Glenn Beck is getting mixed theological reviews from evangelicals. Some of them have expressed pleasant surprise at how “Christian” he has been sounding. Richard Land went so far as to say, according to the Washington Post, that Beck in his recent speech at the Washington rally “sounded like Billy Graham.” But one of Land’s fellow Southern Baptist theologians, Russell Moore, warns us not to be deceived by Beck’s rhetoric. As a Mormon, says Moore,  Beck represents a religious perspective that  is “contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ”;  Mormons “offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures.”

I’m not going to get into Glenn Beck’s specific “culture wars” views, but I am interested in what all of this means for the present state of evangelical-Mormon relations. Glenn Beck is certainly benefiting from the ways in which many evangelicals have come to see Mormonism as an ally in some significant public disputes. On issues of abortion, same-sex marriages, and the like, the two groups have much in common—and in an environment where those holding to more traditional values on sexuality issues are increasingly feeling under attack, it is understandable that there would be some reaching out  from both sides.

Nor should we be surprised that a Mormon can sound like Billy Graham in discussing spiritual matters. Mormonism sprang forth from the soil of 19th century revivalism, keeping many of the basic revivalist overtones. Furthermore, in recent years the LDS church has been giving more emphasis to themes that some of its own leaders are calling “redemptive Mormonism.” Recently in a class at Fuller, I showed a YouTube clip from an address by Elder Jeffrey Holland (he is one of “the Twelve” in Salt Lake City) on Christ’s suffering as a substitute for sinful humanity on the Cross of Calvary. Several of my evangelical students remarked that if I had not told them Elder Holland was a Mormon they would have taken him to be a classic evangelical.

This is not to let Mormonism off the theological hook. There is much to worry about from a classical orthodox perspective regarding many Mormon teachings. But there are also some encouraging signs—not the least being a willingness on the part of Mormon scholars to engage in serious dialogue with evangelicals about crucial theological topics. As one of them has put it in our dialogues, Mormonism has not had serious theological contact with historic Christianity for about a century and a half—“We’re not even sure we are using the right terminology in talking to our evangelical counterparts,” he said. “We need a safe place to test out how best to say what we really believe in proper theological terms.”

This is an important time for the dialogue to continue, even to expand.  An uncritical acceptance of Mormonism on the basis of “sounding like Billy Graham” is not a good thing. But neither is a refusal to engage in serious give-and-take theological discussion. We need to be sure about where we actually disagree.

I am no Glenn Beck enthusiast. I certainly am not ready to give him a free pass theologically—or politically or spiritually! But the confusions about his relation to evangelicalism may be a good opportunity to take the next step in serious theological dialogue about matters of eternal importance.

Read a recent posting of mine on this topic here, on Duke Divinity School’s Faith & Leadership blog.

Lewis Smedes and I were close friends for many decades—the friendship long predated my joining him on the Fuller faculty in 1985. He was a marvelous writer, and his books were read widely beyond the academy. My favorite is the one he had sent off to the publisher just before he died in 2002, My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir (Eerdmans, 2003).

At one point in that book he tells about transferring as an undergraduate from the Moody Bible Institute to Calvin College. Smedes had not been very happy in the fundamentalist environs at Moody, and he went to Calvin in the hopes of finding a more solid grounding for his faith. He was not disappointed. In fact, as he tells the story, he was surprised by the fact that he discovered exciting new dimensions to his faith commitment during the first class session of the basic English Composition course required of all Calvin students. The professor in that course, Jacob Vandenbosch, says Smedes, “introduced me that day to a God the likes of whom I had never even heard about.” This was a God, as Smedes tells the story, who:

liked elegant sentences and was offended by dangling modifiers. Once you believe this, where can you stop? If the Maker of the Universe admired words well put together, think of how he must love sound thought well put together; and if he loved sound thinking, how he must love a Bach concerto; and if he loved a Bach concerto, think of how he prized any human effort to bring a foretaste, be it ever so small, of his Kingdom of justice and peace and happiness to the victimized people of the world. In short, I met the Maker of the Universe, who loved the world he made and was dedicated to its redemption. I found the joy of the Lord, not at a prayer meeting, but in English Composition 101.

In a course I teach on Christianity and culture, I read that paragraph to the students in order to stimulate discussion. The stimulant always works. For the most part they basically agree with Smedes, certainly regarding God’s concern for justice, peace, and the well-being of the creation.  But some of them demur on the question of God’s grammatical preferences. Isn’t this an elitist conception of language? Does God really favor the speech patterns of students of literature at Oxford over the ways in which immigrant kids in Southern California talk to each other?

