Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Brueggemann: The OT Law Pertaining to the Year of Release - The Forgiveness of All Debts

The Most Important Command in the Old Testament isn’t what you think
In Deuteronomy 15, you get a law about seven years. It’s called the Year of Release. It says that at the end of seven years, if a poor person owes you money, cancel the debt.
Uh, what? That’s the most important? A law about releasing debts? What about the Shema? The 10 Commandments? Whatever. If you break this seven-year-release law, the United Methodist Church won’t even put you on trial.
 
So c’mon, how on earth is this the most important commandment? Brueggemann continues:
I’ll give you a little Hebrew grammar–I know you’ve been waiting for this. Biblical Hebrew has no adverbs. The way it expresses the intensity of the verb, it repeats the verb. So if it says give and you want to say “really give” it says “give give” right in the sentence–”give give.” 
This law about the Year of Release there are five absolute infinitives that you can’t spot in English. There are more intense verbs in this law than anywhere else in the Old Testament. This is Moses saying I mean this
[The law] says to not be hard-hearted (or tight fisted) about granting poor people space to live their lives, because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord God brought you out into the good place.
So grammatically, the Old Testament scripture with the most emphasis as in “you must must must must must do this” is a passage about forgiving debts.
 
Fascinating.
 
 
=====
 
Is it the greatest command? Clearly not, I completely agree with Jesus on this point.
 
But the command in the Bible that warrants the most emphasis, the most literary focus, the crescendo that storytellers and givers of oral tradition gave the biggest exhortation to…is a little passage about releasing debts in the seventh year.
 
To Brueggemann, this emphasis means that for a society composed of God’s people that there should not be a permanent underclass but the economy should be organized so that everyone has a viable chance. So that every seven years, there’s a chance for the people to get a leg up and have past errors forgiven. It’s the original social safety net, and it’s more painful to the rich than any progressive tax code in American history.
 
To me, it means that we follow a God who knows our sins, who knows our hard-heartedness, who knows our short memory, who knows that we bully those most like us, who knows that the mighty will always try to hide injustice behind fairness.
 
And we are always called to live a life that follows God’s pattern: to strive for six days a week, and relax on the seventh. To build up for six years, and release it to be whatever it ought to be on the seventh. And to trust that our plans, our schemes, and our dreams should always be planned with space for God to work among us in that chaotic, uncontrollable seventh day, year, or moment…because that’s how a life centered on God just is.
 
Do you? Thoughts?
 
 
 

How to Read Torah in Light of Paul's NT Reading

To Comprehend Paul, Read This
 
by Scot McKnight
December 12, 2013
 
I have long thought Paul’s thought needs to be seen at work in particular passages and that his whole theology comes to expression all at once — dense, to be sure, but all there. One such passage is Galatians 2:15-21, which I quote here so you can see how Tom Wright explains it in his Paul and the Faithfulness of God. In his explanation below, there are plenty of points to observe but some of this will be controversial for some.
 
If you want to hear the “new” perspective in one simple post, this is it. (Question: How does the old perspective read this passage? Hint: personal anthropology is at the forefront, not Jewish history.)
If I were going to pick one passage to make my present point about the Torah, it might well be Galatians 2.15-21. This is all about redefinition, the radical redefinition that can only be captured in the dramatic picture of someone dying and coming up a new person: 
"(19)Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. (20) I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive – but it isn’t me any longer, it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Gal 2.19-20)
Here’s a very important point for the old perspective and one that illustrates the new perspective — the “I” here is not human experience but Paul’s own theology in autobiographical terms:
Paul is not here recounting his own ‘religious experience’ for the sake of it. He is telling the story of what has happened to Israel, the elect people of God – and he is using the rhetorical form of quasi-autobiography, because he will not tell this story in the third person, as though it were someone else’s story, as though he could look on from a distance (or from a height!) and merely describe it with a detached objectivity. It matters of course that this was indeed his own story. No doubt the experience Paul had on the Damascus Road and in the few days immediately afterwards may well have felt as though he was dying and being reborn. But what we have here is not the transcript of ‘experience’, as though he was appealing to that (curiously modern) category for some kind of validation. Peter had ‘this [reborn] experience’ as well; so did Barnabas; so, not least, did James and the people who had come from him in Jerusalem. So, of course, did the Galatians. By itself, ‘experience’ proves nothing. ‘Yes, Paul’, they could have said; ‘That’s what happened to you, but for us it was different.’ No: what mattered, for Paul, was the Messiah, and the meaning of his death and resurrection in relation to the category of the elect people of God (852-853).
What’s the issue, then?
The issue at stake in Antioch consisted, quite simply, in the question: were Jewish Messiah-believers allowed to sit and eat at the same table as non-Jewish Messiah-believers? (230) Paul’s reconstruction of what happened goes in four stages. 
First, the church in Antioch had been used to eating all together. They had made no distinction among Messiah-believers on the basis of their ethnic origin. We may assume, from the sequel, that this was a fairly radical move for Jews who had previously held to some form of the taboo which required them to eat separately from Gentiles. (231)
Second, Peter comes to Antioch and is happy to join in with the practice that has thus become established. Paul appears to regard this as in line with their earlier agreement. 
Third, ‘certain people come from James’, in other words, from Jerusalem. Paul is careful not to say ‘James sent certain people’, leaving open the question of whether they represented James’s actual views. When they arrive, Peter changes his policy – whether because of something they say, or simply because Peter knows what they may think, or imagines what James might well say – and ‘separates himself, being afraid of the circumcision people’ (Gal 2.12). 
Fourth, the rest of the Judaeans present (except Paul himself, we under- stand!), go along with Peter: Paul’s word for this is ‘co-hypocrites’, fellow play-actors (Gal 2.13). A note of sorrow enters: ‘even Barnabas’, who had shared Paul’s early missionary work and (according to Acts) had been of great help to him at a difficult time, went along with Peter and the others (854). 
It is important to be fully clear on what the issues were. This was not a matter, as some have absurdly suggested, of people ‘learning table manners’. (233) The question was as central as anything could be: is the community of Messiah-believers one body or two? Which is the more important division: that between Jews and non-Jews (because Messiah-believing Jews would still be able to eat with non-Messiah-believing Jews), or that between those who believed and those who did not? Was Messiah-faith simply a sub-set of Judaism, leaving the basic structure untouched, or did it change everything? (854-855)
And now this means “justification” is redefined — notice this:
Paul would be up for the quarrel. He knew the moves. The opening statement says it all: 
(15) We are Jews by birth, not ‘gentile sinners’. (16) But we know that a person is not declared ‘righteous’ by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. 
At a stroke, Paul has told us what it means to be ‘declared righteous’. It means to have God himself acknowledge that you are a member of ‘Israel’, a ‘Jew’, one of the ‘covenant family’: the ‘righteous’ in that sense. Yes, ‘righteous’ means all sorts of other things as well. But unless it means at least that, and centrally, then verse 16 is a massive non sequitur. ‘We are Jews by birth, not “gentile sinners”’; to say that, in the setting of a dispute about who you can eat with, and in the context of a statement about people ‘living as Jews’ and ‘living as Gentiles’ where what they have been doing is eating together (or not), leaves no elbow room for the phrase ‘declared righteous’ to mean anything else at its primary level. The whole sentence, in its context, indicates that the question about two ways of ‘being declared righteous’ must be a question about which community, which table-fellowship, you belong to. Do you, along with your allegiance to Jesus as Messiah, belong to a table-fellowship that is based on the Jewish Torah? If you do, says Paul, you are forgetting your basic identity. What matters is not now Torah, but Messiah. Justification is all about being declared to be a member of God’s people; and this people is defined in relation to the Messiah himself (856).
I predict this next paragraph could be contentious for some, perhaps many:
Paul’s overall point, throughout Galatians 3 and 4 is narratival, as we saw in chapter 6. Once you understand how the story works, the great covenant story from Abraham to the Messiah, you can see (a) that the Torah was a necessary, God-given thing, with its own proper role within that story, and (b) that the God-given role of Torah has now come to a proper and honourable end – not that there was anything ‘wrong’ with it, but that it was never designed to be permanent. The latter is what Paul specially needs to stress, but the former point is vital (despite the long and loud chorus of dualistic readers) to avoid any slide towards Marcionism [(a Gnostic ascetic sect that flourished from the 2nd to 7th century a.d. and that rejected the Old Testament and denied the incarnation of God in Christ)]. Granted (b), any attempt to go back to Torah would be an attempt to turn back the divine clock, to sneak back to an earlier act in the play – and thereby to deny that the Messiah had come, that he had completed the divine purpose, that in him the Abrahamic promises had now been fulfilled. It is the same choice that faced Peter: either belong to the redefined elect family, the people of Abraham, or rebuild the walls of Torah around an essentially Jewish ethnic family – which would imply that the Messiah would not have needed to die (2.21) (862).


