Bryan Laughlin, Doug Ponder, Sola Ecclesia, 11/23
During the summer of 2023, a group of cardinals from every continent posed a series of dubia (a Latin word meaning “doubts” in the sense of questions born of concern or reservation) to the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church. The dubiaaddressed a range of pressing contemporary matters, from the possibility of women’s ordination to the blessing of same-sex unions. As one commentator put it, the cardinals ultimately wanted to know, “Is the Roman Catholic Church going to go the same direction as liberal Protestantism—adapting Scripture to suit contemporary culture, ordaining women, and accepting the legitimacy of same-sex unions?” The pope’s evasive reply provoked a follow-up from the cardinals, who reformulated the dubia to be easily answerable with a clear “yes” or “no.” As of the time of writing this article, there has been no further response.
Earlier that year, the Church of England voted to permit the blessing of same-sex “marriages” and civil partnerships.1 The move prompted a strong response from the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), who condemned the development as a schismatic choice “to break communion with those provinces who remain faithful to the historic biblical faith.” Furthermore, the bishops of GSFA denounced the Archbishop of Canterbury, no longer recognizing him as primus inter pares (“first among equals”), while calling for his global “admonishment in love.”
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, in September of 2023—a year that will live in infamy?—the de facto bishop of the evangelical megachurch, Andy Stanley, hosted Embracing the Journey’s Unconditional Conference. The event was advertised as being “for parents of LGBTQ+ children and for ministry leaders looking to discover ways to support parents and LGBTQ+ children in their churches.” The conference featured speakers who either are in same-sex relationships themselves or are supportive of others in the same. While Stanley did tip his hat to the biblical teaching on homosexuality—saying, “It was a sin then, and it is a sin now”—he simultaneously undermined that position by affirming Justin Lee and Brian Nietzel, “two married gay men” whom Stanley called faithful followers of Christ. Apparently, Stanley thinks faithful followers of Christ can persist in flagrantly unrepentant abominations before the Lord (Lev. 18:22; 20:13), contrary to the solemn warnings of Scripture in many places (e.g., Rom. 1:26–27, 32; 1 Cor. 6:9–10).
What are we to make of this rapid, cross-denominational apostasy?2 The fact of this phenomenon is a clear example of culture reporter Megan Basham’s recent warning: “You may have wanted to avoid this subject, but you cannot avoid it any longer. [LGBT ideology] is coming to your church, no matter how solid you think it is.”3 Those who cannot see this are woefully ignorant of the times. Yet the cause of this phenomenon is anything but recent. Indeed, the “journey” that leads to this dead end (let the reader understand) is so well worn that one can see it from space.
We’ve Been Here Before: Christianity and Liberalism
J. Gresham Machen wrote his classic book, Christianity and Liberalism, 4 exactly a century before Catholics, Anglicans, and Evangellyfish failed to uphold biblical sexuality.5 The book’s title is none too subtle, though Machen’s point is sometimes missed in these days of decreasing reading comprehension levels. (To spell it out is no trouble for us and is a safeguard for you.) In his own words, “The chief modern rival of Christianity is ‘liberalism.’ An examination of the teachings of liberalism in comparison with those of Christianity will show that at every point the two movements are in direct opposition.”6
Machen is not saying that liberal Christianity is a terrible perversion of the faith; he is saying that liberalism is another faith entirely. To give an analogy, liberal “Christianity” is more like a virus than a sick or wounded form of the body of Christ. For a body remains a body, even when it suffers from illness or (self-inflicted) injury. But a virus is an alien entity that merely uses the body for its own self-perpetuation. If a Christian church is a body, therefore, liberalism is a virus.
We can see this distinction clearly when Machen addresses “the division between the Church of Rome [in his day] and evangelical Protestantism.” Protestants and Catholics have substantial disagreements, viewing the other body of believers as significantly ill or impaired. Still, Machen writes, “Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.”7
Machen highlights many reasons why “liberalism is totally different from Christianity,”8 but the central reason is a matter of authority: “Christianity is founded upon the Bible. It bases upon the Bible both its thinking and its life. Liberalism on the other hand is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.”9 By “shifting emotions,” Machen means the subjective assessments of men, which are tossed to and fro by the zeitgeist (Eph. 4:14). In this way, for liberals, “It is not Jesus who is the real authority, but the modern principle by which the selection within Jesus’ recorded teaching has been made. Certain isolated ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas.”10
Machen concludes, “The real authority, for liberalism, can only be ‘the Christian consciousness’ or ‘Christian experience.’”11 This raises the question of how a Christian consensus could ever be established. Liberals are loath to appeal to church history, for that would bolster a decidedly non-modern verdict as well as trump their radical conception of the liberty of conscience. Thus, Machen writes, “The only authority, then, can be individual experience; truth can only be that which ‘helps’ the individual man. Such an authority is obviously no authority at all; for individual experience is endlessly diverse, and once truth is regarded only as that which works at any particular time, it ceases to be truth. The Christian man, on the other hand, finds in the Bible the very Word of God.”12
Christianity and Functional Liberalism are ultimately two different faiths.”—Bryan Laughlin and Doug Ponder
Whereas Machen wrote about Christianity and liberalism, we are writing something of an appendix on Christianity and functional liberalism.13 We call it “functional liberalism” (and not liberalism simpliciter) because, unlike the threat of Machen’s day, this strain of the virus does not share the same set of symptoms (even if it has a similar underlying cause). Machen’s liberals were modernists who openly denied the accuracy of the Scriptures, the reality of the supernatural, the necessity of the atonement, and the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. As E.J. Pace’s famous cartoon illustrated in 1922, liberal departure from the faith often happened in stages, with the truthfulness of the Bible being the first to go. A few such liberals are still around, but those who hold to the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3) are—thanks in large part to Machen and his heirs—not tempted to regard them as part of the body of Christ (1 John 2:19).