Good questions. I do think that God loves elegant sentences, but I also think he appreciates a dangling modifier when it shows up, say, in a well-constructed hip-hop performance in which the artist is articulating the genuine rage of someone who has been victimized by racial or economic oppression.

Recently I got some good help from Marilyn Chandler McEntyre on this subject. She is a literature professor at Westmont College who has recently published a wonderfully eloquent book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Eerdmans, 2009). She, like Smedes, obviously thinks that God likes “words well put together.” But she believes that in putting together words—and she says some important things about the need to spend time contemplating words, and not merely using them—we need to pay attention to “the inherent fluidity, liveliness, and invention of spoken language.” In doing so, we can appreciate different contexts in which people put words together well. “Street speech,” she says, is a case in point: “It makes its own contribution to revitalizing the music of language and refocusing our hearing.”

Nicely put. My students will like that. And I think Smedes would agree. More importantly, I believe God approves.

Anne Rice has been much in the news because of her announcement that she is leaving Christianity. No more church for her, she says.  Not that she is abandoning Christ—just the institutional church. “I refuse to be anti-gay,” she says. “I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life.”I found Anne Rice’s 2005 spiritual autobiography, Called Out of the Darkness, where she chronicled her return to Catholicism, very moving. It was clear that she had come to a genuine faith in Christ. When I read her comments about homosexuality—very personal comments, expressing her devotion to her gay son—in that book, however, I said “Uh oh!” to myself. Not because I was ready to question her faith commitment on that score, but because I worried that that sort of strong advocacy she was expressing would alienate her from Evangelicals and conservative Catholics—the folks most likely otherwise to celebrate her marvelous testimony of  profound Christian commitment. It is clear now that the alienation has gotten to her. Some folks obviously wanted to use her to support their agenda, and she has refused to play along.

I am saddened by her decision. At the same time, I am encouraged by her clear testimony of a continuing commitment to Jesus Christ.

The fact is that she is only a much-publicized version of something that has been happening a lot in recent years. The growing movement of Christians who love Christ but can’t find spiritual nurture in “church” is a phenomenon that we—those of us who love “organized” Christianity, warts and all—have to reckon with. Maybe her manifesto is in fact God’s call to start doing the reckoning.

It is easy to decry her decision—as some have done—as yet another manifestation of a “Lone Ranger” approach to the spiritual life. But that is too easy. (And not fair to Tonto either!) The fact is that many representatives of the church who are most critical of a yes-to-Christ but no-to-the-organized-church approach don’t seem to have the same hostile attitude toward, say, a Thomas Merton, who ended up spending much time as a hermit, because he found that more spiritually enriching than active involvement in a community of monks who spent most of their time maintaining lives of silence. Or toward the men and women of the past who lived alone in desert caves, writing prayers and meditations.

Some people forsake organized Christianity for superficial reasons—even stupid ones. But there are others who separate themselves from Christian community for what I suspect are profound motives. I say I “suspect” here because it all remains a bit of a mystery for me. And then there are those who may not be right up there with the Desert Fathers and Mothers, but neither are they acting on stupid impulses. They constitute a challenge that those of us who care about both Christ and his church need to begin to take more seriously.

In my recent blog posting on the “golf bag” image of atonement theory, I thought I was clearly defending the essential nature of substitution. But several readers somehow took me to be waffling, particularly because I allowed that in some cases we might look for a “hole in one” by presenting the defeating-the-Powers aspect to someone who is caught up in a fascination with, or in the grip of, evil spiritual forces.

Here is what I take to be a very important point. We should not assume that we have to present the whole theological picture all at once to unbelievers. People come to Christ for many reasons. This is not unlike human love relationships. Ask a person long married what first attracted them to the person who was to become their spouse. Most of us would be embarrassed to give the details. That does not make those initial attraction factors bad things. They are what bring people together. But once we are together, other factors need to take over if the relationship is to be sustainable for the long haul.

The same with coming to Christ. A very bright Fuller student—mature in the faith—once told me that he became a Christian through reading Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. He was fascinated with futuristic predictions, and Lindsey’s “Bible prophecy” offerings drew him into the study of the Scriptures. “A bit later on, I left all of that behind,” he testified, “but it was what the Lord used to bring me to Christ.”

So, I think any aspect of atonement theory is fair game in witnessing to others. But to come eventually to a more mature, biblically faithful understanding of what our salvation is all about is to recognize that God in Christ did for us what we could never do for ourselves—and because of what happened on the Cross, it can be forever more “well with my soul.”

