Standing Firm

We are committed to the proposition that there is a God and that He has spoken, and the world is going to sneer at us over a lot of these things, but we have resources to challenge those sneers and say, you may sneer all you want, but how are you going to answer these claims and these arguments in defense of our position?

Well, I think all of us who recognize our current cultural climate want to have that kind of boldness. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Saturday. I'm Lee Webb, and today, doctors W. Robert Godfrey and Stephen Nichols consider what it looks like to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, even when we're persecuted.

Let's join our moderator for this session, our president and CEO, Chris Larson. I came in to understand a Reformed theology through Dr. Sproul's teaching, and it was really his illuminating of church history and the way that he would uniquely make some theological points, exegetical points, but he would do it through the illustration of church history. And of course, he just had this illustrative style of just bringing history to life, and I wasn't a very good student. I was publicly educated in these United States, and I know you can all feel very sorry for me about that, but there was something captivating about the way that he would teach, and I would come to find out later that all he was really trying to do through his own teaching was just to get us to go back to the past and to continue to carry forward the truth that has already been delivered to us, from Christ to the apostles, to the early church, and how God has continued to build His church through the ages, and I'm thankful for this session to be able to talk with two church historians, because it's a subject that I think a lot of people are drawn to Reformed theology through this study of church history, and in this moment where everybody in the church feels a little bit dislocated and thinking about how to transmit the truth to the next generation, perhaps you could just begin by helping us to answer a simple question of, what is going on right now in the world? And I ask that tongue in cheek, but in all sincerity, have we been here before? Has the church faced these times like we're in before? What can we learn from the past?

So, it's a wide-ranging question, but I think you see where I'm trying to go with that. What is going on, Dr. Godfrey? I have spent almost all of my life as a historian following out an observation of a distinguished historian by the name of Lawrence Stone, a number of decades ago now, who observed that most historians are either lumpers or choppers. Most historians either want to look at continuities in history, how one thing leads naturally to another, or they're choppers. They want to distinguish things and see how one thing is different from another.

And my whole life I've been a lumper. I believe in trying to see continuities and how one thing leads to another and how there aren't such dramatic breaks as we often think there are. And now, in my extreme old age, I'm becoming a chopper because I think we today live in a moment where Western civilization's history has changed from what it's been for 1,500 years, and we live in a cowardly new world. I just thought of that. I thought that was clever. Have you all read of Brave New World?

This is a cowardly new world. And what I mean by that is for 1,500 years in the West, Christianity has had a legal and cultural position of dominance and leadership. And whether people were actually Christians or not, they almost all believed in God, they almost all believed there was an afterlife, they almost all believed there were moral absolutes, and in general they mostly believed the moral absolutes of the Bible were the real moral absolutes.

Now, it isn't that they all lived that way, but there was a kind of common consensus that the family was important, that divorce was bad, that we lived a moral life that we understood together. And for about 200 to 300 years in the West, that consensus has been under attack. And a lot of the 18th century in the French Revolution, a lot of the rise of Marxism and Darwinism and Freudianism have all been parts of the attack on that Christian consensus. And when movies started to be made in Hollywood in the People's Republic of California, churches attacked the movies because they were undermining morality.

And I used to scoff at that notion, and I've changed my mind. The churches were right. There was a anywhere from subtle to unsubtle attack on Christian values and Christian standards. And I think while that attack gained momentum, it didn't succeed until the Oberfeld decision on gay marriage from the United States Supreme Court in 2015. And I say it's not that decision that marked the end of Christendom, I say it's the reaction to the decision. How did America react to that decision?

By and large with a shrug. Okay, who cares? Because the new religion of America is individualism. We all get to do what we want to do. And as long as it doesn't really affect me, it doesn't matter. And now in the last five to ten years, what do we see? We see a cultural consensus that if you criticize homosexuality, if you criticize marital infidelity, if you criticize premarital sex, if you criticize anything transgendered, you are a bigot.

You are guilty of hate speech. And, you know, that's true on Fox News as much as it is anywhere else. There is a new cultural consensus, and that's why we all feel discombobulated.

That's a Latin term. Why we all feel discombobulated. We feel confused. We feel off balance, and that leads us to feel angry. Who took away the world we all grew up with?

And the answer is a longstanding combination of universities and arts and media and entertainment. And our society has been remade, and we have to get used to being a minority, which brings us right back to the first or second century of Christian experience. And what we have to insist is we are a respectful minority, we are a cooperative minority in so far as we can be, but we are an uncompromising minority in saying, we have a right to speak the truth that our God has revealed to us, and you do not have a right to shut us up. And I am too old to run the race, but I can sit firm, and that's what I'm planning to do.

Would you like me to go on? Can you recombobulate us, Dr. Nichols? I could not agree with you more, Dr. Godfrey. I think there is something significant.

