Blog - Page 66 of 318 - John H Armstrong

Boyd Crowder: Justified or Apostate?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:51-05:00March 8th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, Religion, Television|

You can gain wisdom from a lot of sources. Now and then a script writer for a television show actually speaks truth more powerfully than many of the children of the light. (I have no idea about the faith of the script writer so do not assume I am making a specific statement about someone else here!) Let me explain what I mean.

I watch very little television these days. I watch some national news, which amounts now and then to the CBS Evening News. I watch a bit of the local Chicago news, preferring to watch my favorite anchor Alan Krashesky, a friend who is a solid Christian and a fair journalist. I also watch PBS news and enjoy a lot of the Frontline episodes. I get most of my news on the web.

When I do watch television I watch less and less drama. I have tried several of the popular new series in early 2013 and have already quit on them. The new drama series featuring Kevin Bacon – The Following – is just too […]

Voluntarist Protestantism and the Dangers of Secular Modernity

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:51-05:00March 7th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Culture, Current Affairs, Marriage & Family, Missional Church, Protestantism, Separation of Church & State, The Church, The Future|

Voluntarist/Biblicist Churches

During the same period that I referred to yesterday, and especially since the decade of 1960s, churches deeply centered in teaching the Bible have grown numerically. Only recently has this growth begun to significantly slow down, a fact that very few are willing to openly face at this juncture in history. Was the success of these more conservative churches a result of turning against the subjective tendencies of their more liberal brothers and sisters? This seems to me to be the $64,000 question among modern religious sociologists. The early evidence appeared to support such a conclusion but now that conservative churches are also beginning to decline the data, and thus this debate, needs to be revisited. I believe the answer is that this simplistic analysis, namely that liberal churches in the mainline are in decline because they turned away from strong biblical teaching, is only a half truth.

The compelling idea employed by conservative churches is that each person is directly responsible for their own religious commitment. This is what is meant by voluntarism. This idea has […]

Non-Voluntarist Protestantism and the Dangers of Secular Modernity

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:51-05:00March 6th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Culture, Current Affairs, Ideology, Missional Church, Postmodernity, Protestantism, Religion, The Church, The Future, Uncategorized|

There are two types of churches which constitute the visible expression of Christianity in the modern age. For the sake of simplicity let me call these two expressions of the church the non-voluntary and the voluntary models. If these seem initially confusing they should be clearer as soon as you read what follows.

Non-Voluntary Churches

The decline of non-voluntarist Western Christianity, of both the Catholic and Protestant variety, has been much greater than that of the voluntarist variety of church expression. This should not really be surprising if you consider the context of this statement. A good part of church decline in the West has been the decline in the “mainline” churches. “When a state church loses its central role in society it loses something of its soul” (An Introduction to Christianity, 347). This is exactly what has transpired over the last sixty years or so.

In these mainline churches God was humanized and anything remotely like severity was all but removed. Liberalism led many young people to turn away from divine transcendence toward “human values,” values that were more […]

The Real Threat to Personal Faith Commitment to Christ

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:51-05:00March 5th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Culture, Current Affairs, Discipleship, Education, Emergent Church, Marriage & Family, Missional Church, Protestantism, Separation of Church & State, The Church, The Future|

I would argue that in America the impact of personal and social secularization is different than in virtually all other Western nations. The reason for this is because religion was never formally established in America as a function in which the state had a compelling role. From every angle you can look at this question it now seems that state support for Christianity harms long term personal faith commitment. For this reason the “free market” of faith communities has led to a competitive context in which churches can, and do, appeal for people’s support and, in some ways at least, flourish accordingly. This shift to voluntarism means that churches must work to gain the personal commitment of their people. This has proven to be a very healthy thing, at least in one sense. But recent developments have begun to erode the impact of the church in this culture for what appear to be other compelling social reasons that are new to our history. Let me explain.

Within a democracy […]

Secularization: Its Impact Upon America and Americans

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:51-05:00March 4th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Culture, Protestantism, Religion, The Church, The Future|

Various theories of secularization have been advanced to explain what has happened to the cultures of the West. It seems fairly clear that social secularization has caused religion to lose its power and influence over and within Western society. This process has taken longer to have its impact upon American culture but the last several national elections reveal how profoundly true this has become the “new norm,” at least in terms of social and religious values. Individual secularization, which happens to varying degrees to all of us all the time, is another expression of this same culture-changing phenomenon. This individual secularization seems to have led to our general decline in personal allegiance and open commitment to formal expressions of religion.

The way to measure the impact of personal secularization is notoriously hard to define. I can start with the obvious–declining church attendance and shrinking membership rolls. We do not precisely know what the numbers were for societies prior to the nineteenth century so it is hard to compare the […]

My Birthday: Pondering Life and Mortality

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:51-05:00March 1st, 2013|Categories: Death, Personal, The Future|

As you age you clearly become more aware of the brevity of life, at least of your own life. Today I celebrate my sixty-fourth birthday. There was a time when a big deal was made out of my birthday but I celebrated my birthday yesterday with my wife and two adult children, a simple meal and quiet time to be together. Life, and birthdays, are more simple for me these days. Don’t get me wrong. I am incredibly grateful to be alive. I love life and I really love this blessing the Lord has granted to me of longer life. I just never had any idea that I would actually get to this point in life. (I doubt anyone does if you get my drift.)