Recognizing the multifaceted character of the gospel is, I am convinced, crucial for interfaith witnessing. A book that has influenced me much in this regard—I first read it as a young seminarian—is Bishop Stephen Neill’s Christian Faith and Other Faiths. In discussing a particular religion, Neill stresses the need to invite persons of that perspective to take an honest look at the Jesus of the New Testament. But his invitations have different Christological foci.

Devout Muslims, Neill says, have never really seen Jesus as he is presented in the Bible; they want to honor Jesus as a prophet, but their view of him is obscured by a “veil of misunderstanding and prejudice” because they insist that he basically failed in his prophetic mission. The Hindu, in turn, needs to look beyond the answers given to the basic spiritual questions posed within Hinduism, to see “the One in Whom those questions can receive their all-sufficient answer, the Lord Jesus Christ.”  To the Buddhist, we must point to the Cross, where a peace is made possible that reaches beyond “[t]he Buddhist ideal of passionless benevolence.” Our message to animism can witness to the ongoing experience of connectedness in Christ’s Body, a community of people bound together by life in the Spirit of Christ. And to the existentialist (and this applies also to the advocates of the postmodernism that has emerged in the decades since Neill wrote his book), we can speak of the truly authentic existence that is made possible by the Risen Lord who has brought about the ultimate victory over death and despair, thus allowing us to live, by the power of the indwelling Spirit, in the hope of his final triumph.

To me, that kind of grasp of multifacetedness is not a denial of orthodoxy, it makes orthodox Christianity a rich mine of riches to draw upon.

I am no expert on N. T. Wright’s theology, but I know enough to reject those charges of his critics that he is weak on “the substitutionary atonement.”  Here is the clincher for me, from one of his meditations in The Crown and the Fire: “Jesus, the innocent one, was drawing on to himself the holy wrath of God against human sin in general, so that human sinners like you and me can find, as we look at the cross, that the load of sin and guilt we have been carrying is taken away from us.”

To be sure, Wright has also been calling us to think more expansively about the atoning work of Christ. But he has never advocated doing away with substitution as an essential feature of Christ’s redemptive mission.

The more expansive context is nicely captured by Scot McKnight’s helpful golf clubs image. We need several clubs to play a good game of golf, McKnight observes, and the putter is one of many. But the putter is typically necessary to get the ball in the hole.

One of my colleagues responded to that image in a way that I found helpful. He pointed out that sometimes a golfer does make a hole-in-one, without the aid of a putter. And he observed that some folks in Young Life have reported that there are teenagers who have been brought to Christ by a strong emphasis on the Christus Victor theme. Kids into “Goth, “ vampires, witchcraft and the like often respond most positively to the idea that the powers of evil have been conquered by Christ’s encounter on the Cross with “the principalities and powers.”

A point well taken. But still, holes-in-one are not common occurrences. Normally, the use of the putter is necessary. It’s just one of the clubs, to be sure. But an important one.

Here’s my worry about contemporary talk, especially among some younger evangelicals, about atonement theory. They rightly say that the atonement is more than substitution. But they often proceed then as if it were less than substitution.

I was at a conference a while back where a younger preacher said rather forcefully that he seldom mentions the substitutionary work of Christ anymore in his sermons. Instead, he talks about how Christ encountered “the Powers” of consumerism, militarism, racism, super-patriotism and the like.  I left that conference troubled in my soul. I was driving a rental car to another city, and I turned on the radio which, as it happened, was tuned to “Christian radio.” I was about to search for NPR when I decided to stay tuned to the recording of a man who was telling his story to a group of fellow business folks. I’m glad I listened.

The man told about a time when he was increasingly successful in his business dealings, while increasingly dissolute in his personal lifestyle: drinking heavily, unfaithful to his wife, distant from his children, his marriage headed toward divorce. His wife and daughters were active in church life, but he never attended.

One Saturday evening, after he had downed several martinis, his 10-year-old daughter came to him and pleaded with him to come to church the next morning—she was part of a singing group that would have a role in the service. He reluctantly agreed—something he greatly regretted the next morning when he awoke hung over. But to church he went.

In his testimony he then described what he heard for the first time in his life in the sermon that morning: that he was a guilty sinner who needed salvation, and that Jesus had taken his sin and guilt upon himself on the Cross of Calvary. Weeping, the man said, he pleaded with God to take away his burden of shame, and from that point on his life took a new direction.

I’m glad the preacher had a putter in his theological golf bag that morning. The other clubs are, to be sure, important. But this is the one that made all the difference on that occasion. I hear a lot of creative stuff these days about Christ’s non-violent suffering, his incarnational love—again, all good and proper. But I find myself also listening for the theme that assures me that the whole story of atonement is being told: that I can say as a guilty sinner that “my sin, not in part, but the whole//is nailed to the Cross and I bear it no more.”