This is not just one generation looking at the next generation and scratching their head at their music choice. There is something substantively different in our moment, and I think it is the rapidity of it. It's been in the works for a while, but we had a lot of borrowed capital of our Judeo-Christian worldview, whether that was sincere, visible sainthood or not. It was a Christian worldview. There was a lot of borrowed capital for that to cover its long, slow death. Now that borrowed capital is being used up and we're seeing it.

I couldn't agree with you more on that, and I think that we all sense the chicken little, the sky is falling. What I think we, though, do need is to remember that we have maybe not been here before with this aggressive secularism in the 21st century, but we have been in similar situations before, and that the time I go back to is the collapse of Rome. And so we go back to the early couple centuries, and we see a hostile culture, and we see a hostile environment, and everything about Christianity is out of step with the Roman world. And so we see the persecution. Then we have Constantine, and we're not going to get into whether that was a genuine conversion or not, but there was something different post-Constantine, and instead of these bishops being thrown in jail and beaten, they're now meeting at Constantine's summer palace in Nicaea and writing the Nicene Creed. The fourth century was a different moment. But when we get into the fifth century and the collapse of Rome, I find this, I come back to this, the illustration of, we've got Jerome on the one hand, who is a scholar behind the Vulgate.

At this time he's in Bethlehem. He hears of the collapse of Rome. It reaches his ears. He literally throws his hands up in utter despair.

What can be done? He cannot conceive of Christianity without the culture of the Roman Empire. He can't conceive of God advancing the church without the assistance of the Roman Empire. And he gives up hope. He literally goes into a literal cave.

It's not a metaphorical, I'm going to go into my cave. He goes into a cave in Bethlehem to die when Rome collapses. And then we have our good friend, Augustine, and he goes and writes a book. And the first page of that book, it's a very long book.

It's almost as long as your Russian novels that you like. All the empires that on this world do totter. And that would include Rome. That would include Babylon.

That would include Medo-Persia, Greece. He starts off with that perspective. And he says, here's the city of God, here's the city of man, and we know that God is sovereign.

We know that God has His destiny for the city of God, and that is our hope as Christians. And we don't need to go into a cave to die. We can stand firm or sit firm, whichever the case may be. So, I think we have these cataclysmic cultural shifts in our background that we can turn to and see, yes, things have changed. We can't be naïve. We have to recognize it. We have to acknowledge it.

But we don't have to throw up our hands and say, the sky is falling. And we also, I think, will be greatly served by remembering that we have terrific resources in the history of the Christian church and its study, so that we may not have in much of church history faced the militant atheism that we face today, but there is atheism to be faced in the history of the church and wonderful resources arguing for how we can recognize there truly is a God and defend the existence of God. So, we have resources that we have to revive precisely when we can't take things for granted. We have to revive the arguments for these things. We are committed to the proposition that there is a God and that He has spoken. And the world is going to sneer at us over a lot of these things, but we have resources to challenge those sneers and say, you may sneer all you want, but how are you going to answer these claims and these arguments in defense of our position?

And, you know, I think R.C. used to talk about how people suppress the truth, but the truth is not ultimately suppressible. And that's our confidence. That's our confidence. So, drawing from some of those examples, what are some of the ways that we can be salt and light in this generation, confronting some of the particular challenges, and I think even just what you face, Dr. Nichols, at the college level, and you're seeing this firsthand, you know, with students and families of this generation. Look at Gen Z coming up and, you know, it's a new world that they've grown up in. And so, what are some of those ways that we can encourage the next generation to be salt and light? And you think about the tremendous pressure that they are under. Just a barrage of idolatry is coming at them on a daily basis.

How do you pick and choose sometimes which battle to fight? Yeah, that's a great question. I think a couple of things we can say here, and I want to tie together something you ended with and pull it in with what you're talking about, Chris. I think the main thing we need to tell people, and I think this is true especially for youth, first of all, let's acknowledge the challenges they are facing.

They are so unlike the challenges we faced as youth. So, let's be very sympathetic to the voices that are coming at them. It's a barrage of an anti-Christian, almost anti-human even, worldview. So, let's have some sympathy for them.

And what I want to see at the college, what I think we want to do through Always Ready, what I hope we can all see is we have answers to these questions. So, here's the thing. We don't have a world that the secularist lives in and a world that the Christian lives in. The secularist lives in the Christian world.

And what I mean by that is the secularist lives in the world that God made. And they can attempt to suppress the truth, but it's a vain attempt. And what will happen is the truth will pop up. Now I know this isn't a very good image, but you know the image of the beach… you know when you have the beach ball in the pool and you try to sit on it, you know, to keep it under water, and then your weight shifts and the beach ball pops up?

That's how I liken this. It's like you're trying to sit on the truth, but something will happen, right? A cancer diagnosis will come. A job loss will come. We can go to a kid's life.

A breakup will come, and their world shatters, and now all of a sudden that beach ball has popped up, right? And their perfectly ordered world without God is now starting to tear apart at the seams, and they're starting to see that this idea of a self-identity and therefore self-fulfillment isn't all it's cracked up to be. I think we as Christians need to be there at that precise moment. And we need to say, that's God. That's God popping up.