The problem we face today is of a slightly different sort. If liberalism entailed an overt denial of core Christian doctrines, the essence of functional liberalism is consent to doctrinal confessions on paper while subverting them in practice—whether by downplaying their significance, reinterpreting their meaning, or rejecting the logical implications. We are not the first to make this observation. Somewhere in the annals of D.A. Carson’s prodigious output,14 he gave a lecture in which he issued a strong warning along these lines: ‘The future of liberalism in the American church will not look like it did a century ago. Conservative seminaries and churches will not see brazen denials of the core doctrines that were the battleground of yesteryear. Instead, they will see people who claim to affirm the doctrines while undermining them through subtle but substantial reinterpretation.’15
At least the old liberals had the courage to say, “The Bible is false, the Trinity is bunk, Jesus isn’t divine, the cross wasn’t substitutionary, and the resurrection didn’t happen.” The new liberals—that is, the functional liberals—are worse in this critical respect: they claim to agree with the faith once for all delivered to the saints while simultaneously reinterpreting its doctrines into meaningless statements or else ignoring the same as they press ahead with whatever they want to do.
A Case in (North) Point
Take the statement of faith for Stanley’s Northpoint Community Church as an example of what we have been describing. All the usual suspects are there, including a clear statement that the Bible is “inspired” and “without error.” But, as Sam Allberry points out in his write-up on Stanley and the Unconditional Conference:
Homosexuality is listed [in 1 Cor. 6:9–11] as one of the behaviors characteristic of a life that will not inherit the kingdom of God. And while it is entirely right to point out that homosexuality is not the only such form of sin, it is still—clearly and unavoidably—one of them. It is a behavior requiring repentance. Eternity is at stake. To say or even imply that it is possible to persist in this sin is nothing short of sending people to hell—and a profound failure of pastoral responsibility. One would be unable to say with Paul, “I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:26–27, ESV). But there is a dimension to this that goes beyond pastoral failure. In his letter to the church in Thyatira, Jesus rebukes not only the person whose teaching leads his people into sexual sin; he rebukes the church that tolerates such teaching. “I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet,” he says. “By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality” (Rev. 2:20).16
In other words, how could someone meaningfully say they believe the Scriptures to be “true” and “without error” while simultaneously reinterpreting or outright ignoring what the Scriptures clearly teach in so many places (as the church has universally affirmed for nearly 2,000 years)?
This is precisely what Stanley has done. At the Unconditional Conference, he said: “[Gay Christians] choose a same sex marriage, not because they’re convinced it’s biblical. They read the same Bible we do. They chose to marry for the same reason many of us do: love, companionship and family. And in the end, as was the case for all of us—and this is the important thing I want you to hear me say—it’s their decision.”17
In the same talk, Stanley acknowledges the differences between “his version” of Christianity and that of someone like Al Mohler (president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary). Responding to an article that Mohler wrote about him, Stanley said, “He is actually accusing me of departing from his version of biblical Christianity. So I want to go on record and say, I have never subscribed to his version of biblical Christianity to begin with, so I’m not leaving anything.”
Stanley continues, “This is why Justin and Brian were invited, the two married gay men at the center of all the controversy. And I’m sure that you’ve read all about that. And here’s the thing about Brian and Justin: their stories and their journeys of growing up in church and maintaining their faith in Christ and their commitment to follow Christ all through their high school and college and singles and all up to the time that they were married, their story is so powerful for parents of gay especially kids, that it’s a story gay parents and gay kids need to hear.”18
The Problem Beneath the Problem
If Sam Allberry has written about the contradictory nature of Stanley’s comments, and Denny Burk has written about the subversive nature of the same, we wish to point out the epistemological rot at the bottom of this functional liberalism. Specifically, the particular problem in Western churches—especially in much of American Evangelicalism—is a problem related to the process of knowing and confirming the truth.
Traditional Christians—who admit that we know only in part (1 Cor. 13:9)—insist that truth is real and knowable (cf. John 8:32; 1 Tim. 2:4; 4:3; Titus 1:1; 2 Pet. 1:12; 1 John 2:4, 21). Moreover, we hold that the Scriptures are the ultimate standard for knowing what is true since they are inspired by the Spirit (2 Tim. 3:16), who superintended the human authors to keep them from error (2 Pet. 1:21; cf. Ps. 119:160; John 17:17). In short, the Scriptures are the foundation for knowledge and for knowing. They are the yardstick by which we measure all things, even our own thoughts and experiences (1 Thess. 5:21; cf. Acts 17:11).
What does it say about belief and practice when practice doesn’t follow from belief? Where’s the fidelity? It looks like unfaithfulness to me.
It appears that this Pope, unlike his predecessors, has a higher regard for the World than he does for his Maker. The World’s ways are not God’s ways, as every Christian should know.