Continue to Index -
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Friday, December 13, 2013

How Do You Read the Bible? Incarnationally, Inspirationally, Inerrantly, or Inexpertly?

Today's posting brings out some important questions for us to think about concerning the nature and relationship of biblical inerrancy to Christ's Incarnation.... I'll commence by asking the following questions:
 
  • Is Christ more important than the Bible?
  • Is theology be first centered in Christ or in the Bible?
  • How were the early Christians informed of Christ?
  • How were the believers in the OT informed of Yahweh?
  • Was it necessary to have a Bible to believe in Christ (or Yahweh?)
  • What place does the Bible have in relationship to Christ?
  • Did the Bible inform the early church of Jesus her Lord?
  • Or rather, did Jesus inform His church of Himself through the Hebrew Scriptures?
  • Did Jesus add to these Scriptures, subtract from them, or simply re-interpret them?
  • If Jesus did add or subject was it from the Pharisaical interpretations of Scripture?
  • Did early Christianity function without a Bible in the early church?
  • If not, what did they use? What place and purpose did the Holy Spirit have?
  • What place and purpose did the Holy Spirit have in the Old Testament?
  • Is Christ's Incarnation more central to theology than doctrinal inspiration?
  • Is biblical inspiration based upon Christ's Incarnation or the other way around?
  • How is inspiration and incarnation mutually accommodating or reactive?
 
In reading Wallace's argument I could not determine whether he removed the projected need for inerrancy, or simply reinforced its need based upon his own circular argument? I suspect the latter, however, a commenter did think this same about Wallace when saying: "Reading the Scriptures as mere ancient documents (no more inerrant than any other ancient documents) one can get to Jesus is Lord. Then, given that Jesus is Lord and that He considered the Scriptures to be the word of God, you can arrive quickly at inerrancy. We must believe that the Bible is the word of God because Jesus is Lord. For if we believe that Jesus is Lord because the Bible is the word of God, then, as it was with Bart Ehrman, the collapse of inerrancy leads to the collapse of faith in Christ."
 
What is clear to me is the importance of interpreting Scripture, both i) by itself internally, and ii) externally through outside sources lost to us its readers over the long millenias of time. I have argued before in earlier posts that it is basically an impossible task try as we may to determine the import of Scriptures as it is portrayed through its many cultures and events of the Bible. Even so, must we do the hard work of exegesis as it is possible, however limited or arcane. One may be a committed Jesus follower but it is important for Jesus' followers to know the Word of God - unreferenced by their own predispositions, suppositions, dogmas, or epistemologies. But in order to do that one needs to know oneself and one's group of believers, their needs, wants, and frame of reference. When boiled down we may have produced our own (religious) beliefs about God, His Word, and His Incarnation rather than God's Word itself. Thus the challenge to "interpret the Word" without getting in the way of it with our own wants and needs, views and opinions. Subscribing to the view inerrancy can do just that... it can obscure God's Word by our wooden (or literalistic) reading of its pages.

So what do you think? The way you answer these questions will pre-inform you how you may read the Bible... and how you read the Bible will affect how you think of our Lord. In the article today by Dan Wallace comes the evangelical argument for biblical inerrancy using a Christological method of argumentation based upon Christ's incarnation. I found it specious and unhelpful. Rather than answering the obvious question that Jesus didn't read the Hebrew Scriptures inerrantly Wallace instead went on to place precedence of Scripture over our Lord Himself.

For myself, I do assert the authority and inspiration of the Bible, but stop short of asserting the need for its inerrancy. It's only inerrancy lies within its description of God's salvation for man who has given to us abundantly this saving knowledge through His Son Jesus. As such, the word inerrancy is a slippery slope disallowing further biblical research and contextual construction... that is, it prevents asking further questions of God by stopping our asking questions all together. Which is never a good thing.

Too, it preferences a simplistic reading of the Bible that becomes clouded by personal nuance and prejudice. I'd rather God's Word be a more objective guide than one so simplistically, or subjectively, informed. One that grants latitude over literalism with its concomitant arguments for legalism over love, even as Jesus did so long ago when confronting the Scribes and Pharisees' own private (unloving and legalistic) interpretations of the Word of God.

Even so, doctrines like inerrancy can do just that - provide a harsh/hardened basis for unmitigated legalism preventing sight or sound of the divine words love, mercy, forgiveness and judgment. Let us not fall into this trap of doctrinal thinking. God's Word is larger than that. It's scope broader than we can often understand. And if we fail in this regard than we have darkened God's own council by our own fleshly words of wisdom and justice. Words that should never stand in the place of God's words when bounded by our own councils of what is "right" and "wrong." The bible isn't about that... its about opening up our hearts in submission and service to the councils of God against all the hell that we hold within our sinful hearts to act graciously and firmly in love towards those we would feel naturally inclined to hate, harm, banish, and mistreat. Let us not be the Pharisees of our day. It would be unworthy of our great God and King, our Lord and Savior.

