NeoZine - Archives

You just gotta love ‘em: the “New Calvinists” they’re called, which means they embrace Reformed theology, commonly known as Calvinism.

A young generation of Christian leaders like Mark Driscoll are capturing headlines even in the NeoZine! They are dubbed “the young and restless Reformed” because they are innovative church-planters, but they still maintain a strict diet of old-fashioned Reformed theology.

Driscoll is speaking in July at the Xenos Summer Institute, so it’s worthwhile to study Reformed theology and its history in order to appreciate Driscoll. Especially at Xenos, people are largely unfamiliar with the old, tired dog of Reformed Christianity called Covenant Theology.

Reformed churches were once-monolithic Protestant denominations, such as the Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Baptists, but since the ’60s they are growing increasingly irrelevant, with few exceptions. The newest research now shows about 7% of the population is “evangelical”, and the hardest-hit are these Reformed denominations.¹

But changes are underway, and some Protestant churches are trying to stop the bleeding.

A Gen-X Revolution?

Generation-X made a big splash in the pool of American church life with “Emergents” (Emergent Church) and young, Restless Reformed. The Emergents and Restless Reformed are driving new directions, but with very different theologies.

Emergents are represented by the Emergent Village, and is renown for blending Postmodernism with the Bible,² but the Restless Reformed maintain a classical epistemology (view of truth).

Driscoll characterizes Gen-X as largely ineffective, silly Christianity:

This generation can be a whiny bunch of idealists getting together in small groups to complain about mega-churches and the religious right rather than doing something. - quoted in Relevant Magazine

He then describes his Restless Reformed theopraxy³ as a backlash against the “whiny” Emergent church:

In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.

The Thrill is Gone

Still, these very different Gen-X movements bear the same prominent Gen-X trademark: a penchant for the banal. (What does “Generation-X” stand for, anyway? Nobody knows, and nobody cares.) They know how take the zing out of the Bible.

Continue Reading »

1. See Dennis McCallum’s review of “Fall of the Evangelical Nation”. [⇑]
2. See Wikipedia - Emerging Church: Postmodern World View and the language of deconstruction. [⇑]
3. Theopraxy is the practice of theology, or what some call “the practice of God.” [⇑]

Chaos suddenly flared across Europe, tearing apart the fragile coalitions of the Holy Roman Empire, the “Protector of the Church.” This was bad timing, because Muslim Turks were marching into the soft underbelly of Europe and advancing to the heart of the Empire.

Europeans were romantic and hopeful about their Holy Roman Empire. It was the rebirth of ancient Rome and Europe’s best hope for holding back the invasions of Muslims equally bent on world domination. When Charles V (1519–1558) came to power, he wore the crowns of Spain, Austria and Germany, which could finally unify most of Europe under church rule.

But a crazy monk messed it up early one frosty morning in 1517 with a hammer, a nail, and a handwritten list of “protests” against local abuses by church authorities. As he tapped the nail he had no idea his protests would expose deep fractures lying beneath the glossy surface of the HRE.

His complaints became a movement defying the Vatican’s monopoly on Christianity. It was infectious and flashed across Europe, triggering religious confusion, chaos in revered social structures, riots and wars. The armies of Charles V were preoccupied with the invading Turks and could do little to quash the Protestant Reformation for years, and then it was too popular and unstoppable. Continue Reading »

Bottlenecks in History

The distant past throws long shadows across modern life. Americans recently fought a war in the Balkans that lasted from 1991 to 2001, but did you know this conflict actually began in the 1500’s?

In the same way, many Christians don’t realize the trends in their modern Christian church are tied directly to the 1500s. These long chains of the past are now stressed by secular culture, forcing Christians everywhere to reconsider hallowed institutions once codified during this violent era in European history. The greatest impediment to the Gospel is the Christian’s blind loyalty to those antiquated human institutions.

During this war in the 16th century, King Charles V and the Holy Roman Empire tried to block Ottoman Turk Muslims from invading southern Christian Europe. King Charles did halt the invasion, but lacked the strength to dislodge the invaders. Known as “the Balkan Peninsula,” the area became a perpetual powder keg between Islamic and Christian religions.

