The Ecumenical Movement and Vatican 2 - All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men

There is a cry within many Christian churches - a lamentation over the sins and divisions of the past - sort of. There is an emotional exhaustion among believers who have never understood the biblical and historic issues that have fragmented the visible church, and especially among those who understand them all too well but who somehow wish that they didn't. All the bitterness and bickering, not to mention the wars - after 2000 years of bloody history's crushing weight, who can blame them? But is the church coming together again under one roof really just a matter of forgiving and forgetting? Certainly unity between believers on an individual heart level is, and no doubt that much needs to happen in spirit. But in a religious environment that Jesus himself even said would be characterized by "wheat and tares," is it really just enmity any more that keeps the diverse Christian churches from organizing under one banner? Is organizing under one banner really what unity should be all about in the first place? And if so, whose banner do we organize under? Can we realistically just say, "Let's organize under Jesus!" and leave it at that? Yet how can we expect that the attempt will not just create another new and more terrible religious monstrosity than those we have already seen? Is it faithless to ask such questions in the face of Jesus' prayer for Christian unity in John 17? But how can we be so naïve as to not ask them in the face of our own history? Is such an asking really a face-off between Jesus and History anyway?

We are all spiritually and emotionally tired in this sense. Everybody is sick of the petty bickering and hateful demonization of other Christians that is often heard inside the walls of church. But tired people are apt to make many careless mistakes and to misread the signs of the times in disastrous ways. Even alert people often tend only to see what they want to see.

The Ecumenical Movement grew out of the 19th century cooperation between the diverse mission societies during the heyday of evangelistic expansion. Without going into a great deal of detail, it is possible to trace the development of the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches from these earlier mission alliances. But we also saw how large portions of the mission societies were infiltrated by Liberal theology in the early 20th century. This impacted the way "missions" came to be understood, often making them no longer a vehicle for the propagation of the Christian gospel but mere instruments of an almost secular style of social renovation.

Because the materialistic presuppositions of Liberalism made it impossible for its adherents to take the Bible seriously as an account of historic events in the real world, the same "unequally yoked" leadership situation that had plagued many of the mainline denominations existed also in the developing ecumenical councils. As time went on "modernism" devoured more and more of the decision-making structures in these organizations until the current World Council is completely left wing by any objective meaning of the term. Consequently, conservative Christians, who still take the Bible seriously, either do not get themselves entangled in this movement, or if they do they find their ministries are limited by a system that is often hostile to their biblical convictions. Because of weariness and the deep desire of many believers to establish meaningful inter-denominational dialogue, this is a historic reality most people simply don't want to see.

Please understand I am not saying that the desire for inter-denominational dialog is bad and that we should not seek after it - only that we must do so with our eyes open. Part of the problem is that the word ecumenical in its modern sense conjures up two entirely different pictures for people, and many are not even aware that they are looking at two different concepts.

The first view of Ecumenicalism is the vision of believers from many different denominations treating each other with mutual respect and dignity, praying together for many of the same things and recognizing that they all serve the same Lord in their differing capacities and organizations. This is really a renewal of denominationalism in its positive sense as opposed to sectarianism. Bible-oriented believers, including myself, can get behind many of the ecumenical visions that conform to this pattern because they do not require us to check our minds at the door and submit to ideas and organizations that are measurably anti-biblical in their philosophies. We can evaluate our relationships with individual believers from other groups in a loving and productive way without necessarily coming to a place of total agreement with their organizations, or worse yet making a deliberate departure from biblical issues for fear of further division. Rather than seeing the various Christian ministries as tragic fragments of a once united church, this vision rejoices in the individual distinctiveness of each movement and recognizes that each may be designed by God to minister to certain kinds of people that perhaps would not be reached any other way. Of course, there are biblically reasonable limits as to how far this can stretch. This view of ecumenical outreach does not demand organizational unification and uniformity.

The second vision of ecumenical cooperation is another creature entirely. It has a geopolitical goal of uniting the various Christian religious systems under one organizational umbrella so that when the world sees "Christianity" it will be looking at only one political-religious entity. This ambitious strategy assumes that it is not enough to have the first vision of ecumenical cooperation because there would still be the potential for fragmentation in a model where people could freely follow their convictions in standing against ideologies and religious practices that they saw as anti-biblical. Like trying to glue Humpty-Dumpty back together from thousands of fractured shards, this view of ecumenical unity requires that "all the King's horses and all the King's men" make a primary commitment to organizational mergers and charters.

While some people who claim to be "Ecumenical" in their outlook might believe in various mixtures of these two visions, we need to stress that there are actually two very different pictures out there when it comes to this thing we call the Ecumenical Movement. The first is quite beneficial when we approach it with eyes open, while the second is clearly the embryo of another religious monster. One view offers the potential for spiritual unity based on love amid true diversity, the other demands a unity based on an existential leap that would pigeon-hole the content of Scripture firmly into an unknowable void and replace its authority with yet another system of human engineering.

