciate what my friend Mark Dever has said.  

Today I want to draw off another excerpt from my 2007 interview with Mark. Mark lives, works, and pastors a church four blocks from the U.S. Capitol and three blocks from the U.S. Supreme Court. Mark is geographically—and in his thinking—on one of the front lines where the church and contemporary culture meet.

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C.J. Mahaney: Elaborate more on the priorities of 9Marks.

Mark Dever: Well, what we want to see are communities of people that reflect the character of God, and by doing so are distinct from the world around them. As I travel around I see so many evangelical churches trying to “break the code” of how to look as much like the culture as possible and yet keep the gospel, assuming this will maximize the evangelistic impulse.

I’m not sure that’s true.

I think there is a lot of peril in this. And it seems to be that even from the very earliest chapters of Acts, what strikes people are not thoughts of, “Hey, they speak Hebrew too,” but rather, “Hey, look at how they love one another in a way that is different from the way we are loving or being loved.”

So I think that God’s character, as it is reproduced in a community of people, must be one of the most powerful witnesses to the truth of the gospel, both for evangelism and the edification of those already converted. So I would like to see evangelical churches— while not becoming unsophisticated in how they interact with culture—keep cultural interaction in perspective, and realize that the life-blood of your church continuing is not your contextualization (your similarity to the culture), but how you are blessedly distinct from the culture. The church is full of people who are born again.

So our distinctives are what we want to hold out, and trust that God will make them attractive and will commend the gospel to other people.

So sometimes I feel like I am being called to tar the ark before the flood. Our world is increasingly secular. And churches that are trying to be as much like the world as possible, I fear, are very leaky arks. And churches that are trying to be like the world are often unselfconsciously nothing more than part of their culture. I fear they are just going to sink and become spiritually worthless spiritual tombs.

So I think the rise of secularism will itself cut down on nominal Christianity. It will actually encourage the clarity of what truly is the gospel and the effects that it has, because the cache, the worth, the value of nominal Christianity will just continue to decline in the culture broadly, so that you won’t want to be known as an evangelical Christian because that means you hate various groups of people or you believe these weird things. (As opposed to in the 50s it meant you were a respectable, upstanding citizen.) So as the general cultural perception turns on evangelical Christianity, I think we are just seeing all the more clearly our need to have a positive vision for the church as distinct from the culture.

CJM: And so what would you say to a pastor who is attracted to models of the church that aren’t distinct from the culture and aren’t distinctly proclaiming the gospel?

MD: Well, when you are not distinctly proclaiming the gospel, then you are not talking about a healthy church in any way whatsoever.

I want to be careful here. Not every church is going to be exactly alike. For example, there are churches that deliberately dress differently, or have a different kind of music, or different order of their services. But as long as they are preaching the gospel, preaching the Word, the things they are saying are true, they are reading Scripture, they are praising—as long as they are doing the things we are commanded to in Scripture, I am prepared to believe there are a number of different ways, and that in different settings one can be better than another.

But I would be very careful if these things are what a church begins majoring on. If the adverbs overtake the verbs, the adjectives overtake the nouns, the how you do it becomes more important than what you are doing, well then I think you have surely lost your way.

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For more on this topic, consult Mark’s T4G’08 message (“Improving the Gospel: Exercises in Unbiblical Theology”), The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World by David Wells (Eerdmans, 2008) and Christ and Culture Revisited by D.A. Carson (Eerdmans, 2008).

 

The audio recording of C.J.'s message at the 2008 Dwell Conference in New York City is now online. 

Dwelling in the Cross
C.J. Mahaney
1 Timothy 4:16; Galatians 5:17
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
New York City
43:55 run time; 9.6MB MP3 

Download here.

Listen here:

Together for the Gospel 2008 begins here in Louisville today. Over 5,000 men (mostly pastors) will be assembling in the Kentucky International Convention Center, celebrating the glorious atonement of Jesus Christ.

During the conference attention will be directed to a new book titled In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement by J.I. Packer and Mark Dever (Crossway, 2008). Not long ago, C.J. explained how this book and T4G are closely connected (here).

The discerning content of this book is a gift to all Christians and pastors in particular. Here is one excerpt from the epilogue.

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The cross of Christ is the heart of the apostles’ gospel and of their piety and praise as well; so surely it ought to be central in our own proclamation, catechesis, and devotional practice? True Christ-centeredness is, and ever must be, cross-centeredness. The cross on which the divine-human mediator hung, and from which he rose to reign on the basis and in the power of his atoning death, must become the vantage point from which we survey the whole of human history and human life, the reference point for explaining all that has gone wrong in the world everywhere and all that God has done and will do to put it right, and the center point for fixing the flow of doxology and devotion from our hearts. Healthy, virile, competent Christianity depends on clear-headedness about the cross; otherwise we are always off-key. And clear-headedness about the cross, banishing blurriness of mind, is only attained by facing up to the reality of Christ’s blood-sacrifice of himself in penal substitution for those whom the Father had given him to redeem.