Then 500 years later President Clinton and the American military finally settled the issue, theoretically, right here in Ohio at the “Dayton Peace Accords”.

The Birth of a Movement

As strange as it may seem, the Muslim invasions brought welcome relief to the infant Protestant movement. For two decades King Charles was entangled with Muslims in southern Europe, while Protestant uprisings grew in Germany, far to the north. The Vatican chaffed and issued threats and edicts from Rome to quash the Protestant movement, but Rome was unable do anything to prevent Protestants from dismantling a millennium of well-established church authority.

It was a raucous movement led by rowdy, beer-drinking Luther. The Reformation rocked Germany like John Bellushi’s Animal House (minus the sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll.) Protestants turned the Sunday Mass into a spirited attack against the papacy. This was all terribly exciting for the peasants.

The movement enjoyed widespread popularity. “High Church” ceremonies were swept away by spiritual freedom and love for a personal Savior. The somber atmosphere of Mass was shattered by a crazy new, beer-hall instrument called an organ. A joyful cry of “Sola Scriptura!” raced across Europe and spilled into France, where the carefree movement was suddenly crushed in great bloodshed.

One who fled these massacres was John Calvin. While in hiding, he furiously wrote his famous Magnum Opus a mere three years after his conversion. With Institutes of the Christian Religion, he established a theology of crushing, sovereign authority headed by Jesus Christ which justified torture, massacres and wars. He loved the Protestant cause, but his disciplined mind was repulsed by its wild pace and enthusiasm. He wanted more law and order.

Calvin soon unleashed his theology in Geneva where he established an orderly Protestant world and ruled it with an iron will. Catholics, who were previously the hunters of Protestant rebels, suddenly became the hunted ones in Switzerland.

Institutionalized Christianity

Without a doubt the institutions of the church are the greatest obstacles for God’s love and the single cause for Christianity’s dark history. With good motives, brilliant men wrapped tight structures around the church to preserve it.

Yet the Gospel is conspicuously silent about the structures and institutions we humans are so-enamored with. During the entire first century while the New Testament was written, Christianity spread like wildfire, yet we find little written about their structures and institutions. Why is this? History screams the  answer: whenever the Gospel gets wrapped in the systems and business of the Kosmos — the “World System” as the Bible calls it — the sweet message of God’s grace is gripped by a monster that won’t let go. Human institutions always grow more complex, and their hold grows continually more fixed and frozen.

In this way biblical Christianity became the beastly Institutionalized Christianity that emerged in Europe from the Dark Ages.

Continue Reading »

The Young, Restless Reformed are leaders of remarkable movements in the Reformed tradition.¹ Their “bleeding edges” are split into the Emergent Church and Piper-Reformed Church movements racing away from the Reformed status quo still held by senior citizens. But dead traditions remain unchallenged in the new movements. The Restless Reformed are courageous, but they still need to examine the legalism in the Reformed tradition, because this builds real spiritual prisons:

But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Galatians 3:23 (NASB)

The Piper-Grudem Team

The conservative branch of the Restless Reformed is led by John Piper, famous for Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and other books about God’s sovereignty. Along with popular young leaders Driscoll and Chandler, the Piper-Reformed are spreading across the country through the Acts 29 Network., which provides tremendous resources to the Christian community.

Another fascinating figure in this movement is Wayne Grudem, from Trinity Seminary. When my brother “Buck” was at Trinity he was excited by Grudem’s systematic theology for Gen-X readers, which surprised me because my experience with Dr. Grudem was a little different.

I knew Dr. Grudem from a class I took at Trinity when I was still a young “Fishy” elder at “The Fish House” OSU ministry, and what a bunch of juveniles were were back then! We called this esteemed theologian, “Dr. Gruntum” behind his back (I’ve matured since then). To be fair, he was skinny with a whiny voice that made him a classic “Ivory Tower” academic so irresistible to wise-crackin’ sophomoric minds (he’s buff now).

There is a redemptive point here: Dr. ‘Gruntum’ surprised us. Continue Reading »

1. Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists by Collin Hanson, Christianity Today editor. [⇑]