I resented Billy Berger (I’m changing his name here) for four decades. Sometimes, in the earliest years, the resentment felt like it approached outright despising. At the root of it, though, was envy.

Like me, Billy Berger was a preacher’s kid. In fact, our fathers served as pastors of the same congregation—with Billy’s dad serving first.  Billy was the same age as I, which meant that all the neighborhood kids, and just about everyone in my seventh and eighth grade classes at the local public school, knew Billy.

And they praised him a lot. So much so, that sometimes it really hurt. Betty Boyd (also not her real name) was a case in point. She liked to sketch plans for houses, and I had a bit of a crush on her. So she deeply wounded me when one day she proudly showed me a drawing and said: “This is the house that Billy Berger and I will live in when we are married.”

And then there was the time that Billy came back to town with his parents for a visit. It was summer, and we were on vacation when they visited. When I returned home, there was much talk about how wonderful it was to have seen Billy again. One young man whom I considered a good friend even told me that all the kids liked Billy Berger better than me. I cried myself to sleep that night.

Several years ago, I preached at a church in the Midwest. After the service I stood greeting parishioners at the door, and I saw one man, about my age, hanging back, waiting for the chance to speak with me when the others had passed.

When the time came, he thanked me for my sermon, and then went on, haltingly. “You have no reason to know who I am, but I’ve known about you for a long time. My name is Billy Berger, and my dad served at (——) Church before your dad. We knew all of the same kids in school.” I started to tell him that I did indeed know who he was, but he waved me off. “I have to confess something to you,” he said. “I have resented you for a long time. Once we went back to visit, and all my old friends told me how wonderful you were. Someone even said that Betty Boyd had a crush on you.” And then, some tears. “I’m glad I came to church today. It seems dumb to say it, but I feel like a burden has been lifted.”

The tears came to me too, and I told him that I too needed some burden-lifting. It was not a long conversation, but an important one. We hugged and he went on his way.

I’m not sure exactly what the spiritual lesson was in all of that. But that there was one, I have no doubt.

Phyllis and I have been talking lately about what we sometimes hear as a reason why people do not attend church.  It’s not that they have no interest in spiritual matters, they say. It’s just that they get their spiritual inspiration by “spending time in nature.” Walking in the woods, listening to birds sing, watching a sunset, reflecting along a shoreline—these are for them the ways they get in touch with the divine.

We don’t find these testimonies to be without merit. In fact, it has some attraction for us. A local nature reserve near our home offers Sunday morning Audubon-sponsored bird-watching walks, and we would like to go.  Furthermore, given the many church service times we have to choose from at our home congregation, we could do so without simply skipping church. And for us, the bird-watching walk would also be a way of connecting with God in nature.

I recently came across an Emily Dickinson poem that stimulated my thoughts on this subject:

Some keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;
I just wear my wings,
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton sings.

God preaches,—a noted clergyman,—
And the sermon is never long;
So instead of getting to heaven at last,
I ’m going all along!

What is theologically and spiritually off-base in this poem is that the poet is treating her times listening to birds sing under the orchard’s “dome” as a legitimate substitute for church worship. Having said that, though, I still like the poem, especially if we take it as showing how time in nature can serve as an important spiritual supplement to corporate worship.

Here we can draw some encouragement from the Reformation era confessions. The Westminster Confession points us in the right direction when it tells us that “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence… manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God.” Unfortunately, it quickly blunts the positive point it is making there when it immediately stipulates that all of this serves mainly “to leave men inexcusable”— since the things that are revealed in nature aren’t “sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation.”

The Belgic Confession is more helpful. While it also eventually gets around to the “without excuse” rider, it takes a little more time than the Westminster to get there. “[T]he creation, preservation and government of the universe,” it tells us, “is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely His power and divinity.”

Emily Dickinson can be seen as a gifted reader of the “elegant book” that God has provided for folks who spend time in orchards listening to the birds sing. We would all do well to give careful attention to what that “book” is intended to teach us. But we do need the other Book—where the Lord tells us all of those things that are “necessary unto salvation”—including how best to honor, as his redeemed people, the “all creatures, great and small” that are also loved by the One who has saved us.

Phyllis made a good suggestion about how to integrate what goes on in both church services and nature walks. Someone should write a collection of biblically based devotionals, she said, for people who claim to get more out of spending time in orchards than they do in corporate worship. Such devotionals might even bring them back to church, as necessary supplement to their nature walks. A great assignment for someone who is skilled at carefully reading both “books”! Or maybe it has been done?