Why then is it that in today's churches, even in some professedly evangelical congregations, this emphasis is rare? Why is it that in seminary classrooms, professional theological guilds, Bible teaching conferences, and regular Sunday preaching, not to mention the devotional books that we write for each other, so little comparatively is said about the heart-stirring, life-transforming reality of penal substitution? Several reasons spring to mind.

First, we forget that the necessity of retribution for sin is an integral expression of the holiness of God, and we sentimentalize his love by thinking and speaking of it without relating it to this necessity. This leaves us with a Christ who certainly embodies divine wisdom and goodwill, who certainly has blazed a trail for us through death into life, and who through the Spirit certainly stands by each of us as friend and helper (all true, so far as it goes), but who is not, strictly speaking, a redeemer and an atoning sacrifice for us at all.

Second, in this age that studies human behavior and psychology with such sustained intensity, knowledge of our sins and sinfulness as seen by God has faded, being overlaid by techniques and routines for self-improvement in terms of society's current ideals of decency and worthwhileness of life. It is all very secular, even when sponsored by churches, as it often is, and it keeps us from awareness of our own deep guilty and shameful alienation from God, which only the Savior, who in his sinlessness literally bore the penalty of our sins in our place, can deal with.

Third, in an age in which historic Christianity in the West is under heavy pressure and is marginalized in our post-Christian communities, we are preoccupied with apologetic battles, doctrinal and ethical, all along the interface of Christian faith and secularity—battles in which we are for the most part forced to play black, responding to the opening gambits of our secular critics. Constant concern to fight and win these battles diverts our attention from thorough study of the central realities of our own faith, of which the atonement is one.

Fourth, heavyweight scholars in our own ranks, as we have seen, line up from time to time with liberal theologians to offer revisionist, under-exegeted accounts of Bible teaching on the atonement, accounts which in the name of Scripture (!) play down or reject entirely the reality of penal substitution as we have been expounding it. The effect is that whereas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century evangelicals stood solid for penal substitution against unitarianism (Socinianism) and deism, and taught this truth as no less central to the gospel than the incarnation itself, today it is often seen as a disputed and disputable option that we can get on quite well without, as many already are apparently doing.

What in the way of understanding our Savior and our salvation we lose, however, if we slip away from penal substitution, is, we think, incalculable.

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Taken from In My Place Condemned He Stood by J.I. Packer and Mark Dever, pp. 150-151, © 2008. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.

As part of a younger generation of Christians today, we can give thanks to God for gifted mentors faithfully preaching the cross, men whose ministry began before many of us were born.

Theologically, we reap the fruit of seeds sown in the life and ministries of mentors like John Stott, John Piper, and C.J. Mahaney. For decades these faithful men (and others like them) have written books, trained pastors, and planted churches to lay a theological foundation we enjoy.

At times you can hear the direct impact of these mentors on a younger generation of Christians. Listen closely and you’ll likely hear a distinctive language used by young Christians and preachers. Our mentors have captured these truths in phrases—“the cross-centered life,” “gospel-centered parenting,” “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him,” and “Don’t Waste Your Life”—each, when used by a young Christian, is a giveaway to the continuing influence of older, faithful teachers.

In the language of some younger Christians, the influence of these teachers is subtle and less immediately noticeable. But in others the influence is obvious and pronounced.

In the case of hip-hop artist shai linne and his new album—The Atonement—the immediate influence of men like Stott, Piper, and C.J. is obvious and pronounced. This album reveals a man eager to learn and to apply that learning to his life and his work.

One track off the new album (“Were You There?”) is built from C.J.’s message on the Garden of Gethsemane. Listen to the track (and especially how the sermon excerpt ties the song’s message together at the end).

Throughout The Atonement, shai linne weaves lyrics and sermon excerpts together to reinforce the content of the songs. Here is a video explaining why he uses sermon excerpts in his music. It’s not for background noise (forward to the 3:03 mark).

The Atonement is an excellent album, not only for its content and quality, but for modeling how one hip-hop artist is diligently transferring what he learns about the cross from his theological mentors into his work. I take from this album a challenge to listen more carefully to the mentors, to let the truths of the cross settle into my own heart, and then to strive toward transparency in faithfully passing these biblical teachings to others.

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Update: The Atonement is available through iTunes as well. 