R.E. Slater
December 13, 2013 
 
* * * * * * * * * * * *
 
 
A Bibliology Grounded in Christology
 
by Dan Wallace
December 6, 2013
 
The center of all theology, of the entirety of the Christian faith, is Christ himself. The Christ-vent—in particular his death and resurrection—is the center of time [(I call this the mid-point of salvation history - r.e. slater)]: everything before it leads up to it; everything after it is shaped by it. If Christ were not God in the flesh [(sic, the Incarnation)], he would not have been raised from the dead. And if he were not raised from the dead, none of us would have any hope. My theology grows out from Christ, is based on Christ, and focuses on Christ.
 
Years ago, I would have naïvely believed that all Christians could give their hearty amens to the previous paragraph. This is no longer the case; perhaps it never was. There are many whose starting point and foundation for Christian theology is bibliology. They begin with the assumption that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. I can understand that. Starting one’s doctrinal statement with the Bible gives one assurances that the primary source of theology, the scriptures, is both true and trustworthy. I don’t start there, however. I have come to believe that the incarnation is both more central than inspiration and provides a methodological imperative for historical investigation of the claims of the Bible.
 
Sometimes the reason why doctrinal statements begin with scripture is because the framers believe that without an inerrant Bible we can’t know anything about Jesus Christ. They often ask the question, “How can we be sure that anything in the Bible is true? How can we be sure that Jesus Christ is who he said he was, or even that he existed, if the Bible is not inerrant?”
 
Inductive vs. Deductive Approaches to Inerrancy
 
My response to the above question is twofold. First, before the New Testament was written, how did people come to faith in Christ? To assume that having a complete Bible is necessary before we can know anything about Christ is both anachronistic and counterproductive. Our epistemology has to wrestle with the spread of the gospel before the Gospels were penned. The very fact that it spread so fast—even though the apostles were not always regarded highly—is strong testimony both to the work of the Spirit and to the historical evidence that the eyewitnesses affirmed.
 
Second, we can know about Christ because the Bible is a historical document. (Even if one has a very low regard for the Bible’s historicity, he or she has to admit that quite a bit of it is historically accurate.) If we demand inerrancy of the Bible before we can believe that any of it is true, what are we to say about other ancient historical documents? We don’t demand that they be inerrant, yet no evangelical would be totally skeptical about all of ancient history. Why put the Bible in a different category before we can believe it at all? As one scholar wisely articulated many years ago, we treat the Bible like any other book to show that it is not like any other book.
 
Warfield’s Two Premises
 
We are not asked to take a leap of faith in believing the Bible to be the word of God, or even to believe that it is historically reliable; we have evidence that this is the case. I enlist on my behalf that towering figure of Reformed biblical scholarship, Benjamin B. Warfield. In his Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Warfield lays out an argument for inerrancy that has been all but forgotten by today’s evangelicals. Essentially, he makes a case for inerrancy on the basis of inductive evidence, rather than deductive reasoning. Most evangelicals today follow E. J. Young’s deductive approach toward bibliology, forgetting the great, early articulator of inerrancy. But Warfield starts with the evidence that the Bible is a historical document, rather than with the presupposition that it is inspired. This may seem shocking to some in the evangelical camp, but one can hardly claim that Warfield was soft on bibliological convictions! Let me prove my point with a lengthy quotation from his Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948), p. 174:
 
“Now if this doctrine is to be assailed on critical grounds, it is very clear that, first of all, criticism must be required to proceed against the evidence on which it is based. This evidence, it is obvious, is twofold. First, there is the exegetical evidence that the doctrine held and taught by the Church is the doctrine held and taught by the Biblical writers themselves. And secondly, there is the whole mass of evidence—internal and external, objective and subjective, historical and philosophical, human and divine—which goes to show that the Biblical writers are trustworthy as doctrinal guides. If they are trustworthy teachers of doctrine and if they held and taught this doctrine, then this doctrine is true, and is to be accepted and acted upon as true by us all. In that case, any objections brought against the doctrine from other spheres of inquiry are inoperative; it being a settled logical principle that so long as the proper evidence by which a proposition is established remains unrefuted, all so-called objections brought against it pass out of the category of objections to its truth into the category of difficulties to be adjusted to it. If criticism is to assail this doctrine, therefore, it must proceed against and fairly overcome one or the other element of its proper proof. It must either show that this doctrine is not the doctrine of the Biblical writers, or else it must show that the Biblical writers are not trustworthy as doctrinal guides.”
 
Notice how often Warfield speaks of evidence here as the grounds for believing in inerrancy. The evidence is historical, exegetical, and doctrinal. Two statements stand out as crucial to his argument: “If they [the biblical writers] are trustworthy teachers of doctrine and if they held and taught this doctrine, then this doctrine is true…” and “If criticism is to assail this doctrine… It must either show that this doctrine is not the doctrine of the Biblical writers, or else it must show that the Biblical writers are not trustworthy as doctrinal guides.” Warfield’s argument is one of the most profound paragraphs ever written in defense of inerrancy. If you’re reading this quickly, go back and let it sink in for awhile.
 
Metzger’s Challenge: The Bible Doesn’t Affirm Its Own Inerrancy
 
In 1992, when Bruce Metzger was on campus at Dallas Seminary for a week, delivering the Griffith Thomas lectures, students would often ask him whether he embraced inerrancy. Frankly, I thought their question was a bit uncharitable since they already knew the answer (he did not). But as one who, like Warfield before him, taught at Princeton Seminary, and as a Reformed scholar, Metzger certainly had earned the right to be heard on this issue. His response was simply that he did not believe in inerrancy because he felt it was unwise to hold to any doctrines that were not affirmed in the Bible, and he didn’t see inerrancy being affirmed in the Bible. In other words, he denied Warfield’s first argument (viz., that inerrancy was held by the biblical writers). It should be pointed out that Metzger did not disagree with Warfield’s second argument. In other words, he had a high view of the Bible, but not as high as, say, the Evangelical Theological Society, precisely because he did not think that the biblical writers held to the doctrine of inerrancy.
 
The Role of 2 Timothy 3.16
 
I felt the import of Metzger’s argument even before I had heard it from him, because I had long ago memorized the passage from Warfield quoted above. When I was working on my master’s degree in the 1970s, I was convinced that Warfield’s twofold argument needed to be examined and either affirmed or rejected. So I wrote my master’s thesis on an arcane point of Greek grammar. It was entitled, “The Relation of Adjective to Noun in Anarthrous Constructions in the New Testament.” I chose that particular topic because it directly affected how we should translate 2 Timothy 3.16. Should we translate this verse “every inspired scripture is also profitable” with the possible implication that some scripture is not inspired, or should we translate it “every scripture is inspired and profitable,” in which case the inspiration of scripture is directly asserted?
 
