In June, the Southern Baptist Convention got around to stating its opposition to same-sex marriage, a full decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on that issue. Later that month, The Presbyterian Church in America agreed “to a formal petition to government officials against facilitating transgender procedures for minors.” Politicians paid no attention to their resolutions. The reason lies in the kind of Gospel that the institutional church has, in the main, been preaching for a long time.
To make a long story short, over the last 200 years or so, far too many ministers reduced the gospel from God reconciling the cosmos to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:19, John 3:16) - by a Second Man and Last Adam in the person of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47; Romans 5:14) - to an individualistic, personal (subjective) salvation.
As a result, the unfolding of the image of God as expressed more fully in a human organism joined to a living Head, not a mere aggregation of individuals on planet earth, was lost. That part of the gospel was placed right where the philosophers of the 18th century wanted it—in an upper story, noumenal world of values. They said we had no true and objective knowledge regarding the essential nature of things in the real world beyond the physics of them, the field of knowledge that pertained to realm of metaphysics. That’s why the Gospel had to “move upstairs.”
In sum, Christianity’s gospel succumbed to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. The real world was “out there” somewhere and the phenomenal world of every-day life was divorced from it. A non-incarnational “spiritual” life of the soul in a non-physical Heaven became the thrust of the gospel. Lost was the gospel precept that the soul was made for a body and will be rejoined to a glorious one at the final judgment.
With that non-gospel as the new gospel, Christianity as a brand was ripe for succumbing to 18th century rationalism. To meet the demands of rationalism, Christian leaders rushed in to prove Christianity was also reasonable. In doing so, they unwittingly allowed supernatural and divine truths to be subjected to the eminence of practical reason.
Moreover, scientists increasingly told us that the cosmos was run and ordered by invisible but discoverable laws of nature. Those laws effectively made the life-giving and ordering presence of the Holy Spirit largely unnecessary. Those laws also made the revelation of an essential nature beyond the physics of the phenomenal world - metaphysical realities - unnecessary to properly ordering a human society and its laws. The new Gospel was ready made for such a world.
It was all so seductive. It was easy to believe the original lie. In the work-a-day world of this existence, we could “position [ourselves] outside and above the law [of God] and, like God, determine and judge for [ourselves] what good and evil was.” Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 3, 33 (John Bolt editor).
So, what does the foregoing have to do with our politicians (judges and everyone else) shrugging at the two denominational resolutions about the marital relationship?
Over the last 200 years or so Christian leadership allowed the gospel to be confined to a world of non-objective unknowable “knowledge.” These leaders relegated the church to a spiritual realm.
Why, then, would Christians be surprised that political leaders would say something like the following about the resolutions:
“So what? You agreed to retreat to a spiritual world outside of the knowable real world of phenomenon. You gave up metaphysical realities a long time ago. So, don’t start telling us now that the marital relationship has a real, objective, knowable essential nature that civil law must conform to.”
We have no Gospel for “down here” that can judge a society or its law in the civil realm.
In fact, the SBC’s resolution didn’t even approach the redefinition of marriage as a grave perversion of fundamental nature of law itself as Biblically understood. Instead, the Resolution said it was “regrettable that homosexual rights activists and those who are promoting the recognition of ‘same-sex marriage’ have misappropriated the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement.”
The Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America must do more than spit from their restricted corner of the cosmos into a roaring gale-force societal wind opposed to the knowledge of God. Their words are returning to them void.
Instead, their leaders must unapologetically and unashamedly return to the ever-living root of the old Gospel to apply it in new ways. That root is the good news that the Triune God through the Lord Jesus Christ is renewing a fully integrated harmonious cosmos and bringing it to a glorious consummation in which God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).
The gospel is a declaration that all the wisdom of the wise in this world is, apart from Him, vanity. And, in time, that Word proclaimed, unlike printed words on pieces of paper, will not return void.