The leavening of many modern churches with a Neo-Orthodox existential concept of "faith" makes the whole ecumenical process as it exists today even more problematic. At a time when walls are coming down and inter-faith discussion is on the rise, the very words used in the conversation are often being redefined. Political agendas have infiltrated the process to the point that amidst all the warm fuzziness the very meaning of what is being said is becoming less and less sure as time goes on. In the end what kind of "unity" will this leave us with?

Another layer of complexity was folded into the dough in the 1960s with the advent of Vatican II. It seemed that after long last the Roman Papacy wanted to seriously talk of unity from a realization of how those who had left Rome's fold during the Reformation had done so for some good reasons. I do not question the sincerity and human warmth of Pope John XXIII, nor of his spiritual successors, Paul VI and John Paul II, with regard to their desire to see better understanding between most of the other Christian churches. Yet in parts of Vatican II one can definitely see once again the existential leap of Neo-Orthodoxy. While the papal "fortress" had resisted every attack by pure Liberalism, Neo-Orthodoxy was able to pass almost unseen right through the front gates in varying degrees, dressed in the clerical garbs of traditional Roman Catholic terminology. Not every sentiment that drove Vatican II can be fairly called existential, but enough was there to make the following admittedly over-brief analysis relevant.

Recall that in Neo-Orthodox perception, the realm of reason and doctrine leads to despair and deadness, so that any hope in faith must be found totally apart from reason. On the hopeless level of reason, we have the Second Vatican Council's written reaffirmation of all the canons of the Council of Trent, which damned Reformation-based believers to the lowest hell in their anathemas. 1 Also on the level of reasoned content we see the continued acceptance of Vatican I and Papal Infallibility. 2 The latter position, as far a cause-and-effect rationality goes, has burned Rome's theological bridges behind her in terms of ever being able to retrace her doctrinal steps with regard to recognizing where the papacy went wrong in its side of the doctrinal divisions. Yet in spite of this intellectual reaffirmation, a leap of anti-reason has been established where Protestant believers can be "separated brethren" while still holding to the very beliefs that Trent unmistakably said would damn them to hell.

I have listened to many otherwise brilliant Roman Catholic thinkers try to bridge this chasm in the logical law of non-contradiction and have never yet heard a satisfying answer. It is not that they don't want an answer. It is just that working from a position that is based on reason and which insists on building from the foundation of Trent and Vatican I it is impossible to come to the conclusion that Protestants are "separated brethren". If the canons of Trent are correct (and Infallibility demands that the Roman Catholic believe that they are) then anybody who has an assurance of salvation and rejects purgatory and who teaches justification in the Reformation sense is damned to the lowest hell. The only way to secure a "separated brethren" status for Protestants while building from this foundation is to arbitrarily do so as an irrational leap into a realm where the rules of logic no longer apply. But in such a realm even the sincere are caught by the inevitable result that words will only mean whatever any user wants them to mean. Objective truth in such a place dies.

For those who might say that I have misunderstood the intent of both the Ecumenical Movement and Vatican II let me say that I grew up in the Catholic Church of the decade between 1966 and 1976 when sweeping reforms were made. I remember seeing the Mass done in Latin and then the sudden change, just when I had become an altar boy, of having to have to learn to do it in English. This was a marvelous improvement for Roman Catholics that indirectly made them more receptive to hearing biblical truths from outside their own system that before would have been treated with suspicion. It is not so much the intentions of Vatican II and the Ecumenical Movement that pose the real problem, it is the existential shortcuts that leave people with a fragmented sense of truth and reality. And that includes a realistic view of God as a person who has distinct and communicable ideas that have been revealed in Scripture.

For example, I remember being instructed by the nuns as a young child that when Genesis talked about Adam and Eve it was talking about real people at a real time and that we ought to believe this because the Church said so. The nuns and other church ladies who handled my early education in the Catholic faith represented the traditional non-fragmented approach to truth as it was seen through Roman Catholic eyes. Then suddenly - so suddenly that I can pinpoint the year and the grade of school I was in (6th Grade - 1970) - everything about what the church had taught me changed.

In the two grade levels leading up to my Confirmation, the Catholic Confraternity of Christian Doctrine program at our parish in southern Massachusetts was administered for a brief time by senior seminary students from the local Diocese. As a 6th grader I was very inquisitive and had a special interest in life science that was manifested by a fascination for dinosaurs and the theory of Evolution. Since I already read at near a college level, my ideas were fairly well developed for one so young. Consequently I had a problem with what the church ladies had taught me earlier. I was determined to revisit the issue, since the seminary brothers seemed a lot more approachable than the churchwoman I had questioned on the matter did just the previous year.

I didn't know it at the time, but the answers I got from the seminary students were standard Neo-Orthodoxy. I was told that the Genesis account never really happened in the real world, but that it was just a story that somebody had written to show that God made everything. It was written that way, according to my new spiritual instructors, because many faithful people, like the little old ladies that had supervised my earlier church education, cannot understand modern scientific concepts like evolution. One is left wondering, however, if I had come to this same seminary student with the same question and I had been a "little old lady," would he have told me that "modernist ideas like evolution are tolerated because scientists and students today have no other way to relate"? Even as a 6th grader I suspected that something was wrong not only with the blind authoritarian approach of the ladies but with the sidestepping of the seminary students. As I look back this marked the beginning of my rejection of the Catholic Church as a teen-ager.