I spent over 1200 hours on that thesis, working without the benefit of computers—in the Greek New Testament, in the Septuagint, in classical Greek, in the papyri—to determine whether adjectives in anarthrous constructions (constructions in which no definite article was present) could be predicate or whether they had to be attributive. All of this related to 2 Timothy 3.16 because the adjective “inspired” was related to the noun “scripture” in an anarthrous construction. Further, of the dozens of New Testament grammars I checked, not one gave any actual evidence that adjectives in such constructions could be predicate. A predicate adjective would be translated as an assertion (“every scripture isinspired”) while an attributive adjective would be translated as a qualification or assumption (“every inspired scripture”).
 
I felt an obligation to the evangelical community to wrestle with this issue and see if there was indeed genuine evidence on behalf of a predicate “inspired.” I charted out over 2200 Greek constructions in the New Testament, as well as countless others in other corpora—all by hand—then checked the primary sources a second time to make sure I got the statistics right. When an ice storm hit Dallas in the winter of 1978–79, cutting down power lines in our neighborhood, I had to work by lamplight for a week to get the first draft of the thesis in on time. My conclusion was that “inspired” in 2 Timothy 3.16 was indeed a predicate adjective. And I supplied over 400 similar examples in the appendix to back it up! These 400 examples had never been discussed in any New Testament grammar before. I believed then, and I believe now, that supplying this kind of evidence is a worthy use of one’s time. The main part of the thesis ended up being the first piece of mine accepted for publication. It appeared in Novum Testamentum (one of the world’s leading biblical journals) in 1984 as a lengthy article. And the editors kept my opening comment that my motivation for the article was to help resolve some disputes about bibliology raging at the time in American evangelical circles.
 
I mention the above autobiographical note for two reasons. First, the question of the nature of the Bible has been, and still is, a very precious issue to me. Obviously, to spend over 1200 hours on where to put the “is” in one verse of scripture shows that I regard such a text to be rather significant! And that such a passage is a major verse on verbal inspiration should show that this doctrine is important to me. Second, the conclusion I came to is equally important: I can affirm, with Warfield, that the biblical writers do indeed embrace a high view of the text of Holy Writ. To be sure, this verse is not all there is in defense of inerrancy. But it is a crux interpretum, deserving our utmost attention. I must therefore respectfully disagree with Professor Metzger about Warfield’s first argument.
 
Christological Grounds for a High Bibliology
 
Where does this leave us with reference to inerrancy? I arrive at inerrancy through an inductive process, rather than by starting with it deductively. My epistemological method may therefore be different from others, but the resultant doctrine is not necessarily so. At bottom, the reason I hold to a high bibliology is because I hold to a high Christology. Jesus often spoke of the Bible in terms that went beyond the reverence that the Pharisees and Sadducees had for the text. They added traditions to the Bible, or truncated the canon, or otherwise failed to handle scripture appropriately. Jesus had a high view of the text, and it strikes me that I would be unwise to have a view different from his. Indeed, I believe I would be on dangerous ground if I were to take a different view of the text than Jesus did. Thus, my starting point for a high bibliology is Christ himself.
 
Some may argue that we can’t even know what Jesus said unless we start with a high bibliology. But that approach is circular. Making a pronouncement that scripture is inerrant does not guarantee the truth of such an utterance. If I said the moon is made of green cheese, that doesn’t make it so. At most, what such pronouncements can do is give one assurance. But this is not the same as knowledge. And if the method for arriving at such assurance is wrongheaded, then even the assurance needs to be called into question. A web of issues brings about the deepest kinds of theological assurance: evidence (historical, exegetical, hermeneutical, etc.), affirmations, the role of the Spirit, etc. One does not have the deepest assurance about inerrancy simply by convincing himself or herself that it must be true. Indeed, I would argue that such a presuppositional approach often caves in on itself. Now if inerrancy is true, what harm is there in examining the data of the text?
 
Now, someone may say, “But how do you know that Jesus actually held to a high bibliology unless you start with that presupposition? How do you know that the Gospel writers got the words of Jesus right in the first place?” I think that’s an excellent question. I would use the criteria of authenticity to argue that he did indeed hold to a high view of the text. The criteria of authenticity, when used properly, are criteria that Gospels scholars use to affirm whether Jesus said or did something. Notice that I did not say, “Gospels scholars use to deny whether Jesus said or did something.” The criteria of authenticity should normally be used only for positive results. To take one illustration: The criterion of dissimilarity is the criterion that says if Jesus said something that was unlike what any rabbi before him said and unlike what the church later said, then surely such a saying is authentic. I think this is good as far as it goes. It certainly works for “the Son of Man” sayings in the Gospels. The problem is that the Jesus Seminar used this criterion to make negative assessments of Jesus’ sayings. Thus, if Jesus said something that was said in contemporary Judaism, its authenticity is discounted. But surely that would create an eccentric Jesus if it were applied across the board! Indeed, Jesus said things that were already said in the Judaism of his day, and surely the early church learned from him and repeated him.
 
How does this apply to Jesus’ bibliology? Since his statements about scripture are decidedly more reverential than those of the Pharisees or Sadducees, the criterion of dissimilarity requires us to see that Jesus did, indeed, hold to a high bibliology. Of course, I am not arguing that the average Christian for the past two thousand years needed to think about whether Jesus said something. But I am arguing that even the evidence from a historical-critical perspective points in the same direction. And I am arguing that in the modern world, and even postmodern world, for evangelicals to ignore evidence is tantamount to a leap of faith.
 
I must confess that I did not at first embrace a high bibliology because of applying the criteria of authenticity to the sayings of Jesus. No, I initially embraced a high bibliology because I believed that the Bible’s testimony about itself was sufficiently clear and certainly true. But when I came to grips with Warfield’s inductive approach and Metzger’s denial of Warfield’s first argument, I realized that, for those engaged in serious biblical studies, historical evidence needed to be assessed before dialogue with those of a different perspective could begin. The fact that many evangelical students abandon inerrancy may in part be due to them not wrestling with more than a fideistic claim. What harm is there in adding historical evidence to one’s arguments for a doctrinal position? Why are so many afraid, or unprepared, to do so? The impression this gives to many students is that such views are defenseless.
 