Job says, “Are not the days of my life few? Let me alone, that I may find a little comfort” (Job 10:20). Well, the days of our life are few and if measured by centuries or millennia or, especially, by eternity they are very few regardless of how long we live.

Psalm 144 came to my mind as I thought about my life […]

Understanding our Exilic Missional Context: Evangelicalism and Liberalism in Twentieth Century America

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:51-05:00February 28th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Culture, Current Affairs, Emergent Church, History, Ideology, Missional Church, Politics, Protestantism, Reason, The Church, The Future, Women in the Church|

Most historians and religion scholars now agree that by the twentieth century liberal Protestantism had led to a mainstream Protestantism that was vague, theistic and excessively nationalistic. In a profound sense, concludes British Christian Studies scholar Linda Woodhead, “liberal Protestantism’s triumph can be said to lie to some extent in its disappearance; it dissolved into the blood stream of American culture” (An Introduction to Christianity, 261). I think this is one of the most important single sentences in all that I’ve written in my recent posts about the growing unimportance of Christian faith to most Americans, especially the youngest Americans.

In contrast to this shrinking of Protestant faith the evangelicalism of Moody and Sunday gave rise to a more combative counter-cultural movement that was built on opposition, opposition to liberalism. These more conservative and populist movements produced battles over science in the first half of the century and then battles over political control of the nation in the second half, but I get a little ahead of myself.

Linda Woodhead begins her chapter on twentieth-century Christianity, in her most […]

How Exile Came About: American Protestantism's Common Ground (3)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:52-05:00February 27th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Culture, Kingdom of God, Protestantism, Reason, Roman Catholicism, The Church, The Future, Unity of the Church|

Three main points underscore the unity that American Protestantism enjoyed into the early part of the twentieth century.

Protestants shared a voluntaristic approach that viewed religion as a matter of individual free choice thus it was able to tolerate the co-existence of different Protestant churches and the differences between these churches since they all willingly embraced the greatest American accomplishment in freedom–the separation of church and state. A symptom of this stance was that the church began withdrawing from the public square in favor of investing its effort into the private, domestic circle. This stance led large parts of the church to embrace particular concerns about the morals of the individual, the relationship between the sexes and the overall welfare of the nuclear family. In the words of scholar Linda Woodhead, “Increasingly, Protestantism became a religion of ‘the family’” (An Introduction to Christianity, 257).
Protestants shared a growing optimism about human choice and ability, which eventually led to the acute problem of “rugged Christian individualism,” a problem that we now equate with America in general. It was assumed, when this line of thinking began to be widely accepted, […]

How Exile Came About: Theological and Cultural Developments in the Nineteenth Century (2)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:52-05:00February 26th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Culture, Evangelism, Feminism & Women, Kingdom of God, Religion, The Church, Women in the Church|

Near the end of the nineteenth century the evangelical experience of Christianity in America changed things in the church even more radically than previous movements had done within historic Protestantism. While the paradigm of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress remained deeply embedded in the evangelical conversion system a new version would soon emerge in the Protestant psyche by the first decade or so of the twentieth century. Billy Sunday (1863–1935) brought the message of Christ to multitudes in both America and Britain. The demands of conversion were “much relaxed” (An Introduction to Christianity, 252) through his preaching. On the final day of Billy Sunday’s New York revival campaign he asked: “Do you want God’s blessing on you, your home, your church, your nation, New York? If you do, raise your hands . . . How many of you men and women will jump to your feet and come down and say, ‘Bill, here’s my hand for God, for home, for my native land, to live and conquer for Christ.” The structure of Bunyan’s conversion model was clearly retained […]

How Exile Came About: Theological and Cultural Developments in the Nineteenth Century (1)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:52-05:00February 25th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Culture, Current Affairs, Feminism & Women, Freedom, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, The Church|

My recent blogs have been devoted to developing a perspective I refer to as missional-ecumenism. I want to show where I believe we are in America today–particularly in terms of the church, culture and our mission. I am a passionate missional-ecumenist. This passion is deeply rooted in three principal texts, all found in the Fourth Gospel; John 13:34-35, 17:20-23 and 20:21. What we discover in the Fourth Gospel is that God is a trinity of loving persons who created humankind in his image. The Father sent the Son into the world to redeem the whole cosmos (cf. Colossians 1:15-20). He is now recreating us by the Spirit, forming a unified redeemed people into a community of faith, hope and love. In this theological paradigm the church is the mission of God (missio Dei), a mission that reveals God’s love as we live faithfully in community. This means the church is not an institution that does mission so much as it is a people who are mission! (This does not mean we ignore missions and missionaries, as some have argued. We must always keep our strong focus […]