Soil For The Rootless

No.185: November 17, 2023

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Image created by Bing Artificial Intelligence (powered by DALL-E3) in response to the query: “glorious oak tree planted on a green hilltop with a cross-section showing deep roots”

Dear Friends,

I have spent a lot of time over the past year observing various political, theological, and ecclesiastical convulsions disrupting many communities, online and otherwise. I have written quite a lot (likely too much) about a very loud and vocal subculture of young Christian men who fancy themselves culture warriors. I admit I am tired of it, and imagine you are, too. I’ll be taking a long hiatus shortly, but I do have an observation or two more that I’d like to share, for whatever it is worth.

It’s important to identify what or who (generally) I am talking about because it is quite an inchoate phenomenon. But it does have some identifiable features. Some of these culture warriors write bad books. Some of them start ministries. Most of them spend their days on the social media app formerly known as Twitter where they rant and pontificate and ridicule and mock and play passive-aggressive Motte & Bailey games (say something outrageous and then retreat to something more defensible if challenged). They derisively call older Christian leaders “Boomers” whose minds are “captive.” They think being jackasses on social media is how they are going to save America for Christ. “Jerks For Jesus,” to be more polite. They’re big into weightlifting, growing beards, and “masculinity” as they vaguely define it. They have a very low attention span—it’s a new outrage every single day, but it is on some kind of internal cycle. If it is raging about rotten leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention today, sneering at The Gospel Coalition tomorrow, rest assured they’ll get back to the SBC shortly. They have a sizable remuda of hobby-horses, but it isn’t infinite.

I have been known to be very hard on this constituency, and I do not apologize for my criticisms—after all, “real men,” of all people, ought to know the value of tough love. I want to tell you something else I feel for what I think of as this gang of Lost Boys— although, I assure you, for the rank and file much more than the actual ringleaders—and it is not meant to be condescending in any way: sympathy.

Sympathy, first, because I can hardly imagine how exhausting such a life has to be. To wake up every single day ready to pick a fight, pile on some poor social media account, create some mockery meme, or to invent a controversy. Honestly, these guys talk incessantly about the importance of being a “real man,” and how it involves marriage and kids and work, and just a glance at the volume of Tweets or Facebook comments they send out in a single day will tell you that they cannot spend but a fraction of their lives truly “present” with their families, much less their jobs if they have them. It is a kind of slavery. Enslaved to the dopamine hits, the camaraderie of the Twitter mob, the rush of satisfaction upon scoring a point or delivering some clever barb.

Perhaps they never read C.S. Lewis’s poem, The Apologist’s Evening Prayer, which made a big impact on me as a teen:

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

Go ahead and read that again. Save me from my victories and cleverness and trumpery. I think there’s a better way to live and a better way to fight cultural battles. Living in arrested development, forever stuck in the “cage stage” of some ideology or another, being a young man angry with the world because it will not obey is self-sabotaging victimhood, it is exhausting, and it is futile. It is not lovely or attractive; indeed, the only person it attracts is another very angry young man. It repels most people.

I am sympathetic for a second reason. It has slowly dawned on me how rootless so many young Christian men seem to be. They are cast about on every wave of doctrine or old idea that packages itself up as new or refreshed. They are distracted by slick marketing, passing fads, and shiny objects. They seem neither theologically rooted nor sophisticated, seeming to live on a diet of video clips of their favorite conference speakers or podcast hosts and reading—if they read books at all—the latest pop paperback and thinking it must the greatest thing ever written.

As much as they are themselves to blame for their extreme self-regard, their whining, and sense of entitlement, there is still more to blame. I sense—I have no surveys or sociological data at hand—a generational failure of the American church at large to make real disciples of young men. By real disciples, I mean men who are rooted. Not provocateurs flailing about, chasing after trendy movements, clicks, and social media likes.

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I am not a “Boomer.” I am a Gen-Xer and I am uncomfortably (!) close to a half-century of life experience. And I have reflected a great deal on how God, in his gracious providence, protected a once extremely hot-headed know-it-all young man from the kind of rootlessness I describe above. If anyone was temperamentally ripe for latching on like a pit bull to new and seductive ideas, it should have been me. There were so many traps and pitfalls.