Incarnation as Methodological Imperative
 
Permit me to address one other issue. If Christ is at the core of our beliefs, then the incarnation has to loom large in our thinking about the faith. When God became man and invaded space-time history, this served notice that we dare not treat the Bible with kid gloves. The incarnation not only invites us to examine the evidence, it requires us to do so. The fact that our religion is the only major religion in the world that is subject to historical verification is no accident: it’s part of God’s design. Jesus performed miracles and healings in specific towns, at specific times, on specific people. The Gospels don’t often speak in generalities. And Paul mentioned that 500 believers saw the risen Christ at one time, then added that most of these folks were still alive. These kinds of statements are the stuff of history; they beg the reader to investigate. Too often modern evangelicals take a hands-off attitude toward the Bible because of a prior commitment to inerrancy. But it is precisely because I ground my bibliology in Christology rather than the other way around that I cannot do that. I believe it is disrespectful to my Lord to not ask the Bible the tough questions that every thinking non-Christian is already asking it.
 
 
 
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Reader 1 - To assume that having a complete Bible is necessary before we can know anything about Christ is both anachronistic and counterproductive. Our epistemology has to wrestle with the spread of the gospel before the Gospels were penned…. If we demand inerrancy of the Bible before we can believe that any of it is true, what are we to say about other ancient historical documents?“
 
Reader 2 - It seems to me from reading the original article that Dr. Wallace keeps interchanging the terms "inspiration" and "inerrancy." In fact, he uses Warfield's book to make his case for inerrancy when the book's title is INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE, not INERRANCY AND AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE.
 
Reader 3 - Like others previously, I concur that Wallace never demonstrates "inerrancy" in his article. And, his work on 2 Tim. 3 does not demonstrate inerrancy that I can see.
 
My own view on Paul's use of "God-breathed" (a term research to date indicates that he himself coined) is that he is calling to mind the life-giving nature of Scripture. "God-breathed" meant that God was giving life to a being. So, in Gen. 2 - God 'breathes' into humanity the breath of life. In Ezekiel God breathes life - through the Spirit (spirit, breath, and wind are all the same word in the OT - significantly) - into the dead, dry bones - a resurrection! And, in John 20 Jesus "breathes on the disciples" and says "receive the Holy Spirit." This is a new creation breath of life.
 
I think that is really all that Paul is getting at in 2 Tim. 3. That the Scripture can bring us "life" - not just physical, but real life, eternal. Life in God. Why? Because, as Wallace ably points out - the Scripture points us to Jesus. That, in fact, is also Paul's point in the context. V. 15 "and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus." The sacred writings, the God-breathed (life-giving) Scripture leads to salvation through Christ Jesus. They point us to Him and it is faith in Him, as the risen king, that transforms our lives and brings us victory.
 
Reader 4 - I  would echo two points made here in previous posts and elaborate on one of them:
 
(1) Wallace does appear to assume that "inspired" entails "inerrant" but that begs the question.
 
(2) It seems to me that the most one can derive from Wallace's "incarnation" approach to the question is the general conclusion that we, as followers of Jesus Christ, should adopt the same attitude toward Scripture as did our very Lord. I would agree with that. Taking such a view does have significant consequences. For example, b/c Jesus cites the Old Testament as authoritative for right conduct and revelatory of true God, so also should we--and hence reject all forms of Marcionism ("a Gnostic ascetic sect that flourished from the 2nd to 7th century a.d. and that rejected the Old Testament and denied the incarnation of God in Christ.")
 
But this view has limitations as an argument for inerrancy. First, and obviously, it entails nothing (directly, at least) about the New Testament.
 
Second, it also does not even follow from this view that Jesus believed that the Old Testament is inerrant. That Jesus appealed to the OT in instructing his followers and refuting his critics entails only, as Wallace's labored-upon text (2 Tim 3:15-17) itself actually says, that the OT scriptures are competent and capable of instructing us in God's way of salvation and righteousness for the purpose of making us effective doers of the good.
 
Third, and perhaps most problematic for Wallace's argument, Jesus himself did not grant the OT absolute authority in matters of right conduct but, evidently, took a critical attitude toward it, at least in part. In his most important sermon, Jesus explicitly repeals an OT law, forbidding his followers to retaliate evil for evil as was permitted by the Torah (Matthew 5:38-42). If Jesus believed the OT scriptures were inerrant, how then could he even qualify any text of scripture, much less reject a text of the OT as properly instructing us in the way of righteousness?
 
Reader 5's reply to Reader 4 - Well stated. I agree with you until your third point (last paragraph). There is no indication in the antithesis that Jesus is contradicting the Torah but the Scribal and Pharisaical interpretation and application of that law. Mt. 5:38-42 may be interpreted quite differently (and several commentators do) from the one you give. It seems much more in keeping with the whole series of antitheses and the context (5:21-48, coming in the context of Jesus calling for righteousness to exceed that of the Pharisees - 5:17-20) and even within the statement itself that Jesus is arguing against personal retaliation. They "eye for an eye" was not a license to take Torah into one's hands as a vigilante. But, was to be executed within the confines of a decision of the community. Jesus is not contradicting the punishment of the community; but the abused interpretation of the Scribes and Pharisees.
 
Reader 4's reply to Reader 5 - I quite agree that Jesus is addressing the legal practices of the covenant community. The lex talionis governed the reparation of harms and punishment of crimes within the Torah. The intent of the lex talionis was not to justify retaliation as an absolute standard of justice but to limit retaliation to the measure of equality ("one for one"). Even within the Torah, therefore, the lex talionis did not express the ideal of justice for the covenant community. That ideal, as Jesus himself taught, was the law of love: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Indeed, the Torah itself points this way: the law of love for the neighbor is prefaced by a prohibition of taking vengeance against the neighbor (Lev 19:17-18). Jesus, who teaches the full intent and highest measure of the righteousness that Torah desires (Matt 5:17-20), thus instructs the community gathered around him that what is to define right relationship among them must exceed the lex talionis. The community of Jesus is to go beyond retribution against evildoers and enemies as the standard of justice; and transcending retribution leads us to complete love, including both neighbor and enemy, which is what God intends for us (Matt 5:38-48).
 
Reader 6I don't think that scripture attests to its own inerrancy in a Chicago Statement sense. And Wallace's grammatical analysis of 2 Tim 3:16 is irrelevant because all the verse attests is that Scripture comes from God for a purpose and serves that purpose. Yes that means a serious regard for Scripture ... but doesn't speak at all to most of the arguments that cause feuds in evangelicalism (historicity of Adam, nature of flood, genre of Jonah, whither the wandering saints of Matthew, etc. etc. etc.)
 
 
 

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

From the Series "Evangelicalism's Challenge": "Where Are the People?" (Crystal Cathedral, Rob Bell)

 


Where Are the People?
http://theamericanscholar.org/where-are-the-people/#.UqdRHymA29I

by Jim Hinch
Winter 2014 Cover Story

Jim Hinch is a religion correspondent for the Orange County Register. He has also written for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gastronomica, and other publications.
 
"Evangelical Christianity in America is losing its power -
what happened to Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral shows why."


The Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, is one of America’s largest and most celebrated ecclesiastical buildings. At 60,000 square feet and designed by architect Philip Johnson, it was until recently the sanctuary of Robert H. Schuller, once one of the country’s most prominent and influential Christian ministers. In September 1980, when he dedicated the cathedral at an opening ceremony (“To the glory of man for the greater glory of God”), Schuller was at the height of his influence, preaching to a congregation of thousands in Orange County and reaching millions more worldwide via the Hour of Power, a weekly televised ministry program. Among the show’s annual highlights were “The Glory of Easter” and its companion production, “The Glory of Christmas,” multimillion-dollar dramatic extravaganzas staged inside the cathedral with a cast of professional actors, Hollywood-grade costumes, and live animals. The setting for the spectacles was a striking, soaring, light-filled structure justly praised by architecture critics. But it was not a cathedral. It was never consecrated by a religious denomination. The building is not even made of crystal, but rather 10,000 rectangular panes of glass. Like the much beloved, much pilloried Disneyland three miles to the northwest, the Crystal Cathedral is a monument to Americans’ inveterate ability to transform dominant cultural impulses—in this case, Christianity itself—into moneymaking enterprises that conquer the world.
 
But 2013 marked the end of an era. In June, Schuller’s evangelical Christian ministry, founded almost 60 years ago amid the suburbs of postwar Southern California, conducted its last worship service and filmed its last Hour of Power in the Crystal Cathedral. Hounded by creditors (including some of those Hollywood-grade costume and livestock suppliers), the ministry had declared bankruptcy three years earlier and last year sold the cathedral for $58 million to Orange County’s Catholic diocese. The diocese promptly announced plans to transform the 34-acre campus, which also includes notable ministry buildings by other name-brand architects, into Christ Cathedral, a spiritual home and civic showplace for the county’s surging population of more than 1.2 million Catholics, many of them immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia. The equipment facilitating Schuller’s elaborate stagecraft—lights, cameras, below-stage elevators, theater-style seating, an indoor reflecting pool—will be ripped out and replaced with a consecrated altar, bishop’s cathedra, baptismal font, and votive chapels dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe and other saints prominent in immigrant Catholics’ devotional lives. When the building reopens for worship in 2016, it will embody a transformation in the nation’s spiritual landscape that is only now beginning to be felt.
 
Just 10 years ago, evangelical Christianity appeared to be America’s dominant religious movement. Evangelicals, more theologically diverse and open to the secular world than their fundamentalist brethren, with whom they’re often confused, were on the march toward political power and cultural prominence. They had the largest churches, the most money, influential government lobbyists, and in the person of President George W. Bush, leadership of the free world itself. Indeed, even today most people continue to regard the United States as the great spiritual exception among developed nations: a country where advances in science and technology coexist with stubborn, and stubbornly conservative, religiosity. But the reality, largely unnoticed outside church circles, is that evangelicalism is not only in gradual decline but today stands poised at the edge of a demographic and cultural cliff. The most recent Pew Research Center survey of the nation’s religious attitudes, taken in 2012, found that just 19 percent of Americans identified themselves as white evangelical Protestants—five years earlier, 21 percent of Americans did so. Slightly more (19.6 percent) self-identified as unaffiliated with any religion at all, the first time that group has surpassed evangelicals. (It should be noted that surveying Americans’ faith lives is notoriously difficult, since answers vary according to how questions are phrased, and respondents often exaggerate their level of religious commitment. Pew is a nonpartisan research organization with a track record of producing reliable, in-depth studies of religion. Other equally respected surveys—Gallup, the General Social Survey—have reached conclusions about Christianity’s status in present-day America that agree with Pew’s in some respects and diverge in others.)
 
Secularization alone is not to blame for this change in American religiosity. Even half of those Americans who claim no religious affiliation profess belief in God or claim some sort of spiritual orientation. Other faiths, like Islam, perhaps the country’s fastest-growing religion, have had no problem attracting and maintaining worshippers. No, evangelicalism’s dilemma stems more from a change in American Christianity itself, a sense of creeping exhaustion with the popularizing, simplifying impulse evangelical luminaries such as Schuller once rode to success.
 
Prominent figures in the evangelical establishment have already begun sounding alarms. In particular, the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me. Young people’s most common complaint, he said, is that churches are too focused on sexual issues and preoccupied with their own institutional development—in other words, he explained, “Christianity no longer looks like Jesus.”
 
A book making the rounds among evangelical pastors these days is called The Great Evangelical Recession. Written by John S. Dickerson, a former investigative journalist turned evangelical pastor, it chronicles in unsparing statistical detail how evangelical Christianity is hemorrhaging members, money, and influence. “The United States has shifted into a … post-Christian age,” he writes. “No one disputes this.”
 
Visible from nearby freeways, the 128-foot-tall Crystal Cathedral looms over Orange County’s landscape of low-rise tract houses, shopping centers, and manicured office parks. Up close, it resembles a giant, angular greenhouse. Glass panes, affixed to steel trusses by silicone-based glue, cover the entire exterior, glinting in the hazy Southern California sunshine and reflecting the landscaped grounds. Across a paved plaza from the cathedral are an older church sanctuary and an office tower designed in the 1960s by celebrated modernist architect Richard Neutra, and the so-called Welcoming Center, a performance and exhibition space completed in 2003 by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Meier, known for his design of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Adjacent to these buildings are a memorial garden and columbarium sunk like an amphitheater into the ground, and a 236-foot-tall mirrored glass bell tower, also designed by Philip Johnson.
 
The cathedral complex is an odd, sometimes startling juxtaposition of high and low culture. The three main buildings, though architecturally distinguished, bear no stylistic relation to one another and thus resemble ships from different eras run aground on a shoal. The light-filled interior of the cathedral, seen from ground level, feels more like a corporate convention hall than a religious sanctuary. Before the Catholic diocese began renovation in 2013, potted palms and ferns surrounded a raised stage. A reflecting pool ran the length of an aisle between rows of folding, padded theater seats. Banks of stage lights hung from the roof. Giant speakers flanked the stage. Outside, gaudy statues (“The Smiling Jesus,” “Christ With the Lost Sheep”) adorned the plaza, including a bronze replica of Jesus striding across a reflecting pool at the base of Neutra’s exacting, 13-story Tower of Hope. Amateur religious art donated by members of Schuller’s congregation hung in an exhibition gallery adjacent to the reflecting pool.
 
On a recent tour of the cathedral, Father Christopher Smith, the Catholic priest charged with supervising transformation of the complex into a Catholic worship space, did his best, but frequently failed, to be diplomatic about Schuller’s design sensibilities. “It was a beautiful campus,” he said. “It’s still beautiful. But it’s tired.” He pointed up toward the cathedral’s sloping glass roof. “We recaulked 1,500 panes of glass. We’re really trying to fix the leaks.” In its final years, Schuller’s cash-strapped ministry skimped on building maintenance.
 
