The first thing I would say is that everything I write is an echo of people I’ve read. The entire recent reformed resurgence is a critique of evangelicalism. Macarthur’s book “Ashamed of the Gospel” was a critique of evangelicalism. He’s spent hundreds of pages denouncing evangelical charismatics and is about to spent hundreds denouncing evangelical missionals and emergents.

R.C. Sproul. Timothy George. John Armstrong. Os Guinness. Francis freakin’ Schaeffer himself. And on and on and on. Michael Horton and the entire history of WHI.

If I am a critic, I am a dim bulb compared to the more articulate, more academically prepared critics that inspired me.

No one hits evangelicalism harder than Eugene Peterson. Is he killing his parents?

Your point about this blog makes it sound as if I am somehow odd. I am one small voice in a large group of critics. Read the Cambridge Declaration. Who are they seeking to correct.

If you have detected a note of “abandon ship,” please cite it. How does saying we have too many personality driven aspects of evangelicalism amount to me trying to kill my parents? Is that what Keith Green and A.W. Tozer and even Steve Camp are doing?

I appreciate your point, but it seems to be trying to make ME into the problem, something I am used to on this blog and something that’s easy to do because I am a problem. But trust me, I am hardly the only person making these points.

To extend your analogy, a family in therapy does not cease loving one another. A family in therapy is presumably seeking healing and restoration. Are you seeking healing and restoration of the family, or are you trying to start a new family and leaving behind the old?

>Family dysfunction is worked through by telling the truth. Sometimes the truth, coming through subjective experience, is less than flattering. If our rule is “be sure and don’t say anything too alarming,” then the whole therapy project is wasted. Of course, that’s how a lot of evangelicals feel: they are OK. Everything is OK. Show that critic the door.

I agree with telling the truth. It is often painful and many people don’t want to hear it. But telling the truth in therapy is a means to an end, not the end itself. What is your goal in telling your truth here on imonk? Is it just to vent the frustrations you feel toward the evangelical church, or do you have a higher goal in mind?

And I have no desire to show you the door. I would rather show you a comfy chair, give you a cup of coffee and chat awhile

(Sorry for taking this thread off topic. I appreciate this blog, and your hard work and wisdom here Michael. However, I do have sincere questions. If there is a better forum, please let me know).

“Nitpick.” Interesting word. Small criticisms are just as endemic of the need to leave as large ones, eh?

I’m picturing your comment in the context of family therapy. You would be the one saying to those of us pointing out family dysfunction that we are “nitpicky” and ought to just get another family. After all, aren’t we really just trying to “kill” our parents?

Family dysfunction is worked through by telling the truth. Sometimes the truth, coming through subjective experience, is less than flattering. If our rule is “be sure and don’t say anything too alarming,” then the whole therapy project is wasted. Of course, that’s how a lot of evangelicals feel: they are OK. Everything is OK. Show that critic the door.

“Nitpicking” is a code word for “we’d all be happier if the critic would just go away.” I don’t plan to kill my parents, or leave.

I appreciate your pov, but I disagree.

As an evangelical for the past 19 years, I must disagree. Maybe my church/community is unique, but I don’t see this obsession with “personality” as you claim. I certainly don’t see anything near the elevation of saints in the RCC.

I also seem to be missing out on the fascination with Martin Luther. He is definitely looked to as someone who was willing to “put it on the line” to share Biblical truth, but I don’t see anyone trying to paint Martin Luther as an evangelical, or using his teachings as foundational to evangelical theology.

I do see individuals arising and getting attention for awhile. I see fad teachings and quasi cult ministries. I see many shortcomings, but none of them unique to evangelicalism.

As a lurker here at imonk for the past few months, I find myself agreeing with some of your criticism of the evangelical movement. I appreciate and echo your desire to see politics and religion further separated. I would love to see an end to many “Word of Faith” ministries. But I can’t help but feel that in some way you are trying to kill your parents to attain some measure of freedom. If you want to leave your parents house, I would say go ahead and leave. It isn’t necessary to nitpick at the brothers and sisters who choose to stay.

Oh, Luther definitely got around to the “details” – Luther’s Works in English is a 55 volume set. Of importance to the ‘evanglical’ community to realize (speaking here as the Lutheran that I am): Luther was a reformer, not a revolutionary – and a politically saavy reformer, at that.

In my readings of Luther as I age, I am also beginning to realize that Luther was becoming in touch with a certain form of spirituality – the sacraments (of which Luther only discerned two) were not just symbols or reenactments, but a way to connect with the sacred. (Thus, Luther’s split with Zwingili had little to do with “Roman Catholic Tradition” rather than Luther’s view of the presence of God/Christ in the actions of the sacraments, and also includes how “God acts” in salvation and the sacraments.)

No prayer to Spurgeon, yet. I agree.

But how bad is it?

http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/bio/contempreform.html

I disagree. Big difference between admiration, however excessive, and praying to a saint and expecting intercession from them. Is there a Protestant analog to Mel respecting Catherine Emmerich’s writings so much he seems to regard them as cannonical?

>I’d like to suggest that when you observe evangelicals picking, promoting and icon-ing their favorite theological heroes, you may not be learning so much about those theologians as you are about evangelicals themselves.

Nothing wrong with picking and choosing. After all the reformers were fallible and everything they said should be tested by scripture, therefore a certain level of picking and choosing is inevitable.

>What we see is Luther used, not understood
I’d tend to agree more with John H. I think most people know of these aspects of his theology, but cut him slack if he didn’t happen to get around to all the details.

In my experience, the usual (non-Augsburg) evangelical explanation for Luther/Lutheranism is that Luther wasn’t able to fully escape from his inheritance of medieval Catholicism and that it took Calvin to finish the job. The implication tends to be that, if Luther had had longer to think things through, he would have come round to the Reformed way of thinking sooner or later.

As for the specific question of whether Luther’s teachings on the sacrament of the altar were a hangover from medieval Catholicism, there’s a great quote from Luther somewhere in which he defends his teachings on justification by faith (I think) by saying he has thought about these as deeply, and investigated them as closely, as he has the sacrament of the altar. In other words, Luther’s teachings on the Lord’s Supper, far from being not fully thought-through, were regarded by him as the touchstone for all his other teachings.

I’m sure you’ll have come across this before, Michael, but for anyone who hasn’t, David Yeago wrote a superb essay for First Things about ten years ago on The Catholic Luther, in which he argues that a “catholic” view of the sacraments, far from contradicting Luther’s teachings on justification by faith, was in fact at the very core of those teachings.

Personally, I’m convinced that many of the problems in evangelicalism (individualism, fissiparousness, triviality in worship) stem from detaching justification by faith from the context of the church’s ministry of word and sacrament, which is where Lutheran theology firmly places it.