Sad to say this situation has not improved with time. The acceptance of formerly excommunicated Catholic evolutionary pantheist Teilhard de Chardin as one of John Paul II's favorite authors and the Pope's refusal to even speak with scientists from the Institute for Creation Research before his recent "evolution encyclical" reveals volumes. 3 At least on some levels the Neo-Orthodox view of truth has found a new and powerful sponsor.

Given many of the unhealthy underlying forces at work in the Ecumenical Movement, how do we try to maintain unity among the different kinds of Christian faith? Certainly a unity based on agape love among individual believers in differing movements is a noble thing to be cultivated with all diligence as much as possible. This is the spirit of Jesus' prayer in John 17, as best as can be applied in our current historic situation. But when the desire for unity becomes leavened by political ambitions or by fear that biblical exhortation might lead to further disunity, or by the emotional exhaustion from unresolved historic issues that need to be resolved, something disturbing happens. The Neo-Orthodox idea that content of belief is unimportant can create a false emotional comfort zone that is ultimately sustained at the price of abandoning the very things that are knowable about God from Scripture. This doesn't happen all at once, but in varying degrees over a period of time. Nor does it always happen completely. Yet the devaluation of our language, especially in contexts of religion, also creates an illusion of communication where sometimes very little actually exists. Ironically the very existentialism that promised an "experience with God" apart from the requirement to take the Bible seriously has produced a "god" that is no longer functionally real in the sense of being a knowable person outside of our own cultural consciousness. If the price of "unity" is the relegation of God to the unknowable in any of these ways, then the price is far too high. The specter of the Book of Revelation's future "religious whore of Babylon" haunts such a path.

Few people can be said to represent the spirit of the positive kind of ecumenical ideal better than that quintessential evangelist of the second half of the 20th century, Billy Graham does. Even if it must be candidly admitted that occasionally Mr. Graham has been cornered into some aspects of the second kind of ecumenicalism also, his clear effective presentation of the biblical gospel to so wide a variety of peoples certainly clears him of any accusation of glib Neo-Orthodoxy.

Graham's preaching was the first product of a more-or-less Fundamentalist emphasis to find wider acceptance in churches that did not reflect a Fundamentalist view. He avoided most potential intra-faith problems by centering his message on the universality of the need created by human sin and the effective meeting of that need by the blood of Christ. He presented the sin problem in real life down-to-earth terms that were not at all ambiguous in the way they could be interpreted, and yet he did not demonize people in the process. While he never avoided a frank portrayal of the moral problems in our culture, he did not allow any one social issue to sidetrack him from his stated purpose - to win souls. His reach across the many walls, from those of denominations to those of the Iron Curtain has been long and steady.

Aside from his flair for diplomacy, television gave Graham a pipeline into the homes of people who would never have in a million years gone out to see a travelling preacher. Even before the proliferation of television, Graham was reaching many thousands in old style tent and stadium crusades reminiscent of the revivalists from the previous century. But the tube multiplied his reach to untold masses across the globe. Even though he was the first to make effective use of the TV medium for Christ, it is hard today to think of Graham as a "televangelist" because of what that word has come to mean. Many imitators have come along and tried to equal his success without equaling his integrity in terms of moral, spiritual and financial accountability.

It can be said that Billy Graham brought certain positive aspects of revival again even to times that were not always being characterized by what students of church history would call true "revival". Historic revivals brought on multitudes of deep conversions that filled many different churches of many denominational stripes all at the same time. Graham mainstreamed the sentiment of what used to often happen by human "accident" through his canvassing local churches of all interested persuasions and partnering with them to help disciple those who came forward at his altar calls.

By the end of the 20th century it could probably be said that not a neighborhood existed in the United States and in many other parts of the world where at least one person had not "gotten saved" while listening to Billy Graham. While many also made decisions that were shallow and incomplete, it was not because God or Mr. Graham had dropped the ball. Certainly Graham set the matrix for the evangelistic model of the late 20th century and it will be interesting to see what his successors do in the new millennium with the legacy he leaves behind.

Another phenomenon that was reaching over denominational barriers in the second half of the 20th century was the Charismatic Renewal, sometimes called Neo-Pentecostalism. Just as the older Pentecostal Movement had appealed to the disaffected black and poorer white people at the turn of the century, so the Charismatic Movement began amid the 1960s in a generation that was dissatisfied with the deadness in large portions of organized Christian religion at that time. The movement spread out of traditional Pentecostal churches into many other denominations in just a few years, even drawing significant numbers in Lutheranism, Anglicanism and the Roman Catholic Church. Many of those who received the "baptism of the Holy Spirit" chose to remain in the churches where they were. Most of the mainline denominations tolerated them in a way that would have been unthinkable only a decade before.