Outside, on the plaza, the priest stopped beside a statue of children surrounding a beneficent Jesus. “Some of these are awful,” he remarked. Most, he said, would be removed during the diocese’s $53 million renovation. The diocese, taking its inspiration from the historic cathedrals of Europe, envisions the structure as something wholly different from Schuller’s ministerial showplace. “Traditionally, cathedrals are centers of art and culture,” Smith said. “We want it to be that.” He spoke of touring symphony orchestras playing in the sanctuary, academic and theological conferences in the Welcoming Center’s exquisitely spare meeting spaces, ecumenical worship services, art exhibits, the bustling cultural activity of a civic gathering place—something Orange County, built over decades with little central planning in car-mad Southern California, simply doesn’t have.
 
Born in Iowa in 1926 and educated at an evangelical seminary in Michigan, Schuller arrived in rapidly suburbanizing Orange County in 1955, the year Disneyland opened. Like other successful evangelical ministers before and after him, he quickly grasped the direction American society was moving and molded his ministry accordingly. He established a church not in a building but at a drive-in movie theater in the town of Garden Grove, which, following World War II, was rapidly transforming from an expanse of orange, walnut, and strawberry farms 30 miles south of Los Angeles into a grid of suburban neighborhoods home to 44,000 people. Five years after Schuller’s arrival, the newly incorporated city’s population had doubled. Many of those new residents attended Schuller’s church, where he preached atop a snack bar to rows of worshippers in their cars. In 1958, Schuller bought a parcel of land a few miles from the drive-in and commissioned Neutra, an émigré Austrian who had made his name designing glass-walled houses for wealthy Los Angelenos, to build a permanent home for what was then called the Garden Grove Community Church. Neutra’s modernist, rectangular worship hall was dedicated in 1961. Seven years later, the architect added the equally severe Tower of Hope. In 1980, by this time a pastoral celebrity known around the world, Schuller began preaching in the $18 million Crystal Cathedral.
 
Schuller, like Billy Graham and other name-brand evangelical ministers, led a mid-20th-century spiritual resurgence that corresponded with the birth and subsequent coming of age of America’s baby-boom generation. Even as older, inner-city mainline Protestant congregations withered in postwar America, suburban evangelical churches gained members when boomers, now having children of their own, began showing up in the late 1970s. A decade later, evangelical megachurches—some of the largest of which were in Orange County—were the dominant trend in American Christianity, growing in lockstep with the suburbs that gave them birth and set their spiritual tone.
 
The Christianity practiced in these suburban churches was not of the fire-and-brimstone variety. Evangelicals are far looser and more theologically diverse than Christian fundamentalists, who emerged in the late 19th century in reaction to the destabilizing effects of industrialization, the Civil War, and advances in science. Fundamentalism, especially the view that the Bible is inerrant in all of its teachings, has been steadily declining as a force in American Christianity for decades. Recent Barna Group research shows that just 38 percent of Christians—down from close to half two decades ago—regard the Bible as “totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.” Evangelicals, by contrast, while acknowledging the authority of scripture, place greater emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with Christ. They trace their roots in America to Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century Massachusetts divine who paired Calvinistic theology with scholarship, evangelism, and spiritual conversion. The preeminence of conversion has produced huge variety and creativity in their outreach to nonbelievers. For nearly a century, evangelicals have been at the forefront of innovations in church music, worship style, architecture, and use of media to engage the non-Christian world.
 
Schuller was one of those innovators. His embrace of California car culture, his commissioning of high-profile architects, and his focus on televised spectacle were all efforts to wow, and woo, secular audiences. (Those approaches also fed Schuller’s ego, and their success his pocketbook.) The suburban style of evangelicalism Schuller pioneered was showmanlike and inspirational, emphasizing feel-good messages and entertaining worship services rather than liturgical tradition and theological complexity. Most other large evangelical churches have followed this pattern, with greater or lesser doses of commitment required of their worshippers. Christian traditionalists often assailed popular evangelical ministers for watering down the faith. But their flocks grew as baby boomers, accustomed to television and American plenitude, sought churches that matched their upwardly mobile, entertainment-oriented life styles.
 
Only with the social turbulence of the late 1960s—and particularly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion—did evangelicals begin moving to the political right, merging with fundamentalists in a conservative Christian voting bloc—a rightward tilt that tracked with larger shifts in American culture. As the boomers’ youthful political activism evolved into the suburban libertarianism and mistrust of government that propelled Ronald Reagan into office, evangelical megachurches offered their own spiritual blend of social conservatism and entrepreneurial innovation. Pastors emulated the corporate managers who often filled their pews. They researched their audience, introduced new products, marketed their offerings, and measured success by growth in membership and budgets.
 
Schuller’s own Orange County was at the forefront of America’s plunge into entrepreneurial suburbanization. Explosive growth in the county during the 1950s and ’60s led in subsequent decades to the construction of sprawling planned communities. Heavily capitalized developers transformed the landscape into a manicured rebuke to America’s troubled inner cities. Their plans excluded the prevailing elements of urban design: high-rise buildings, mixed-use commercial districts, multifamily housing, and straight streets, which were thought to be easier for criminals to navigate. The county lured corporations with plush but safely bland office parks, and local governments kept taxes low and business regulations light. The result was a resounding success. Today, Orange County is an economic colossus with a 2012 GDP of $195 billion; per capita, its GDP is roughly the size of Singapore’s. Over the years, some portion of that wealth flowed into the evangelical churches, which molded themselves to suit the county’s mostly white-collar, affluent population.
 
But just as Orange County pioneered a new form of low-rise urbanism, it was also among the first places to experience the demographic consequences. All those planned communities—their well-paid inhabitants liked to eat out, their houses needed cleaning, and their lawns needed trimming. Beginning in the 1970s, migrants, mostly from Mexico, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and Korea, began arriving to cook, clean, and mow. These immigrants and their families began taking over formerly all-white neighborhoods, principally in northern parts of the county, transforming the look and cultural fabric of those areas. Today, Orange County is one of the most ethnically, politically, and economically diverse places on the planet. Only 43 percent of its more than three million residents are white, and almost a third were born abroad.
 
Nowhere is this more visible than in the neighborhoods surrounding the Crystal Cathedral. Garden Grove, where Schuller once preached to young white homeowners in their cars, is now inhabited almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants. The adjacent city of Westminster is home to the world’s largest population of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. In another neighboring city, Santa Ana, 82 percent of the families speak at home a language other than English, primarily Spanish. These mostly poor residents cram several families into tract houses, work low-wage jobs, and reliably vote Democratic (the county’s registered voters are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans; Barack Obama won in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012). They also gravitate not to evangelical megachurches like Schuller’s but to Catholic parishes, Buddhist temples, mosques, and storefront Pentecostal churches. The Islamic Society of Orange County, which owns a mosque, school, and mortuary five miles from the Crystal Cathedral, is one of America’s largest centers of Islamic worship. The Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, a few miles north of Orange County, is the largest Buddhist temple in the United States. Orange County’s Catholic diocese is one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing.
 