In the early 90s I read more Gary North books than I care to count or remember (he wrote them faster than you could read them; and that’s typing only with his two index fingers). But I did not follow him down the rabbit hole and become a gold-hoarding conspiracy junkie, and whatever influence his brand of theonomy or “reconstruction” might have had on me didn’t stick for very long. And I went the opposite way of his rhetoric (though I think I am still a work in progress); he seemed to get more and more acerbic and nasty (if that’s actually possible) in his bombastic denunciations of everyone who didn’t agree with his enlightened and dogmatic proclamations, and I got less and less so. It is now to the point that I cannot read his work even if, for some reason, I wanted to—these guys nowadays who don’t like “winsomeness” are very late to the party. Gary should be their patron saint. And his in-your-face, combative mode of cultural engagement was as successful as theirs will be (it will not move the needle one whit). My main point is that twenty-year-old me could easily have become a Gary clone—the sociological incentives were all there—but that didn’t happen.

By the late 90s and early 2000s postmodernism was the rage in evangelical circles. “Fresh” was the word on everyone’s lips: a new, exciting, fresh approach to theology! We would leave old, dusty “foundationalism” behind and head off on a never-ending theological journey into LaLaLand singing “Kumbaya, My Lord.” The so-called “Emergent” church was so seductive in those days. Brian McLaren was touting his New Kind of Christianity, and Rob Bell was making aesthetically cool hipster “Nooma” videos (he’s now just a surfer dude, last I checked). And I was completely immune.

In the early 2000s I got a front-row seat to another trendy fad that continues to this day: the “deconstruction” of one’s evangelical faith—becoming an “Ex-vangelical.” The person undergoing this deconstruction was my seminary professor and I watched it happening in real-time right in front of me. He had a cohort of eager students lapping up his every word and initially he seemed to show some interest in me being a part of his fan club. Now this was a temptation closer to home—this was a professor at a Reformed seminary offering me what C.S. Lewis called entry into the “Inner Ring.” I won’t say there wasn’t any internal struggle, but at the end of the day I just wasn’t impressed or very tempted. (He might’ve ruined his chances when he told me he loved Brian McLaren’s book A Generous Orthodoxy—ay yi yi!)

I write none of this to be self-indulgent or self-congratulatory. I write to tell you some of the reasons (none of which are to my credit) I was not blown about by these—and many, many other—cultural and theological winds. God’s grace is paramount, obviously, but that grace came by way of means. They are means that appear to be in short supply in some sectors of the American Christian world. (I am going to leave aside for this discussion the obvious means of knowing the Bible.)

The church I grew up in took theology seriously and that is because the two successive pastors during my tenure were themselves rooted. Both had expansive educations and were well- and widely read. The second, my pastor for 26 years, taught high-octane subjects extremely well; he did not teach down to the lowest common denominator, but sought to lift his flock to new heights of understanding. I remember many Sunday nights he would teach massive courses—for all intents and purposes, a seminary-level education for laypeople. The fellowship hall would be packed with ordinary people listening to lectures on church history—ancient, medieval, Reformation, modern—for which our pastor had produced his own syllabus hundreds of pages in length. On Sunday afternoons periodically he would meet with a group of young men to study systematic theology. And the Sunday school classes always offered theology courses—doctrines of grace, the doctrine of God, Christ, salvation, and so forth. We were Reformed and Presbyterian, and not shy about it. But we were also not part of any subset or faction or movement narrower than that—no need for “TRs” or a “Federal Vision,” or anything else. None of this teaching was in service to some partisan or sectarian movement. We were pretty (small “c”) catholic in comparison with other Reformed tribes. That was the atmosphere of my youth.

I studied history in college, but more importantly I studied philosophy. At age 18 I took a class on the “Modern Period” of the history of western philosophy. The teacher was Dr. Greg Bahnsen, and this was the last class he ever taught. He died from complications during a heart surgery the following year. I’d had a really good head start in my teen years (reading Francis Schaeffer and Van Til), but it isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that Bahnsen taught me how to think as a Christian. And that laid a foundation for further philosophy studies at the state university—I was rooted in a way that inoculated me from being taken in by philosophical fads (not least the recent resurgence of Romanticism among the Christian Nationalists).