Theologically the Charismatic Movement emphasized the same things that the older Pentecostalism had, but often without the fragmentation that followed. This was partly because adherents to the new Pentecostal experience were often better educated than their spiritual forebears and not as apt to get embroiled in artificially induced doctrinal contradictions like the Oneness dispute. Unfortunately it also had something to do with the fact that by this time a Neo-Orthodox view of faith had sometimes so de-emphasized the importance of doctrine that fewer believers bothered to pay close attention to what the Scriptures said, even with eyes that misread what was written there.

The earlier Pentecostalism had hoped to cross over denominational barriers but often could not do so. There was a two-fold reason for this. One involved racial and religious prejudice and the other was that many biblically astute believers still cared about doctrinal content, and they were not interested in hearing from a movement that often seemed like it could not intelligibly agree on what it believed. Neo-Pentecostalism did not have to face this obstacle so much. Two things contributed to the falling down of the walls. One was a truly biblical desire of people to experience the power of God in their lives at a time when the churches were in decline and Christianity seemed less and less relevant to the real world. This was a genuine spiritual conviction that dead authoritarian orthodoxy could not reach a new generation that was asking many pertinent questions. The other was the Neo-Orthodox de-emphasis on the importance of doctrine that had by this time enveloped many of the denominations that the Charismatic Movement found themselves welcomed in. But it must be emphasized that the Charismatic Movement did not produce this cavalier attitude about doctrine in itself, it was already there and sometimes got inducted into the movement from people who already had it.

We cannot simply write off the Charismatic Renewal as a mere manifestation of existentialism in Christian garb. Many have tried to do this, but each attempt has been unfair and overly simplistic in its analysis. The New Testament, when interpreted without prejudice, allows for the continuance of tongues, prophecy and healing and I can personally attest to seeing these things alive to varying degrees within the present day church and in my own life. But we would be negligent if we did not admit that too often the lack of biblical teaching on how the gifts of the Spirit should operate within the church has produced waves of bizarre extremes also. People frequently would "catch the fire" and never settle into a place of obedience and study of God's word. Not everything that went on in the name of the Holy Spirit truly bore the marks of that Spirit. Like movements of the past, the Charismatic Renewal also produced a mixed bag of results in the Body of Christ, some powerful and promising, yet others divisive and truth diluting.

Embracing both a Fundamentalist and Neo-Pentecostal Biblical Emphasis without the Extremes: The Jesus Movement, Calvary Chapel and other Kindred Visions

While many Christians had seen a limited revival of faith that helped them through the terrible years of the Great Depression and World War II, the immediate post-war prosperity often saw the minds and heart of that generation suddenly turned to other things. Culturally speaking people that came of age in the 40s and 50s existed with a sense of Christian morality and values that they had inherited from earlier times, but often without a believable Bible-based intellectual foundation to match. As Schaeffer concisely put it, their values ran on "cultural inertia." 4 This manifested itself during the 60s and early 70s by a tendency for parents to be able to tell their children what was morally right without being able to give them a meaningful and convincing intellectual foundation for holding up such values. While this is an over-generalization to some extent, historians have nevertheless called this phenomenon the "Generation Gap."

By the early 1970s the youthful idealism that had flamed high during the 60s had slumped to mere sex, drugs and rock n' roll. Young people who had dropped out of an establishment that valued only prosperity and the status quo had tried to find existential answers in psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation and leftist ideology. But some were discovering that this too was a dead end - one that led to hypocrisy far worse than that of their parent's generation. Parents were also left questioning the validity of their own values as well.

Even biblically orthodox churches at this time often behaved with the very stuffiness and self-righteousness the hippies attributed to them. I remember going to a church with my grandmother and some of my friends during this time period. An usher stopped one of the girls with us at the door and told her that she could not enter because she was wearing sandals. We were not hippies by any stretch of the imagination (not yet anyway). In fact, we didn't even have the temerity to mention that Jesus had worn sandals - we didn't think of it until later.

On both sides of the country teen-agers were experiencing the same kind of thing. Young men were told they couldn't attend service without a "proper haircut and shoes" while girls had to wear dresses or skirts. No denim was allowed. But the generation of the 1960-70s had not been given a believable reason why God should care about such meaningless things, much less for the more important questions of faith and morality. The philosophies of Rousseau and his ideological offspring had complete dominance in the universities and young people everywhere were asking the rhetorical question voiced in the rock opera Hair:

My hair like Jesus wore it, hallellujah! I adore it! -- Hallellujah, Mary loved her son - Why don't my mother love me?

Whether the perception was completely fair or not, in the minds of an entire generation the churches had sided with form against substance in the battle for love and truth. Some of them still do.

Yet God was breaking the hearts of a precious few in pastoral circles with the conviction that the sin lay not so much in the communes as in the pews. Two of those pastors have already been quoted in this series because both have deeply influenced my thinking and spiritual growth. One has since gone home to be with the Lord and I never had the privilege of meeting him in person, but the books of Francis A. Schaeffer helped me to put reality together out of the swirling intellectual storms of my youth. The other man, who mentored the men that have spiritually mentored me, and who I have met only briefly, is Chuck Smith, founding pastor of the Calvary Chapel movement. These two men, and others like them, were part of a much broader church trend that began to freely welcome hippies and other disaffected young people into their congregations and talk with them instead of at them. History has called this phenomenon the Jesus Movement.