This demographic shift, which experts predict will make the United States’ majority population nonwhite in roughly three decades, has not been kind to suburban evangelicalism. Young people in Orange County, no matter their ethnic or economic background, no longer view themselves as living in a suburban appendage of urban Los Angeles. The county is dense with Vietnamese pho joints, boba tea shops, Asian shopping malls, halal markets, Mexican swap meets, punk-rock nightclubs, and art galleries. Corporate-style megachurches seem bland by comparison. Several of them remain in Orange County, including the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, Mariners Church in the planned community of Irvine, and First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton. But these are clustered in the county’s most affluent areas. None are growing rapidly anymore.
 
These days, young Christians in Orange County attend very different kinds of churches, some unrecognizable as churches at all. Laundry Love, a ministry in Santa Ana, is an ad hoc community of young Christians who gather monthly at various inner-city, coin-operated laundries and wash patrons’ clothes for free. The ministry is an offshoot of Newsong Church, a mostly Asian evangelical congregation founded nearly three decades ago by a pastor named Dave Gibbons, who sought to reach people like himself, mixed-race descendants of immigrants (his parents are white and Asian) who felt out of place in mainstream American society. Newsong now has branches in Thailand, England, Mexico, and India—all of which function like self-sustaining Christian communes oriented around humanitarian relief initiatives. Gibbons has emerged as one of a growing number of in-house critics of evangelical Christianity’s wholesale adoption of corporate American values. “The church has become involved in big business,” he told me by phone. “That’s why artists and creatives don’t want anything to do with church. What’s unique about how we’re trying to do things is we focus on people who aren’t like us. We don’t have to build our own brand.”
 
A decade ago, Newsong, with 4,000 members, was on its way to becoming America’s latest Asian megachurch. Unsettled by its relentless focus on growth, Gibbons abruptly changed course, rededicating Newsong to ministering in low-income neighborhoods and providing a haven for artists. More than a quarter of the congregation left. But now Gibbons’s move seems prescient. In the past decade, evangelical churches, especially in culturally diverse urban areas, have been forced to choose between adopting urban cultural values and extinction. “The megachurch was a baby-boomer suburban phenomenon that folks under 45 typically aren’t perpetuating,” says Ryan Bolger, who teaches contemporary Christianity at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Young evangelicals “want to start communities in cafés, and this isn’t just whites. We’re starting to see with Koreans and Latinos a desire to move away from the churchiness of church, to be multicultural and in an urban context, church in the profane areas of life.”
 
At Epic Church, a 200-member, decade-old congregation in a northern part of Orange County populated mostly by Koreans and Hispanics, members gather for weekly worship in a rented office building but spend much of their time together working as tutors to low-income students at a nearby neighborhood center. “We haven’t been a church that understands ourselves as goods and services,” said Kevin Doi, Epic’s founder and pastor. The church welcomes gays, makes no overt effort to raise money from members, and regularly invites residents at a neighboring homeless shelter to its services. Doi said he has no long-range plan for his church and wouldn’t mind if it ceased functioning as an institution altogether. “We didn’t feel like our goal was to get people to come to our church,” he said. “We wanted to be present in the neighborhood, where we’re the guests.”
 
In a few years, perhaps a decade or two, religious America will catch up to Orange County’s present. There will be a shrinking number of evangelical megachurches, gradually aging and waning in influence. There will be numerous small, eclectic, multiethnic evangelical congregations whose emphasis on spiritual commitment and social service is unlikely to attract a large, mainstream following. And there will be surging numbers of immigrant Catholics, Pentecostals, and Muslims. The political influence of evangelicalism will decline. America will not become like Europe, where ossified state churches proved unable to compete against the inherently secularizing forces of market capitalism—and where immigrants’ faith expressions are often met with hostility. America will remain exceptionally religious. But traditional evangelical Christianity will no longer be a dominant presence in that religiosity.
 
Two years ago, in December 2011, yet another immigrant arrived in Orange County. Rob Bell migrated not from abroad but from Michigan, where he was a megachurch pastor and author who’d recently made the cover of Time and was about to be profiled in The New Yorker. Bell’s arrival, with his wife and three children, in the oceanfront city of Laguna Beach was tantamount to an escape. His spring 2011 book, Love Wins, the catalyst for the magazine stories, had ignited a firestorm in the world of evangelical Christianity. The book questioned the existence of hell and raised the possibility that all people, not just Christians, will be redeemed by God. Nothing in the book was theologically new; indeed, Bell never denied outright the reality of hell. But his book became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over evangelicalism’s future. Younger, liberal evangelicals were for the book. Older, conservative evangelicals rejected it. In the midst of the debate, Bell, who had already tired of the institutional responsibilities of running his 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, stepped down from leadership and lit out in semi-anonymity for the beach.
 
When I spoke to Bell earlier this year, he was still in the first flush of California love, waxing lyrical about the spirituality of surfing (he owns seven surfboards and arranges his schedule around the daily surf report). He was also at work on plans for a television talk show. Bell represents the new breed of young evangelicals who are, with gathering speed, reshaping and in some respects dissolving their movement. A decade ago, Bell was lionized in the evangelical world for blending the movement’s age-old formula (conservative theology; rapid, corporate-style growth) with hip new brains and style (sermons larded with quantum physics; a YouTube video series). Yet, like so many younger evangelicals, Bell grew disenchanted with church. By the time he wrote Love Wins, he was already fantasizing about Southern California, where he had attended graduate school. Bell doesn’t go to church in Laguna Beach. He and some friends from college have formed a quasi-intentional spiritual community, gathering in one anothers’ homes to worship and talk about faith.
 
“Evangelicals are good at whipping people up into a frenzy, and then you’re like, ‘What was that?’ ” Bell told me. “I was the pastor of a megachurch, and lots of people came, and I did book tours and interviews and films. That’s fine. But I’ll take seeing God every day, which is washing dishes with my kids and walking my dog and interacting with someone I just met.”
 
In other words, the future of the evangelical church as glimpsed from Orange County might be no church at all. Robert Schuller’s brand of worship might just turn out to be nothing more than a spiritual fad. As the generation that embraced it—middle-class, baby-boomer whites flocking to car-based suburbs—dies off, their spirituality dies with them. This is not to say that the church will go away. The Crystal Cathedral still stands. But its name is now Christ Cathedral. And Schuller’s vision of a glittery surface reflecting himself and the suburbs where he preached is gone.