Today’s pastor is given the challenging task of discerning error that comes published in hip packaging from Christian publishers, authored by professing Christians.

So many errors, so little time.

In executing this responsibility, pastors must discern whether the influence of the individual and the gravity of their error necessitate research and evaluation by a pastor. Today I want to explain one particular concern and give you an inside look at how I approach this difficult task.

Now, because this short post limits what I can say, I recommend listening to one the finest messages on this topic—Mark Dever’s message from New Attitude 2007 (“Discern Your Doctrine”).

Gilbert on Bell

Today I want to draw your attention to Greg Gilbert’s critique of Rob Bell’s NOOMA videos. Greg serves as director of theological research for the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In prioritizing what materials concern us as pastors, I believe Rob Bell’s writings, videos, and influence cannot (and should not) be ignored. I think we should carefully consider Greg Gilbert’s reviews, which demonstrate a commendable combination of humility of heart and theologically informed discernment about matters of primary importance.

Within this pastoral task of discernment, I’m reminded of four biblical priorities.

1. Protect Your People

A pastor’s role includes protecting the flock from error. This is no easy task today, especially when so many of the popular books and videos published by professing Christians who appear to have serious theological deficiencies. Yet pastors cannot simply ignore the prevalence and influence of these materials; they have the responsibility to protect those entrusted to their care.

This discernment is especially important when the issues are of primary importance and not secondary, when—as carefully noted by Greg Gilbert—matters of the gospel are in question.

It’s worth noting that acting to protect the flock from published teachings that depart from Scripture is handled differently than steps taken privately to confront a brother in sin (i.e. Matthew 18:15-20). Let me state clearly that I don’t assign sinful motivation to Rob Bell. Actually, I assume he is sincere. But sincerity doesn’t exempt any of us from the appropriate evaluation of what we teach.

2. Prepare Your Heart

When required to critique the writings and teachings of another, I must pay careful attention to my heart. Scripture calls us to correct those in error with gentleness, avoiding quarrelsome attitudes, showing kindness to everyone, and enduring all evil (2 Timothy 2:24-25).

Whenever it’s necessary to critique erroneous content, I find it helpful to remind myself of the mercy of God. Any insight I have learned has been learned from others, and ultimately, this discernment has been graciously revealed by God. In no way does my critique indicate intellectual or moral superiority on my part. We must critique erroneous content, but our critique must be humble and not self-righteous.

If we accurately perceive God’s mercy, this will become an occasion of thanking God for his mercy in our lives rather than an opportunity for self-righteous communication.

Whenever we take up this task of critiquing and addressing error, we must guard our hearts and pursue the task with humility and gentleness.

3. Preach Sound Doctrine

The most effective way to protect your church from error is by a steady diet of gospel-centered, sound doctrine. For this reason I don’t recommend that pastors repeatedly and consistently make public references to erroneous books or media.

Only on a few particular occasions do I think it’s wise for a pastor to make specific reference to an individual in the context of a sermon. However, a pastor must be aware of what is popular and influential, because he will be asked these questions by church members in private conversations. So I draw a distinction between what a pastor addresses in a sermon and what he should be prepared to address in private conversation when approached by a member of his church.

You need to be prepared for these conversations, and that’s why I believe Greg Gilbert’s reviews will help prepare you for when you are asked about Rob Bell.

4. Pray for Rob Bell

We must pray for those who are in need of correction and who teach erroneous doctrine. Even those classified as our “opponents” should be addressed kindly, out of concern for their souls, praying that God will lead them to a knowledge of the truth (2 Timothy 2:25). How much more care should be taken with a professing brother in Christ?

Specifically, I pray for Rob Bell in the following ways:

• Pray that God reveals to him the content of the gospel.
• Pray that God reveals to him the primacy of the gospel.
• Pray that he perceives his accountability to God and responsibility for those he leads.
• Pray that he would be humbly attentive and responsive to the critique of godly scholars.
• Pray that he would devote himself to the study of sound doctrine by finding his way to the right books and scholars who can train him.

Prayer is an effective way to examine our motives in correcting others. When I pray for someone I find it more difficult to be self-righteous in my attitude toward him. Correction without concern for the corrected leads to self-righteousness. Correction with sincere concern for the welfare of the corrected is a display of genuine humility and love.

Conclusion

In all instances of critique, we must carefully research the details in private to avoid misrepresenting the position of the one we critique. I think you will agree that Greg Gilbert’s reviews of Rob Bell’s NOOMA videos have been carefully researched. But the reviews also display character we can learn from—a careful humility of heart and a theologically informed discernment about matters of primary importance (those related to the gospel).

Read Greg’s critiques here.