If any move of Christian faith in the last century appeared at first to have the least likelihood of going anywhere serious, the Jesus Movement was it. At its start young Bible teachers, barely more than babies in the faith themselves, got so excited about the love of God and shared with so many of their friends that the enthusiasm was contagious. Francis Schaeffer, who had started a Christian commune in Switzerland, called L'Abri Fellowship, was concerned that the young multitudes would simply "drop out and turn on with Jesus" as just another existential leap into non-reason. Indeed, that was what many seemed to be doing, for several cults, like Moses David's "Children of God" also sprang out of the Jesus Movement. But Schaeffer concentrated on a rigorous regimen of Bible teaching and Christian philosophy designed to show that the historic Christian faith had the only consistent answers for the deep questions young people were asking at that time. Some have complained that his work was "too intellectual". Yet it came in an era when young Christians were often in much greater danger of being anti-intellectual and giving up on a reasonable understanding of Scripture in favor of an existential never-never land than they were of having a mere "intellectual faith". These kids were searching. Schaeffer tempered his intellectualism with vast reservoirs of agape love.

In Southern California, Chuck Smith was dealing with the same kind of problems, but in a way more suited to his unique style of ministry. Coming from a Pentecostal background, "Pastor Chuck" understood the importance of the experiential side of Christianity. Having been exposed to many of the abuses in Pentecostalism while growing up, however, he also saw a desperate need for biblical balance and expositional teaching. One of the great successes of Calvary Chapel has been its ability to emphasize having an experience with God through the Holy Spirit as well as having a logical, defensible, obedient and systematic understanding of the Bible. Pastor Chuck has taught the Scriptures simply, book by book, verse by verse in this way for four decades and doubtless will continue to do so until the Lord takes him home. In so doing Calvary Chapel has fostered an environment where the gifts of the Holy Spirit can be experienced and practiced without the unbiblical extremes that fragmented Pentecostalism and have sometimes leavened the Charismatic Movement as well. Believers in the latter two movements have sometimes criticized Calvary Chapel for "quenching the Spirit" because when they visit our services they do not hear people speaking in tongues out loud. But isn't it possible that the Holy Spirit sometimes leads us not to speak in tongues - that there is a time and a season for everything under heaven? Even the Apostle Paul, who according to 1st Corinthians 14, spoke in tongues more than anybody, desired rather to speak five words plainly in the gathered teaching service than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue. Can it be that in the sincerest desire to shed tradition and follow the Spirit there is still that human tug that draws us into forming new traditions that must in turn also be shed at times lest they eclipse God's bigger picture? My 22 years of involvement in the Calvary Chapel movement have led me to consider this certain.

The Jesus Movement came as a massive flood of conversions among what was then the younger, "Baby-boomer" generation. It was perhaps the first move of the Holy Spirit that focused not on people at a geographic location, but on a certain age group or strata within Western civilization in general. Indeed it aimed for the very first generation to be completely existential and post-Christian in their world-view. Marijuana smoking surfer-dudes and misfits like Skip Heitzig, Mike MacIntosh and Greg Laurie were changed by the power of God's Spirit and taught in the Scriptures by Chuck Smith, and have since come to spiritual maturity in the ensuing decades to mentor others in the same way. Violent personalities like Vietnam veteran and martial arts expert Raul Ries were snatched from the very brink of murder and suicide and transformed into loving servants of the Prince of Peace. Raul today pastors the gigantic Calvary Chapel of Golden Springs in Southern California.

As Jesus Movement outgrowths like Calvary Chapel and Jesus People USA matured, they came to appeal to far more than just the Baby-boomers, attracting many in the older generations, as well as Generation X, and now the "Millennials" like my daughter. As college age kids from the 70s and 80s pressed on into adulthood, a much wider biblical revolution in church culture occurred that at long last began to flex its muscles into the realm of the arts and sciences once again. Contemporary Christian music now comes in all varieties and penetrates deeply into areas of culture long unexposed to biblical concepts of truth and reality. While music is not the same as gospel preaching and expositional teaching, it does help to set a mood where people are often more receptive to the latter. The Creation Science Movement has impacted the intellectual disciplines also, along with its stepchild "Intelligent Design Theory". While these are a minority view in the science community, they are a significant minority that can not only hold their own, but have gained ground against both materialistic and pantheistic evolutionism at the highest doctoral levels.

It is true that the independent ministries from the Jesus Movement have had to undergo certain crisis points that might not have happened in more centralized organizations. But in more centralized institutions the Holy Spirit would not have had the freedom to move as far. During the early 80s in Calvary Chapel, a parting of the ways came between Pastor Chuck and the Vineyard Fellowships that at one time were partnered with the Calvary fold. This was a disagreement that arose over what should be the primary emphasis of the teaching ministry in the church - spiritual experience or expositional Bible study. Pastor Chuck felt that without a primary emphasis on expositional teaching there was no standard by which we could understand our spiritual experiences and ultimately relate them to God's person and will. While spiritual spontaneity had an important place in church life it could not exist as the foundational standard because there are too many unhealthy spiritual influences out there trying to deflect God's people into an unstable orbit around something other than Christ and the word of God.