That's apologetics. It's reminding people who God is. It's telling them when they see these traces of God in the universe and see this truth revealing itself in God's world because it is the world that He made. We need to be there at that moment and say, that's God. I think the other thing we can do is that other part of apologetics, which is taking them to the gospel. And I've been reading through the Minor Prophets a lot recently and project I'm involved in, and it just strikes me, judgment and mercy, judgment and mercy. And, of course, the focus of this comes to a head in the book of Jonah. We can talk about wickedness.

Let's go to the city of Nineveh. And this is judgment, but this is the surprising thing. What God said about Nineveh was so repulsive to Jonah that it caused Jonah to be disobedient, that God would be merciful to one who would repent, even wicked Nineveh.

Let's remind kids of that too. Our God is a God of judgment. Our God is a God who is full of mercy. And I think those are some of the things that we can do, some of the things we as Christians can even think about.

It's helpful. Dr. Godfrey, last question for you. Just at the local church level, what are some of those healthy discipleship and church rhythms that we need to recover and not forget to be able to perpetuate strong and faithful Christian disciples in the next generation? Well, I think we need strong patterns to teach our children, in particular, in the local church.

My own conviction, I'm sorry if I offend you, but I get to leave soon. Our children ought to be in church with us. They shouldn't be in a children's church. Our children should not be able to remember a time when they weren't Sabbath by Sabbath in the church worshiping with the church and part of the church. And knowing people in the church who are a different age from them, they need to know old Christians as well as young Christians. They need to be knowing Christians who can still run the race and Christians who can only sit and be firm. And we need to establish a pattern that the church is a priority.

It's not an option. It's not an occasional experience. It's our weekly experience. We organize our life around it. And I just think establishing those patterns of attendance, of worship, of study, we ought to have good catechetical instruction for our young people so that they learn not only the stories of the Bible, but they learn the pattern of truth. They learn the basic systematic theology that the Bible contains.

And all of these things need to be in a context of seriousness but also of joy. I remember talking to a wise old pastor who said, you know, the children that I observe that are most in trouble in our tradition are the ones who go home every Saturday afternoon to eat roast preacher. If you establish with your children a pattern of only talking about the problems with the church and criticizing the church, children are going to grow up and say, I guess the church isn't worth much. If we affirm the importance of the church in what we say and how we live, it's going to go a long way. We don't have guarantees in this life, but the more effective patterns we can lay down of discipling our children. And I'm a great believer in Christian schools.

That's a little half-hearted. You know, when large numbers of Roman Catholic immigrants came to this country in the 19th century from Ireland and from Italy and from Eastern Europe, one of the first things the Catholic churches did was to establish a Roman Catholic school system to send the kids to. And when they were asked why did they do that, they said because in America the public schools are Protestant schools. And in the 19th century that may well have been true. I don't want to disillusion you.

It's not true anymore. And if we say to our children, God is a God who's important one day a week, but you can spend most of your time learning about this world in a context where God has never mentioned we're going to cause trouble. And our church has a Christian school aid tuition fund so that the deacons seek to help every family who wants their kids in a Christian school to be able to do it. It's a communal responsibility. And the more secular and antagonistic that the public schools become. I mean, I'm all in favor of Christians being teachers in public schools and being what light they can be there. But when we are entrusted to raise our children in this increasingly hostile world where there are people apparently seriously saying grammar school children, you see how old I am, I call it grammar school, grammar school children should be talking about their sexual identity. This is a vicious, wicked place if that's what's going on. And we need to do everything we can to protect our children.

How can Christians live with integrity as we engage a world where God is hated, immorality celebrated, and the truth is suppressed? We've heard some helpful answers today here on Renewing Your Mind. This was a panel discussion from our 2022 Ligonier National Conference here in Orlando. It featured Dr. Double D. Robert Godfrey, Dr. Stephen Nichols, along with our president and CEO, Chris Larson. I think what we just heard underlines our need as Christians to know what we believe, why we believe it, how to live it, and how to share it. And we learn how to do that by discovering what the Bible says about all of life. With that in mind, let me commend Dr. R.C. Sproul's book Everyone's a Theologian, An Introduction to Systematic Theology. In it, R.C. surveys the basic truths of the Christian faith. If you've never contacted us before, we would be happy to send you a free copy.

You can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. If you are new to this ministry, let me also recommend that you explore the many podcasts we produce here at Ligonier. One of them is Ultimately with R.C. Sproul. You know, I have to admit that when I drive somewhere, my first impulse is to turn on the radio for the latest news, but that only increases my blood pressure. A much better use of my time is to listen to things of eternal significance, like this podcast called Ultimately. Each brief episode is filled with theological wisdom to help you set your mind on what matters most. Subscribe and listen when you look for Ultimately with R.C.

Sproul. Next Saturday, we'll return to the 2022 Ligon international conference. Host Nathan W. Bingham will interview Dr. Michael Reeves on the topic of a continuing Reformation. I hope you'll join us for that next week here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.