THE TRUTH WE SEE

My good friend Chris McGregor has a link on his blog to an article from Tom Brokaw about contemporary evangelicalism (taken, if I’m not mistaken from a recent NBC special). In the article Brokaw interviews Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of a megachurch in suburban Colorado Springs. In the interview there is an interesting exchange between the two men:

Brokaw: Most of the churches that I know of, and certainly the ones I attended, at some point, you out loud acknowledge that you were a sinner or that you came face-to-face to guilt that you may feel.
Haggard: Right.
Brokaw: I didn’t see any of that here.
Haggard: Well, we do talk about sin. But, see, the issue is Jesus took care of our sin. And Jesus removes guilt from our life. So the emphasis in our church isn’t how to get your sins removed because that’s pretty easy to do. Jesus did that on the cross. The emphasis in our church is how to fulfill the destiny that God’s called you to.
Brokaw: You’re making it easier for them.
Haggard: Making it easier for them just like Jesus did, just like Moses did.

I know very little about Ted Haggard and am hesitant to be too critical of an isolated comment, but he said something here that captures much of my concern with contemporary, consumer-driven evangelicalism. It’s hard for me to read the New Testament or the history of the Church and see how Jesus made things “easy” for his would-be followers. Don’t get me wrong. I like “easy.” I’ve lived much of my life with “easy.” And obviously “easy” sells well in the suburbs. But deep down inside I’m afraid “easy.”

I was doing some research for my dissertation this morning, reading one of my favorite theologians, P. T. Forsyth. I came across a great passage written by this British theologian in 1912 about the Gnostics of the early centuries of the church, a passage referring to an ancient heresy that I fear has an all too familiar ring to it:

“They impressed people by a magnetism, a facility, and a confidence which the apostles, much humbled and scarcely saved, did not command. They offered a liberty very different from that wherewith Christ made apostles free. To their ardours, at their height, everything was lawful; and therefore sin was mostly a fiction. It could certainly be made too much of. They lowered and practically erased the fence between the Church and the age, and adjusted the Cross with so much ingenuity to the culture and comfort of the hour that it also was erased from their gospel.... And there were many who fell in with the ways of pagan society, only bringing to them a certain religious aspiration and refinement which even paganism could not command. Throughout it all the death of Christ was pushed into the corner, like an embarrassing episode of which the less said the better.... It tended to banish repentance from its experience, as spiritual culture always does when it claims to outgrow evangelical faith. The fear of God dropped to a crude and inferior stage of religion. The idea of discipline vanished from church life; and an extravagant idea of personal liberty, imported from the natural democracy, took the first place, vacated by the obedience of faith” (Faith, Freedom, and the Future, 23-24).

Jesus did say “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” but he also said “anyone who would come after me must take up his cross and follow me.” The former is much more easily marketable than the latter, but if you really want Jesus, you don’t get one without the other.