The fellowships and ministries that arose out of the Jesus Movement have seen phenomenal growth in the past 30 years not only in terms of numbers but in spiritual depth as well. Their counter-culture origins have perhaps prepared them to exist as a Christian counter-culture within post-Modern civilization. Calvary Chapel alone has burgeoned from one small church in 1968 to over a thousand fellowships world-wide with more being added every year. That is actually comparable to the expansion of the 1st century church! Yet rather than end on such a proud observation, it behooves those of us who understand the dynamics of church history to pray diligently and in the holy fear of God. While God is for us, the trend of church history is against us. We must pray that such movements will remain humble, with their hearts sensitive to the Spirit and their minds focused on the Word as their founding teachers now hand the torch down to a new generation in a new millennium in an increasingly hostile post-Christian age. BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. See Council of Trent, Canons 11, 12, 15, 24, 25 & 30 cited in Ch. 16 of this book. 2. Flannery, Austin O.P., gen. ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (revised edition) vol. 1, p. 412; Costello Publishing (1988) 3. Morris, Henry M. Evolution and the Pope, in Vital Articles on Science/creation, Acts and Facts Dec. 1996, found at the ICR web site http://www.icr.org/ 4. Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, pp. 216-217 & 205-206, Fleming H. Revell Co. Old Tappan, NJ. (1976)

I found this from part 22 of Powderly's series:

http://calvarychapel.com/riorancho/Library/Church%20History%20Transitions/Part%2022.htm

...

Neo-Orthodoxy: Existentialism Couched in Christian Terminology and "Christianized" Pantheism

One of the things that added fuel to the distrust between Fundamentalists and Pentecostals was how much the Pentecostal emphasis on experiencing the Spirit could sometimes superficially resemble a modernist philosophy called Existentialism. We briefly mentioned Existentialism as an outgrowth from Soren Kierkegaard's impression that reason inevitably leads to despair and that hope is to be found only in a "leap of faith" outside the bounds of reason to a place of optimism in spite of ones intellect. Certainly one can understand the concern about how easily this might infiltrate a movement like Pentecostalism. Yet a stark difference lay between Existentialist experiences and Pentecostal ones - Pentecostalism generally sought its experience with God within a biblical framework, whereas Existentialism for the most part denied that framework. The first wave of this philosophic intrusion into the life of the churches came through an entirely different vehicle than Pentecostalism - one that built its view of the Bible from the materialistic rationalism of Liberal theology and yet irrationally clung to Scripture as a revelation of "religious truth" anyway.

Existentialism is the belief that in the realm of reason everything has been proved to be meaningless and absurd and that meaning and values can only be found by making a leap of faith into an experience that transcends reason in some way. This idea came of age as a secular philosophy in the early 20th century with the French Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In secular Existentialism it does not matter what the defining experience of ones life ultimately is, as long as it transcends reason and grants some epiphany of meaning to an otherwise purposeless existence. While Existentialism has largely died out as a formal philosophy, it has nonetheless entered into the world-view of grassroots culture via the arts and entertainment media on a massive scale throughout much of the 20th century.

Modern art began to depict human figures in a more fragmented way and to emphasize the themes that "all is random" and "hope can only be found in a romantic emotional experience apart from reason." And yet even as many artists made such statements, their art itself betrayed an underlying order to things. Francis Schaeffer documents how modern painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) deliberately tried to paint the idea that the universe is nothing but chance and meaninglessness. He did this by hanging paint cans with bottom holes by strings from a moving lattice that allowed the paint to drip randomly on a canvass underneath. 7 But his art betrayed him in the end. For when one looks at this work one sees that the paint dribbled out in elliptical patterns that signified the laws of motion described by the lattice's movement. There was order in the universe after all.

Movies often made these kinds of statements even more powerfully, not only because of the visual spectacle but because film reached more people than the fine arts did. Schaeffer also gives a list and a description of how movies proclaimed this kind of message throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In one title, Blow-Up, the trailer for the film poster read, "Murder without guilt, love without meaning." 8 Heroes began to disappear in many instances, to be replaced either by an anti-hero who has some kind of existential experience that causes him to make a dramatic choice of some sort, or simply a main character that becomes the focal point of the movie, which follows and records his or her meaningless impressions of individual "reality". Blade Runner is an example of the anti-hero and Stanley Kubrick's film version of the novel A Clockwork Orange describes the second kind of focal character. Even recent movies that have some excellent Christian moral themes and a revived concept of heroism woven into them, like Saving Private Ryan, still frequently suffer at least partly from the existential dilemma. An entire squad of soldiers gave their lives to fetch Private Ryan home to a mother who had lost every one of her other sons to World War II. As the Captain of the detachment lay dying after securing Ryan's safety, he charged the young soldier with living a life worthy of the men who had given theirs to save him. But in the last scene an aging and decent family man Ryan is left with no sure way of knowing in the end whether or not the good life he had tried to live was really good enough to warrant the price paid by those soldiers. This is the dilemma of existentialism even when it takes on a noble form - there is no ultimate way of knowing, no reasonable basis for being sure of what is right and wrong. And without a firm basis, there is also no possibility of a consistent concept of grace.

