Strange Fire – The Church’s quest for cultural relevance – Part I

A significant cause of the decline of the Western church is its fascination with and desire for cultural relevance. This persistent affliction of Western civilization is not of its own making but has been present since before the fall of man.

The business of Satan is to compromise the church. If he is successful, the message of the church will be adulterated and its continued existence imperiled. His favorite weapon is first to plant doubt. Doubt expressed and considered is then followed by the brazen lie. In Genesis 3, the serpent said to the woman, “…Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” Eve was not ignorant of God’s instruction and she gave the right response to the serpent, “…we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die’.” But the serpent challenged the truth spoken by Eve with the lie, “You will not die…” [Genesis 3:1-4 RSV] Although knowing the truth, Eve believed the lie and ate of that which was forbidden.

Thirty-five hundred years ago the story of Nadab and Abihu and their sudden and ignominious demise was recorded in Leviticus. This brief story has been a warning to God’s people down through the ages and continues to be applicable to the twenty-first century church. First, we must review a little of the back story preceding the disobedience of Aaron’s two sons, both highly regarded leaders of ancient Israel. Chapter 9 recounts Moses instruction to Aaron, his sons, and the elders of Israel to make a sin offering and burnt offering for the people. Having done so, “…the glory of the Lord appeared unto all the people. And there came a fire out from the Lord, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat: when all the people saw, they shouted and fell on their faces.” [Leviticus 23b, 24. KJV] God accepted the atonement for the sins of the people, and they demonstrated their joy. “And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord.” [Leviticus 10:1-2. KJV] The fire was strange [unholy] because it was not holy fire from God but common fire of man’s creation.

Matthew Henry wrote that the motivation for Nadab and Abihu’s disobedience arose from pride and presumption.[1] Like Eve, Nadab and Abihu were not ignorant of God’s instruction, and like Eve, their disobedience cost them their lives. When God’s commands are compromised by anyone in church leadership, the sins of pride, presumption, and disobedience must be properly addressed by the church or the entire church is endangered. [See: Leviticus 10: 4-7. RSV]

The greatest enemy of Christianity in its two thousand year history is humanism, and one of the reasons for its success is because humanism personifies Satan’s implantation of doubt followed by the big lie. One of the cornerstones of humanism is its rejection of absolute or objective truth. Without a belief in objective truth, all other human ideas of truth become debatable and therefore lend themselves to compromise. In humanism’s definition, truth is perceived as merely situational, of one’s own making, a product of the times and subject to change, a difference of opinion. And without the benchmark of objective truth as presented by God’s word, it is ever so much easier to embrace the lie even when one has known the source of unchangeable truth.

The modern humanistic surge began during the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, humanists’ corrupted use of scientific knowledge and advancement spread seeds of doubt as to the truth and authority of God and His Word. The nineteenth century’s icons of the humanistic faith included Charles Darwin and his Origin of Species in the biological sciences; Christopher Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895 and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. at the beginning of the twentieth century in the realm of law; John Dewey and the progressive education movement which began in the 1890s; and William James who divorced psychology and the study of human nature from the biblical worldview. In the early part of the twentieth century, many in leadership of the various spheres of American life were sufficiently conditioned to move from objective truth, to doubt, and then acceptance of the big lie: there is no God.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many mainline churches felt the effects of a loss of cultural authority as secular humanism advanced. In order to retain a modicum of cultural authority in the face of humanism’s onslaught, Protestant leaders began embracing secular human sciences to lend credibility and cultural relevance to the tenets of their religion. One of the great Christian leaders of the era who embraced the secular human sciences was Charles Clayton Morrison, publisher of the influential journal Christian Century.

Morrison was the son of a Disciples of Christ minister and attended a Disciples of Christ College in preparation for ministry. He was heavily influenced by H. O. Breeden, another Disciples pastor that supported evolution and biblical criticism. Morrison continued graduate studies at the University of Chicago where he studied psychology and philosophy as opposed to theology. John Dewey and others in the functionalist [practical, utilitarian] school of psychology were his teachers. Any remnants of Morrison’s revivalist faith were completely abandoned. He wrote of this transformation.[2]

When I left [the University], I was thoroughly immunized against every form of rationalism, apriorism, or speculation of any kind based on dogmatic or authoritarian ideas. Ideas, I saw, arise in experience, they are conditioned by experience, they refer to experience…In a word, ideas are functional for experience.[3]

Founded in 1884, the Christian Oracle was the liberal voice of Disciples of Christ ministers and laity. The journal’s name was changed to the Christian Century in January 1900, but the journal continued to struggle with low readership amidst intermittent bouts of bankruptcy. Morrison acquired the journal at a sheriff’s sale following another bankruptcy in 1908. Under Morrison’s editorship, the Christian Century’s commitment to liberal theology was strengthened. Darwin was “hailed as the most important figure of the nineteenth century…and that evolution does not contradict but affirms the Christian account of creation.” Liberal Protestantism was profoundly affected by the promotion of psychology through Sunday school teachers training courses, promotion of books on psychology, pastoral care and counseling, seminary training, and Sunday school classes.[4]

By 1938, Morrison had been the editor of the Christian Century for thirty years. In that time the journal had attained great cultural prominence but at the loss of much of its Christian character. Although indistinguishable from many of its secular peers, the journal was recognized as the preeminent voice of mainstream American Protestantism. One year later, Morrison shockingly wrote “How My Mind Has Changed” in which he described the secularizing consequences of the publication on American Protestantism in which he and his staff “…introduced and popularized psychology with a language of instinct and personality, which displaced the Christian theological language of morality and grace.”[5]

I had baptized the whole Christian tradition in the waters of psychological empiricism, and was vaguely awakening to the fact that, after this procedure, what I had left was hardly more than a moralistic ghost of the distinctive Christian reality. It was as if the baptismal waters of the empirical stream had been mixed with some acid which ate away the historical significance, the objectivity and the particularity of the Christian revelation, and left me in complete subjectivity to work out my own salvation in terms of social service and an “integrated personality.”[6]

Morrison’s quest to make the church culturally relevant was in reality comparable to Nadab and Abihu’s strange fire—an introduction of man’s ideas and methods devoid of biblical authority and truth in order to make the church acceptable to a fallen culture. From such pride and presumption, great damage has been inflicted upon the church and its witness as to the unchangeable truth of God’s Word. Unfortunately, the American church’s quest for cultural relevancy is alive and vigorous in the twentieth-first century. In Part II, we shall examine Christianity’s modern expressions of its efforts at cultural relevancy which have completely captured the liberal church in America and is now invading many evangelical churches.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary, Dr. Wilbur M. Smith, Ed., (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1961), pp. 122-123.
[2] Keith Meador, “My Own Salvation,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, Ed., (Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 2003), pp. 273, 277.
[3] Ibid., p. 277.
[4] Ibid., pp. 273-274, 278-292
[5] Ibid., p. 302.
[6] Ibid., p. 269.