In my long exploration of the Charismatic takeover of Evangelicalism, here on The Hump, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that one core issue is that because Evangelicals lost many of the legitimate sources of knowing the emotions of joy, peace and love in Christ, it has appeared to them that the only way to know these things is through the direct, mystical, experience of God through the “Pentecostal experience.” This “blessing,” as we’ve seen, is not only absent from Scripture, but in effect deifies human passions or, worse, taps into some other spiritual source, if that’s what “kundalini energy” is. In the end it must disappoint.
In a brilliant historical survey, Dr Glenn Sunshine suggests that the Thirty Years War of religion from 1618 to 1648 resulted in Protestant preaching becoming increasingly the scholastic exposition of each denomination’s statements of doctrine over against the others. This had the effect of freezing out what Jonathan Edwards explores in his Religious Affections, that is experiential exultation in the biblical truths of the gospel, leading to heartfelt worship, as advocated by the early Puritans in England, as well as Edwards.
The reaction to such cerebral preaching was the rise of Pietism, looking inwards for a direct experience of the Holy Spirit through intense seeking. It incidentally introduced the false dichotomy between “head and heart religion,” by denigrating the mind as mistakenly as the scholastic preachers ignored the emotions. I’ve shown how, from the start, in figures like Count Zinzendorf (whom Dr Sunshine also incriminates), Pietism often resulted in the side-lining of doctrine, a trend which to varying degrees has persisted through revivalism to the present mess of the New Apostolic Renewal and its diluted Charismatic expressions.
I’ve been reading about an apparently unconnected, but on reflection closely related, process in Neil Thomas’s new critique of Darwinism, False Messiah. As he demonstrates how Darwin’s rather evidentially weak theory resonated with the Victorian mid-century surge in elite secularism, he mentions the poetry of William Wordsworth as, perhaps, the greatest, though also secular, cultural antagonist to Darwin’s materialism. Wordsworth elevated the Romantic ideal of the sublime in Nature (capital “N”) to a near-deification of Nature as a spiritual wellspring. This was novel, and captured the public imagination to this day, accounting for the widespread sense that one is closer to the transcendent in the natural world than in church. That was my own immediate reaction to Worsdworth’s Prelude, in particular, as a young schoolboy.
For some, this attitude to nature led to opposition to Darwin’s thoroughly materialistic theory, whilst to others it softened it (think of Chris Packham’s near-worship of nature in conjunction with his extreme adaptationist version of evolution). Its modern extreme is the kind of environmentalism that regards mankind as a malignancy on the divine face of Nature.
As I considered this I was reminded me of my own book, God’s Good Earth (just 2 days left to get it at half price from Wipf & Stock using the code CONFSHIP), and how the post-Reformation doctrine of a cosmic fall actually denied the Christian the possibility of incorporating the Worsdworthian insight about natural Creation into their faith. If Creation is actually corrupted, in Spurgeon’s words, with “the slime of the serpent,” then The Ascent of Snowdon by Moonlight is sheer idolatry. But it seemed that scientific study of the world demands blasphemous atheism, and biblical doctrine was seen as dry and intellectual. Evangelicals became alienated from science, art and theology. The endless Quest for an overwhelming anointing of the Holy Spirit seemed the only hope for the thirsty soul. My book was an attempt to remedy some of that by proving that natural Creation is not fallen.
Another talk from the same conference as Dr Sunshine’s address covers this subject. It is The Things of Earth – Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts by Dr. Joe Rigney. During this he provides a striking method of showing the proper Christian attitude towards nature – that of constant thanksgiving leading on to worship – by reconstituting the famous passage about the origin of idolatry in Romans 1 in the form of the attitude of the non-idolater:
For the approval of God is revealed from heaven toward the godly and righteous, who by their righteousness acknowledge the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So because they knew God, they honoured him as God and gave thanks to him, perceiving the glory of the immortal God behind mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
In a few words, Darwin’s Epicureanism is demolished, and Wordsworth’s poetry is redeemed for the Lord. It seems to me that, by better appreciating the triune God as the loving Creator and giver of the things that are immediate and visible to us, we are better equipped emotionally to be thankful for those things that remain invisible and spiritual, that is the truths of the gospel. To glimpse the glory of the Creator in his works is, surely, to wonder that much more at his taking on flesh and giving his life for us.
And so our worship, both in daily life and in our assemblies, will arise from the truths of God in Creation and Scripture, rather than from the dopamine hit of mystical experience. The gathering of the saints for mutual upbuilding will seem less a poor substitute for a walk in the hills than a joyful result of it.
“There is grandeur in this view of life…” Now who was it who said that?