Post-Modern people in Western society now perceive reality in a dualistic existential way even if they have never heard of or understood the meaning of the words dualistic and existential. 9 By dualistic I mean that they exist in a fractured dual perception of reality where on one level reason (force-marched by materialistic preconceptions) has led to the hopeless conclusion that we are nothing but meaningless biochemical automatons that evolved by accident, with no genuine free will. On another totally disconnected level post-Modern people at the same time imagine themselves to be "free" to create their own arbitrary meaning and values - their own reality as it were. It is totally unnecessary for these individualized "realities" to correspond to one another on a social level, or that they correlate to any system of reason, because they are all based on a totally irrational leap. Of course few people ever consciously become aware of this dynamic.

In the current cultural mindset it is possible for everybody to have different contradictory concepts of religion and God and yet to have them all be "correct". This is not merely a tolerance that respects the individual right to differ, which I think all of us would agree is a good thing. Rather, it is the actual thrusting of all things moral and religious into a faerie realm of anti-reason. In such a realm there is no cause-and-effect reality and the law of non-contradiction is made null and void because nothing in this kind of "personal faith" ever touches the real world in a way that significantly effects anybody else. And if this is so, then faith and morals do not really belong in the marketplace of public discussion at all. We are left with a burden to not merely respect another person's right to believe an absurd idea, but to respect that absurd idea itself, because to question the rationality and morality of any world-view would violate the emotional comfort zone of those who hold to that view.

In the unrealistic cocoon of this existential type of society even the tools of intellectual and moral persuasion become out-of-bounds as a means of evangelism for Christians to use. For this scenario has the maddening tendency to work only one way. It becomes quite all right for people to question a world-view that believes in moral and spiritual absolutes, but the reverse is viewed as abominable and intolerant. Unfortunately for such a society, if the tools of intellectual and moral persuasion are deemed to be equally as reprehensible as political and military coercion, then there is simply nothing left for the Christian to use in obeying the Great Commission. This is the problem with an over-blown and distorted concept of volantaryism. A whole array of moral and spiritual issues cannot be legitimately discussed in such a value system. Hence we see the fragmentation and breakdown of moral and spiritual consensus in our culture and especially in our youth.

This kind of irrational dualism has manifested itself in the last century through a variety of ways within the arts, religion, popular science and politics. It really does not matter what kind of experience one places this kind of hope into as long as it seems to work superficially for the individual. The person who finds meaning in an LSD trip is essentially on the same level as the artist who hopes in the existence of art, or the religionist who experiences ecstasy with absolutely no intellectual content, or the scientist who dreams of seeing the next quantum leap in human evolution. It is really the ultimate waking illusion. The problem is that the popular perception of the Christian faith has also been shoved into this domain along with UFOs, Mother Earth and peyote buttons, frequently by people and methods operating inside the church itself.

Just as theological Liberalism was the materialistic Rationalism of the Enlightenment expressed in Christian words, so its stepchild Neo-Orthodoxy is Existentialism couched in theological terms. This "new orthodoxy" purported to revive a respect for biblical teaching while at the same time it had accepted the Liberal conclusions about Scripture being largely the product of pious fraud. I can think of few concepts more irrational than that. A Neo-Orthodox theologian, to one degree or another believes that the Bible is full of historic and scientific errors about nature and yet somehow that a kind of "spiritual" truth still glows through it anyway. Yet this leaves us with the subjective problem of how to know whether or not any given Bible passage is a product of that glowing "spiritual truth" or of the human fraudulence. But because Neo-Orthodoxy sometimes comes out as an emphasis of sorts on Bible teaching, its methods have managed to influence even conservative Christian institutions in various ways that pure Liberalism never could. For one thing, many Bible-oriented believers throughout the 20th century still had an almost subliminal cultural distrust of things like reason and science. Neo-Orthodoxy seemed to neatly sidestep the kinds of issues raised in those realms by automatically dismissing them as unimportant. In fact, Neo-Orthodoxy is not really an intellectual theological position with an emphasis that can be described in points like Calvinism or Pentecostalism at all. Rather it is a method of perceiving truth that brings into the church the Existentialism of the world by using re-defined Christian words. As such it often results in a variety of different conclusions on any given theological topic to which it is applied. Some of these conclusions would even sound quite orthodox if one could be sure that the definitions of the words being used were always the same as the ones historically understood.

As slippery as all this is, many genuine lovers of Jesus during the 20th century at times espoused different degrees of this Neo-Orthodox concept of Bible truth. Yet each time it was applied, the effect was spiritually and intellectually corrosive to any personal system of evidential biblical faith in direct proportion. But within the Neo-Orthodox model it seemed possible for teachers like Karl Barth in Germany to have a profound respect for biblical morality and spirituality as a religion while at the same time conceding the scholarly issues wholesale over to the Liberals. In spite of this intellectual suicide, we must not doubt the validity of the man's bottom line faith even though it suffered from the existential split view of reality. Barth joined Dietrich Bonhoeffer in signing the Barman Declaration of 1934, which took a true biblical stand against Nazism and its attempt to redefine the Christian churches into just another propaganda organ for National Socialism. There were not many other pastors in Germany at the time who showed as much courage or biblical conviction. On the other hand, we can't simply say that just because of Barth's bravery his having a Neo-Orthodox dualism in his theology really didn't matter either. The next generation of Christian thinkers had a severely eroded foundation to build on at a time when big storms were on the horizon.