Seminary was not all just Ex-vangelicals in the making (and they’ve long since been sent packing). Other professors took up the slack in helping me to be rooted. You simply could not sit through a New Testament class with Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. and come out on the other side unchanged. He didn’t just root you theologically; his lavish and detailed exegesis of the Apostle Paul’s theology planted you in concrete. Immovable on the things that matter. Scott Oliphint continued to encourage my interest in Van Til and philosophy. Carl Trueman continued my education in church history and its great perennial debates—there are very few things that inoculate you from fads like knowing some history.

All this led me eventually to Herman Bavinck and the turn-of-the-century Neo-Calvinist movement spearheaded by Abraham Kuyper. And I’ll just say this about Bavinck: nobody can carefully read and study his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics (I am not talking about “dipping in” to a topic here and there; I am talking about devouring and digesting the whole thing) and come away a feather buffeted and blown about on every cultural breeze. I know that isn’t entirely accurate; plenty of Dutch Reformed people did read Bavinck (or did they, really?) and nevertheless got swept away by liberal and progressive trends, so I’ll put Bavinck as a “necessary, but not sufficient” ingredient in the recipe. He is, in my view, the greatest dogmatician the Reformed world has ever known, and I was privileged to spend many years thoroughly immersed in the deep end of that pool.

These environments and experiences—church, academy, and finally realizing I have a “home” in a robust theological tradition—have brought me to a place of what John Frame calls (in his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God—another influential masterpiece!) “cognitive rest.” That strikes me as another way of saying “rooted.” My itching ears need not be scratched because they don’t often itch. I am satisfied in the Lord, in his providence, what he has taught me, where he has placed me, and to admit the vast number of things I do not know and do not have to know.

I know that my biography isn’t repeatable. And I know, happily, that others with different experiences and backgrounds and traditions have had similar and salutary results—rooted people. But if on the off-chance a zealous-but-rootless young man had a mind and desire to find some cognitive rest, most of the resources I’ve mentioned are available. I can’t help you with your local church situation, but I can help with the rest.

Learn. Not as a means to an end (e.g., to make one clever or a more effective culture warrior), but as an end in itself. Do not pick up books as a polemical exercise—determined to find the flaws or to write off the author when you find out he isn’t part of your “club” or he doesn’t scratch where you itch. Pick up a book to learn. (And, by all means, be critical when warranted; but you’re not reading to be critical.) And read widely. Read secular philosophers and writers, theologians from other traditions, and read great novels. Really: be countercultural; in a world with TikTok attention spans, pick up a hefty volume and read it.

Learn how to think. Greg Bahnsen’s 64 lectures on the history of western philosophy (and more) is available, for free, right here. John Frame’s stellar and rich resource, The History of Western Philosophy & Theology is available right here.

Learn church history. It’s daunting, to be sure, but get Jaroslav Pelikan’s five volumes on the history of Christian doctrine and painstakingly plow through them. Learn the names of major and minor figures, what happened in each century, and the contours of perennial doctrinal debates. This will help you calibrate the relative importance of various doctrinal differences and keep you from parochialism and sectarianism.

Learn biblical theology. Read Gaffin’s books. One is long and profound, the rest are short and profound. And then read them again.

Learn systematic theology. Get Bavinck, either the one-volume or the four-volume. Start reading and don’t stop.

Notice I haven’t recommended pursuing apologetics. I love apologetics, but too often young people think learning to defend the faith is a root when it is really strikes me as a fruit. Get rooted in the faith you’re planning to defend.

Mix all this soil and dump it into a deep flower bed. Then dive in. There is a very good chance you will emerge planted and secure.

And for the rest of you, who don’t have an inclination to pursue that measure of theological and philosophical depth, be part of the church, love and serve God and your neighbor, and work well and hard at the vocation to which you’ve been called, whatever it may be, and avoid avocations to which you are not called (e.g., being a social media troll). That is not Greek or Hebrew, the Reformed Dogmatics, or rocket science; it’s just the two great commandments.

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This was lengthier than usual, and thanks for sticking it out to the end! Have a wonderful weekend. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider clicking the button below!