The Muslim scholar and I were sitting at dinner together, and he was telling me about his involvement in a Muslim project devoted to interfaith dialogue. “How about the faith and culture questions?” I asked. “The attempt in places like France to regulate how Muslim women dress in public—is that a big topic for you and your colleagues?”

“Ah, the burqa,” he said. “It’s too bad that is such a big issue. Especially since for many of us it ought not to be an issue at all. The Qur’an, you know, says nothing about that kind of thing. There is nothing in our Islamic tradition that requires women to cover themselves in that way!”

Part of me was pleased with his attitude. Like many Muslim intellectuals with whom I have talked, he is eager to encourage the Islamic community to find its proper place in larger pluralistic democracies. That kind of project is extremely important. And to the degree that the burqa is an expression of resistance to the call to live together with mutual respect, it is something that we should want to disappear.

But there is another part of me that resists the idea that we should be abandoning those forms of dress that are expressions of religious conviction that stand over against the dominant culture. A few days after my conversation with the Muslim scholar I was in an airport, sitting at the gate area, waiting for my plane. A young nun, wearing the habit of her community, was sitting nearby. A teenage girl passing by the nun stumbled and dropped some things she was carrying. The nun quickly stepped forward and helped her retrieve her belongings. I saw their eyes meet for a brief moment as the girl thanked the nun for helping. The nun smiled and wished her safe travels.

The teenager was wearing a tee-shirt bearing the Satanic symbol of a rock band, and had several tattoos and piercings. It was an interesting brief encounter. Two modes of dress that spoke very different messages.

I was glad that the young nun was wearing her habit. I felt the same way about two Mennonite women, wearing head coverings and long skirts, who passed by a few moments later.

In those brief moments in the airport, I resolved to live with some ambivalence about the burqa.

BP, as we all know, is in big trouble as the oil continues to spill into the Gulf waters. But recently the company drew additional criticism when its board chair said that his company recognized the woes that this crisis was inflicting on the “small people.”

The angry response to his comment temporarily caught me up short. A week before reading about the controversy, I had sent off to the publisher my final draft of a short book manuscript on Abraham Kuyper’s theology of culture. At one point in my manuscript I mentioned the fact that the Dutch statesman-theologian was well known in his day for his affection for de kleine luyden—“the little people.” I had not felt the need, when I reported this in my study of Kuyper, to apologize on his behalf. Which makes me wonder whether there is a difference between Kuyper’s attitude and that of the BP leadership.

I think there is a difference. The “small people” comment by the BP leader came across as condescending. For Kuyper, on the other hand, the term “little” was an expression of affection, of deep concern. He worried much about political and economic systems in which the voices of “ordinary” people are not heard. Those who often appear to be “low” in the eyes of the powerful are “high” in God’s estimation.

To be sure, the line between affection and mere condescension can be a thin one. But it must be respected. In Isaiah’s prophecy, for example, two of the images of leadership employed are shepherd and father. The good shepherd “gently leads those who are with young.” And a godly king is a “nursing father.” While each of those can be taken in the wrong direction, properly understood they point to the need for leadership to be sustained by a genuine empathy for those the leader has been called to serve.

Sometimes people who regularly profess a concern for the poor do so in a condescending spirit. This comes through when “the oppressed” becomes an abstraction, or when a commitment to “the marginalized” is so heavily freighted with ideology that real people themselves get marginalized.

I once spoke to an ecumenical gathering where I held up John Perkins’ “Voice of Calvary” ministries in Mississippi as an admirable program for serving those in need. I described how Perkins had set up a health clinic and had organized food cooperatives for the poor. At a reception afterward, a person from a denominational agency berated me for advocating a “band-aid” approach for dealing with poverty. “These little measures do no good,” she said. “We need a revolution that redistributes wealth!”  But what about actual suffering people in Mississippi? I asked—surely the “band-aids” of medicine for the sick and food for hungry children can be a significant blessing. She smirked: “You do them no good by offering them false hope!”

A year later at a gathering of the same group, also at a wine-and-cheese reception, I heard her once again holding forth about the futility of band-aids. I offered up a silent prayer for what John Perkins had been doing for real human beings in the meantime.

Some of my warmest memories from childhood are of an adult lovingly applying a band-aid to a cut or a scrape. The line between affection and mere condescension can be a thin one, but most of us have experienced a real difference between the two.  And my clear sense is that the BP chairman and Abraham Kuyper were on different sides of the thin line.