Nazism was more than just a political movement. It was rife with twisted messianic religious overtones and various kinds of occult spiritualism. It was able to permeate German culture largely because people were reacting angrily against the moral bankruptcy and wishywashyness that grew in the wake of Liberalism. Many conservative church leaders went right along with Hitler because they thought he would clean up the streets and the brothels. The depth of their miscalculation only occurred to them later as sanctioned gang violence from the Brownshirts and then the SS made clear the true nature of the new order. This of course does not excuse the majority of church leaders in Germany for their blindness and apathy. The proverbial writing was fully on the wall many years earlier with the Nazi and Communist acceptance of Social Darwinism as a political philosophy, and the anti-Semitism that Hitler never even bothered to try and hide. Social Darwinism is the idea that certain groupings of men are more evolved and less beast-like than others are. Before World War II the deciding factor in what made people more "evolved" was primarily racial. Since the fall of Hitler the deciding factor in Social Darwinistic ideologies has shifted from the racial to the philosophic and religious -- highly evolved people are those who can accept a pantheistic view of God and humanity versus those who can not or will not accept such a thing.

The same spiritual saltlessness in the Liberal church that had produced Neo-Orthodoxy had also allowed the social evils to prevail in Germany that Nazism deceitfully claimed to have answers for, just as ultra-rightwing white supremacists are claiming to have such answers today. One reason people found Hitler so believable at the time and came to think that Nazism had real answers for them was because long experience had convinced them that the churches clearly didn't. Karl Barth managed to reach a place of personal spiritual stamina to stand against the Nazis through his respect for Bible morality, in spite of his belief that in the realm of history and nature the Scriptures were inaccurate. But with a fractured intellectual foundation, Barth's stamina could not be culturally contagious. The tiny remnant of faithful German Christians from both Catholic and Protestant denominations suffered the "trampling under the foot of men" because the churches as visible institutions of culture and religion had lost their ability to convincingly use moral and intellectual persuasion in advancing a Spirit-led biblical world-view. One could not give to people what one no longer had.

Another tendency that has come from Neo-Orthodox-style approaches to Christianity is the acceptance of Pantheism into the church. We discussed that Pantheism is the idea that everything in the universe added up together equals God in the form of an impersonal force that permeates nature. This type of Neo-Orthodoxy is somewhat different from the kind espoused by Barth. It denies that the Bible has told us anything useful about moral absolutes, history and God in its content. The theologians who took this view saw the value of Scripture only in terms of the way people could use it to obtain a Christianized version of an existential emotional experience. But if the content of what Scripture says about God and Christ is unimportant, then how does one reach a place of knowing anything about who and what God is? By the 1960s this school of theology simply threw up its hands and announced that "God is dead." The majority of Americans were shocked to hear this statement coming from church leaders and theologians. And yet for most people by this time, convinced that reason leads only to despair and emptiness, any sure and knowable content about God was as extinct as the dinosaurs.

Schaeffer has pointed out quite brilliantly that because of this the Neo-Orthodox believer is left ultimately only with the word God - a word that has been stripped of its meaning and historic Judeo-Christian significance. 10 Biblical statements as moral absolutes also become extinct in this view of faith, for people are left only with token religious buzzwords that have no sure definition, and a god that is nothing more than a "philosophical other" or an impersonal "higher power." The inevitable next phase is that religious slogans from our biblical past become redefined by various spiritual and political interests and used as tools for religious and social manipulation. 11 It becomes much easier then for people with just any spiritual and political agenda to infiltrate even traditional and orthodox congregations and influence them away from a genuine biblical understanding of Christ and humanity into bizarre movements and even ideologies that are hostile to biblical concepts of truth.

That is where a frighteningly large segment of Christian religion has been for the last 50 years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Orr, J.Edwin. The Role of Prayer in Spiritual Awakening (video), Inspirational Media (1977)

2. Bartleman, Frank and intro by Synan, Vinson. Azusa Street: The Roots of Modern-day Pentecost, Logos International (1980)

3. Wallis, Arthur. In The Day Of Thy Power, pp. 75-77, Cityhill Press (1956)

4. Synan, Vinson. The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, p. 109, Eerdmans (1971)

5. Cornelius, R.M. and Morris, John D. Scopes: Creation on Trial, p.12, Master Books (1999)

6. Ibid. p. 13

7. Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, pp.190 & 195 & 197, Fleming H. Revell Co. Old Tappan, NJ. (1976)

8. Ibid. pp. 201-204

9. Ibid. p. 169

10. Ibid. pp. 176-181

11. Ibid. p. 178

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